Every October 14th at 8:21am the sun would shine through my bathroom window and perfectly illuminate the toilet bowl.
I liked to drop a duke in there before that happened because I thought it was hilarious that the universe would celebrate my bowel movement like that.
I’m reminded of a quote from an old Tom Scott video. He’s visiting a modern reconstruction of a Neolithic long barrow. Tom points out that the sun lines up with the entrance on the summer solstice, then it cuts to the owner who says
I think a lot of people would assume that getting the alignments of a monument like this… would involve complex calculations, a sharp pencil, and computing power. But in fact, you can do it just as easily by getting up at the right time with some sticks.
The GENIUS of people who wake up early and actually go outside
In other words, we do understand the stakes. They involve using stakes.
This is so frustrating because yeah, it’s impressive how advanced the architecture and construction are in many ancient sites. And it’s entirely possible that the Inca believed that the sunlight on a specific day had special power. But the ability to make a building a certain way doesn’t mean they were right about the sunlight, any more than Notre Dame makes the Christian god real.
If we could only unlock poor Photoshop skills to demonstrate the imaginary Incan power of two suns.
It’s cool how the magical rays from the suns know where they’re going and only bother lighting the path straight to the windows.
Excuse me. Are you being whimsical?
terrifying precision
Wait until this person gets a load of the Michelson-Morley experiment in the 1880s to measure the speed of light in all directions, opening the door for Einstein to formulate Special and General Relativity.
Let alone what they’re doing now with entangled laser photons, beam-splitting crystals and mirrors that fluctuate in attoseconds.
Or what they’re doing with non-entangled lasers and mirrors to detect gravitational waves in the very fabric of space-time, ripples one thousand times smaller than the width of a single proton.Now that’s terrifying precision right there. Although I’d prefer to use the term exquisite, I’d even go so far as calling it a miracle of science and engineering.
TERRIFYING PRECISION and ARCHITECTURAL GENIUS of checks notes
…
double-checks notes
“Knowing how shadows and windows work”
Man, the bar is unrealistically high for some people…
I feel kind of bad for the architectural genius they executed. Seems like he was just doing his job.
Yeah yeah yeah I honor the solstice too. I swear to the gods people who oversell this stuff…
I mean, it’s just an excuse to eat starchy foods and get drunk
Oh boy would you love Mabon and Lamas then. The holidays of beer and bread. But yeah that’s one of its major draws, though I’m partial to the light in the darkness and warm community in the cold months aspects of the solstice
THIS IS NOT SOME WHIMSICAL NOTION!
