Ulisezzz

Solía preocuparme que la gente me encontrara en el internet.

[Noam Blum @neontaster]

I had to recrop the original meme to work in IMAX.

[trash @trashh_dev]

people who do local ai are the new vegans

[Erume @Erume]

La UNAM en estos momentos:

[xiu_shoegaze @xiu_shoegaze]

odysseus when the Trojan horse designed to trick and destroy Troy, tricks and destroys Troy

[Ulisezzz @ulisezzz]

@cavidaga Ulises is used instead of Odysseus, there’s plenty of us

[Gabriel @gbrl_dick]

very ghost in the shell that we’re calling the first rogue autonomous AI cyber attack the “hugging face incident”.

[Nobody 🔥 @MissTypos]

POR QUÉ CHINGADOS VAS A MANDAR UNA CAPTURA DE TU CLABE INTERBANCARIA EN LUGAR DE PEGAR EL NÚMERO SIN ESPACIOS PARA QUE HAGAN COPY/PASTE Y ASEGURARTE DE QUE HAGAN BIEN LA TRANSFERENCIA?

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

This meeting could’ve been 57 slack messages over the span of two days

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

we're getting so insanely fucking lucky with all of these warning shots and then we're just fucking ignoring all of them and ploughing ahead

[Oscar Chavira @Oscar_Chavira]

Lo que mas me sorprende de esta foto es que Jorge Campos es mas alto de Tom Cruise.

[Jteve Sobs @JteveSob]

when you hear the music you sing

[Zoe Miller @zoeschimke]

“So, if you had to guess, roughly when do you think you’ll be home from Troy”

[hank @apraxophobia]

Cross sectioning insects in an electron microscope with a femtosecond laser - new video from @BenKrasnow

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

For over a thousand years, historians thought the Viking "sunstone" was nothing more than a myth, until the ocean gave up its secret...

The Norse sagas repeatedly referenced a mysterious object called a "sólarsteinn" or sunstone, a navigational tool so powerful that Viking sailors could locate the exact position of the sun even on the most overcast and cloudy days. For centuries, scholars debated whether this was real technology or simply folklore embellished over generations of retelling. Most assumed it was legend. They were wrong.

In 2013, marine archaeologists excavating a British warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592 made a stunning discovery buried among the wreckage. Alongside navigational instruments including a pair of dividers and a slate, they found a rectangular chunk of translucent crystal. Testing confirmed it was Iceland spar, a remarkably pure form of calcite with extraordinary optical properties. The fact that it was found stored alongside other precision navigation tools was not a coincidence.

Iceland spar possesses a property called birefringence, meaning it splits a single beam of light entering the crystal into two separate beams. When you hold the crystal up toward the sky and slowly rotate it, the two beams will vary in brightness independently until, at one specific angle of rotation, they become perfectly equal in intensity. That precise angle points directly toward the sun, regardless of whether the sun is visible to the naked eye. Cloud cover, fog, and even twilight conditions cannot defeat it.

Researchers from the University of Rennes in France conducted extensive testing and published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Their experiments demonstrated that Iceland spar could locate the sun's position with an accuracy of within one degree, even under completely overcast skies. For Viking navigators crossing the North Atlantic toward Iceland, Greenland, and eventually North America, this accuracy would have meant the difference between a successful voyage and sailing hopelessly off course into open ocean.

The Viking Age spanned roughly 793 to 1066 AD, and during this period Norse sailors were completing oceanic crossings that would not be replicated by other European cultures for another 400 years. Historians had long puzzled over how they achieved such consistent navigational precision without magnetic compasses, which did not reach Europe until the 12th century. The sunstone appears to be a significant part of that answer.

What makes the Channel Islands find especially compelling is that the 1592 shipwreck is far outside the traditional Viking era, suggesting that knowledge of this navigational technique survived and was still being used by European sailors centuries after the Viking Age officially ended. The crystal was not a relic or a curiosity on that ship. It was working equipment.

The sagas specifically describe King Olaf consulting a sunstone on a cloudy day to verify the position of the sun, with a separate observation then confirming the stone's accuracy. For generations this was dismissed as poetic invention. Science has now confirmed that every element of that description is physically possible and practically achievable with a simple piece of Icelandic calcite.

The Vikings were not lucky explorers stumbling across new lands by accident. They were sophisticated navigators armed with technology so elegant and effective that it required no moving parts, no maintenance, and no power source beyond the sky itself.

📷 : the original calcite crystal alongside Elizabethan navigation dividers next to a cannon

Alderney Museum

#archaeohistories

[OnlyFlans 🍮 @OnIyFlans]

🥇

[J-MAT（ジェイマット） @jmat2022]

こっちをこっちに

[PS @dostoevesque]

During the filming of The Lord of the Rings, someone asked why the night scenes were being lit. "It's supposed to be dark," they said. "Where is all this light coming from?"

The cinematographer replied, "The same place the music in that scene comes from."