Month: July 2026

Exploring the Missing Trojans: Homer’s Illusive Episodes | July 21 2026, 18:14

Tomorrow I will go to the Odyssey. Remember the Trojan Horse, the snakes, Laocoön, and “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”? So, it turns out that the most famous episode of the Trojan War isn’t in the “Iliad”—the main poem about this very war, and things with the Odyssey are also tricky. In the Iliad, Homer ends the story earlier: the “Iliad” covers only fifty days of the last year of the siege and ends with the funeral of Hector—there’s no horse, no death of Achilles, nor fall of the city in it. In the “Odyssey,” the horse appears a couple of times but only in passing: the bard Demodocus sings about it at a feast, Menelaus recalls how Helen walked around the horse and mocked the voices of the Greeks hidden inside. That’s it. There is no elaborate scene of assault and fire in Homer’s works at all. And that canonical story—with the spy Sinon, Laocoön strangled by the snakes, and burning Troy—is from the Roman Virgil, the second book of the “Aeneid,” written in the 20s of the 1st century BC, almost seven hundred years after Homer. It is precisely from there that the plot leaked into pop culture.

But Virgil did not invent the horse out of nowhere. Between him and Homer, there was an entire “epic cycle”—a series of poems that covered the entire war from beginning to end: “Cypria” (prehistory: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen), then “Iliad”, then “Aethiopis” (the death of Achilles), then “Little Iliad”—here’s where they finally build the horse,—then “The Sack of Ilium”, where they roll it into the city and the massacre begins, and then “The Returns”, “Odyssey”, and a somewhat odd “Telegony” for dessert. Out of the eight poems of the cycle, only two Homeric ones fully survived. The other six—including both with all the salt about the horse—have disappeared and are known only from a later synopsis-summary and scattered quotations, totaling about a hundred lines. That means we have the middle and epilogue of the story at hand, while the beginning and the climax in the original are lost.

Turns out, we’ve been retelling a scene for centuries, the authentic text of which we don’t have.

P.S. A separate story about whether Homer was blind. And whether there was a Homer. It’s all very complicated 🙂 But that’s a story for another time.

41 Days of Fitness with Oculus Quest 3: A Game-Changer for Home Workouts | July 21 2026, 01:09

Oculus Quest 3 workouts. Day 41. 40 minutes a day. All systems go! Basically, I highly recommend spending a few hundred dollars on such fitness. It especially helps with switching tasks between projects and weight disappears quickly. Not least because of Oculus I am 10 kg lighter 🙂 In other words, if you work from home, finding 30-40 minutes for several sessions is usually not difficult, and it’s really fun! In the video, I’m passing an 8-minute Advanced level with weights on my arms and torso – 3 kg on the arms, another 10 on the shoulders. Well ok, I do it after three more such levels (off-camera), but I’m already used to it, and still, about 20-25 minutes is enough to be dripping sweat on my shoulder and shirt.

In the video is the game FitXR. There are actually a lot of such games. I just started with this one, and it keeps statistics and all that – vendor lock, basically. There are games that I can’t even properly start – it’s a simulator of a gravity board, the speed of which is determined by the frequency of squats, while you try to stay in lane with the joystick. Quite a dizzying thing, a challenge for the vestibular apparatus. But the main thing is the muscles give up – after a few minutes of very fast squats, you don’t want to play anymore, but people are chopping at it, apparently, need more training.

When we went to Florida, I managed to play between beds – overall, you don’t need much space. But the room at home is large, 6×6 meters, almost no furniture, so you can even play in a level where you need to run around the room and hit virtual buttons hanging in the air. This is augmented reality, through the mask you see quite clearly everything around, and these animated buttons during a very short time allow you to press them (but you first have to quickly find them, then run to them).

The Future of Fiction: Satire and Automation in “The Silver Eggheads” | July 20 2026, 16:48

I came across the book “The Silver Eggheads” (1961) by Fritz Leiber—a satirical novel about the future of literature, featuring “wordmills” and, darn it, so many parallels with what is being done now.

In the novel, wordmills are enormous machines that have completely replaced writers in the production of fiction. They mechanically “grind” words, producing an endless stream of novels—a so-called “wordwooze”, a product perfectly tailored to the tastes of the mass reader. It causes almost narcotic pleasure: the reader swallows the book and immediately forgets its content, remaining hungry for the next one.

Human writers in the novel still exist, but purely decoratively. They don’t write a single line—they only “service” the wordmills (by pressing buttons) and maintain a public image: they wear bohemian outfits, live in attics, stir up scandals, start affairs—all that the public expects from a “real writer.” Writing has turned into show business and cosplay, while creativity itself is left to machines.

Writers, imagining that they truly can write, rise up and destroy the wordmills. And then a catastrophe is revealed: none of them can compose anything readable—the skill has been lost for generations. The publishing industry panics, searching for a solution.

That’s when the titular Silver Eggheads come into play—preserved human brains in egg-shaped metal containers, brains of writers and thinkers of the past, stored for decades in the “Wisdom of Ages.” The publishers hope that these brains will be able to write books again. The Eggheads, however, having become rather snide and peculiar entities over years of pure contemplation, don’t rush to cooperate.

The plot then turns into a whirlpool of intrigues around these thirty brains—they suddenly become the only “productive asset” in the entire publishing industry.

Meanwhile, the main trouble becomes clear: the Eggheads do not want to write. Two hundred years of pure thought have turned them into haughty contemplators—to them, human novels are trivial and petty. The first attempts to make them write yield either mockeries or texts so strange that they are unsellable. The characters eventually realize that the Eggheads need not orders but motivation: experiences, sensations, participation in life.

Funny book, I should read it sometime.

Exploring the Scorching, Solid Ice of Alien Worlds | July 17 2026, 14:56

There exists ice that does not melt even at hundreds of degrees, and it seems that entire planets stand on it. Under normal pressure, ice has to be cold. But if you compress water tens of thousands of times stronger than atmospheric pressure, the molecules have nowhere to go, and the pressure itself compresses them into a crystalline lattice, causing the water to “freeze,” even while being scalding hot. Not supercooled, not tricky—just simultaneously solid and hot. It’s called “Ice VII”. At a pressure of about 10 GPa, it remains a crystal at temperatures above +300°C.

This type of ice has been found in nature. In 2017, its tiny crystals were discovered locked inside diamonds that had been lifted from the depths of the Earth’s mantle—the water was sealed in there under monstrous residual pressure. And if you compress and heat water even more—to hundreds of GPa and thousands of degrees—it transitions into an even more bizarre phase: superionic ice. Oxygen atoms sit in a rigid lattice while protons flow freely through it like a fluid. This ice conducts electricity and, according to calculations, appears black and incandescent. It was momentarily produced in the laboratory with laser shock waves, and models suggest that significant portions of the interiors of Uranus, Neptune, and many “water” exoplanets are composed of it—this particularly explains their strange, skewed magnetic fields.

Our domestic experience of “ice = cold” is a narrow special case at one atmosphere of pressure. Science already knows about twenty crystalline forms of ice, and in the interiors of planets, water can easily be both solid and hot at the same time.

Yuka App Reveals Surprising Health Scores: The Uncommon Bread That Scores Perfectly | July 14 2026, 19:18

There’s an app called Yuka, and it shows how healthy food is based on its barcode from 0 to 100. You’ll never guess what scored a 100 out of 100 from the photo. It’s not berries and not salmon. It is – bread.

Ezekiel 4:9. It’s truly not ordinary bread. There’s no flour in it. It’s made entirely of sprouted grains, seeds (like flax, sunflower, and chia) and psyllium as a binding agent. Sprouted Grain Bread. Well, in terms of texture, it’s bread as usual. Speaking of which, the regular white and yellow sandwich bread from the same store scored a 4 out of 100.

How Yuka evaluates products. Three criteria – nutritional value according to the Nutri-score system (60%), presence of additives (30%), organic status (10%). The algorithm adores products high in fiber and protein but severely penalizes for caloric content, saturated fats, sugar, and salt. Salmon, due to fats and high caloric content, scores 78/100. Meanwhile, ready-to-eat French fries score 66/100, and BBQ chips – 4/100.

Engineering Zen: Mind-Bending Science and History Revealed | July 13 2026, 16:16

Reminding you that I have an Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, there have been posts about:

– The British plan to build an aircraft carrier… out of ice. Measuring 600 meters in length — the largest ship in history. Material scientists found an additive that makes ice as strong as concrete. A prototype was actually built — its remnants still lie at the bottom of a Canadian lake.

– The fact that no one really knows why a bicycle doesn’t fall over. For a century and a half, textbooks offered two beautiful explanations — until in 2011 they built a bicycle that disabled both effects. By all laws, it should fall over. Yet, it rides.

– How the military communicates with submarines through the depth of salty water, where radio waves cannot penetrate. The Americans nearly turned 40% of the state of Wisconsin into an antenna, while the Soviet system used the Earth’s crust itself as an antenna. Efficiency — megawatts in, a couple of watts out. And that’s enough for almost the entire globe.

– That very rotor with blades behind glass, which has been explained incorrectly for 150 years. Maxwell was initially pleased — but then they noticed it spins the wrong direction. The correct answer is much trickier, and it specifically requires a “non-ideal” vacuum.

– Why a fridge magnet sticks only on one side, and barely on the other. It turns out, it’s the same trick used to focus beams in particle accelerators. And it has a very non-obvious “flip side.”

– The “Silicon Lottery”: chips from the same production line turn out different, and your processor might just be a flawed model of a higher-end version with blocks disabled. And in the 90s, there was a coprocessor that, upon installation, simply switched off the main processor and worked instead.

– Undersea cables that carry the entire internet: as thick as a garden hose, under 20 kilovolts, amplifying light directly with light — no electricity involved. And why traders are willing to pay for the fact that light in fiber is “too slow.”

– The Hoover Dam, inside which nearly 1000 km of piping is hidden — otherwise, the concrete would have taken 125 years to set and it would have cracked from tension. It was cooled with an on-site ice plant.

– And for dessert — the fact that trolleybuses, electric cars, faxes, drones, video calls, and even humanoid robots are much older than you think. One of the robots walked, talked 700 words, counted with his fingers, and smoked. In 1939. Seems we’re just dusting off the past.

Join us to not miss much more interesting stuff.

“Engineering Zen”, Engineering Zen and on Telegram t.me/engineersdzen