Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org
Not a bot, just a fifty-year-old male who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, book, map, chart, and graph related. Some toots containing videos may also find their way into the timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Finis
Joined Nov 2022
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**Welcome**
Thank you for visiting this humble account. I hope the time you spend here will be informative. If a particular toot brought you here, please do view other toots from different subject areas. You never know what new topics may interest you.
**How Bond Vigilantes Made Trump Blink**
Bloomberg Originals
“_US President Donald Trump retreated from his sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs after a bond selloff sent Treasury yields soaring. But who are the much-feared bond vigilantes behind his reversal?_”
#Video length: ten minutes and fifty-four seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vB8wB1lDF0.
#Bonds #Trump #Tariffs #Markets #Economy #Economics @economics
**UK trade with the United States: 2024**
“_In 2024, the UK imported £57.1 billion of goods from the United States (9.7% of all goods imports) and exported £59.3 billion of goods (16.2% of all goods exports)._”
Office for National Statistics (ONS), released 25 April 2025, ONS website, article, https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/articles/uktradewiththeunitedstates/2024.
#Data #DataViz #Statistics #Trade #Economy #Business #Economics #UK #UnitedKingdom #USA #US #UnitedStates @economics
Bibliolater 
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**Chauvinism**
Dave Wilton
“_The original sense of the word was jingoism or superpatriotism, the blind, bellicose, and unswerving belief that one’s country is always in the right._”
https://wordorigins-org.ghost.io/chauvinism/.
#Etymology #Words #English #Language #Linguistics @linguistics
**The So-called Bust of Josephus**
https://brentnongbri.com/2025/04/25/the-so-called-bust-of-josephus/.
**‘Squared blunder’: Google engineer withdraws preprint after getting called out for using AI**
_An expert in AI at Google has admitted he used the technology to help write a preprint manuscript that commenters on PubPeer found to contain a slew of AI-generated phrases like “squared blunder” and “info picture.”_
#Preprint #Retraction #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech @ai
Bibliolater
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A tale of civilizational decline and rebirth.
Around 250 BC Archimedes found a general algorithm for computing pi to arbitrary accuracy, and used it to prove that 223/71 < π < 22/7. This seems to be when people started using 22/7 as an approximation to pi.
By the Middle Ages, math had backslid so much in Western Europe that even scholars believed that pi was actually equal to 22/7.
Around 1020, a mathematician named Franco of Liège got interested in the ancient Greek problem of squaring the circle. But since he believed that π is 22/7, he started studying the square root of 22/7. 
There's a big difference between being misinformed and being stupid. Liège was misinformed but not stupid. He went ahead to prove that the square root of 22/7 is irrational!
His proof resembles the old Greek proof that the square root of 2 is irrational. I don't know if Liège was aware of that. I also don't know if he noticed that if pi were 22/7, it *would* be possible to square the circle with straightedge and compass. I also don't know if he wondered *why* pi was 22/7. He may have just taken it on authority.
But still: math was coming back.
Liège was a student of a student of the famous scholar Gerbert of Aurillac (~950–1003), who studied in the Islamic schools of Sevilla and Córdoba, and thus got some benefits of a culture whose mathematics was light years ahead of Western Europe. Gerbert wrote something interesting: he said that the benefit of mathematics lie in the "sharpening of the mind".
I got most of this interesting tale from the book "3000 Years of Analysis", which turns out to be quite fun to read. It's over 700 pages long, but you can start anywhere!
https://mathscholar.org/2019/02/simple-proofs-archimedes-calculation-of-pi/
**Bursting your bubble: Chewing gum releases microplastics into your saliva, UCLA research shows**
“_The research suggests that regular gum chewers could potentially be ingesting tens of thousands of microplastic particles a year, although the health effect is not known._”
#UCLA #Research #News #Microplastics #ChewingGum #Science @science
**Solar Orbiter’s widest high-res view of the Sun**
_“The image you see here combines a whopping 200 individual images into the widest high-resolution view of the Sun yet.”_
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/04/Solar_Orbiter_s_widest_high-res_view_of_the_Sun.
**Stop Silent Reading - Try This Instead**
Robin Waldun
“_A video on why we struggle to stay awake and make our reading more immersive, and an overlooked technique for overcoming this._”
#Video length: twelve minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
**Dollar has further to fall, says Goldman Sachs chief economist**
“_A weaker dollar, by making exports cheaper, would also help narrow the U.S. trade deficit and help buffer the economy from recession. But Hatzius notes the drivers of dollar weakness matter and reduced appetite for U.S. assets could offset the impact of a weaker currency on financial conditions._”
#USA #US #UnitedStates #Dollar #Finance #Economics @economics
**When it comes to reading the room, humans are still better than AI**
“_Johns Hopkins research shows artificial intelligence models fall short in predicting social interactions, a skill critical for systems to effectively navigate the real world_”
https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/04/24/humans-better-than-ai-at-reading-the-room/.
**Why these Gen Zers are ditching college degrees for blue-collar careers**
“_With college costs topping $200,000 and white-collar job security slipping, many Gen Zers are skipping four-year degrees for skilled trades._”
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/04/24/gen-z-ditching-college-blue-collar-careers.html.
#University #Education #College #Jobs #GenZ #USA #US #UnitedStates
**Lawrence of Arabia: A View from 1939**
https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2025/04/24/lawrence-of-arabia-a-view-from-1939/.
#History #Histodon #Histodons #Archives #Arabia @histodon @histodons
**Do students around the world think they know more than they do?**
“_Analyzing PISA data to uncover patterns of overclaiming in mathematics._”
https://students-overclaim.netlify.app/.
#Maths #Mathematics #Math #Education #Learning #Students #Data #DataViz
**The ChatGPT surge began in your 8 a.m. lecture: How academia drove students into AI’s arms.**
Gabriel Slark
"_At this moment in history, education is in peril. Coupling political challenges with the rapid involvement of AI (particularly ChatGPT) in our learning environments, the threat becomes magnified._
_We must confront this very real problem. Children are not learning. We are not learning._"
https://www.miamistudent.net/article/2025/04/chatgpt-college-ai.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Education #Learning #Studying #Academia @ai
**Enough Is Enuf by Gabe Henry review – the battle to reform English spelling**
Matthew Cantor
“_In his amusing and enlightening new book, Gabe Henry traces the history of these efforts, beginning with a 12th-century monk named Orrmin, continuing through the beginnings of American English and the movement’s 19th-century heyday, finally arriving at textspeak._”
#Nonfiction #BookReview #Book #Bookstodon #English #Language #Linguistics @bookstodon @linguistics
**Online shopping: more people buying print than e-books**
“_When shopping online in 2024, print remained the preferred format for readers, with 14.7% of EU residents purchasing printed books, magazines or newspapers online in the 3 months before the survey - more than double the 6.8% who downloaded e-books or audiobooks._”
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/w/edn-20250423-1.
#EU #Europe #News #Data #DataViz #Statistics #Books #Ebooks #Audiobooks @bookstodon
**'We Need Urgent Global Action': Study Warns Humanity on Path to Trigger 16 Climate Tipping Points**
_“It is clear that we are currently on a dangerous trajectory,” said one University of Exeter professor”_
https://www.commondreams.org/news/climate-tipping-point.
#News #Climate #ClimateChange #Environment #FossilFuels @climatechange
Not a bot, just a fifty-year-old male who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, book, map, chart, and graph related. Some toots containing videos may also find their way into the timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Finis
Joined Nov 2022
