Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

Ruby Falls, a massive 44-meter waterfall at a depth of 341 meters (the height of the Eiffel Tower is 300).

The story of its accidental discovery is interesting. There was a cave in the area, Lookout Mountain, accessible only to enthusiasts. A guy, Leo Lambert, bought the land on the mountain and hired a team of workers to dig a vertical tunnel, aiming to reach the most interesting part of the cave and open it to the public. However, during the digging, they encountered a narrow 45-centimeter passage, from which fresh air was blowing. Leo went in to explore, and after eight hours of crawling, they emerged by the waterfall. Leo immediately decided to name it after his beloved wife – Ruby. It took another eight hours to crawl back. They began to cut a proper passage and let in tourists. Until the Great Depression, it was an insanely popular place, but then the crisis hit, and the company went bankrupt. A new owner invested in marketing, and gradually they transformed it into this beauty.

Besides the waterfall, there is actually nothing else to see. The lower cave – actually, Leo’s main target – was closed in 1935 as it was not very popular when there was a waterfall. Near where I live, there are Luray Caverns, and they are interesting in their own right. But the beauties there are somewhat different 🙂

The “self-improvement” section in Amazon’s bookstore

Phew, it’s great to have winter when you can ride your bike to Washington in February wearing just a T-shirt and averaging 25.3 km/h (even with stops at intersections and an elevation change of 146 meters). Forty minutes and I’m here

Ah, it’s great to have a winter when you can ride to Washington in February on a bike in a T-shirt with an average speed of 25.3 km/h (and that’s with stops at intersections and an elevation change of 146 meters) Forty minutes and I’m here

Happy Birthday!

Sharing a link to an unregistered media outlet (free for now)

How I turned from a Jeep Wrangler enthusiast to a Wrangler-hater in just one day. All it took was renting the car.

Decided to drive from Atlanta to Chattanooga (the one from Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Sun Valley Serenade”). That’s about 200 miles (300 km). And I took the beloved 2019 Jeep Wrangler Sahara. Brand new.

I’ll skip details about the discomfort of the interior (narrow), controls, and glasswork – that’s a matter of taste and style, and I didn’t like a lot there. But the worst thing about the Wrangler is the Death Wobble, and I experienced it all the way today. It would have been good to know about it beforehand.

Atlanta-Chattanooga: good roads, no traffic lights, and a speed limit of 70 miles per hour allow you to speed up to 120 km/h and drive like that for almost two hours without barely slowing down. A perfectly smooth road turns into sections with slight unevenness. And then it starts! At the speed of 120 km/h – shaking and harsh vibration of the entire car, which stops if you slow down to about 40-50 km/h.

Today, I had this issue about three times, each time requiring a combination of two factors: speed over 100 km/h and uneven road (or better, suddenly uneven). Learned to slow down in advance on uneven roads, and simply not to drive so fast at night.

Maybe that’s normal for a car that is supposed to be an off-roader, not for highways, but damn it, it’s the twenty-first century, others seem to manage. Do you know any other car that goes into death wobble at 120?

By the way, a day’s rental of the Wrangler at Routes cost only 24 bucks (I stupidly paid six more to the broker HolidayCars). Ridiculously cheap. Kept waiting for the catch, but so far so good, hopefully, it won’t happen.

In general, now I love my Toyota RAV4 even more 🙂

Happy Birthday! All the best!

Yesterday, in the Nature journal, British scientists (the real ones, from Cardiff) published an interesting article. They managed to assemble T-lymphocytes that can bind to almost all types of cancer.

The technology itself is not new. CAR-T therapy involves implanting specially engineered lymphocytes with chimeric receptors targeted at a specific type of cancer and individual.

In this case, it seems they created a “universal soldier” that works across a broad range of target molecules.

This has always been a rather expensive procedure, up to 1 million dollars, partly because it requires fine-tuning. The novelty—seemingly a discovery—is only the first swallow.

It will be interesting to observe.

I have always been amazed – why on earth should we know and remember when someone like the hypothetical Pushkin was born if the school years of all these luminaries went relatively unnoticed in history, and some even began writing closer to their life’s twilight.

For “practical” purposes, it’s sufficient to remember for about a decade when this or that author was in their prime, and who their contemporaries were (especially in the same location), and what significant events were happening around them (especially in the same location). It’s never and nowhere important whether Pushkin was born in 1799 or, say, five years later (unless you are a Pushkin scholar, of course). Yet, in school, we had to learn all these dates for some reason.

To me, it seems far more important to remember that Pushkin’s brightest works came within 15-17 years starting around the era of the Decembrists and Nicholas I, around which time there was also war with the Persians and Turks and the Caucasus in general, and that young Lermontov and Gogol were loitering somewhere nearby. That’s it, unforgettable. And no need to remember any dates.