Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org

**Reappraising a controversial figure: Ross Carroll’s Edmund Burke**

Morien Robertson

“_Burke was not just a thinker and writer, but a constantly active politician and agitator, who pushed for a variety of causes that might be called progressive, and admonished the failings of the British elite, particularly with regards to the colonial administration in India._”

https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2025/03/24/reappraising-a-controversial-figure-ross-carrolls-edmund-burke/.

#Conservatism #EdmundBurke #Nonfiction #Politics #BookReview #Book #Bookstodon @bookstodon

**How Reading Shields Your Mind from Social Media**

Robin Waldun

#Video length: thirteen minutes and fifty-five seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL9I7y8cAxc

#Read #Reading #Book #Books #Bookstodon #SocialMedia #Internet @bookstodon

**Three Hundred Years Later, a Tool from Isaac Newton Gets an Update**

"_A simple, widely used mathematical technique can finally be applied to boundlessly complex problems._"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/three-hundred-years-later-a-tool-from-isaac-newton-gets-an-update-20250324/.

#Algorithms #Maths #Mathematics #Math #IsaacNewton

**Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation**

“_While we show that integrating CoT monitors into the reinforcement learning reward can indeed produce more capable and more aligned agents in the low optimization regime, we find that with too much optimization, agents learn obfuscated reward hacking, hiding their intent within the CoT while still exhibiting a significant rate of reward hacking._”

Baker, B. et al. (2025) Monitoring reasoning models for misbehavior and the risks of promoting obfuscation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11926.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMS #ComputerScience #Obfuscation #Preprint #Academia #Academics @ai @computerscience

**Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed**

“_Our analysis reveals that risks to people increase with the autonomy of a system: The more control a user cedes to an AI agent, the more risks to people arise. Particularly concerning are safety risks, which affect human life and impact further values._”

Mitchell, M. et al. (2025) 'Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed,' arXiv (Cornell University) [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2502.02649.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Preprint #Academia #Academics @ai

@jorgecandeias I am similar, but I think we must be in the minority

**The Persistence of Tychonism**

“_In conclusion I will suggest that the historical longevity of
Tychonism has been considerably underestimated and also that Tychonists were not generally restrained from public endorsement of heliocentrism by religious pressure. On the contrary, I suggest that the continued acceptance of Tychonism was conditioned by its congruence with scientists’ religious beliefs._”

Barker, P. (2025) ‘The Persistence of Tychonism’, in Philosophical Readings. Zenodo, pp. 11–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15035063.

#OpenAccess #OA #DOI #History #HistSci #EarlyModern #Science #Religion #Academia #Academic @science @religion

**Born On This Day**

Mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace was born in Beaumont-en-Auge, Normandy, France on this day in 1749.

“_He proved the stability of the solar system. In analysis Laplace introduced the potential function and Laplace coefficients. He also put the theory of mathematical probability on a sound footing.”

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Laplace/.

#BornOnThisDay #BOTD #History #Maths #Mathematics #Math #Science #HistSci #Astronomy #Physics @science

**The garden strawberry**

Wikipedia picture of the day for March 23:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedItem/potd/20250323000000/en

#Image #Picture #Photograph #Photography #Strawberry @photography

**Aristotle by George Grote**

Project Gutenberg

_“Aristotle” by George Grote is a scholarly treatise written in the late 19th century. This work provides a comprehensive account of Aristotle's life, philosophy, and influence, focusing particularly on his ethical and political theories._

_Read now or download (free!)_

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45851

#ProjectGutenberg #Read #Ebook #Bookstodon #Philosophy #Aristotle #Free #Download @bookstodon @philosophy

**The human-driven ecological success of olive trees over the last 3700 years in the Central Mediterranean**

_“We hypothesize that cultural exchanges between Sicily and the Aegean in the Early-Middle Bronze Age have promoted the use of wild olive trees in the Messina area. At that time, olive trees could have been used for various purposes, including fruit production, but also wood and forage for animals. The development of olive groves followed a gradual, multi-stage process in the Central Mediterranean, with large-scale cultivation appearing only in modern times.”_

Palli, J. et al. (2025) 'The human-driven ecological success of olive trees over the last 3700 years in the Central Mediterranean,' Quaternary Science Reviews, 356, p. 109313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2025.109313.

#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #Ecology #History #Olive #Trees #Mediterranean #Academia #Academics