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

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.

@bibliolater @ai @archaeodons this is a
wonderful example of using AI for good. but we should be clear that the AI did not decipher some code/language that humans could not… it was used to allow humans to read some of what was written in previously unreadable text (due to serious physical degradation from burning). the AI had no understanding of the text.

On Sunday I made an infographic about early Latin loanwords related to construction, such as 'kitchen' and 'street'.

Here's one about food.

Unlike words such as 'carnivore' and 'edible' - late, obvious loanwords - words such as 'cheese' and 'wine' were borrowed from Latin 2000-1500 years ago.

Scothish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle died #OTD in 1881.

His major works include The French Revolution, 3 vol. (1837), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), and The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, 6 vol. (1858–65). He founded the London Library, contributed significantly to the creation of the National Portrait Galleries in London and Scotland.

Books by Thomas Carlyle at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/523

#books #literature

Around median age 41 you get more people over age 65 than under 15. There are 10 large (20mil) countries past that point: Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Korea, France, Canada, Poland, UK. #demography #aging

#Google phases out 3rd party tracking cookies: #Privacy Sandbox explained 🍪

(video courtesy of @simon.caine Be sure to Like, Comment, & Subscribe for more great content!) 💙

https://tilvids.com/w/qPG4T14qo7N2kcZ3t4u8iG

#tech #Technology #news #PeerTube #tilvids

In the latest twist of the publishing arms race, firms churning out fake papers have taken to bribing journal editors https://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds #publishing #science #research #papermills

Portuguese writer João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, viscount de Almeida Garrett was born #OTD in 1799. In 1843, Garrett published Romanceiro e Cancioneiro Geral, a collection of folklore; two years later, he wrote the first volume of his historical novel O Arco de Santana (it took inspiration from The Hunchback of Notre Dame). He proposed the construction of the D. Maria II National Theatre and the creation of the Conservatory of Dramatic Art. via @wikipedia

#books #literature

Words such as 'formula' and 'ratio' instantly give away their Latin origin, but did you know 'wall' and 'kitchen' come from Latin too?

They were borrowed during the Roman occupation of a part of Europe that spoke the ancestor of English.

This infographic shows six of these early borrowings into West Germanic and their descendants in English, Dutch, and German:

The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

“If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm,” said Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University. “That is exactly what we have now.”
#Science #Integrity #Fraud #Scicomm

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point

Please be honest. No one is watching or judging, so there’s no need to puff-up the numbers in this anonymous poll.

How many news outlets, newsletters, or podcasts do you actually pay for?

@bibliolater yes those I count as a given, they would have bought sport cars before and endangered us in subtly different ways ...

@bibliolater @bookstodon Alexandria, the city that changed the world by Islam Issa