Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐 @bibliolater@social.cleverlibre.org
Not a bot; a rather corpulent male approaching fifty years of age; married; father; a very very slow reader; barely reaching up to the level of mediocrity; an ignoramus who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, sciences, books and maps related. Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions. Expect many typing errors.
Addendum: for those wondering, I do not physically resemble a fountain pen.
Joined Nov 2022
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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@bibliolater @earlymodern @histodon @histodons @philosophy
One of the Fathers of the Founding Fathers!
"In contrast, Locke lived at a time when it was still possible for a well-educated man to master many branches of knowledge. The polymath was still a reality: John Locke, though primarily a philosopher, was a qualified doctor, and wrote on theology, political theory, and education. His herbarium (a collection of 3,000 flowers) preserved between sheets of his pupils' exercises, and now housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) is possibly the oldest surviving collection of English wild flowers."
Jeffreys M V. John Locke. Br Med J 1974; 4 :34 doi: https://www.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.4.5935.34 #Research #Article #DOI #PDF #BMJ #History #Histodon #Histodons #Philosophy #Polymath #EarlyModern @earlymodern @histodon @histodons @philosophy
#Image attribution: Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portret_van_John_Locke,_RP-P-OB-51.033.jpg
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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If you're reading this post here on #Mastodon you probably understand the importance of using social media a little more slowly, a little more mindfully.
This week's newsletter is a bit of a guide to doing just that:
https://themarkup.org/hello-world/2024/02/17/an-essential-guide-for-mindful-posting
#Question: do instances have control over how many #followers a particular account can have?
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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@bibliolater @science I’m gonna have to read the Carl Sagan version of this paper….
"We propose to conceptualize science-related populism as a set of ideas which suggests that there is a morally charged antagonism between an (allegedly) virtuous ordinary people and an (allegedly) unvirtuous academic elite, and that this antagonism is due to the elite illegitimately claiming and the people legitimately demanding both science-related decision-making sovereignty and truth-speaking sovereignty."
Mede, N. G., & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473-491. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662520924259 #OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #DOI #Science #STEM #Epistemology #Populism @science
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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#speculative #traders have amassed a $8.7bn bet across London and New York #cocoa futures contracts that prices will continue to rise, the largest ever in dollar terms, according to positioning data from the CFTC.
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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A quick primer on how to measure all the mass in the universe:
1. Map the cosmic microwave background
2. Look for distortions caused by gravity
3. Reconstruct the mass that caused that gravitational pull
(It took 6 years to make a preliminary measurement; better ones are on the way.)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11608 #science #space #astronomy #astrodon
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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Why large language models are not intelligent, exhibit #64338.
"Are you bilingual? Or even multilingual? It turns out there are lots of upsides to speaking more than one language." https://youtu.be/nBGuQHsXllg #Language #Languages #Neuroscience #Science #STEM #Brain #BBCIdeas #Video @science
"A peer-reviewed medical journal has published strange AI-made images, despite them containing imaginary words and letters as well as a very unusual rat." https://youtu.be/OqjpK70BOZg #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Image #Rat #Journal #C4News #Science #STEM #Research #PeerReview #Youtube #Video @science
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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Georg Joachim Rheticus, who brought the manuscript of Copernicus' De revolutionibus from Frombork to Nürnberg to be printed was born 16 February 1514 #histsci
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2019/03/27/the-emergence-of-modern-astronomy-a-complex-mosaic-part-vii/
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/the-emergence-of-modern-astronomy-a-complex-mosaic-part-viii/
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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US #inflation – where it is and isn’t, chart @YahooFinance https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inflation-is-cooling-the-gop-wants-you-to-remember-its-up-179-since-biden-took-office-152408852.html?.tsrc=372
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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#UK Britain ‘s economy fell into a #recession in 2H2023, chart @ReutersBiz https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-economy-entered-recession-second-half-2023-2024-02-15/
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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Some geometry problems are easy to state but hard to solve! For any triangle, can an ideal point-sized billiard ball bounce around inside in a 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑐 trajectory - a path that repeats?
The answer is "yes" for acute triangles, and this has been known since 1775. It's also "yes" for right triangles. But for obtuse triangles, nobody knows!
In 2008, Richard Schwartz showed that the answer is "yes" for triangles with angles of 100° or less. He broke the problem down into cases and checked each case with the help of a computer. Then progress was stuck... until 2018, when Jacob Garber, Boyan Marinov, Kenneth Moore and George Tokarsky showed the answer is "yes" for triangles with angles of 112.3° or less.
Beyond that we're stuck.... except for triangles with all 𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 angles (measured in radians). For them too the answer is "yes".
The picture here is from
George Tokarsky, Jacob Garber, Boyan Marinov, Kenneth Moore, One hundred and twelve point three degree theorem, https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06667
and for more check out this article on Quanta:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mysterious-math-of-billiards-tables-20240215/
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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And if you want to know some of the #mathematics behind this, there are two great text by Sergei Tabachnikov openly accessible on the web:
* Geometry and Billiards at https://web.archive.org/web/20051211063150/http://www.math.psu.edu/tabachni/Books/billiardsgeometry.pdf
* Billiards: http://num.math.uni-goettingen.de/~summer/tabachnikov_billiardsbook.pdf
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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Mathematical billiards are fascinating objects… and you don’t need to look into very complicated shapes to find intriguing problems. A new post on @QuantaMagazine is doing a marvellous job in giving a glimpse of this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mysterious-math-of-billiards-tables-20240215/
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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“Last year in the UK 669m physical books were sold, the highest overall level ever recorded.”
This surprised me. Have to admit.
"The results allow us to reconstruct the seasonal strategies employed by neolithic groups that occupied Campo de Hockey and to establish whether this island site was occupied all year round or seasonally."
García-Escárzaga, A., Cantillo-Duarte, J.J., Milano, S. et al. Marine resource exploitation and human settlement patterns during the Neolithic in SW Europe: stable oxygen isotope analyses (δ18O) on Phorcus lineatus (da Costa, 1778) from Campo de Hockey (San Fernando, Cádiz, Spain). Archaeol Anthropol Sci 16, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-024-01939-0 #OpenAccess #OA #Journal #Article #Research #DOI #Cadiz #Spain #Europe #Archaeology #Anthropology #Archaeodons #History #Neolithic #Science #STEM #Academia #Academic #Academics @science @archaeodons @anthropology
Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐
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The names of our weekdays have a long history.
The days were named after the sun, the moon and five Germanic gods.
This system had been adapted from Latin, where it was based on a Hellenistic Greek system, which in turn was based on a Babylonian system.
Here's the whole story:
Not a bot; a rather corpulent male approaching fifty years of age; married; father; a very very slow reader; barely reaching up to the level of mediocrity; an ignoramus who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, sciences, books and maps related. Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions. Expect many typing errors.
Addendum: for those wondering, I do not physically resemble a fountain pen.
Joined Nov 2022
