How do you map the exact reason, though. A hotel could have gone down years down the road due to Covid, some war that influenced existing clientele, general drop of tourism, change in weather patterns that made summer less attractive, competition from AirBnb, being bought by someone totally inept, spread of remote work instead of business trips, aging population that does not like to travel anymore, or combination of all those factors etc.
The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience.
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.
Yes, experimental archaeology has reproduced the process from quarrying to transport.
But also there are accurately hewn stones all over the world from many eras of history. It is not unique or special in any way.
The pyramid stones also aren't generally that accurate in an absolute sense. They just fit really well together. The vast majority aren't particularly flat or square, but have been worked to mate with their neighbors, which is a very different and far more mundane type of work. Some stones, particularly exposed interiors and the outer face of the casing stones were cut pretty accurately, but only the parts you can see. Inside they're usually pretty rough.
Ancient Egyptian stoneworking was impressive, even at the time, but not spectacular or exceptional. Other civilizations throughout history have built to equal skill, if not scale. People in the West just get so caught up in the mystery of the ancient Egypt myth that they think it's magical ancient lost technology. It was just regular human labor and skill, but a whole hell of a lot more of it applied in one spot than anything we can imagine today.
(I know nothing about this subject, feel free to ignore me.)
My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:
Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.
To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.
But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.
That's a fascinating link, and it sounds like what I'm talking about is what's called "engineer's blue" in the link.
But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some kind of grit, I don't know. Still seems harder.
Also, grinding methods end up removing more material (bad for teeth!), and I would expect more overall physical work to be done in order to remove that material (bad for massively heavy stone blocks).
As for making them flat, that seems unnecessary to me. But then, I'm not a pharaoh. (Even for a pharaoh, it seems like only the seems would need to be straight. Nobody could tell about the faces after assembly.)
Then again, after some quick researching, it seems like there's a good chance that the well-fitting blocks (which are not all of them) may have been cast out of a concrete-like slurry, not hewn.
You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.
That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.
Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.
BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.
Most countries in the West have higher threshold to arrest someone over social media posts. Some actually much, much higher.
12K is just a ridiculous number and indicates that the UK indeed has a free speech problem. I don't think that in my country there were more like ~ 20 actual arrests over the same problem during the same period.
Even if you agree with prosecuting people for speech, why exactly would you arrest them and drag them to prison/jail? Even here in Europe, this is a sort of offense that usually results in a suspended sentence or a fine, and a physical arrest is absolutely unnecessary, unless there is a good suspicion that that person is going to harm some concrete people at a concrete time.
In a more liberal country, even if prosecution over an utterance takes place, it usually happens without arrests, simply by asking the culprit to come to a police station and explain themselves, later the same in front of a court. There just isn't any need for physical restraining of that person, it is just intimidation.
The 12K figure is the total figure for arrests for Malicious Communications offenses. It's not a figure for social media posts specifically. The vast majority of these arrests have nothing to do with people making edgy social media posts. They're arrests for personal threats, harassment, stalking, etc. etc.
I think a lot of people assume by default that other European countries have fewer (or less egregious) arrests for social media posts just because the American right isn't boosting the relevant stories. But if you Google, you'll find some pretty wild instances of arrests for social media posts in lots of other European countries. Here are some examples.
In Spain you can be arrested for insulting the King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Has%C3%A9l [No, he didn't just insult the King, but that is one of the crimes he was charged with.]
In the Czech Republic, you can be convicted for making rude posts about Ukranians: https://www.newsendip.com/in-czech-republic-two-men-guilty-o... And if you're a communist, that's too bad, because it's illegal to express support for communist ideology (on social media or anywhere else).
All of these (with the exception of some of the non-King-related charges in the Spanish case) are pretty clearly instances where someone would not be arrested – and would certainly not be convicted – in the UK. But you won't find out about these cases from Elon Musk's X feed. And of course, people do get arrested and jailed for social media posts even in the land of the free, from time to time:
For me, it is evidence that our ability to build new power stations has seriously eroded, mostly due to bureaucracy, and that we need to fix this if we want to maintain competitiveness.
Consider the following graph which shows the power generation capabilities of China vs. the US during the last 40 years.
There is power available in the country. It is not available in arbitrary quantity, to arbitrarily selected buildings, on arbitrarily short timelines.
That said, I agree we need more power generation in this country. Massive rollouts (like in China) would bolster industry while being beneficial to nearly every citizen except those dependent on legacy energy technologies.
Sadly, the party in power opposes the most scalable approaches to this because greatly expanded power generation would hurt margins for a few special interests.
One of the problems of the EU is that the largest countries (FR, DE, IT) are exactly the most ossified and bureaucratic ones, and their pro-endless-papering attitudes leak out through Brussels to the more nimble, but smaller players which find it harder to organize blocking minorities.
I find it interesting that most Germans don't seem to be aware of just how much worse their bureaucracy is than elsewhere, or even willing to defend such system as somehow optimal, even though it burns a lot of human energy and time while not
even moving forward, just spinning the wheels in sand. Their refusal to even start thinking along the lines "maybe the Poles or the Balts or even the Romanians are doing something better and we should learn something from them" is very stubborn, probably stemming from surviving prejudice against the Wild East.
These days, no one can compete with China et al. by burying their own economy in endless rivers of paper. This is categorically the false way.
I wouldn't underestimate the market for AI videos. From funny to hyperpolitical/propagandist.
One of the most globally recognized attribute of the recent US-Iranian war was the Lego cartoons. This sort of content will be soon churned out by everyone.
The propaganda lego cartoons I have seen were not AI slop. They were also perfectly doable in a traditional studio. The lyrics had meaning - insulting but a real one. They were not constrained to truth, but that seemed like normal propaganda lying rather then hallucinations. The lying was very purposeful.
"the russian firehose" and "flood the zone" have been proven to work, and work well.
that a human studio can make similar things is irrelevant; they're aiming for volume, one that is utterly all-encompassing, and they will succeed in that effort.
marketing is simply the same idea but pushed towards economic ends. instead of flooding the zone with memes to curate an entirely GOP worldview, they curate a lifestyle that creates anxiety that can only be remedied by buying a comically large pickup truck
Technically yes, but in the case of nuclear, regulatory cost is what matters more. If the paperwork needed for construction of one large scale reactor is much more expensive than that needed for construction of a hundred smaller identical reactors, then the SMRs will win.
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