A bit of a shift from our regular schedule due to a sudden stomach bug (I feel better already).

The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight

The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.

Reminds me of the Clock of the Long Now.

Late Bronze Age collapse

Gold and silver were the first metals human discovered. They are quite rare but exist in pure form. You need advanced metallurgy to extract copper or produce bronze by mixing it with tin.

Copper and tin were usually found in different places and tin was quite rare, producing vast trading networks.

But if you can produce a fire as hot as 1500-200 degrees, you can smelt iron. And iron ore is everywhere.

When humans discovered iron it led to a societal collapse in the Mediterranean basin. Supposedly, everyone got access to better weapons and no longer had to keep trading for tin.

Speaking speed across languages

Speaking speed varies widely across languages.

Japanese is much faster than English and almost 2 times faster than Thai.

But the rate of information is relatively consistent, around 39 bits/s: both English and French are 30% faster than Thai (poor Thai).

After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris

It was incredibly captivating to watch the video about how professional Tetris players managed to beat the game.

At championships and on Twitch they play the NES version. With each level Tetris speeds up, and at some point level 38 simply becomes impossible to pass – the pieces fall too fast to move them.

But the players literally found a way to press the buttons faster and were able to break through this barrier. The game was not ready for this at all, so it stopped speeding up, but instead they ran into another problem. Every 10 levels the color scheme changes, but at some point the game starts reading data from the wrong space, and the palette becomes almost random. Wuld be fine if the pieces were just pink, but on some levels they become just black.

And after all that, at certain levels the game simply crashes. That’s how the “endless” Tetris acquired a sort of finale that everyone began trying to reach. And one player actually did it.

The Playlist

Liked this biopic on the story of Spotify. It starts with Daniel Ek but shifts to a new characters at the end of each episode to present a comprehensive story. And it's very compelling!