What’s better than a rare Super Delta formation featuring the Thunderbirds and the @USNavy Blue Angels over Washington, D.C.?
Watching it from four different views for #UFCWhiteHouse as part of #Freedom250. 🇺🇸
Red Sox pitcher Payton Tolle threw the ball over his catcher’s head and Orioles manager Craig Albernaz thinks the baserunner should have been allowed to go to third
That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.
Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.
The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.
Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.
Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.
The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.
Elon Musk: "Where are the aliens?"
"A lot of people have asked me if I've seen any evidence of aliens and I haven't which is kind of concerning."
"I've not seen any evidence of aliens. If they're out there, they're very subtle. We might just be the only consciousness at least in the galaxy."
Civilization is a flash in the pan just 5,000 years old on a 4.5 billion year old Earth, roughly one millionth of its existence.
Life took eons to reach this point, and the Sun is slowly expanding. Without becoming multi planetary, Earth will eventually boil like Venus.
Mind blowing perspective on the Fermi Paradox & why the universe seems so quiet.
Elon Musk just measured your existence by how many times your atoms have been inside a dying star.
Musk: “How many times have your atoms been at the center of a star? I think it’s like on average three or four times.”
Every atom in your body has already survived the core of a star.
Multiple times.
Crushed under pressures that would flatten planets.
Superheated to millions of degrees.
Blown apart in explosions so violent they forged new elements.
Then gravity pulled those scattered pieces back together.
New stars formed.
And the cycle repeated.
For 13.8 billion years, your atoms have been fuel for the most violent process in the universe.
And they are not done.
Musk: “In terms of existence as measured by the number of times your atoms will be at the center of a star, we seem to be roughly halfway.”
Halfway.
Your atoms have been through the furnace three or four times.
They will go through three or four more.
But right now, in this impossibly thin sliver between cycles, those atoms are doing something they have never done before.
They are conscious.
For billions of years before you, they burned through stellar cores with no awareness.
No memory.
No sense of what they were or where they had been.
After you, they will return to that state.
Unconscious matter drifting through space until the next star claims them.
This is the only moment in their entire journey where they can look back at the stars that made them and understand.
Musk: “If you want to look at the big picture… that’s the really big picture.”
The big picture is not that we are small.
Everyone already knows that.
The big picture is that we are temporary witnesses to a process that does not need witnesses.
Stars do not need observers to burn.
Atoms do not need anyone to understand where they have been.
The universe ran for billions of years with no one in it.
It will run for billions more after the last conscious thing disappears.
But right now, matter is examining itself.
That has never happened before in 13.8 billion years.
You are not a person who happens to contain ancient atoms.
You are ancient atoms that briefly figured out how to think.
The universe did not design consciousness.
It designed stars.
Consciousness was the accident.
And the accident is half over.
"It hit him in the meat... I don't even watch a game on TV without wearing a cup."
Terry Francona couldn't believe Reds pitcher Chase Burns was cupless
Dobes has been saved by two glaringly obvious quick whistles in Game 7. To say nothing of the two too many men on the ice calls that were never called #LetsGoBuffalo ⚔️