Our World Cup journey is over
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— Justin McElroy π¨π¦ (@jmcelroy.bsky.social) July 4, 2026 at 1:02 PM
The boys did good
Canada’s World Cup Journey Ends in Houston. What a Ride It Has Been. π
By Annie Koshy
A 0-3 defeat to Morocco today in Houston in the Round of 16. A bridge too far, against one of the best teams in the world.
Five matches. Two wins. One draw. Two losses. Canada’s men scored eight goals and reached the Round of 16 of a home World Cup after 40 years of waiting for a single win.
Jesse Marsch built something real. Jonathan David announced himself to the world. Alphonso Davies showed what a player he has become. Stephen EustΓ‘quio became a national hero in stoppage time in Los Angeles. This generation of Canadian footballers changed what this country believes is possible.
The Men’s World Cup goes on. Canada’s done us proud . π⚽❤️ππ½
- Annie Koshy
Read on Substackon one hand getting to the round of 16 is an unqualified success but between the first half and the davies and konΓ© injuries we’re going to have a “what if” debate for years to come but maybe that’s the beauty of sports and wait you’re all yelling at me yeah okay that’s fair
— Justin McElroy π¨π¦ (@jmcelroy.bsky.social) July 4, 2026 at 12:53 PM
More on Messi and Vozinha
So last night after the Argentina game, Vozinha asked Messi for his shirt and Messi said he would give it to him in the tunnel after they left the field. Here is how that worked out:
And just to be contrary, here's a funny piece by
Robert Lynch at
The Laughing Ape about why soccer is boring:
...Soccer’s rules were written down in England in 1863, before any of the good sports existed. By the time someone built a game where you could use your hands, where scoring was common and luck was rare, soccer already had a half-century head start and most of the world’s children. It isn’t popular because it’s the best. It’s popular because it got there first.
I could recite all the tedious, oft-repeated ways to make soccer less boring—widen the goals, shrink the field, add hockey-style power plays, lose the goalkeepers, and give one player per side (the Reaper) a metal pole he may use to strike an opponent in the face no more than five times per game, provided he isn’t offside. But I don’t have time to solve all of soccer’s problems.
Soccer’s greatest trick is convincing a billion people that frustration is suspense, that scarcity is beauty, and that being bored stiff means you’ve finally become sophisticated.
Moving on, some
good posts
In Spain today: installation of solar panels above major irrigation channels. Channels of more than 100 kms transport water from dams to farmland.
- Reduces evaporation
-Provides large agricultural areas with power & supports irrigation
-Decreases use of water in food production, doubling the crop.
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— Chris Rivers (@chrisrivers50.bsky.social) June 28, 2026 at 3:15 AM
Germany has successfully engineered a revolutionary transparent solar glass that generates clean electricity while remaining completely see-through from both sides, fundamentally transforming how buildings produce energy. #solarpower #ActOnClimate
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— alexvonwitzleben.bsky.social (@alexvonwitzleben.bsky.social) June 26, 2026 at 11:04 AM
A few decades ago, I read a newspaper article that stated with zero uncertainty that solar panels will never, ever pass 30% efficiency because of the Shockley-Queisser Limit (which is a real thing, first calculated in 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit).
This outspoken writer then used the line: “because of this limit, we will never make solar panels efficient enough to power everyday life.”
Now, this has happened - see screenshot below.
Over a THIRD.
(That’s a Bluesky post via historian & sci-fi author Ada Palmer, a trustworthy source, and it links to this story, which also checks out: https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/12/most-efficient-solar-module-in-the-world-new-record/)
In the lab, things have already been even crazier: 47.6%, in 2022, also by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, but not under conditions that would translate into the real world, eg. the roof of your house.
Who knows what’s next? We’re finding out, at great speed.
Performative certainty is charismatic. Performative certainty prints money and grabs all the attention. And performative certainty is usually proven deeply stupid, given enough time.
(It’s also unscientific. Real scientists? They’d never.)
Trust the uncertaintists. They’ll guide you in the right direction.
- Mike Sowden
Read on SubstackSolar panels between railway tracks sounds like an idea from a first year engineering student.
But a pilot project in Switzerland has now run more than 11,000 trains over track-mounted solar panels, with the developer saying the system has stayed stable and produced electricity as expected.
The clever bit of course, is the land use. The panels sit inside existing rail lines, meaning no new land clearing, or farmland tradeoff, no expensive rooftop installations. Apparently a purpose-built machine can lay up to 300 metres of panels an hour.
There are still obvious questions: cleaning, maintenance, shading, vibration, and whether rail operators are willing to deal with another thing that can break inside their already rickety infrastructure.
Still… worth trying in other places, surely?
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/emissions-reduction/solar-energy-from-railways-shows-first-positive-results-in-switzerland/91628036
- Angus Hervey
Read on SubstackChina installs a new wind turbine every 40 minutes. Every minute of every day. Every day of the year. π¨π³π¨⚡
The numbers behind China's wind energy deployment program are so large they require deliberate effort to absorb. In a single recent year, China installed more wind generating capacity than every other country on the planet added together — and did so while simultaneously breaking its own previous records for wind installation pace. The rate works out to a new turbine connected to the grid approximately every 40 minutes, sustained continuously across all 8,760 hours of the year. At night, on holidays, through typhoon season — turbines keep going up.
The industrial machine enabling this pace is enormous and deeply integrated. China manufactures the overwhelming majority of wind turbine components it installs — towers, nacelles, blades, gearboxes, generators, and electronic control systems. The supply chain is domestic, massive, and vertically integrated in ways that minimize delays between manufacturing and installation. Specialized installation fleets of cranes, transport vehicles, and logistics teams operate as permanent rapid-deployment forces that move continuously from site to completed site across the country.
The geographic scale of China's wind development spans the windy northern plains of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, the southwestern ridges of Yunnan and Guizhou, the eastern coastal zones, and increasingly offshore in the Bohai Sea and beyond. Each region has its own installation teams, grid connections, and development pipelines running simultaneously. The aggregate result is a wind deployment program without historical precedent — one that is reshaping both China's electricity system and the global wind industry economics that every other nation benefits from.
#windenergy
- Being Liberal
Read on Substack
Canada's oldest buildings:
I love historic buildings. They are structures that help tell the story of Canada.
That got me thinking about the oldest buildings in Canada and the role those buildings played in our history.
To that end, here are the oldest buildings in each province and territory!
British Columbia:
While the Fort Langley Storehouse and St. Ann's Schoolhouse were built in the 1840s, the Kamloops Museum states that the Fort Kamloops Log Cabin was built in 1822. It became Kamloop's first museum in 1937.
Alberta:
Father Lacombe's chapel is listed as the oldest building in the province, built in 1861. Located in St. Albert, the church was built on a site selected by Father Lacombe and Bishop Alexander Tache.
Saskatchewan:
The Holy Trinity Anglican Church at Stanley Mission along the Churchill River was built from 1854 to 1860. The church was designed by Reverend Robert Hunt and the first service was conducted entirely in Cree.
Manitoba:
The oldest building in Manitoba is the Prince of Wales Fort, built along Hudson Bay and the Churchill River in 1731. A log fort was built in 1717 but replaced with the current structure. It is the oldest building west of Ontario.
Ontario:
The oldest building in Ontario is the Secord House in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was built in 1782 by Peter Secord, the uncle to Laura Secord's husband. His Grist Mill was also built around the same time.
Quebec:
The oldest building in the province is Maison Puiseaux in Quebec City. The original building was built in 1638, but the current building was built in the early-1700s. Frances Moore Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague in this building.
New Brunswick:
The oldest building in the province is Treitz Haus, built in 1769 in Moncton. The eastern section of the building was completed that year, and the second addition was finished in the 1820s.
Prince Edward Island:
The Doucet House is the oldest building in the province, dating back to its construction in 1768. It was moved to the Rustco National Historic Site in December 1999.
Nova Scotia:
The oldest building in Nova Scotia is also the oldest building in Canada. The South Powder Magazine at Fort Anne in the Annapolis Valley dates to 1708.
In 1917, it became Canada's first National Historic Site.
Newfoundland and Labrador:
It is believed that the Anderson House in St. John's is the oldest building in Newfoundland and Labrador. It was built around 1804 by James Anderson.
Nunavut:
The oldest building in the territory is Fort Conger, built in 1881 as an Arctic exploration camp. It is located on the northern shore of Lady Franklin Bay in Grinnell Land on the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island.
Northwest Territories:
Located along the Mackenzie River at Fort Good Hope, the Church of Our Lady of Good Hope was built between 1865 and 1885. It was built as a mission of the Oblate Fathers.
Yukon:
The oldest building in the territory is the Fort Selkirk Schoolhouse, which was built in Fort Selkirk in 1892. It is believed it was built by Reverend Thomas Henry Canham.
I hope you enjoyed that look at Canada's oldest buildings.
If you enjoy my Canadian history content, you can support my work with a donation at π
http://www.buymeacoffee.com/craigu
- Canadian History Ehx
Read on SubstackThe ‘dog days’ of summer get their name due to their association with the Dog Star, Sirius, found in the constellation Canis Major.
The first visible rising of Sirius occurs during the hot stretch from early July to early September.
Woof.
— Merriam-Webster (@merriam-webster.com) July 1, 2026 at 11:01 AM
I never suspected this, to be honest.
- David Roman
Read on SubstackIn 2012, a team of scientists revived a flowering plant called Silene stenophylla by growing it from ancient plant material that was about 30,000–32,000 years old. These seeds/fruits were found in frozen squirrel burrows deep in the Siberian permafrost — basically nature’s deep-freeze storage.
Here’s how researchers did it:
They found fruit and seed material buried about 38 m below ground in a permafrost layer that had been frozen for thousands of years.
Rather than just planting the ancient seeds — which mostly didn’t germinate — they used tissue from the fruit’s placenta in lab culture to coax new growth.
From that tissue, they managed to grow dozens of plants, and those plants grew into fully mature flowering individuals that even produced new seeds.
π Why it matters
This wasn’t something made up — it was published in a respected scientific journal and widely reported in scientific media. The experiment shows:
Permafrost can preserve biological material for tens of thousands of years.
Under the right conditions, plant cells can still be viable after incredibly long periods of cold storage.
We share wholesome science content. Feel free to join us for more.
- Science Is Fun
Read on SubstackBethan's Rock is a small grey stone on display at Poole Museum in Poole, England. It was donated to the museum in 2019 by a five-year-old girl named Bethan, and it has since attracted significant attention on social media and become the museum's most famous object. - Wikipedia
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— Wil Eelsing (@wileelsing.bsky.social) July 1, 2026 at 2:11 AM
The modern world uses math to create addictive social media algorithms.
The old world used math to create works of timeless beauty.
- Beauty Matters
Read on SubstackAurora Australis from the International Space Station
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— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) July 1, 2026 at 11:09 PM
Her name is Dr. Tatiana Erukhimova, PhD (Physics) and she loves to teach. π
people.tamu.edu/~etanya/
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— Luca (@lucagalletti.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 4:18 PM
Beauty is how the living refuse to let death have the final word.
- Culture Explorer
Read on SubstackI'm reposting this photo of a beautiful spray can paintings that includes some rollers and brush work too on the wall of an apartment building in northern Barcelona. I think it's one of the most fascinating paintings on a wall I have ever seen before. #SprayCanArt #Barcelona #Art #Photography
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— Brad Holkesvig (@bradjholk.bsky.social) June 29, 2026 at 7:45 AM
A #mural by Dutch #artist Judith de Leeuw shows the Statue of Liberty covering her eyes (in shame) in Roubaix, France (in 2025, just before July 4th).
Judith de Leeuw, also known as JDL #StreetArt, creates #murals worldwide (41 countries) to draw attention to social issues. info@jdlstreetart.com
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— Butterflies Katz ⓥ (@butterflieskatz.bsky.social) June 29, 2026 at 5:48 AM
they've been tutting up our local high street with some funds from the Mayor and have done a bunch of murals on various shops. They're all good, but this one, from Curtis Hylton, was banging.
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— Not Space Karen (@rowan68.bsky.social) July 4, 2026 at 8:45 AM
Stairs at the University of Balamand, Lebanon
- Cool Stories About Art
Read on SubstackThe Herculaneum scrolls that survived the destruction of Pompeii did so only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it.
This week, for the first time, that conundrum was solved.
The Vesuvius Challenge launched in March 2023 with an impossible goal: read the sealed scrolls without touching them. The technique they invented to do this was crazy:
Fire X-rays through the carbonised papyrus at a particle accelerator in France, generating up to 300 terabytes of data per scroll.
Train a machine learning model to detect ancient ink that is almost indistinguishable from the charred material surrounding it.
Geometrically reconstruct the wound layers of papyrus inside each roll, then flatten them into a readable surface.
Get ancient language experts and papyrologists to review every letter.
Three years later, they've finished their first, entire scroll: 22 columns of ancient Greek end to end, revealed for the first time in two millennia.
The text appears to be (of course) a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its author is Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes, dates it to the 2nd century BC.
Because the papyrus is damaged, the readings are fragmentary, with gaps where the surface has been lost. Even so, several passages can be read clearly for the first time in 2,000 years.
“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”
“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”
Hundreds more scrolls still to come…
- Angus Hervey
Read on SubstackCoincidence? I don't think so.
For nearly 500 years, hundreds of millions of people looked at the most famous painting of God ever made, and none of them noticed what was hiding in plain sight.
Then, in 1990, a doctor looked up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and realized that God is wrapped inside a human brain...
The painting is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, finished around 1512. You know the image even if you don't know its name: God reaching out from the heavens, His finger almost touching Adam's, the spark of life about to leap across the gap.
But look at the shape around God, the swirling red cloak that holds Him and the angels aloft. For five centuries it was seen as just a billowing robe... but in 1990, a physician named Frank Lynn Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that the red shroud is something else entirely: an anatomically precise cross-section of the human brain.
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The outline of the cloak traces the outer curve of the brain. A fold in the fabric forms the Sylvian fissure, the deep groove that separates the brain's major lobes. The angel curled beneath God is positioned exactly where the brainstem would be, and the green scarf trailing down becomes the vertebral artery. Even the pituitary gland and the optic chiasm, where the nerves from the eyes cross, fall precisely into place.
This was not a man likely to invent such a thing by accident. Michelangelo had spent his youth secretly dissecting human corpses in a monastery in Florence, studying the body from the inside with an obsessiveness that, by one early account, exceeded that of professional anatomists...
So what did he mean by it?
Meshberger argued that the painting has been misnamed. He suggested it should be called not the Creation of Adam, but the Endowment of Adam. In the Bible, God gives Adam life. But in Michelangelo's fresco, Adam is already alive, his eyes open, his body lifted. What God is reaching across that famous gap to give him is not life. It is intellect. The divine spark of human thought itself, delivered, fittingly, from inside the very organ that produces it.
One of the most looked-at images in the history of the world may contain a message that took half a millennium to be read, hidden by a man who understood both the human body and the human soul better than almost anyone who has ever lived, and who seems to have decided to bury his deepest idea about us where only the most careful eye would ever find it...
If you enjoyed this, subscribe! I write a weekly newsletter read by over 52,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
Thanks for reading.
- James Lucas
Read on Substack
Finally, guess the AI
Funny posts
Did you know?
It takes 7 seconds for food to pass from mouth to stomach.
A human hair can hold 3kg.
The length of a penis is three times the length of the thumb.
The femur is as hard as concrete.
A woman’s heart beats 2 times as much as a man’s.
We use 300 muscles just to keep our balance when we stand.
A woman has read this entire note.
A man is still looking at his thumb. π€ͺπ€ͺ
- Brad Davenport
Read on SubstackEnjoying my fourth espresso of the morning, I realized I might be addicted to caffeine. I have beaten addictions before. For example, I used to be addicted to time travel...but that's all in the past now.
- David Marlow
Read on Substack"tbh, I think K-cups are fine, actually" I type on the coffee forum. the sniper's bullet finds me before the first reply.
— William B. Fuckley (@opinionhaver.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 3:59 PM
Dani gets an Iran Lego!
At the dentist musing about all the music being 1990s when I realized that's like 50s music now in terms of being oldies
— Popehat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) June 18, 2026 at 12:24 PM
“Detractors might scoff at Musk’s ambition to die on Mars, but at least the dying part would be easy.”
— @henrywismayer.bsky.social
#mars #spaceexploration #spacex
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— Noema Magazine (@noemamag.com) June 18, 2026 at 11:01 AM
You are just a bunch of nay-sayers; I for one π£π¦ππͺπ¦π·π¦ in Musk’s dream of dying on Mars!
Next week, hopefully.
π€
— quokkafella.bsky.social (@quokkafella.bsky.social) June 19, 2026 at 9:07 AM
The USA celebrates its 251st anniversary
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— Pup Fiction (@pupfiction.bsky.social) July 3, 2026 at 6:08 PM
Getting Old(er)
The older I get, the more I understand why cats just walk away mid-conversation
— Introvert Problems (@introvertproblems.bsky.social) June 16, 2026 at 12:45 PM
Your death will come on an ordinary day, in the middle of unfinished plans and the world will continue without you.
So live a little.
- pathsofstoicism
Read on Substack
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