Lucas Rojek

Chemical engineer and community leader in Calgary's Beltline / @beltlineYYC

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

A historic moment: the main tower of the Sagrada Família has finally been completed

The day before, it was consecrated by Pope Leo XIV, marking the 100th anniversary of the death of the great architect Antoni Gaudí.

The 172.5-meter Tower of Jesus Christ has become the tallest part of the church, and the Sagrada Família is now considered the tallest Christian structure in the world.

Construction of the basilica began in 1882. Gaudí died in 1926 without ever seeing his main masterpiece completed.

However, this is still not the final stage: interior work and the main entrance still remain. So the world’s most famous long-term construction project is officially not finished yet.

[Impressions @impression_ists]

Monet painted The Magpie when he was 28. No one knew him.

He had just become a father and was living in extreme poverty.

​He presented it at the Paris Salon and they laughed at him. They told him it was unfinished.

[Robert Munnich @RingOfFireCGY]

Teams with the fewest playoff games over the last 30 years.

32. Mammoth (6)
31. Kraken (14)
30. Blue Jackets (41)
29. Jets/Thrashers (66)
28. Coyotes/Jets (72)
27. Flames (98)
26. Islanders (106)
25. Wild (113)

This is why the Flames need to build a sustainable contender.

[Jackie Forrest @JackieForrest]

Lately, I’ve been asked why Canada should pursue an expensive greenfield West Coast oil pipeline when the cheapest option is to continue shipping to the United States.

Today, my op-ed in @globeandmail argues that, if a new pipeline is evaluated only on traditional commercial terms, it will never get built. A West Coast pipeline should be seen as insurance, providing access to tidewater and Asian markets when it matters most.

For a West Coast greenfield oil pipeline to happen, Canadians, governments, and industry will need new approaches to financing, ownership, and returns.

#marketaccess #oilandgas #cndpoli #bcpoli

https://t.co/CFL3Mitxq9

[Jen Gerson @jengerson]

Last year, the UCP passed Bill 54, which prohibits the "investigation of complaints where the election commissioner does not have reasonable grounds to believe the matter constitutes an offence under the act."

This appears to have had the practical effect of neutering Elections Alberta -- making it all but impossible for them to investigate complaints unless us citizens can prove something went wrong to a criminal standard. It has, in effect, reversed the onus of responsibility to investigate wrongdoing.

This can be changed.

[Grok @grok]

**No other current NHL teams have gone 43+ years without a top-3 pick.**

The Flames (since relocating to Calgary in 1980) are the only one with that long a drought—their highest pick ever in Calgary is 4th overall (Sam Bennett, 2014).

Vegas is the only other team that's *never* picked 1-2-3, but they've only existed since 2017. All other franchises have had at least one in the last 43 years.

[Darren Haynes @DarrenWHaynes]

The funniest part of the whole thing is ultimately, based on how the bingo balls fell, the Flames didn’t win enough games down the stretch to get No. 1 pick.

[Heather Exner-Pirot @ExnerPirot]

👀 Department of National Defence is making an initial $40-million investment for 2026–2027 to assess the potential of a Canadian‑controlled microreactor that could provide heat and electricity to remote and northern DND and Canadian Armed Forces facilities and operations. 👏

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk is on the witness stand in Oakland right now telling a jury how Sam Altman stole a charity.

Not a company. Not a venture. A charity.

The founding documents are entered into evidence.

It started with a conversation.

Google co-founder Larry Page called Musk a “speciesist” for favoring humanity over computers. At his own birthday party. In front of a crowd.

One of the most powerful technologists on the planet told the man beside him that caring more about human survival than machines was a character flaw.

Musk walked away from that conversation and asked one question.

What is the exact opposite of Google?

Musk: “It would be an open-source non-profit. And that is where the word ‘open’ in OpenAI comes from.”

He funded it. Named it. Recruited the researchers. Brought in Ilya Sutskever. Personally brokered the original Microsoft Azure deal with Satya Nadella.

Musk: “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding.”

$38 million of his own money. Into a structure designed to prevent any single person from profiting off the most dangerous technology ever built.

The founding charter is now sitting in front of a federal jury.

It says OpenAI was created to build “open source technology for the public benefit” and was “not organized for the private gain of any person.”

Then they offered Musk shares.

He turned them down.

Musk: “Non-profits are not supposed to have shares. It did not seem morally or legally defensible.”

The man who built it refused the money because the mission was never supposed to make anyone rich.

Then something changed.

Sam Altman took that structure and converted it into a for-profit subsidiary. Attracted a $10 billion Microsoft investment.

And built what is now approaching a trillion-dollar company on top of $38 million in charitable donations.

When Musk found out about the Microsoft deal, he texted Altman directly.

Musk: “I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I think I said, ‘This is a bait and switch.’”

The media frames this as a billionaire grudge match. Two egos fighting over territory.

That framing is a lie designed to make you look away from the documents.

This is not a dispute over equity. Musk is not asking for money back.

He is asking the court to return every dollar to the nonprofit foundation. $130 billion in damages. Altman and Brockman removed from their positions.

The entire for-profit conversion unwound.

He wants the charity restored because it was never supposed to be anything else.

Then from the stand, one line.

Musk: “I was a fool. I gave them free funding to create a startup.”

$38 million donated to protect the species. Turned into an $800 billion vehicle for private enrichment.

The most sophisticated theft of charitable intent in American corporate history.

And if this conversion stands, it sets the precedent for every nonprofit that comes after it. Every donor who writes a check believing a charter means something.

Every mission statement drafted to protect the public instead of enrich the founders.

If you can collect tax-exempt donations, build the most valuable technology on Earth, and hand the returns to private shareholders, then the nonprofit structure is not a safeguard.

It is a startup incubator for anyone willing to rewrite the paperwork.

And the question no one in that courtroom is asking.

If the people handed the tools to protect humanity used them to enrich themselves instead, what does that tell you about what happens when the technology actually arrives?

The charter said for the benefit of all.

The cap table says for the benefit of Sam Altman.

[GlobalStatsX @GlobalStatsX]

🇺🇸🇨🇿 Largest Czech Population by U.S. State (2024)

1. 🇺🇸 Texas ➜ 186,078
2. 🇺🇸 Illinois ➜ 83,490
3. 🇺🇸 Minnesota ➜ 76,903
4. 🇺🇸 California ➜ 72,719
5. 🇺🇸 Wisconsin ➜ 71,391
6. 🇺🇸 Nebraska ➜ 70,282
7. 🇺🇸 Florida ➜ 50,417
8. 🇺🇸 Ohio ➜ 47,388
9. 🇺🇸 Iowa ➜ 44,950
10. 🇺🇸 New York ➜ 40,489
11. 🇺🇸 Pennsylvania ➜ 39,829
12. 🇺🇸 Michigan ➜ 37,640
13. 🇺🇸 Colorado ➜ 34,484
14. 🇺🇸 Washington ➜ 26,642
15. 🇺🇸 Arizona ➜ 26,322
16. 🇺🇸 Missouri ➜ 21,520
17. 🇺🇸 Virginia ➜ 20,288
18. 🇺🇸 Kansas ➜ 19,900
19. 🇺🇸 New Jersey ➜ 19,672
20. 🇺🇸 North Carolina ➜ 18,617
21. 🇺🇸 Maryland ➜ 16,884
22. 🇺🇸 South Dakota ➜ 16,620
23. 🇺🇸 Oregon ➜ 16,529
24. 🇺🇸 Oklahoma ➜ 14,656
25. 🇺🇸 Indiana ➜ 14,159
26. 🇺🇸 Georgia ➜ 14,155
27. 🇺🇸 Massachusetts ➜ 11,404
28. 🇺🇸 North Dakota ➜ 9,847
29. 🇺🇸 South Carolina ➜ 9,212
30. 🇺🇸 Connecticut ➜ 9,172

📌 Note: Figures are based on people reporting ancestry.
📊 Source: U.S. Census Bureau (ACS 5-Year Estimates)

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[Heather Exner-Pirot @ExnerPirot]

A bit lost in the good news of the Enbridge $4B Sunrise expansion is that 36 nations got a 12.5% stake in Enbridge’s Westcoast natural gas pipeline system last year with the first federal Indigenous loan guarantee, to help pave the way for this.
It's good to be reminded that there are pathways for mutual benefit and we have good tools and willingness to find those, including in BC and including on pipelines.
There's Indigenous ownership in over 5000km of pipelines in Canada.
https://t.co/a0tzzzRRuj

[Culture Explorer @CultureExploreX]

Medieval builders understood they were building for generations they would never meet.

Many of them knew they would never see the cathedrals completed. Construction often lasted centuries. A mason carving a column in the thirteenth century knew the roof might not be finished until long after his lifetime. Yet they continued anyway.

Once you understand this, walking through a cathedral becomes something very different from tourism.

You begin outside with the façade. You cross the threshold and feel the height. Light transforms the interior. Geometry reveals hidden order beneath your feet. Sculptures speak from the walls. Music fills the space. Silence gathers everything together.

By the time you leave, the building feels like a conversation across centuries about how human beings should stand in the presence of something greater than themselves.

And once you learn to walk through a cathedral that way, you will never enter one the same way again.

Continue reading here:
https://t.co/C1pCqiMR9s

[Gil McGowan @gilmcgowan]

Wow. This is a lie. I remember being surprised when Lukazsuk said the petition called for a vote in the Legislature and not a referendum. So, I checked the legislation and Lukazsuk’s actual application. Sure enough, that’s what he was asking for. The Premier is a shameless liar.

[Brian Jean @BrianJeanAB]

This is great news for Alberta natural gas producers. The Sunrise Expansion program will create more capacity on Enbridge’s Westcoast Pipeline System which connects Alberta’s Montney region to B.C.'s gas system including the Woodfibre LNG facility.

Critically, the Stonlasec8 Indigenous Alliance Limited Partnership holds a 12.5 per cent stake in the Westcoast Pipeline System. Indigenous co-ownership is foundational to getting energy projects built.

Geopolitical conflicts have underscored the importance of Alberta being able to get our oil and gas to the global market, particularly Asia. More pipeline capacity means more of our resources get sold onto the world.

#abpoli #ableg #alberta #pipelines #lng #naturalgas

https://t.co/4EbWSA65Q0

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Every hospital in Britain had a stockpot on the stove until approximately the 1960s. Every workhouse before that. Every military mess. Every school kitchen. Every farmhouse. Every household that could afford bones, which was every household, because bones were the cheapest thing the butcher sold.

The stockpot ran continuously. Beef bones, pork bones, chicken carcasses, lamb shanks. The bones went in with water and were simmered for 12, 18, 24 hours. The broth that came out was the foundation of every soup, every stew, every gravy, every sauce.

Bone broth contains collagen, which breaks down into gelatin during cooking. Gelatin provides glycine and proline, essential for joint health, gut lining integrity, and connective tissue repair. It contains calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium leached from the bones. It contains glucosamine and chondroitin, now sold as joint supplements at £15 per bottle. It contains bone marrow, rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2.

Your grandmother did not know the names of these compounds. She knew the broth kept the family well. She knew a bowl of broth settled the stomach when someone was ill. She knew the broth made the gravy and the gravy made the dinner and the dinner kept the children growing.

The broth was replaced by the stock cube.

The stock cube contains salt, maltodextrin, palm oil, yeast extract, flavouring, sugar, and colouring. It does not contain collagen, glycine, glucosamine, or any of the compounds the 24-hour broth provided. The stock cube is flavoured salt water.

The generation that grew up on the broth has joints. The generation that grew up on the stock cube has a glucosamine subscription and an orthopaedic appointment.

The supplement industry now sells, individually and at substantial markup, every compound the bone broth contained for free. Collagen powder: £25. Glucosamine tablets: £15. Bone broth itself, repackaged as a wellness product: £8 per serving from a company in Shoreditch with a minimalist label.

They have not discovered anything new. They have rediscovered what their grandmothers threw away.

The stockpot is still available. The bones are still at the butcher's. Water. Bones. Heat. Time.

The broth has been the broth for approximately 10,000 years.

The stock cube has been the stock cube for approximately 70.

The broth's track record is better.

[TrevorNeufeld @Trevor_Neufeld]

Can we take a moment to celebrate former Flame Daniel Vladar in his first season as a starter?

52 games
Record: 29-14-7
Sv%: .906
GAA: 2.42

The Flyers made the playoffs by 3 points. 8-3-0 in his final 11. Beast mode in April. 5-1-0.

No Vladar. No Playoffs.

#Flames

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There's never been an investment like the investment in railroads. (This graph has a log scale!)

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

Calgary Flames goalie Dustin Wolf gives his stick to a 10-year-old superfan after the game and the kid can’t hold back his emotions.

[Darren Haynes @DarrenWHaynes]

My 37th year of freelancing at the Saddledome for The Canadian Press is a wrap. After working the past 15 home games, I get Thursday off. Considering I started this side hustle in 1989 while still in J school at MRC, it’s been a long run. Fun gig though and I’ve seen some things.