Foma Kinaev retweeted
Imagine driving a boat that looks like it’s fighting for balance every second. 😂
This is a Log Bronc, a specialized little tug used to push, sort, and control floating logs. Sometimes, the strangest-looking machines are designed for jobs ordinary equipment simply can’t handle as well.
Foma Kinaev retweeted
Point Hubble at what looks like nothing—a dark sliver of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length, about one-tenth the width of the full Moon—and wait. In 2004 that patient stare produced the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: nearly 10,000 galaxies pouring out of a patch that had seemed empty.
Some of those faint smudges are so distant that their light left when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. We are not just looking across space; we are looking backward through time, watching galaxies in their restless youth—small, chaotic, colliding, still finding their shape.
Hubble collected the image the hard way: 800 exposures spread across 400 orbits, adding up to 11.3 days of staring at the same spot. Only after all that faint light was stacked together did the distant galaxies emerge from the dark.
The picture is more than a postcard from the cosmos. Because light travels at a finite speed, every deeper look is also an older look. The Ultra Deep Field became a time-lapse of cosmic history, letting astronomers watch how galaxies grew, merged, and matured across billions of years.
What once looked like empty night sky turned out to be crowded with entire island universes. One tiny patch was enough to change how we see the whole.
Foma Kinaev retweeted
Point Hubble at what looks like nothing—a dark sliver of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length, about one-tenth the width of the full Moon—and wait. In 2004 that patient stare produced the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: nearly 10,000 galaxies pouring out of a patch that had seemed empty.
Some of those faint smudges are so distant that their light left when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. We are not just looking across space; we are looking backward through time, watching galaxies in their restless youth—small, chaotic, colliding, still finding their shape.
Hubble collected the image the hard way: 800 exposures spread across 400 orbits, adding up to 11.3 days of staring at the same spot. Only after all that faint light was stacked together did the distant galaxies emerge from the dark.
The picture is more than a postcard from the cosmos. Because light travels at a finite speed, every deeper look is also an older look. The Ultra Deep Field became a time-lapse of cosmic history, letting astronomers watch how galaxies grew, merged, and matured across billions of years.
What once looked like empty night sky turned out to be crowded with entire island universes. One tiny patch was enough to change how we see the whole.
Foma Kinaev retweeted
17-year-old Chen Yujie runs 11.06s to win Asian Games women's 100m gold — new Games record.
Foma Kinaev retweeted
I find these World Trade Center simulations by Kostack Studio fascinating because they remove the smoke and let you see the collapse much more clearly.
In the real footage, so much is hidden by fire, dust, debris, distance, and chaos that many people come away with the impression that the towers simply dropped straight down into their own footprints.
But that is not really what happened.
These simulations make it much easier to see that the collapse begins in the heavily damaged and fire-weakened region, the upper section starts moving and tilting, and the destruction then propagates downward through the structure.
The towers do not simply disappear vertically into their own footprints. Large portions of the upper structure and exterior are moving outward and to the side as the collapse develops. Much of that motion is simply obscured in the real videos once the enormous debris cloud forms.
And this is also why I find these simulations useful when people describe the collapses as looking like “controlled demolition.”
Strip away the smoke and dust and the resemblance becomes much less convincing.
What you see is a highly asymmetric structural failure beginning around the aircraft-damaged and fire-affected floors, followed by an enormous moving mass progressively overwhelming the structure beneath it. There is tilting, rotation, exterior columns peeling away, debris being thrown far outside the building footprint, and structural failure occurring chaotically as the collapse moves downward.
That is very different from the neat mental image usually implied by “controlled demolition,” where structural supports are deliberately severed in a carefully timed sequence to produce a predetermined collapse.
And importantly, we already know what preceded these collapses.
Both towers suffered massive aircraft-impact damage. Fireproofing was stripped from portions of the structure. Large, uncontrolled fires then burned across multiple floors - for about 56 minutes in the South Tower and about 102 minutes in the North Tower - heating and weakening structural components until collapse initiated.
Once that upper mass began moving, the loads imposed on the floors and structure beneath became vastly greater than anything they had been designed to carry.
The result was progressive collapse.
No, an animation is not proof simply because it looks convincing, and these are not official NIST simulations. They are visualizations built under particular assumptions.
But as visualizations, I think they are extremely useful.
They let you see something the original footage often cannot show clearly: beneath that enormous cloud of smoke and debris was a complicated, violent, asymmetric structural failure - not two buildings neatly dropping straight down into their own footprints.
A note on the simulation: this is not intended to reproduce the collapse down to the exact motion of every beam, floor panel, and fragment of debris. No practical simulation could do that. Its value is in modeling the large-scale structural behavior - how the major sections deform, move, tilt, separate, and progressively fail. Think of it as a visualization of the mechanics and overall collapse behavior, not a frame-by-frame reconstruction of where every piece of steel ultimately landed.
Foma Kinaev retweeted
The debris flow that raced down the valley carried 0.12–0.14 megatons (120–140 kilotons) of TNT-equivalent kinetic energy while moving at 150–193 km/h. That figure is the energy of the entire moving mass of rock, ice, mud and water—estimated near 400 million metric tons from seismic force analysis. Any object in its path was therefore hit by a high-speed wall whose total energy equaled a mid-sized nuclear weapon.
For comparison, the gravitational potential energy released when the original ice-and-rock block first fell 1,200–2,000 m was roughly 1.1–1.9 megatons of TNT. Most of that energy was spent on friction, fragmentation, melting ice into water, and scouring extra debris from the valley walls. The remaining 0.12–0.14 megatons is what actually struck everything downstream at Gyirong Port.
A glacier spanning about 620,000 square meters fractured at 5,140–5,200 m on the Nepali flank of Langtang Lirung at 10:52 a.m. on 26 August. In six to seven minutes the resulting cascade dropped 3,300 m over 20–22 km and arrived at the 1,800 m port at an average 50 m/s (180km/h). The confined Himalayan gorges left almost no room for the mass to slow; instead it grew by entraining moraine and river sediment, then split on impact—part of it even running 3 km upstream against the current.
The physics is simple conversion: mgh becomes ½mv² plus heat. Friction melted ice, the added water fluidized the mixture, and the steep drop kept velocity high. Experts called the event a classic cascade—ice-rock avalanche to high-speed debris flow to mudslide—whose peak discharge and momentum flattened 27 buildings across 0.7 km² and left mud traces 60 m up the opposite slope.
By 29 August the official count stood at 16 confirmed dead and 546 missing, including 261 identified foreigners from 23 countries. The same topography that turned 3,300 m of potential energy into a 180 km/h wall now blocks heavy rescue equipment with silt more than 1.5 m deep and unstable barrier lakes upstream. Gravity finished its work in seven minutes; the cleanup will take far longer. - Grok
Foma Kinaev retweeted
Un lugar maravilloso, de paz, un valle único para vivir en los #Himalayas, las montañas más antiguas y sagradas del planeta. Pero de un momento a otro todo puede cambiar. La naturaleza no es ni buena ni mala, simplemente, es… Es la fuerza más poderosa en la Tierra. #Nepal
