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

Hubble, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory all contributed to this multi-wavelength image of our galactic center, made for the International Year of Astronomy back in 2009.
Image: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC and STScI

Inspired by seeing on Twitter that Melbourne is closer to Antarctica than to Darwin, I started playing with maps.

* Bangor, Maine is closer to Ireland than to LA
* Miami is closer to Lima than to Seattle
* Cape Town is closer to Buenos Aires than to Cairo
* Vladivostok and Moscow are both closer to Chennai than to each other. (Vladivostok is also closer to Australia than to Moscow; Moscow is closer to Canada than it is to Vladivostok.)

26 Nov 1607: b. John Harvard #otd in #Southwark - he emigrated to New #England in 1637, a founder of #Harvard College.

One reason may be the way we experience the passage of time changes as we age, often resulting in the feeling that time speeds up as we get older.

This difference in ratio compresses the relative time between Christmases each year.

Expert explains.

https://theconversation.com/why-we-feel-like-christmas-comes-around-more-quickly-each-year-194575

#OTD 1504, Isabella of Castile one of the most influential monarchs in European history died in the small town of Medina del Campo, Spain, aged 53. Isabella is the ancestor of every current European monarch, including HM The King, her 14 x great grand-son. Her daughters were queens of Portual and England as consorts, whilst her oldest surviving daughter was the unfortunate Juana, Queen of Castile. 2 of her grandsons became Holy Roman Emperor. http://bit.ly/2wGcmFq #history #queens #histodons

From #Ireland with love. This German print of 1690 announces to show a man-eating monstrous animal, half human and half camel, that was captured by Protestant troops of William III at Limerick, and transferred to London. A protestant story of taming beasty Catholics sold in revolutionary times (post 1688) for a continental European audience. The print (https://t1p.de/66gkz ) is a woodcut that came in many variations and echoes, as I will show, follow me along.

#BookHistory #Histodons

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A mesmerizing timelapse of the Sun in ultraviolet light, captured by the SDO spacecraft over the course of a month.

Credit: NASA/SDO
#sun #nasa #space #astronomy

Albert Einstein presented "The Field Equations of Gravitation" to the Prussian Academy #OTD in 1915.

After years of work culminating in a frenzied month-long race against David Hilbert, Einstein finally had the correct form of the field equations for general relativity.

Any site that wants to maximize profit, or is under pressure to maximize profit, and is subject to the kinds of algorithms that currently exist on social media will be under enormous pressure to fire up the outrage machine.

I doubt they will choose otherwise.

I've run a large site and Facebook page for more than a decade. I've seen what drives traffic. I have to actively choose to make less money by not posting outrage inducing things.

Occasionally, I accidentally post a teaser that causes people to react about "those lazy people" and how language is going to hell, with everyone piling on about their pet peeves, and traffic goes through the roof.

If I cared about making money, I'd post things like that every day.

As you're considering the other new Twitter alternatives, ask yourself if you really want to go to another corporate entity that could end up being just as bad as Twitter and Facebook. Algorithmic sites, by design, reward hate and outrage. You're jumping into another fire.

We have a rare and fleeting chance to build something different right now.

I'm choosing to spend my time trying to make this place succeed — helping new users and saving my best content for here.

An #intoduction after moving instances: I'm a #prof at #cornell in #CS doing scientific computing. Home base is #linearalgebra (esp #eigenvalues), computational #mechanics, #optimization. Work on numerical methods for #data science, formal verification of numerics, #plasma #physics for #fusion, etc. I run our Center for Applied Math, am assoc dean for #DEI in the college. Collect #fountainpens, read #scifi & #fantasy, #code in #julia (and C/C++, Fortran). Also #coffee, #tea, #books, more #books.