BOILED COOKIES, from 1953.

The Bent Pyramid is weird. Ignoring its dual slope for a moment, the Bent Pyramid has features that no other pyramid has.

So there’s this pop culture idea that the pyramids used camouflage as a security method: That the pharaoh and his grave goods would be interred inside, and then the passageways plugged up and hidden so they’d look like any other stone on the monument. This doesn’t seem to be the case; all pyramids have an entrance roughly centered relatively low on the North face. Those with entrances that have intact casing stones have big, showy lintel blocks above the entrance that would make a plugged entrance easy to find. There is no evidence that a pyramid entrance was ever concealed.

…Except on the Bent pyramid. Which does have a fairly obvious entrance low on the North face, but also has a hidden side door high on the West face. This entrance was hidden by an ordinary looking casing stone and was only discovered and opened in 1951. When that entrance was concealed, Thuban was the North star, not Polaris. It was opened during the fifth season of Howdy Doody.

Unlike every other known pyramid, the Bent pyramid was apparently built with two unconnected interiors. The standard North entrance leads to the typical descending passage that descends through the superstructure into the bedrock below, levels out. From there it opens into a high corbeled chamber. A passage high on the wall of this chamber leads to another high corbeled chamber; a modern wooden staircase allows access up to this chamber, which has a bizarre vertical shaft off to one side commonly called the “chimney.” This is centered under the pyramid’s apex and has some odd architecture, it’s one of the most inexplicable pyramid features I’m aware of.

As originally built, this would have been the end. There’s nowhere else to go. At some point in antiquity, there was a passage carved through the masonry high in this upper chamber, which leads almost directly to a horizontal passage running East-West. To the west, past a pit trap, is one of the pyramid’s two portcullises. Many pyramids feature portcullis stones (or the remains thereof) but the Bent pyramid’s are the coolest. They close across the passageway diagonally, so that no edge of the stone is flush with any surface of the passage, making it lever proof and impossible to open once closed. The Western one was sealed, but has since been tunneled through. The floor before the portcullis has also been excavated, in an apparent attempt to undermine it. Beyond is an ascending corridor that leads out to the casing stones.

To the East is a similar portcullis that closes the opposite way (one from the North, the other from the South–good thinking, Imhotep) but this one has never been closed. To this day it’s still propped open by an ancient cedar log. Beyond is the apparent burial chamber, which had a now-destroyed false floor.

It seems like the pyramid was designed with an upper burial chamber designed to be secured behind portcullises, traps and a concealed entrance, with a separate and unconnected chapel below entered from the North for worshippers.

The popular story is that the Bent pyramid was a fuckup, and then the nearby apparently superior Red pyramid was built. Except the Red pyramid doesn’t have a satellite pyramid or a temple complex. Sneferu’s cult was still active 1000 years later, and they practiced at the Bent pyramid. So even though no sarcophagus has ever been found, there’s evidence to suggest Sneferu was actually buried in the Bent pyramid.

I don’t think that’s the case. Weirdly enough, I think it’s a coincidence.

Who would use circumferences of a wheel in one axis, but diameters of a wheel for another?

See…have you ever laid out a roof? Here in inch land, the slope of a roof isn’t given in degrees, it’s given in rise over run, and run is typically 1 foot or 12 inches. So a slope of 45 degrees works out to 12 in 12, it rises 12 inches for every 12 inches. You’ll find a lot of American roofs have a 33.69 degree angle. Why that weird number? It’s a slope of 8 in 12.

Pause for the Europeans to cope with being carried through the industrial revolution by the English and Americans by pontificating about metric. Are we done? Good. Moving on.

The ancient Egyptians didn’t have feet and inches, they had cubits, palms and fingers. Four fingers to a palm, seven palms to a cubit. The Egyptian unit of slope is the Seked, palms of run per cubit of rise. Notice that: We’re now in run over rise, not rise over run.

The first (attempt at a) smooth sided pyramid is the Bent Pyramid built for Sneferu. It starts off at a Seked of 5, which works out to a smidge over 54 degrees. The popular lore is the building started showing cracks, so to save weight they reduced the slope to a Seked of 7.5, which works out to 43 degrees. The nearby Red pyramid, also attributed to Sneferu and apparently built immediately after, is built entirely at that 43 degree angle.

The pyramid at Meidum, Sneferu’s other pyramid, was first built as a stepped pyramid like Djoser’s, and then modified into a smooth sided pyramid, with a Seked of 5 palms, 2 fingers, or about 51 degrees. This worked, at least in antiquity (the Meidum pyramid is heavily ruined in the modern day).

So when his son Khufu decided to build the biggest pyramid of all time (and nobody has proven the magnificent bastard wrong yet), that’s the slope he used. 5 palms, 2 fingers. 51 degrees.

So the ratio of the Great Pyramid’s height to the distance from the center to the middle of a base edge is 7 to 5.5. That means the ratio of the height to the length of a base edge is 7 to 11. Which means if we take the length and width of the pyramid’s base, and divide it by the height, we just so happen to get 22 / 7, which about a millennia later the Greeks would discover is a pretty good approximation for Pi, but the 4th dynasty Egyptians didn’t know about that.

That’s not what Khufu’s son Khafre did. Khufu was a magnificent bastard but Khafre was clever sumbitch. Khufu built the world’s biggest pyramid. Khafre built his slightly smaller pyramid uphill from his dad’s so his would look bigger. And, he built it very slightly steeper, with a Seked of 5.25 (about 53 degrees). That works out to the same slope as a 3-4-5 triangle. 3/4 is 0.75, and because Seked is given as palms per cubit we multiply by 7, 0.75 * 7 is 5.25. And they DID know about that in the 4th dynasty. Clever sumbitch.

Something you’ll forever see now: In the United States, homes in the North have inboard chimneys and hearths. The brickwork is inside the walls for better heating in the winter. Homes in the South have outboard chimneys, so that you can cook in the summer without dying of heat stroke.

I’ve seen someone do something slightly like this with a greenhouse. It had a large tank of water in the middle. It was black, so it absorbed sunlight during the day, heating the water, and then that kept the temperature up at night.

I think it also had something to do with an aquaponics setup? Like there were either fish in the tank, or in a “pond,” and fish shit water would be cycled out to the plants because fertilizer?

I waited until winter to rip my DVD collection because it meant hours of high throttle on the PC.

He videoed about dishwashers so hard he’s got his own line of dish detergent now.

Sounds healthier than Dick Trickle.

The problem I have with the Matrix sequels…1. they’re too far up their own ass. The original was a little up its own ass but it was up the part of its own ass that mattered for the story it was telling. Reloaded and Revelations are up their whole ass. “Love is a word.” 🙄 2. The original is a very straightforward hero’s journey in which deciding to answer the call is the ultimate key to the hero’s power. The sequels are about fate and inevitability and how basically no decision can ever matter. So we’re sorry to have bothered you.

Pilot here: in a weird way, a thousand feet is a unit. “Five thousand, Five hundred feet” is processed kind of like 5.5 altitudes. Bonus: traffic patterns are typically flown at 1000 feet AGL, so 1.0 altitudes, so pilots see that distance a lot.

Are you sure? Aren’t they Bri’ish, so they’d be gallons, but weird slightly small gallons?

No you see, everyone else in the world exclusively describes the world in accurate SI units, only Americans are dumbfuck enough to measure things in bullets per cheeseburger. Nobody else in the entire world will casually say “it’s the size of a medium dog” because America bad.

GTK fully expands to GNU’s Not Unix Image Manipulation Tool Kit.

A maGical briDge of hoPe, and wonDer…

ChaaaaaaRlieeeeeee…ChaaaaaaaaRlieeeee…We’re on a bridge, Chaaaaaarlieeee…

It’s not open source unless the package name is a scabby dumpster fire.

Tally marks versus uppest case E.

It’s been so long that I’ve gamed on Windows that I’ll have to take your word for it.

I have a money market account at a credit union…?

The grapuh of Linux suitability as a function of user skill is a U. At the bottom of user skill, you’ve got your aunt who needs a Chrome bootloader. Linux is perfect for them, maybe better than Windows.

As you get into the middle, you get into “I just need to use Photoshop” or “I just want to play Valorant”. It’s gotten to where software that doesn’t run on Linux is a deliberate choice, but they’re still out there. Gaming has been easing up in large part due to Valve, so the middle of the U has been rising, but it’s still a big dip.

At the top end you’ve got the computer science types developing all these internet and AI based systems almost all of which run on Linux servers in the back end. Linux dominates literally every computing platform except desktops.