John Berry 🇬🇧

All opinions expressed here are my own, or someone else's.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

The first time you turn a corner in Florence and the cathedral appears in front of you, it does not look real.

This is Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral of Florence, and it is one of the largest churches ever built.

It stretches 153 meters long and rises 90 meters from the floor to the base of the lantern. When it was completed in the fifteenth century, it was the largest cathedral in all of Europe, with room inside for tens of thousands of people. Even now, it is among the largest churches on earth, surpassed in size by only a handful of others in the entire world.

But the real marvel is the dome.

Filippo Brunelleschi built it between 1420 and 1436, without the wooden scaffolding everyone believed such a thing required, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell in a herringbone pattern he devised himself. It weighs tens of thousands of tons and it rises to nearly 115 meters.

600 years later, it remains the largest masonry dome ever constructed anywhere on the planet. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has ever surpassed it.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Monster waves captured by photographer Ben Hartley at Nazaré, Portugal.

[The Medieval Scholar @MedievalScholar]

The ruins of Montfort castle, built by the Teutonic knights in the holy land in approximately 1220

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

In 1901, divers pulled a lump of corroded bronze out of a two thousand year old shipwreck. It took the next century to understand what it was, and the answer broke the timeline of human history.

It's called the Antikythera Mechanism, and it is the oldest known computer on earth.

It was built by the ancient Greeks, around 100 BC, and it should not exist. Nothing else of its sophistication would appear anywhere in the world for more than a thousand years after it...

It was found by sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera, in the wreck of a trading ship that had sunk in the first century BC, surrounded by bronze statues and pottery.

The corroded fragments looked like nothing at first, and sat largely ignored in a museum in Athens. Only over the following decades, and especially with modern X-ray and CT scanning in our own century, did researchers finally see inside it.

What they found was a machine. Behind its bronze face was a system of at least thirty interlocking precision gears, cut and arranged with a sophistication that would not be matched until the geared astronomical clocks of medieval Europe, well over a thousand years later.

It was, in the words of the team that studied it, a mechanical computer that worked by turning astronomical theory into bronze...

And it did extraordinary things. You turned a hand crank on the side, and the mechanism calculated the positions of the sun, the moon, and the five planets the Greeks knew. It tracked the phases of the moon. It predicted solar and lunar eclipses years in advance. It even displayed the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games. A person standing in the ancient world could set this device to a date and watch the heavens be calculated in front of them, by gears, by hand.

Roughly a third of the original survives, in 82 corroded fragments. We still do not know who designed it, or how a civilization without anything resembling industrial machinery achieved this level of precision engineering. What is certain is that it was not a one-off accident. A device this refined implies a tradition behind it, generations of knowledge and earlier attempts that have been lost completely.

The Antikythera Mechanism is proof of how much the ancient world knew, and how much of what human beings have achieved has simply vanished without a trace, leaving us to stumble on a single piece of it at the bottom of the sea...

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

For 4th July, I share this lovely American Autochrome from 1910, capturing a woman darning the US flag (which, at the time, only had 46 stars, as there were only 46 US States). It was taken in colour 116 years ago by Mrs B Russell, using an early colour glass plate process. It isn't colourised.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

The Chief Constable of Essex Police said it was “madness” - the furore after two officers visited my house on Remembrance Sunday.

He described it as “just a five-minute conversation with a journalist”.

There is no “just” about a visit from the police. It is deliberately intimidating and an attack on free speech.

I was accused of a serious offence under the Public Order Act for posting a tweet, a year earlier. No one thinks the tweet came anywhere near the threshold for criminal investigation.

The CPS threw the case out but the process is the punishment.

In the same week, a 15-year-old boy was robbed at knifepoint a few miles from me. Terrified, he called the police and was told it was no longer a live incident!

Feisty tweet - police visit. Knife crime - you’re on your own, mate.

Police now think it’s their business to advise and to lecture to enforce “values”. Usually on the basis of an allegation by a “protected characteristic”.

They look increasingly sinister and ridiculous. They need to return to policing.

Allister did nothing wrong and I hope he joins me in suing the police.

Innocent, decent people must take a stand against tyranny,

Thank god for @SpeechUnion
Do join today if you haven’t already.

[Deep.State.Cringe @DeepSt8Cringe]

“Some crews install shingles. Others install trauma.” -Attenborough’s Algorithm

#DetroitRoofers #AttenboroughsAlgorithm #RoofingLife #WorkplaceSafety #DeepStateCringe

[Donna Louise @DonnaLouise1212]

😂 Oh, the sweet, sweet smell of progressive hypocrisy in the morning.

The Oxford branch of "Stand Up to Racism" has just launched a petition... opposing the government's plan to house 1,250 asylum seekers on a former MoD site in Bicester.

Their devastating reasons?
"Lack of infrastructure."
"Massive strain on local facilities."

"The town might become a far-right target."

"And the facilities aren't good enough for the poor migrants."

Not in my backyard, bigots! This one’s got rainbow flags on the porch and a "Refugees Welcome" gnome in the garden... until the delivery van actually shows up.

You know, the same "infrastructure" and "facilities" arguments the rest of us have been screaming about for the entire country for years.

But apparently when it’s your charming little market town instead of some working-class area that’s already been culturally enriched to death, suddenly it’s a crisis.

Stand Up to Racism, everybody. Just not in their town.

Classic.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is real footage from 127 years ago.

A family was performing their acrobatic act in Paris, in 1899, and someone was there to film it...

What you are watching was captured by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, the two Frenchmen who pioneered cinema. Only a few years earlier, in December 1895, they had held the first public screening of projected film in history, using their invention, the Cinématographe.

Now they were pointing their camera at the world around them, recording ordinary life as almost no one ever had before: workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station, and this, a family of acrobats throwing their bodies through the air.

The performers were the Kremos, a celebrated troupe who had created their signature act just a few years before this film was made. They were what circus people call icarists, specialists in a breathtaking discipline where one performer lies on their back and launches another into the air with their feet, catching and re-launching them like a juggler using human beings instead of clubs.

The family kept the act alive for generations. Their descendants were still performing, on stages around the world, more than a century after this film was made...

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

We are used to seeing the 1920s in black and white. This is what London actually looked like, in full color, more than a hundred years ago.

What you are watching comes from The Open Road, filmed in the summer of 1924 by a British cinematographer named Claude Friese-Greene. It is some of the earliest colour film of London ever made.

What I love about this film is that the color collapses the distance between us and them.

The black-and-white footage we are used to is beautiful, but it makes the past feel like another world. Colour changes that. Red buses, a blue sky, the green of the trees, and suddenly 1924 does not feel like history at all...

What most people don't know is that this footage was one man's attempt to finish his father's life's work: Claude was the son of William Friese-Greene, one of the pioneers of early cinema. Together they had spent years developing a way to capture true color on film, using a system of spinning red and blue-green filters in front of the camera. The process was flawed. It flickered, it produced strange color fringes around anything that moved too fast, and it was soon overtaken by better systems and forgotten. Claude set out on a journey by car from Land's End to the north of Scotland, filming the whole country in his imperfect color, trying to prove that his father's dream could work.

For decades the footage sat largely unseen, its flaws making it almost unwatchable. Then, in our own century, the British Film Institute used digital technology to clean away the flicker and the fringing, revealing what Friese-Greene had actually captured: a lost world, brought back to life in color.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

The main bronze door of Milan Cathedral weighs 37 tons and took a single sculptor 10 years to complete.

The Duomo of Milan is one of the largest and most intricate cathedrals on earth, and its five bronze doors were built to be worthy of it.

Every inch of the great central door is covered in sculpted bronze, dozens of scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, faces caught mid-emotion, figures that seem to press forward out of the metal as if trying to step into the world...

It was designed by the sculptor Ludovico Pogliaghi, who received the commission in the 1880s and did not see his door installed until 1906, having poured a decade of his life into modelling every figure by hand.

And his was just the beginning.

The five doors of the cathedral were not made together, or even in the same lifetime. They were created across nearly seventy years, by a succession of different sculptors, each carving their panels with the same obsessive care. The final door was not completed until 1965, its unveiling taken as the symbolic close of a cathedral that had been under construction, in one form or another, for 579 years...

More than a century ago, the English polymath John Ruskin tried to put into words what it means to build something like this. He managed it in a single sentence. "When we build," he wrote, "let us think that we build for ever."

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

Watch this! I’m sat outside the Bell and Crown at Strand on the Green in Chiswick right now watching a dolphin! Yes, seriously! A dolphin in the Thames in Chiswick while I sip my wine. Life cannot get any better. Incredibly, this is the second time I’ve stood here and watched a dolphin.

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

And now I’m here and I’m very angry. I mean fuming. Strand on the Green in Chiswick and the councillor Rick Rowe of Hounslow council has said that the pubs here; the Bell and Crown, The City Barge and The Bulls Head, aren’t allowed outside seating anymore. They’ve had that seating forever and people love to relax outside in the sunshine by the river, but now, the council has said that must stop. Hounslow council govern Chiswick. Hounslow is an absolute third world shithole. All the taxes from Chiswick pay for Hounslow to survive and these idiots want to make it even harder for businesses to survive. I have no say in these pubs and they certainly haven’t asked me to post, in case someone thinks that. I’m posting because I know how hard it is to run a business. I know how hard pubs work to survive and I know how terrible councillors are. Disgusting

[Andrew Kerr @AndrewKerrNC]

NEW: @FreeBeacon has the receipts on Ro Khanna’s obscene, oligarchic wealth:

—his 2 kids (under 10yrs old) own 3 private golf courses in Ohio (not kidding)

—his wife drives a $190,000 luxury Range Rover

—his house has a 4-story indoor elevator

And more:https://t.co/Bk6nS7WRwT

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

✍️🤡🤙

[Muse @xmuse_]

Another beautiful reminder of Roman mosaic mastery.

12 million hand‑placed tesserae.

3,500 square meters of ancient storytelling.

Villa del Casale, Italy 🇮🇹

[Footy Humour @FootyHumour]

The stadium cleaning staff seeing that Japan has been eliminated:

[Declaration of Memes @LibertyCappy]

Imagine being at the mall when one of these breaks out!

👀👇👇

[Community Notes & Violations @CNviolations]

Legend has it he's still there

[big john the boshfather @Johnfis08605918]

This is just so funny and spot on 🤣🤣