Dan Davis

Dr. of the Deep - Prof. of classical archaeology. Keen on ocean exploration, shipwrecks, coffee, bringing MIA's home, and astronomy, trophy husband ⚓️🏛🌟🌎

[Dan Davis @semperexplorans]

@WilliamShatner Yeah, feeble is the first word I think of! I hope I have have your energy when I reach your young age. Keep up the great work, young man!

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Bertrand Russell

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I needed to move a sofa.

I mentioned this to an American. He said, "You know anybody with a truck?"

I did not know anybody with a truck.

He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.

"You gotta know somebody with a truck."

I asked how one acquires such a person.

He said, "You just do."

This is the third time I have received that answer in this country. It is the answer to everything here. You just do. There is no process. There is only the eventual fact of having.

He said, "Ask Kevin."

I do not know a Kevin. He said Kevin like I should. He said it the way you say a shared uncle.

I met Kevin four days later. Kevin owns a truck. Kevin does not own a truck for himself. Nobody owns a truck for themselves. Kevin owns a truck for a fifteen mile radius.

Inside I said: THIS MAN HAS TAKEN A VOW. HE DID NOT ANNOUNCE IT. HE SIMPLY PURCHASED A BED AND ACCEPTED THE CONSEQUENCES.

Kevin arrived on Saturday. He brought the truck. He also brought a second man.

I had not asked for a second man.

The second man's name is Tony. Tony came because Kevin came. Tony did not know me. Tony did not ask what we were moving. Tony brought gloves.

They moved the sofa in eleven minutes.

I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.

I asked what I owed them.

Kevin said, "Buy the pizza."

That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.

Inside I said: THE FEE IS FIXED ACROSS THE ENTIRE NATION AND WAS SET BY NO ONE.

We ate on the floor because the sofa was against the wall and none of us wanted to be the first to sit on it.

Tony told me his daughter plays soccer. I asked if she is good. He said, "She's aggressive."

I still think about that.

Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.

"You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge."

He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.

Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CALLED UP. I DID NOT ENLIST. THE PAPERS WERE FILED ON MY BEHALF.

I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.

Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.

I said, "Yeah, I got a guy."

I have a guy.

I am somebody's guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.

He describes me as "the guy who's strong for his size."

I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we reject any evidence of the bamboozle. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

— Carl Sagan

[E/V Nautilus @EVNautilus]

Dr. Ballard gives the Corps of Exploration onboard #EVNautilus a presentation on his search for Cleopatra’s Tomb!

[E/V Nautilus @EVNautilus]

🚨 #DiveAlert! We’re exploring an unnamed seamount east of the Mariana Trench with #ROVHercules! Watch live at https://t.co/zhUi3dQOeD

[E/V Nautilus @EVNautilus]

A new study examines the amphora carriers discovered off the coast of Knidos by ROVs from the #EVNautilus between 2010 and 2012 within the context of Eastern Mediterranean maritime trade. Read more via @GreekReporter: https://t.co/675X9PR6Gp

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

100 years ago, this photo would have ended every newspaper headline on Earth.

Today it'll get scrolled past in 2 seconds.

This is a photograph of Mars. Taken today.

140 million miles away from us.

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

🚨: A civilization 2,000 light-years away pointing a powerful enough telescope at Earth right now would see the Roman Empire.

They'd see Jesus alive.

[CyrilXBT @cyrilXBT]

A MIT professor gave a 1-hour lecture in 2019 that has 18 million views.

He died 5 months after recording it.

It was his final gift to the world.

Patrick Winston taught at MIT for 50 years.

The smartest engineers on earth sat in his classroom.

And he spent his last lecture teaching them the one skill their degrees never covered.

How to speak.

15 lessons that will change how you communicate forever:

Never open with a joke. Your audience is not ready to laugh yet. Open with a promise of what they will know by the end.

Your ideas are like your children. You are too close to them. What is obvious to you is invisible to everyone else. Explain the obvious.

The 5-minute rule: the first 5 minutes of any talk determine whether people will listen for the next 55. Spend more time on your opening than anything else.

Repeat your most important idea 3 times in 3 different ways. Once is never enough.

Build a fence around your idea. Tell people what it is NOT before you tell them what it IS.

Verbal punctuation. Pause. Let the idea land before moving to the next one.

Ask questions nobody will answer. Then wait 7 seconds. The silence is not awkward. It is processing.

Never read your slides. Your audience can read. They cannot listen and read simultaneously.

Use the board not the slides. Writing forces you to slow down. Slowing down forces clarity.

Inspire before you inform. Nobody learns from someone they are not inspired by.

End with a contribution not a summary. Tell them what you gave them. Not what you said.

Never say thank you at the end. It is weak. End with something that lands.

Stories make ideas stick. Data makes ideas understood. You need both. In that order.

The quality of your communication determines the quality of your ideas in the eyes of the world. Not the ideas themselves.

Practice is not preparation. Practice IS the skill.

Patrick Winston understood something most people spend their entire careers missing.

Your ideas are only as powerful as your ability to transfer them into someone else's mind.

You can be the smartest person in the room and be completely invisible.

Or you can master communication and make average ideas feel like breakthroughs.

He chose to spend his last lecture teaching this.

Watch it tonight.

Bookmark this first.

Follow @cyrilXBT for more lessons from the people who built the future.

[NASA @NASA]

The countdown begins.

Teams at @NASAKennedy have arrived to their stations at the Launch Control Center. We are about 48 hours from the launch of the Artemis II mission around the Moon. https://t.co/PqaR8eyxu4

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

A visualization of the Ptolemaic system, a geocentric model of the solar system (with Earth at the center) that dominated astronomy for 1,500 years until it was overturned by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler.

[Philosophy Of Physics @PhilosophyOfPhy]

Find the incorrect one ✍️.

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

You’re looking at ANOTHER PLANET.

140 million miles away from us.

Not CGI. Not art.

Just Mars—silent, distant, and real.

[Interesting AF @interesting_aIl]

A small demonstration of how hard it is to find planet Earth in the middle of space

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

NASA just dropped a jaw-dropping animation that squeezes twenty-two confirmed black holes into a single frame, each one lurking inside its own X-ray binary system. These aren’t random monsters; they’re real, catalogued beasts like Cygnus X-1, GRS 1915+105, and V404 Cygni, all scaled to the same size so you can finally compare the cosmic heavyweights side by side. Watch closely and you’ll see the black holes (shown as dark spheres) calmly orbiting their companion stars that glow white-hot from the hellish radiation. The accretion disks blaze in furious orange and yellow, twisted maelstroms of superheated gas spiraling toward oblivion. Every frame is a violent ballet: matter gets ripped from the donor star, forms a glowing ring, then vanishes forever past the event horizon. To make the show visible to human eyes, NASA cranked the orbital speeds up by roughly 22,000 times; what you’re seeing as seconds actually unfolds over weeks, months, or years in real time. Some pairs whirl around each other in just a few hours; others take lazy days to complete a single lap. A few systems flare like paparazzi cameras when the black hole suddenly gorges on extra material. The whole scene feels like a cosmic nightclub where the darkest guests throw the wildest parties. In under a minute, you witness feasts, flares, and gravitational dances that would take lifetimes to observe naturally; proof that even the most patient universe can be edited into pure adrenaline.

[Dan Davis @semperexplorans]

@elonmuskTN 42

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Pretty intuitive animation explaining seasons, equinox, solstice, length of day and night.

Today marks the autumn equinox in the Northern Hemisphere.

[🎞️ German Valencia Garcia]

[Metatron @pureMetatron]

If you would like to hear what fluently spoken Latin sounded like with the same Classical pronunciation the ancient Romans used check this video of mine.

I speak Latin for 5 minutes non stop with no jump cuts. One single camera take.

Also answer me this. How much could you understand? I'll leave a comment with the full transcript with phonemic vowel length indicated for each word for further study and analysis.