Corvus follow me. They get close, not certain why.

Asking for a friend, because I have personal preferences. What is best #vegetable?

‘No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or banished or in any way molested, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land’. Happy Magna Carta Day edwest.co.uk/p/the-glory-of-…

In 1960, David Latimer planted a spiderwort sprout inside of a large glass jar, added a quarter pint of water, and then sealed it shut. He opened the bottle for the first time only 12 years later, in 1972, to add some water and then sealed it for good. The self-contained ecosystem flourished for more than 60 years as a perfectly balanced garden and self-sufficient ecosystem. The bacteria in the compost ate the dead plants and broke down the oxygen released, turning it into carbon dioxide, essentially forming a microcosm of Earth.

Seville disease - destroying productive capacity by exporting the currency, and confusing the resulting temporary revenue/consumption capacity for actual wealth, which in the long run is a function of production, is one of the major problems of 21st century America.

"In my opinion, the greatest game ever pitched was between the San Francisco Giants and Milwaukee Braves on July 2, 1963. Forty-two-year-old Warren Spahn and 25-year-old Juan Marichal each went 16 innings and the game ended 1-0 on a home run by Willie Mays. Each pitcher threw over 200 pitches. Spahn threw 201. Marichal threw 227. There were seven future Hall of Fame players in that game, including Spahn and Marichal. We will never see that again because the game won’t allow it. But both guys were prepared to go as long as it took. And this game was not a fluke, both pitchers won 20 games that season. For Spahn, it was his 13th 20-win season and for Marichal, it was his first of 6. My highest pitch count was 232 in a game against the Red Sox in 1974. I pitched 12 innings, struck out 19, walked 10, and had a no decision. My counter-part, Luis Tiant threw 180 pitches in 14 1/3 innings and took the loss 4-3. We were on a 4-man rotation and pitched on 3 day’s rest. I had 26 complete games in 1973 and 1974 and didn’t even lead the league. Gaylord Perry had 29 in 1973 and Ferguson Jenkins had 29 in 1974." Nolan Ryan. Art by Graig Kreindler.

This what American technology does. youtu.be/ILCgPSTrDeY

This song so resonates with me. Simple Minds - Belfast Child youtu.be/7vhhTvcLoRw?is=D3E1… via @YouTube

Tinnitus sucks. It won’t stop at night. I wish I could simply sleep. Earplugs don’t help either.

In 1957, Mantle reached base 319 times in 144 games. That's 2.22 times per game. If you attended a game, you were more likely than not to see him on base multiple times.

In 1854, 27-year-old Riemann had to give a public lecture to qualify as a professor at Göttingen. Custom was to propose three topics; examiners almost always chose the first. His examiner was Gauss, who broke convention and picked the third - the one Riemann had barely prepared: the foundations of geometry. The audience was the philosophy faculty, so Riemann used almost no formulas. In plain prose, he argued that the geometry of space is not given in advance - space could be curved, and only measurement can decide. Gauss, famously impossible to impress, walked home praising the lecture. It was published only after Riemann's death at 39. Sixty-one years after the lecture, Einstein needed exactly that mathematics to write general relativity.

On December 27, 1968, Apollo 8 needed to fire its engine to leave lunar orbit and return to Earth. If the burn was wrong, the crew would never come home. In Mission Control, a 25-year-old mathematician named Frances Northcutt, known as Poppy, had prepared the return-to-Earth calculations. She was the first woman to work in Mission Control in a technical role. When the burn data came back, something was off. The numbers didn't match the expected trajectory. She had 4 minutes to determine whether the deviation was within tolerance or whether Apollo 8 was in danger. She ran the calculations by hand. They were within tolerance. She gave the go. The crew came home. She later went to law school and became a prominent civil rights attorney. When asked about her time at NASA she said: "We were just doing our jobs. Nobody thought it was unusual except the reporters." The people who kept the astronauts alive were largely anonymous. Most of them were young women with slide rules.

Exactly.

Fireworks celebrating the completion of the 566ft Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família

Roberto Clemente has 65 more career outfield assists than any player born after 1909. This is why.

I’m a huge baseball fan, won last year in MLB fantasy league. This year, every time I turn around. Injuries.

In 1963, New York City committed what one critic called an act of vandalism against its own soul. It tore down the most beautiful building it had ever built, and it has regretted it every day since. The building was Pennsylvania Station, and for half a century it was one of the great rooms of the world... It opened in 1910, designed by the architects McKim, Mead & White, and it covered eight acres in the heart of Manhattan. Its main waiting room was modeled on the Baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome, with ceilings that rose 150 feet into the air. Sunlight poured down through vast steel-and-glass canopies onto the concourse below. To step off a train and walk up into that light was, for millions of arriving travelers, the moment New York announced itself. A historian, Vincent Scully, famously wrote that, through it, one entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat... Because in 1963, the railroad, losing money and sitting on immensely valuable land, sold the air rights above the station. The great building was condemned. Wave by wave, the pink granite columns were pulled down and dumped in a New Jersey swamp, and a low, windowless complex of Madison Square Garden and an office tower was built on top of the surviving tracks. There was no law to stop it. At the time, nothing in New York protected a historic building from destruction, however beloved. Leading architects stood outside in protest as the demolition began. It made no difference... But something came out of the loss. The destruction of Penn Station horrified the public so deeply that it gave birth to the modern preservation movement in America. New York passed its landmarks law in 1965, and that law would later save Grand Central Terminal from the very same fate. In a way, Penn Station became more powerful in death than it had ever been in life. It’s really true that we never truly know what we have until we lose it... the columns of Penn Station could not be saved. But every landmark that still stands in New York today stands partly because of what their loss awakened in the people who watched them fall. Ada Louise Huxtable, the first architecture critic of The New York Times, wrote of the demolition in 1963: "The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it." I started this newsletter because the people who came before us left us something extraordinary, and almost no one is teaching us how to see it anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

In Grassy Cove, TN, a creek runs into the mouth of a large cave. 14 miles away, the water comes out. In the 70s they put dye in the water to confirm that it exited at “the Head of Sequatchie.” It took 11 days for the dye to come through. The farthest anyone has been in the cave is 1.5 miles (as far as I know). I’ve ventured about a half a mile into the otherworldly tunnel the creek falls into. Only God and some blind newts know what secrets are kept in the deep recesses under the Crab Orchard Mountains.

Newton's English is recognisably different from our own, but his maths - building on work done by Rene Descartes - is exactly the same as what mathematicians use today. Here, he describes the curve of a mathematical function.

USA. A diner. The waitress asked me how I want my eggs, and my mind went completely blank. "How do you want your eggs, hon?" Want. How do I WANT them. No one has ever asked me this. In my land, the egg arrives as the cook decrees, and you thank the egg, the cook, and your ancestors, in that order. "Scrambled? Over easy? Sunny side up?" she offered, gently, the way one talks a man down from a roof. The terms did not help. Over easy — over WHAT, easily? Easy for whom? Sunny side up — these people have named an egg after the dawn. Who does that. I needed time. I have chosen battlefields faster than I chose those eggs. She refilled my coffee and said she'd come back. It was the second refill. I had been deciding for nine minutes. The man on the next stool leaned over. "Just say over easy, man. You can't go wrong." "And if I CAN go wrong?" "...it's eggs, buddy." It's eggs. Eight hundred years of my family training itself to want nothing, and this man dismissed all of it with a fork in his hand. He was right. I will never tell him. "Sunny side up," I declared, with the weight of a man choosing a path for life. "I will face the sun." "You got it, hon." The eggs came. Two small suns on a white plate, looking up at me. Golden. Ridiculous. Exactly what I wanted. So THAT is what wanting feels like. I had to cross an ocean and hold up a breakfast line to learn it. The man on the next stool got his check and left. "Good choice," he said. I have never been more proud of anything. A man does not ask the eggs to be simple. He only becomes a man who knows what he wants. Tomorrow: over easy. I am almost ready.

Indeed.