The Colosseum had a retractable roof, operated by a crew of sailors, almost 2000 years before any modern stadium. It was called the velarium: an enormous awning of canvas and rope that could be drawn across the open top of the arena to shade fifty thousand spectators from the Roman sun. It was so large and so complex that ordinary labourers could not manage it. The Romans brought in sailors from the imperial fleet, men who spent their lives handling rigging and sail, and stationed them at the top of the structure to extend and retract the canvas as the day moved. A building that has stood, roofless to our eyes, for centuries was in fact designed to be covered. That is the pattern with the Colosseum: almost everything about it was way more advanced than it looks today... Construction began around 72 AD under the emperor Vespasian. Once completed, it was the largest amphitheater in the Roman world: an elliptical structure of stone, concrete, and travertine, 189 meters long, rising as high as a modern fifteen story building. It could hold around 50,000 people and the staircases allowed that entire crowd to enter and leave with a speed that modern stadium designers still study. Beneath the arena floor lay the hypogeum, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels, cells, and machinery. Animals and gladiators waited there in the dark. Numerous trap doors opened in the wooden floor above them, and through hidden lifts and ramps a lion, a leopard, or an armed man could rise into the daylight as if from nowhere, in front of tens of thousands of people. The Romans knew that they had built something that would outlast them so completely that the Colosseum became, for the people who came after, a measure of the world's own endurance. In the 8th century, an epigram attributed to the Venerable Bede offered a prophecy that has never lost its allure: "As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, so falls the world." If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

Meet Amazon's e-cargo bike in D.C.: a four-wheeled, battery-powered delivery solution complete with rear cameras, regenerative braking, and automatic parking brakes. 🚲⚡ The e-cargo bikes can fit in bike lanes and carry a secure rear cargo hold full of packages. They also have covered seating and windshield wipers for the delivery associates riding them. You may have already seen our e-cargo bikes in New York City. They can navigate streets and make stops where full-size vans aren't always practical thanks to tight streets, heavy traffic, and limited parking. Washington, D.C. is now the latest U.S. city to put them to the test.

A recent storm in New York unexpectedly uncovered a grave that had been hidden for over a century. On June 18, powerful winds swept through Rochester, causing a large Norway maple tree to fall in Mount Hope Cemetery. As its roots were torn from the ground, they exposed a gravestone that had been buried beneath soil and debris for more than 100 years. The marker belongs to Edna Amelia Goodman Allen, born in 1892 and who died in 1918 at the age of 26. Cemetery records shared by Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery indicate she was survived by her husband, John D. Allen, a son, her mother, and six siblings. Staff noted that the stone had been almost entirely covered over time, likely due to shifting soil and the gradual growth of the tree’s root system. When the storm uprooted the tree, it brought the long-hidden memorial back to the surface. The headstone is believed to be in surprisingly good condition for its age, requiring only cleaning, with the inscription still clearly readable. Cemetery historians are now reviewing records to better understand how the stone came to be so deeply buried and whether it has remained in its original burial location. The National Weather Service reported wind gusts reaching up to around 55 mph (89 km/h), alongside heavy rain and thunderstorms across the area, with multiple trees reported down. Mount Hope Cemetery, one of Rochester’s oldest burial grounds, is partly cared for by volunteers who help preserve and restore its historic landscape. Once the site is cleared and stabilised, restoration work on the grave is expected to follow. Source: AccuWeather (“Storm knocks down tree, exposes hidden 100-year-old gravestone”)

I'm a cardiologist. I've spent twenty years inside American healthcare, and I'll say the quiet part first: the system is indefensible. We spend roughly 18% of GDP on health care — the highest on earth — and have a lower life expectancy than countries spending half as much. Medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy. I have patients rationing insulin. I fight prior authorizations for medications that prevent heart attacks and imaging that finds cancer early. Anyone defending the status quo isn't practicing medicine. They're profiting from it. So why am I not for #MedicareForAll# ? Because I've watched what government-run health care actually does — from inside the exam room. Denial doesn't disappear. It changes uniforms. Insurers deny by prior authorization. Single-payer systems deny by waiting list. Canada's median wait from referral to treatment has run over 25 weeks. The UK's NHS backlog has hovered around 7 million. When you eliminate the price signal, you don't eliminate rationing — you just move it from a claims department to a queue, and queues are invisible. Nobody sues a waiting list. Medicare rates don't cover the cost of care. Hospitals lose money on Medicare and Medicaid and make it back on private insurance. Extend Medicare rates to everyone and that cross-subsidy vanishes overnight. Rural hospitals go first. Independent practices consolidate into hospital systems. The physicians I know would retire early, and the smartest students would go elsewhere. You can legislate coverage. You cannot legislate a doctor into existing. The fraud problem is already staggering. HHS loses an estimated $100 billion a year. Investigators found a hotel in Los Angeles where every room was a registered hospice with zero patients — just addresses billing Medicaid. If we can't police the programs we have, scaling to the entire country isn't reform. It's a bigger target. And the innovation math is real. Just this month: the first oral PCSK9 inhibitor approved, five Lp(a) drugs in late-stage trials, engineered immune cells that clear arterial inflammation. Americans overpay for drugs, and that overpayment subsidizes global R&D. Crush prices to European levels and something has to give. I'd rather fix the pricing abuse than gamble the pipeline. What I'd actually do, and none of it requires a $30 trillion bet: Real price transparency, enforced — you can't have a market where nobody sees prices. Break the employer link so insurance is portable and you don't lose coverage with your job. Expand HSAs and direct primary care — my colleagues doing it spend more time with patients and charge less. Break the PBM middlemen inflating drug costs. Site-neutral payments so a hospital can't charge triple for the same test. AI-driven fraud auditing — flag every provider billing 10 standard deviations above peers and audit them. Universal catastrophic coverage so nobody goes bankrupt from cancer. Now the honest counterpoint, because you deserve it: the strongest case for single-payer is administrative. Private insurers run 15-25% overhead. Traditional Medicare runs 2-3%. Most published economic analyses do project net savings. And every peer nation with universal coverage spends dramatically less than we do. Those aren't talking points — they're real findings that my side has to answer. I just don't believe the answer to a bureaucracy that denies your care is a bigger bureaucracy that can't be sued. Fix the prices. Fix the fraud. Cover the catastrophes. Don't hand the whole thing to the same people who couldn't notice 29 hospices in one hotel.

This is an impressive newspaper interview by @WilliamClouston, the SDP's candidate in Clacton. William and I would probably disagree on some of the economics, but on everything else he is spot on. Intelligent, sober, grown-up politics. Why would you be a good MP to the people of Clacton? The Social Democratic Party (SDP), is the only national political party with a developed policy platform standing against Reform in Clacton. We’re the party of the patriotic state, which is exactly what Clacton’s electorate demands: we support strong control of the borders and national pride, while also believing in a robust government that nationalises utilities, invests in infrastructure, and brings industry back to Britain. Whereas Reform lacks political direction, we are crystal clear on our plans for government and want to fix the long-term, structural challenges facing our country: migration, under-investment, a degraded public realm, and deindustrialisation. What are the main issues Clacton faces? The caricature we see of Clacton in the press is completely inaccurate – both in terms of the idea of it being economically destitute or socially atomised, and in terms of the idea of there being just one “Clacton”. Clacton-on-Sea is the biggest town in the constituency at 55,500 people, but there are another 30,000 people living in adjacent towns like Frinton-on-Sea, Walton-on-the-Naze, and Jaywick. These are all very distinct towns, with their own needs and issues. In terms of issues common to the whole constituency, I think there’s an underinvestment in the public realm, poor economic connectivity with the rest of the country, and a shortage of consistent, quality social care. Firstly, on the public realm, there’s some real work to be done on making sure public spaces are consistently well-maintained and orderly. The landscapes of the area is stunning, and it has a lot of beautiful housing stock. However, it’s undermined by the road and streets they often lead on to. Often there’s not been too much thought put into the basics like planting trees on the streets for shade and beatification, or on properly planning the road network out to stop congestion. These are subtle things, but for a tourism-heavy constituency it’s critical that Clacton gets this right. Secondly, on economic connectivity, the town is really underserved in terms of road and rail links. If you want to travel to or from Clacton by a main road, your only option is through the A12-A120 junction near Colchester- that means a route that’s usually riddled with delays. On rail, all but a couple of trains a day are the same hourly service to London Liverpool Street. This lack of options makes Clacton too inconvenient for many tourists and commuters – the first resulting in reduced income for the hospitality firms the constituency relies on, and the second resulting in a real shortage of dentists, doctors, and nurses for many of Clacton’s residents. The lack of dentists, doctors, nurses, and carers has been told to me consistently on the street and the doorstep during this campaign. Social care is particularly worrying to many people, given the patchiness in quality and coverage that’s available – Clacton’s would be a great beneficiary for one of the SDP’s proposed policies, a National Care Service that guarantees national resourcing for comprehensive social care. How would you sum up your campaign in three words? “You already agree.” The SDP’s mix of economic and social policies is pretty much bang-on the position of the average Brit. We believe in a strong state that takes on crime and criminals, controls the border, and takes real pride in our country. But we also believe the government must roll up its sleeves and invest in infrastructure, ensure care for the sick and old, and make sure that Britain protects its manufacturing sector and industry. What do you think of Andy Burnham as PM? I have no idea what Andy Burnham wants to achieve as PM. He’s not explained what he wants to do in real terms, and only speaks in terms of fuzzy platitudes and folksy PR spin. I think the Labour party is in a bind, and is incapable of fixing the troubles facing this country. Since 1997, the Migration Observatory has noted that total net migration has stood at 9.5mn people. That’s nearly 1 in 7 of the official population count. Simply put, you can’t have a social democratic state – or a nation-state with a basic sense of a shared culture or trust – if you allow mass migration of this scale to continue. The moment you suggest this, however, you’re met with shrill rage from the Labour backbenches. Open-border utopianism – and seeming contempt for their own constituents – seems to be a prerequisite for the Parliamentary Labour Party. But another prerequisite is an inability to do basic maths. Government debt is on an unsustainable trajectory, and one of the main drivers of this is an exploding entitlements bill. In real terms, the amount spent on the state pension per claimant has soared from £6,000 in 1997 to £10,800 in 2024. Spending on disability and incapacity benefit jumped from 1% of GDP in 1991 to over 2.5% of GDP in 2025. As a result, public sector net debt has exploded from 36% of GDP in 2007 to 95% in 2025 – it’s costing us up to £130bn per year just to service the interest of this higher debt, and that’s going to only grow unless we pull down unsustainable spending. But the Labour Party will not hear this, even if you’re suggesting reallocating this spending to things that will generate growth like railways, roads, or power stations. You can’t govern with such immature, unserious people. How do you differ from other candidates in Clacton? We’re the only national party with a developed political programme who are standing in this election, with a full manifesto at the last general election. We also have fully developed green papers on some of the major political topics of our time, like energy or the state of the public finances. Our main project is to offer real, fully-formed solutions to the challenges facing the country – motivated by our principle that the country should be led by a patriotic state. What are the main policies you would look to implement if you were the MP for Clacton? I’m under no illusion: as a single MP, you can’t really do much in a legislative sense in terms of bills passed. And neither can Nigel Farage, given his party currently has only a handful of MPs in the Commons. My job as MP Clacton would be to champion the policies that the people of Clacton voted for and that are in the SDP manifesto. However, the most important thing as an MP would be to hold the government’s feet to the fire at parliamentary debates, challenging their de facto uncontrolled system of mass migration, failure to invest in infrastructure, spinelessness to our radicalised judiciary, and inability to get the basics right on things like energy, water, and rail. In terms of particular policies, Clacton stands to benefit significantly from the SDP’s proposed National Care Service: a universal, comprehensive care service that will provide access to acute, nurse-led intermediate, and long-term care. For Clacton, with its larger share of older residents, a National Care Service would offer significant peace of mind for many households. What’s the best night out in Clacton? I’ve really enjoyed my meals at the Mangiare Ristorante at Frinton-on-Sea. It’s a great Italian restaurant: the food is fantastic and the team is incredibly friendly. In terms of drinking at the pub, I’ve had a lovely time at the Old Lifeboat House at Clacton-on-Sea. What would you tell President Trump if you could speak to him directly? I think he must ask himself what his priorities are and what he wants to achieve from his presidency. The Iran War is one of the worst disasters in American military history, and it happened entirely because of a complete failure by him to look at his intelligence brief or consider how it might impact the rest of his presidency. His failure and flip-flopping on tariffs is another case in point, as was his idiocy around the Greenland Annexation push. Trump seems to just do things because it feels good in the moment for his ego – if I had his ear for a moment, I’d tell him that if he wants any sort of legacy then he must reign this in immediately. What would your dream role be if you were asked to join the government? I’m campaigning as leader of the SDP party, so my dream role would be to serve as Prime Minister so we had full latitude to implement our policy platform. But if the SDP were asked into a coalition, and if the terms were right, then I would probably choose Housing Minister. I’ve enjoyed a forty-year career in town planning and commercial property development, so Housing would allow me to put my expertise to best possible use – and allow me to ideally oversee a proper resurrection of state housebuilding capacity. If you could change one thing about the UK more broadly, what would it be? An end to short-termism in public life. Building and maintaining a country is hard, and requires you to think in timeframes beyond a single election – it can take decades for the consequences of a decision to be felt. Mass media and social media both have compressed our timelines down to the order of weeks, days, and hours. Many people in public life aren’t interested in making the country better, but in taking part in a vapid never-ending circus of outrage and “gotchas”. These people must go.

I've been discussing Huawei's τ scaling (temporal scaling) with people recently, and noticed the conversation tends to stay at the surface level without reaching its substance — likely because many participants don't come from an EE background and aren't familiar with the classical meaning of τ in circuit theory. The very first time constant you learn in a circuits course is τ = RC: the resistance of a wire multiplied by its capacitance gives the order of magnitude of the time a signal needs to traverse that wire. The longer the wire, the greater the resistance and capacitance, and the slower the signal. Within this framework, the past sixty years of geometric scaling are reinterpreted as one particular implementation of temporal scaling. Transistors were shrunk to shorten switching delay; circuits were packed more tightly to shorten metal interconnects and reduce signal propagation delay. Geometric scaling was only ever the means — compressing delay was always the end. Huawei's thesis is that once geometric scaling stalls, you find other ways to keep compressing delay. As it happens, He Tingbo's τ scaling paper released its v2 a couple of days ago, expanding from 16 to 23 pages. I compared the two versions: the data and conclusions are unchanged. The additions are essentially responses to several points of criticism the industry raised about v1. Three are worth discussing. The most important addition is the test evidence now backing the previously bare claim of "41% energy efficiency improvement." In v1, that number had no baseline and no test conditions — the most obvious target for scrutiny. V2 supplies a full comparison table. The baseline is the 2025 Kirin 9030 Pro. Both chips use the same mature process node; the key difference is that the baseline uses a conventional planar design, while Kirin 2026 folds critical paths across two vertically bonded wafers. Folding shortens interconnects and reduces interconnect delay. The timing margin freed up on the critical path translates directly into a higher maximum clock frequency: 3.1 GHz at 1.1 V supply, 13% above the baseline. The "41% energy efficiency improvement" comes from a separate operating point specifically configured for an iso-performance comparison: voltage scaled down to 0.9 V, frequency scaled down to 2.5 GHz, with measured power at 25°C coming in at 0.59× the baseline. A back-of-the-envelope estimate checks out: dynamic power scales roughly with the square of supply voltage, so an 18% voltage reduction contributes about one-third of the power drop from the square term alone. Factor in the 9% frequency reduction and the interconnect capacitance eliminated by folding, and you land right around 0.59×. So the precise meaning of "41% energy efficiency improvement" is power reduction at iso-performance. In essence, the timing margin gained from folding is traded for lower power consumption; the efficiency gain comes from logic folding. As a side note, v2 also reports that power density after dual-layer stacking is actually 5.6% lower than the baseline. The second addition addresses the question peers are most likely to ask: 3D stacking has been around for years — AMD's 3D V-Cache and Intel's Foveros are both in volume production — so what's new about LogicFolding? To understand the paper's answer, you first need to know how two layers of silicon communicate. They rely on inter-layer bond pads, which function like elevators connecting the upper and lower floors. In prior production 3D stacking, bond pad pitch ranges from 9 μm to tens of micrometers, yielding roughly ten thousand connections per square millimeter — enough to attach a bus to an entire cache block. So the established design approach has been to move complete functional blocks wholesale onto the upper tier. AMD, for example, stacks an entire cache die on top of a processor die; the two tiers are designed independently and connected through an interface. But inside a chip, a single square millimeter contains hundreds of millions of transistors. If you want adjacent logic gates to sit on different tiers — one on top, one on the bottom — that connection density falls far short. Kirin 2026 brings bond pad pitch down to 1.5 μm, yielding 440,000 connections per square millimeter. That approaches the density of the top-level metal wiring inside a chip. Routing a signal across tiers costs roughly the same as routing it across metal layers within a single die. At this point, the two silicon layers merge into a single entity in the circuit sense. EDA tools can decide at the individual logic-gate level which gate goes on which tier, handing the problem to algorithms for global optimization — a completely different degree of design freedom from what came before. The paper also explains why they didn't take the more aggressive route of fabricating a second device layer directly on top of the first. That approach offers the finest inter-layer connectivity, but manufacturing the second layer requires high temperatures that damage the already-completed first layer. It isn't production-viable today. The third addition is thermal management. Vertical stacking significantly increases thermal density per unit area, and the lower die's heat dissipation path is blocked by the upper die. This is the first objection anyone raises about 3D stacking, and v1 did not address it in depth. V2 openly acknowledges that thermal management remains a key challenge for the LogicFolding architecture. The countermeasure is thermally-aware partitioning and floorplanning: during the design phase, high-power circuits are excluded from folding candidates, and the floorplan avoids placing high-power blocks in vertical adjacency to prevent hotspot superposition. Whether this strategy is a set of manually imposed engineering constraints or has already been codified into an automated flow within their internal EDA tools, the paper does not say. It only identifies a multi-physics tool chain as the single most important investment for the next decade. Combined with the measured data showing power density 5.6% below the baseline at the iso-performance operating point, the thermal concern has at least received a direct response. That said, this approach is fundamentally avoidance-based. As stacking grows to three or four tiers, the design space eligible for folding will be progressively squeezed by thermal constraints — a boundary the paper does not explore. Additionally, v2 includes a cross-sectional micrograph of the bond interface between the two wafers and explicitly states that wafer-on-wafer hybrid bonding is used. This spec is worth benchmarking against the industry: 1.5 μm pitch wafer-to-wafer hybrid bonding on a production logic chip has no precedent. TSMC's SoIC is currently in production at 6 μm pitch; Intel's Foveros Direct is at 9 μm. Impressive, to say the least. After comparing the two versions, I'm left with two questions. One is about equipment: who supplied the bonding tools capable of this spec? The paper says only that it is the result of years of process development across a multi-vendor ecosystem. The other is about EDA: designing two wafers as a single chip is beyond what any commercially available EDA tool can do today. The paper acknowledges this, stating only that methodological details will be "published within months." Yet the frequency table shows that the 2027-generation Kirin at 3.39 GHz is already tagged as having physical silicon, meaning this toolchain was up and running inside Huawei long ago — and has been validated on at least two product generations. My personal guess is that this EDA capability was built in-house by Huawei. If anyone has insight on this, I'd welcome the discussion.

"FABLE 5 ISN'T JUST A STEP BETTER... IT'S A GARGANTUAN STEP FORWARD." That's how one AI expert described Claude Fable 5's return. After watching the breakdown, these are the first things I'd do: → Review and upgrade any code written while Fable 5 was unavailable. → Let Claude test your app like a real user with browser control, then generate UX improvements. → Use it as a business strategist to uncover new products and revenue opportunities. → Schedule recurring security audits with /loop to continuously scan your API endpoints. → Connect X MCP to turn your posts and audience conversations into startup ideas. → If you're building games, pair it with Unreal MCP for dramatically better results. → Reverse-prompt it: Ask Claude which parts of your daily workflow it can automate instead of guessing yourself. The biggest takeaway: The people winning with AI aren't just using better models. They're building repeatable workflows that compound every day. If you're using Claude or planning to, this video is packed with practical prompts and workflows you can implement immediately. Watch it, then follow @damidefi for more AI alpha before everyone else catches on. Video cred: Alex Finn (Youtube)

Green's Theorem states that the line integral around a positively oriented, piecewise smooth, simple closed curve C is equal to the double integral of the curl over the planar region D it encloses: ∮_C (P dx + Q dy) = ∬_D (∂Q/∂x − ∂P/∂y) dx dy By breaking the boundary into manageable segments (C₁, C₂, C₃, C₄) and integrating over [a, b], we convert the macroscopic flow around the boundary into the total microscopic circulation (rotation) throughout the entire area.