Rika | Thailand | Still Alive
This is an intro which tells you that I shouldn't spend so much time on this website but I am.
Icon credit goes to @swoopypoolin.
Here’s another one from my archives. It’s the town under a rock, Setenil de las Bodegas, Spain, where around 3,000 inhabitants are living quite literally, under a rock.
The small white washed town
has a unique setting along a narrow river gorge eroded by the Rio Trejo river, with many of the houses being built into and under the walls of the gorge itself.
There was a practical reason for living here.
The natural caves are
ideal living quarters because they didn’t need to build whole houses to keep out the heat and cold- the cave did that. All they had to build were the façades.
The bars, restaurants and food shops
are ranked as the best in the region.
In summer, the town is vibrant.
The town used to be used to be large store rooms for local produce, b/c of the cool environment in the rock.
It’s fascinating to think of them building this town.
Look at this little house.
Even though a lot of the town is under the rock, a lot of it still gets the sun. It’s like going in and out of tunnels.
The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar that is the world’s thickest known fluid and was once used for waterproofing boats.
Thomas Parnell, UQ’s first Professor of Physics, created the experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties.
At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a hammer. But, in fact, at room temperature the substance - which is 100 billion times more viscous than water - is actually fluid.
In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. He allowed the pitch to cool and settle for three years, and then in 1930 he cut the funnel’s stem.
Since then, the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel - so slowly that it took eight years for the first drop to fall, and more than 40 years for another five to follow.
Now, 87 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops have fallen - the last drop fell in April 2014 and we expect the next one to fall sometime in the 2020s.
The experiment was set up as a demonstration and is not kept under special environmental conditions - it’s kept in a display cabinet - so the rate of flow of the pitch varies with seasonal changes in temperature.
The late Professor John Mainstone became the experiment’s second custodian in 1961. He looked after the experiment for 52 years but, like his predecessor Professor Parnell, he passed away before seeing a drop fall.
In the 86 years that the pitch has been dripping, various glitches have prevented anyone from seeing a drop fall.
had a dream last night where marbles were back en vogue and everyone carried their marbles around in cute little pouches that they’d clip onto their backpacks or purse straps or belt loops so they’d always have their marbles on them and your marbles were deeply personal objects that showcased your individual personality and people would get really passionate and proud of them and playing for keeps was a deeply serious and honor-bound affair and i played a game with an old man while waiting for a bus and he told me how he met his wife while playing in a for-keeps tournament and in a miracle shot he knocked out her most precious marble a brilliant sparkling green one with an inside like a geode and when he looked up he found she was crying at its loss and so right there on the spot he proposed to her so that she could divorce him and take it back in the divorce “but in the end,” he told me, “she kept me and the marble” and i awoke teary and resentful to be ripped from a fleeting world that had found for itself such a small and beautiful peace
oh so you’ve got notes on my dream? you’ve got some criticism for the subconcious machinations of my mind? you wanna tell him yourself? you wanna tell the cordial old man invented by my slumbering brain that he doesn’t have to do all that? you wanna workshop my REM cycles next?
