The 638 acres (2.58 km2) of land [We Build the Wall] built on is part of farmland that belongs to Neuhaus and Sons, and the wall added over $20 million in taxable land improvement, increasing the tax burden by 75 times. In January 2020, Fisher Industries started a lease-purchase agreement with Neuhaus and Sons for the land under the wall, but had not completed the ownership transfer by their court hearing on December 12, 2020, citing a problematic land survey by Fisher. Fisher's attorney, Mark Courtois, was hopeful the US government would become owners of both the wall and land. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Public Affairs Officer Thomas Gresback said that the wall was privately paid for and on private property, and CBP does not have anything to do with the project. CBP is constructing its RGV-03 project wall outside the floodplain 0.3 miles (0.48 km) away.[66] As of July 2021, the property had been reassessed at 100 times its original value, and Fisher was hoping to sell a 3-mile section of wall (4.8 km) that had cost $30 million to build.[67]

(Or at least partly factual, I don't know if we've proved that they can't read.)

8. They can go a lifetime without water

Birds are experts in conserving water.

Along with mammals, they’re the only animals capable of concentrating urine, and this helps them reduce the water they need, thus reducing their weight and making flight a heck of a lot easier – even if they choose not to fly much.

These birds can go an entire lifetime without drinking water (technically, so can everything else, but at least in roadrunners that lifetime isn’t reduced by it), and get their moisture entirely from their diets.

https://factanimal.com/roadrunner/

Chuck Jones did the research!

Inuvik, NWT, with a 2021 census population of 3,137 is the fifth largest settlement in Northern Canada (north of the 60th parallel). At "only" 68°22′ north, it doesn't even quite make it to Wikipedia's list of northernmost settlements. But that is the most populated town in Canada whose antipodal point lies within the continent of Antarctica. The antipodal point is the point you would get to if you could drill directly down through the centre of the Earth and come out the other side (also, it is the most distant point on the surface of the Earth, which is always approx. 20,000 km from the original point). Yellowknife and Iqaluit, the capitals of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, respectively, have antipodal points that lie at sea close to the Antarctic mainland, within a few hundred kilometres from shore.

I found that interesting because while Inuvik is certainly cold most of the time, it's still surrounded by a lush boreal forest and the warmest couple of months of summer are fairly pleasant. I've personally never been, but a friend of a friend lived there for years and still goes there. The antipodal point though is a white desert. About 300 km from that point, on the much milder coast (the antipodal point itself is more than 2000 metres above sea level), one finds Dumont d'Urville Base, a a French scientific station, which is completely barren of vegetation and is barely above freezing during summer (at least they have penguins).

The reasons for the difference in climate are many, but the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is probably mainly to blame, together with the high elevation of the surface and high albedo of the ice.

"Help keep yourself, your family and your community safe by being aware of rumors and scams and sharing official information from trusted sources. Do your part to stop the spread of rumors by doing three easy things:

1. Find trusted sources of information.
2. Share information from trusted sources.
3. Discourage others from sharing information from unverified sources.

The Shiva hypothesis, also known as coherent catastrophism, is the idea that global natural catastrophes on Earth, such as extinction events, happen at regular intervals because of the periodic motion of the Sun in relation to the Milky Way galaxy.

Initial proposal in 1979

William Napier and Victor Clube in their 1979 Nature article, ”A Theory of Terrestrial Catastrophism”,[1] proposed the idea that gravitational disturbances caused by the Solar System crossing the plane of the Milky Way galaxy are enough to disturb comets in the Oort cloud surrounding the Solar System. This sends comets in towards the inner Solar System, which raises the chance of an impact. According to the hypothesis, this results in the Earth experiencing large impact events about every 30 million years (such as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event).

Edit: added source

In other terms, West Virginia's 2020 population size was 8.3% of Florida's. As someone that grew up in Florida most of their life, I find that the culture has made a pronounced change since my childhood.

Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style.

The original term comes from Ancient Greek: "like the ox turns [while plowing]". It is mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. It was a common way of writing on stone in Ancient Greece.

A fun variation is the reverse boustrophedon: the text in alternate lines is rotated 180 degrees rather than mirrored.

The reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line from left to right again. When reading one line, the lines above and below it appear upside down.

I heard about it on a podcast about the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. They use used the reverse boustrophedon style for their system of glyphs called Rongorongo, which remains undeciphered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17045970

From Wikipedia

Stampede events that involve humans are extremely rare and are unlikely to be fatal.[5] According to Keith Still, professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University, "If you look at the analysis, I've not seen any instances of the cause of mass fatalities being a stampede. People don't die because they panic. They panic because they are dying".[5] 

Paul Torrens, a professor at the Center for Geospatial Information Science at the University of Maryland, remarks that "the idea of the hysterical mass is a myth".[5] Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.[16][17] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.[18][19][20] […] [M]ost major crowd disasters can be prevented by simple crowd management strategies.[22] Crushes can be prevented by organization and traffic control, such as barriers. […] Such incidents are invariably the product of organisational failures.[4]

Replacing a broken set of blinds in my house and apparently no one sells the old standard kind where you pull the cord to raise them, I guess because kids and/or pets could tangle in the cord? Bit of an education in miniblinds today.

Relevant excerpt, emphasis is mine:

Rubio's maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, immigrated to the U.S. legally in 1956, but returned to Cuba to find work in 1959. When he fled communist Cuba and returned to the U.S. in 1962 without a visa, he was detained as an undocumented immigrant and an immigration judge ordered him to be deported. Immigration officials reversed their decision later that day, the deportation order was not enforced, and Garcia was given a legal status of "parolee" that allowed him to stay in the U.S. Garcia re-applied for permanent resident status in 1966 following passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act, at which point his residency was approved. Rubio enjoyed a close relationship with his grandfather during his childhood.

Something shady happened, y'all.

At the age of six, Obama and his mother had moved to Indonesia to join his stepfather. From age six to ten, he was registered in school as "Barry"[31] and attended local Indonesian-language schools: Sekolah Dasar Katolik Santo Fransiskus Asisi (St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School) for two years and Sekolah Dasar Negeri Menteng 01 (State Elementary School Menteng 01) for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.[32][33] As a result of his four years in Jakarta, he was able to speak Indonesian fluently as a child.[34] During his time in Indonesia, Obama's stepfather taught him to be resilient and gave him "a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works".[35]

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979.

The decision to demilitarize started from a proposal to put more money into education and healthcare by the then Defense Minister Edgar Cardona, who passed it to the Interior minister Alvaro Ramos and then, taken to the constitutional assembly by the provisional President at the time, Jose Figueres Ferrer.

But even though Costa Rica has no Army, it has a special police force, officially called the Public Force of Costa Rica (Fuerza Pública). It was established in 1996 by the Ministry of Public Security to perform law enforcement, policing, and border patrol tasks. The force’s motto is “God, Fatherland, and Honor.”

The Effects of Costa Rica not having an Army

The budget previously dedicated to sustaining the Costa Rica Army is put into other aspects of the society like education and health care.

This, in turn, allows for improved political, economic, and social stability. New schools and hospitals lowered the country’s infant mortality and heightened the literacy rate.

Today, Costa Rica’s infant mortality rate is the second-lowest in the region, and the literacy rate is 98%. It also has a higher life expectancy, averaging 80 years old. So, overall, the standard of living has increased.

In fact, in 2012, based on the Happy Planet Index, it was the happiest country in the world!

Population of 5 million.

Source : « The Great Scientists: From Euclid to Stephen Hawking », from John Farndon

I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato or before, just wanted to share, what a time.

B.t.w., we know about ChatGPT, some about Sam Altman, but nothing about the researchers, and the same goes for every other technology, it's a choice of society 🤷(, causes&consequences).

Edit : Transcript :

All the same, if anyone wanted a proper education, Alexandria in Egypt was the place to go, and here Archimedes went as a young man.
At the time he was there, the city was the greatest centre of learning in the ancient world. Although the museum or university there was barely 20 years old – the city itself had been founded by Alexander the Great just half a century earlier – it already held an unrivalled library, containing at least 100,000 scrolls, including all of Aristotle’s priceless personal collection.
It was here that the great Euclid taught geometry, that Aristarchus showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and that Hipparchus made the first great catalogue of constellations, categorizing stars in terms of their brightness. And it was here that, much later, Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential book about the nature of the universe for 1,500 years.
Euclid was probably dead by the time Archimedes was there, but Archimedes undoubtedly met Eratosthenes, the brilliant thinker who measured the circumference of the world to within 4 per cent of modern figures, and made a measurement of the year’s length as precise as any until barely half a century ago.

Edit : Now that i think about it, conquering Persia&Egypt&.. probably helped them in developing these knowledges/sciences