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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • it said something like “this is very high”.

    Maeshowe, in the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland. It’s a properly ancient structure, and there are 30 runic inscriptions in it which are all just straight up graffiti, including “Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up”. My favourite part is it’s not even that high up, like the guy was probably just on someone’s shoulders.

    Oddly enough we probably have the story of the graffiti artists. The Orkneyinga saga tells the tale of some 12th century Norsemen who took shelter there during a snowstorm and looted the place. By the time they did so, Maeshowe was already about 4,000 years old, and whatever they looted was probably left there by their own ancestors a few centuries beforehand.







  • Volume is not mass, and neither of them is weight. A gram is strictly speaking a measure of mass, and we just consider it to be a unit of weight in casual terms because the only frame of reference the vast majority of us have has reasonably constant gravity so we conflate mass and weight. That you can sort of use grams to measure volume is literally only because the density of common stuff (especially water) is close enough for most purposes. It’s kinda like measuring a distance in units of time so long as the method of travel is known. I can say “an hour’s walk” and I’m not really measuring distance there but you know roughly how far I mean