The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite – the oldest known Indo-European tongue – after an introduction that essentially translates to: “From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalašma”. Kalašma is referencing an organized society from the Bronze Age, which probably sat on the northwest fringe of the much larger Hittite Empire in ancient Anatolia – some distance from the capital city of Hattusa, where this clay tablet was later unearthed.
The article goes on to describe the Hittite culture and why they preserved foreign rituals in their original tongue.
O, let not the pains of financial burden which come upon thee enter into my automobile. I am the Extended Warranty, and I am in the foremost part of the loan, and the insurance policy which protecteth me is that which is with all the paid claimants forever.
I want magic to be real… I would love for that to happen. Just a bunch of scientists in the dirt unlocking some ancient evil… That’s the world I want… Fuck what we have now.
The timeline of Egyptian history is so wild. The span of time between this pyramid being built and the founding of Rome is longer than the time between Plato and Aristotle and now. There’s 1,100 years between this pyramid and King Tut. There’s 800 years between this pyramid and mammoths going extinct. And this isn’t the oldest pyramid.
My understanding was that Egypt was also extremely green for a long time. As generations passed and the population grew, over farming the land allowed the dust-bowl creep across the land. Haven’t checked recently but the same thing is happening across parts of China and the dust can blow nearly halfway around the world. Humans have been good at exploiting land for a very long time.
It’s not necessarily human intervention that did this, the Sahara desert was a lot smaller back then, and there’s evidence of regular rain eroding the Sphinx. A similar process happened to the Levant.
Maybe it’s a matter of short- vs long-run? The article seems to describe the short-run effects. fewer idle cars is better. But you are saying that in the long run this might lead to more cars, which is worse.
Road designers say if you want traffic throughput in high traffic situations, use traffic lights instead of roundabouts. Apparently there are a lot of studies that show that.
Roundabouts are amazing, but they have 2 drawbacks. Throughput is limited and the size of the intersection becomes larger. Hence, there will always be a lot of places where traffic lights are the better option.
Had same situation. It was pouring rain. 3 way intersection, I didn’t even see it turn to red only yellow. Cop took like 2 min to catch up to me to pull me over and say “you almost killed me” I was so confused.
I went to court to talk to magistrate or whatever and there was like 20 people and they all were getting reduced to non moving violations but when it was my turn she was like “you may have noticed everyone before you got reduced to non moving violation but we can’t just have that for everyone can we, gotta make an example out of someone and I was promptly denied reduced offense.
So I went to court again to go against the judge but the cop that pulled me over pulled me aside and asked why I was here and I told him “I never ran a red light. It was pouring rain and the light turned yellow as I went through… and he’s like fine and told the judge to drop it.
I think mine ended up being a $600 fine and a point on my driving license that dropped after like ten years. I recently tried to get the paperwork for it, but it was so long ago there’s no record of it.
Don’t count on it. For instance, one of the main drags in Plano,TX was set so that doing the speed limit would cause you to sit at the lights - because one of the city council owned those an ad business and the combo billboard/bench made him money. And the police liked it too, since impatient people would speed the whole way to avoid getting caught at the lights.
I’m still waiting for the day EV’s will be reasonable for people who don’t own a home that they can charge their vehicle at. It’s a humongous population and people don’t seem to have great ideas to incentivize people to tackle the problem.
Yeah, there definitely needs to be more incentives for apartment owners and condo managers to install Level-1 and Level-2 changers in tenant parking spots. The question is how to fund it, of course. Perhaps some sort of increased petrol tax could help accelerate the implementation of EV infrastructure?
Roads that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists get more people out of their cars. Longer car commute times make people consider alternatives such as public transit, walking, or biking. Every additional person who isn’t in their car has an exponential decrease in automobile congestion. This is all relatively well understood within urban planning and traffic engineering.
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