Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐 @bibliolater@social.cleverlibre.org

English scholar, writer & clergyman Robert Burton was born #OTD in 1577. He is best remembered for his publication Anatomy of Melancholy where he describes, among other things, the advances gained in our knowledge of astronomy. This in a long section of the book where he brings the reader up to date with efforts to observe & learn about the heavens, notable the then-recent observations of Galileo Galilei. via Soc. Hist. Astronomy

Robert Burton at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3686

#books #astronomy

The slave trade and the origins of matrilineal kinship: "We find that the slave trades are positively associated with the subsequent presence of matrilineal kinship. We also find evidence of a complementarity between polygyny and matrilineal kinship"

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2023.0032

Material insecurity and religiosity: A causal analysis | "We find that years of formal education and food insecurity do not consistently contribute to individual religiosity cross-culturally"

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/material-insecurity-and-religiosity-a-causal-analysis/BD571D853F183B66B0CBF6A6A0E2DDF3

Shakespeare's Richard II is presented at the Globe #OTD in 1601.

Shakespeare's play appears to have played a minor role in the events surrounding the final downfall of Essex. On 7 February 1601, just before the uprising, supporters of the Earl of Essex, among them Charles and Joscelyn Percy (younger brothers of the Earl of Northumberland), paid for a performance at the Globe Theatre on the eve of their armed rebellion. via @wikipedia

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1512

#books #literature #theatre

English novelist and social critic Charles Dickens was born #OTD in 1812. His works include A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era. via @wikipedia

Books by Charles Dickens at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37

#books #literature

Poll time!

Now that Bluesky is open to everyone will you be using it?

Feel free to boost so more people see it 😁

#poll #bluesky #fediverse #mastodon #SocialMedia

Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024 https://lifehacker.com/tech/the-best-rss-reader-apps-in-2024

1,000 times yes! As an information junky, I can't *imagine* life w/o RSS. I loves my Inoreader!

Science sleuths are using technology to find fakery and plagiarism in published research | “They want science to be and do better,” Oransky said. “And they are frustrated by how uninterested most people in academia — and certainly in publishing — are in correcting the record.”

https://apnews.com/article/danafarber-cancer-scandal-harvard-sleuth-science-389dc2464f25bca736183607bc57415c

How did human beings acquire the ability to do #mathematics? New "Devlin's Angle" post for the Math. Assoc. of America https://mathvalues.squarespace.com/masterblog/category/Devlin%27s+Angle

English playwright, poet and translator Christopher Marlowe was born #OTD in 1564. He was an Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse. His plays include Tamburlaine the Great (1590), Dr. Faustus (1604), The Jew of Malta (1633), and Edward II (1594). via @wikipedia

Books by Christopher Marlowe at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/410

#books #literature #poetry #theatre

Spanish "aceite" means "oil" but looks confusingly like it might be cognate with "acid". Spanish was spoken for a thousand years before enyone knew that fats are chemically speaking acids. Turns out it's an Arabic word, "azzayt", and has nothing to do with Latin "acidus".

#language #spanish #etymology

The 12th root of 2 times the 7th root of 5 is

1.333333192495....

And since the numbers 5, 7, and 12 show up in scales, this weird fact has implications for music! It leads to a remarkable meta-meta-glitch in tuning systems. Let's check it out.

Two important glitches that afflict tuning systems are the Pythagorean comma and the syntonic comma. If you go up 12 fifths, multiplying the frequency by 3/2 each time, you go up a bit less than 7 octaves. The ratio is the "Pythagorean comma":

p = 531441/524288 ≈ 1.013643

And if you go up four fifths, you go up a bit more than 2 octaves and a major third, which ideally has a frequency ratio of 5/4. The ratio is the "syntonic comma":

σ = 81/80 = 1.0125

In music it would be very convenient if these two glitches were the same - and sometimes musicians pretend they are. But they're not! So their ratio is a tiny meta-glitch. It's called the "schisma":

χ = p/σ = 32805/32768 ≈ 1.0011298906

and it was discovered by an advisor to the Gothic king Theodoric the Great.

In the most widely used tuning system today, a fifth is not 3/2 but slightly less: it's

2^(7/12) ≈ 1.498307

The ratio of 3/2 and this slightly smaller fifth is called the "grad":

γ = p^(1/12) ≈ 1.0011291504

Look! The grad is amazingly close to the schisma! They agree to 7 decimal places! Their ratio is a meta-meta-glitch called the "Kirnberger kernel":

χ/γ ≈ 1.0000007394

If you unravel the mathematical coincidence that makes this happens, you'll see it boils down to

2^(1/12) 5^(1/7) ≈ 1.333333192495

being very close to 4/3. And this coincidence let Bach's students Johann Kirnberger invent an amazing tuning system.