Looking like an ancient archaeological dig… this is Concrete pouring at the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. The massive heat generated by the curing concrete required an embedded cooling system of water pipes to prevent the dam from cracking

“How wrong is Nick Bostrom’s “Paperclip Maximizer” thought experiment that most of AI safety is predicted on?” It is really wrong and it is time to put this comic book fear to rest.

Why do Vermont and New Hampshire look like a square that's split at an angle? They look like a square cut on the bias because they were never designed as two states. They were one contested colonial claim, then sliced by a river. Put Vermont and New Hampshire together and the outline is roughly a block: Canada on the north (the 45th parallel), Massachusetts on the south, New York on the west, Maine and a sliver of Atlantic on the east. That outer box is the leftover of 17th- and 18th-century English land grants. The slash through the middle is the Connecticut River. New Hampshire began as a coastal grant. In 1629 John Mason received the land between the Merrimack and Piscataqua Rivers, running about 60 miles inland. That is why the state is fat at the bottom and pinches toward the north. Vermont is the opposite shape—wide against Canada, narrow against Massachusetts—because its western side follows Lake Champlain and a surveyed line with New York, while its eastern side follows the river. The river became the cut because two colonies claimed the same interior. New York’s 1664 patent to the Duke of York ran east to the Connecticut River. New Hampshire’s governors later claimed west as far as Massachusetts and Connecticut did: 20 miles east of the Hudson. From 1749 to 1764, Governor Benning Wentworth sold that claim as the New Hampshire Grants—more than a hundred six-mile-square towns on the west bank of the Connecticut, in what is now Vermont. New York sold overlapping titles to the same land. King George III settled the colonial fight on July 20, 1764: the boundary between New Hampshire and New York would be “the western banks of the River Connecticut.” That order is why the two states look like halves of one block. Everything east of the west bank stayed New Hampshire. Everything west became New York on paper, then the Vermont Republic in 1777, then the 14th state in 1791. The river does not run due north–south, so the cut is angled. It rises in the Connecticut Lakes in far northern New Hampshire, then trends generally south with a southwest lean through a valley that already existed as a travel corridor. On a map that reads as a diagonal. Vermont is the western triangle; New Hampshire is the eastern one. Flip either state and it roughly fits the other. That is the “square split at an angle.” Two later fights locked the line in place. During the Revolution, Vermont annexed a string of New Hampshire towns east of the river. George Washington told Vermont to drop the claim if it wanted to join the Union. In 1782 Vermont did, and gave up any jurisdiction east of the low-water mark on the western shore. A century and a half later Vermont tried to tax mills in the river. In 1933 the Supreme Court held Vermont to that 1782 concession. New Hampshire owns the river. Vermont owns the bank. The border is the ordinary low-water mark on the Vermont side, not the middle of the channel. So the geometry is an accident of grants, a royal order, a river that was already there, and a republic that traded the water for statehood. Nobody drew a square and then drew a diagonal through it. The box is the old claim. The slash is the Connecticut.