Prost i vakre Ytre Nordmøre prosti, liten mann med stor sans for pragmatikk. Tofotssyk. 🌈 Follower of Christ but totally suck at it. Snapchat: sindruskulis
The view from inside Integrity as recovery forces pop open the hatch…watching the helicopter pass over their shoulders and hearing all the joy, it was as good as it gets.
Look at this Norwegian church. It has been standing through Norwegian rain for over 840 years.
The trees were prepared for nearly two decades before anyone cut them down.
Workers walked into old-growth pine forests and stripped the chosen trees of their tops and their branches. The trunks stayed standing for fifteen to twenty years. The roots kept pulling resin upward. The pitch bled out of every old branch socket and saturated the heartwood from the inside.
By the time the trunks were felled in winter, the heartwood was no longer wood. It was malmfuru. Ore-pine. Functionally pressure-treated lumber, except the pressure was applied by the tree itself, for free, across two decades before construction started.
That is why iron was rejected. Iron rusts. Iron expands and contracts on a different cycle than the wood around it. After 100 winters iron splits the fiber and the joint dies. Wooden pegs swell with moisture in the same direction as the staves. The joints get tighter over time. Tongue-and-groove walls. Ground sills on a stone foundation. Four corner posts carrying load down through stone, never up through soil.
Then the tar. Pine roots and stumps stacked under clay, lit on fire, burned for two days under controlled airflow. The wood decomposes into pitch. The pitch gets reapplied to the church every 10 to 15 years. Including this decade.
Norway built around 2,000 stave churches between 1150 and 1350. 28 survive. Borgund is the best preserved because its corner staves rest on stone, not soil. The ground never won.
Modern lumber arrives at the construction site finished.
Borgund's builders made the lumber finish itself.
People don't realize how absurd this view actually is.
A camera. On a robot. On Mars.
Built by humans on a planet 140 million miles away, launched on a rocket, landed using a sky crane, and now driving across an alien desert taking pictures so detailed you can count the rocks.
100 years ago, your great-grandparents thought airplanes were a miracle.
You are scrolling past Mars on your phone.
Newly released video footage from the splashdown of NASA’s Artemis ll in the Eastern Pacific on Friday, April 10, 2026, shows the moment that U.S. Navy Divers cracked the door open and entered the Orion to greet the Astronauts, welcoming them back to Earth after their journey around the Moon.
I figured out why the Artemis stream felt so different
It's because for the first time in decades, we collectively witnessed something that was untouched by politics, celebrities and influencers