Herodotus wrote in
:

Yes, the two main things I wanted to see in Spain when we sailed there
was Gaudi's Barcelona, especially his Sagria Familia - the Cathedral
that is still under construction and the Alhambra, the Moorish palace
in Granada. In both places I was in the seventh heaven. It's amazing
to see irrigation schemes around Andalucia that are still intact and
providing water to crops that were built more than 1,000 years ago by
the Moors.

I lived in Tehran, Iran from 1977 to 28 days before the Shahanshah was
deposed in 1979. He was more reluctant than I to leave the gunfire in
the streets.

While I lived there, I became fascinated with Persian engineering,
especially the water systems that collect rain on the tropical north
side of the Alborz Mountains and funnel it into Tehran in the desert on
the south side, at the expense I'm sure of thousands of slave miners'
lives a few thousand years ago. The city is literally awash in running
water running down a channel on each side of the streets called a jube.
In small streets, modern Iranian engineers designed the jubes between
the road surface and the curb, perfectly placed and just the right width
to DROP YOUR TIRE INTO, proving that modern Iranian engineers have just
about zero chance of building a working bomb without destroying half the
country in the oops explosions that are sure to ensue. There is a wide
difference between PERSIAN engineers and IRANIAN engineers, who are
raised in a social system based on one of the most comical bluff systems
I've ever encountered. If an instructor wants all the Iranians taking
the test to have the SAME wrong answer to the test, he only needs to
exit the testing room for 15 minutes and it will occur...(c;

The aquaducts and tunnels carved through the mountain to the Tehran side
is quite a feat of engeering still in use today. The original shah
bought huge oak trees from the Israelis and planted them in little steps
down Pahlavi Avenue (now renamed I'm sure) from the palace to the train
station. They have grown so huge being waterered 24/7 with 12 hours of
sunshine every day in the desert to create food and O2 they completely
cover the 4-lane highway from storefront on one side to storefront on
the other. Every little step is a separate little waterfall for the
millions of gallons pouring downhill from the mountain...and makes a
separate little evaporative air conditioner that cools amazingly well
the entire street under this beautiful canopy of trees. If the city
weren't just totally covered in dust from construction and dust storms,
it would be truely beautiful. I explored both sides of the mountain
where the water goes in and where it comes out...very interesting
considering how many centuries separate us.

The only people in peril from Iranian nuclear weapons research are the
ones living around the plant's blast zone WHEN, not if, it finally goes
critical and takes out the valley.... I worked with their finest who
are also expert bluffers. If you look at Doshen-Tappeh Air Force Base
on the NE side of Tehran, where I worked while there, using current
Google Earth sat photos, you'll find the whole base without planes,
trucks, cars, or anything else that looks like military activity. It's
DESERTED except for a few old planes that look abandoned next to the
hangar building I worked in, the largest building on the tarmac. It was
a bustling array of activity in 1978-79 when I worked there, our primary
mission SIGINT/ELINT of Afghanistan and Iraq along the borders where we
had many mountaintop listening stations monitoring Iran's neighbors'
electronic emissions....up to 18Ghz, higher than the neighbors ever
transmitted...(c;