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🔴 **Detectorists’ finds rewrite history by unearthing the real story of money**

"_A study of ancient coins has shifted the focus of Europe’s economic history from the Greeks and Romans to the Arabs_"

🔗 theguardian.com/commentisfree/

@histodon @histodons @econhist

🔴 📖 **Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne**

The latest addition to my TBR list arrived yesterday. I was particularly interested in obtaining the Norton Critical Edition.

@bookstodon

Thank you to everyone that took part in this . The non-partisans carried the day.

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@bibliolater @bookstondon

Depends. Who are you? Can you write? The most important is the second one. A boring life, well written, can be interesting. Terrible writing is terrible, period.

🔴 📖 🖋 **Is the act of writing an autobiography pretentious?**

@bookstondon

🔴 🇦🇷 🎥 **Is Milei’s Radical Plan to Save Argentina Working?**

"_After eight months in office, Argentine President Javier Milei has slashed spending on social security, public wages and consumer subsidies. His austerity measures have won praise from former US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Milei also remains largely popular at home, with approval ratings above 50%. But painful reforms can only stay popular for so long. To win midterm elections next year and hang on to power, Milei must lift a cobweb of capital controls to restart the slumping economy without fanning inflation further._"

🔗 youtu.be/57FS5oYcHa4

@economics

The Bernoulli numbers are defined like this:

x/(1 - e⁻ˣ) = B₀ + B₁x + B₂/2! + B₃/3! + ....

and if you grind them out, you get

B₀ = 1
B₁ = 1/2
B₂ = 1/6
B₃ = 0
B₄ = -1/30

and so on. The pattern is sort of strange.

They're connected to hundreds of interesting things. For example if you want to figure out a sum like

1³ + 2³ + 3³ + ... + 10³

or

1⁸ + 2⁸ + 3⁸ + ... + 1,000,000⁸

you can use a formula that involves Bernoulli numbers. The video here explains it.

But where the hell did this function x/(1 - e⁻ˣ) come from?

If D means derivative:

(Df)(x) = f'(x)

then 1 - e⁻ᴰ is a so-called 'difference operator':

((1 - e⁻ᴰ)f)(x) = f(x) - f(x-1)

which you can show using the Taylor series for f. So D/(1 - e⁻ᴰ) is about derivatives versus differences, and its inverse is about integrals versus sums. This lets you reduce sums like those above to integrals... 𝑖𝑓 you know your Bernoulli numbers!

But x/(1 - e⁻ˣ) also shows up when you compute the expected energy of a quantum harmonic oscillator in thermal equilibrium!

Let's work in units where ℏ = 1. Say we have a quantum harmonic oscillator whose allowed energies are 0, 1, 2, 3, ... etcetera. What is its average or 'expected' energy at temperature T? Let x = 1/T. Then its expected energy is

x/(1 - e⁻ˣ)

So the quantum harmonic oscillator secretly knows about Bernoulli numbers.

What does this fact really mean??? I don't know. I once read a book called Triangle of Thought about a conversation between Alain Connes and two other mathematicians, and he said this fact explained a lot of stuff. But he didn't go into any detail, so I'm left looking for clues.

youtube.com/watch?v=fw1kRz83Fj

🔴 🇬🇧 **The scone pronunciation map of Britain**

_...a recent YouGov study of more than 54,000 Britons finding that 51% say they pronounce the word to rhyme with ‘gone’ but 45% saying they pronounce it to rhyme with ‘bone’._

🔗 yougov.co.uk/society/articles/

@linguistics

🔴 🇬🇧 🎥 **The Story of British Pathé – Around the World**

"_A fascinating introduction to the history of the pioneering newsreel company British Pathé, which documented almost every aspect of everyday life in Britain and around the world in the 20th century._"

length: fifty nine minutes and sixteen seconds.

🔗 youtu.be/eOqy744ViSc

@histodon @histodons

🔴 🗺️ 🇳🇴 🎥 **See Historical Maps in Oslo**

"_Anders Kvernberg (National Library of Oslo, nb.no) shows us some of the amazing historical maps housed at the National Library's Maps Center._"

length: twenty three minutes and twenty nine seconds.

🔗 youtu.be/jmnMrOPoNrI

@histodon @histodons

🔴 📖 🖥️ **The smell of paper or the shine of a screen? Students’ reading comprehension, text processing, and attitudes when reading on paper and screen**

"_Our results reveal that, overall, the students performed better when reading on paper compared to on screen, which parallels existing findings highlighted in our literature review. Yet, examining single-student performance revealed that some performed equally well across both modes, and one student comprehended better with screen reading._"

Jensen, R.E., Roe, A. and Blikstad-Balas, M. (2024) 'The smell of paper or the shine of a screen? Students’ reading comprehension, text processing, and attitudes when reading on paper and screen,' Computers & Education, 219, p. 105107. doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.

@bookstodon

🔴 📖 **Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich**

"_Evans devotes an incisive chapter to each of the rogues’ gallery of Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, von Ribbentrop and to notorious antisemites such as Ley, Streicher and Heydrich. It is however even more interesting to read about lesser figures who portrayed themselves after 1945 as honourable, principled and patriotic and far from being deranged and perverted._"

🔗 colinshindler.co.uk/hitlers-pe

@bookstodon

🔴 🇪🇸 **Archaeologists unearth ‘hidden empire’ after discovering long-lost Roman city**

"_Archaeologists in Spain have uncovered a trove of ancient Roman settlements that could point to the existence of a “hidden empire” previously unknown to historians._"

🔗 independent.co.uk/news/science

@histodon @histodons @archaeodons

🔴 **How spammers and scammers leverage AI-generated images on Facebook for audience growth**

"_We show that spammers and scammers—seemingly motivated by profit or clout, not ideology—are already using AI-generated images to gain significant traction on Facebook._"

🔗 misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/

@ai

🔴 🎥 **Mpox: First case of contagious variant outside Africa reported**

"_The disease - previously known as monkeypox - has been largely contained in the Democratic Republic of Congo where it's endemic. It now appears to have spread through Eastern Africa and into Scandinavia._"

length: seven minutes and forty seconds.

🔗 youtu.be/W-NHWDg5yxk

@science

🔴 💧 **Mapping safe drinking water use in low- and middle-income countries**

_Our results emphasize that access to an improved drinking water source does not always provide safe drinking water as <u>almost half of the LMIC populations (48%) were estimated to be exposed to fecal contamination in their primary drinking water source</u>. Our predictions show that more than half of the populations of Oceania, sub–Saharan Africa, southeastern Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean may be exposed to contaminated drinking water (fig. S9)._

Esther E. Greenwood et al., Mapping safe drinking water use in low- and middle-income countries. Science 385, 784-790 (2024). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/science.adh957

@science

🔴 **Fake memories: A meta-analysis on the effect of fake news on the creation of false memories and false beliefs**

"_We conducted a meta-analysis to obtain an estimate of the average rate of false memories elicited by fake news. Thirteen articles were included in the final analysis, revealing that nearly 40% and 60% of the participants reported at least one false memory and belief (respectively) after fake news exposure, while each participant remembered or believed 22% of the total number of fake news presented._"

Schincariol, A. et al. (2024) ‘Fake memories: A meta-analysis on the effect of fake news on the creation of false memories and false beliefs’, Memory, Mind & Media, 3, p. e17. doi: doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.14.

@psychology

🔴 🌡️ **What is the hottest temperature humans can survive? These labs are redefining the limit**

"_As climate change heats the Earth, blistering days have become a regular feature of weather reports worldwide. Last month, the record for the world’s hottest day was broken twice, and the United Nations made a global call for action on extreme heat, to help vulnerable people, workers and economies to cope using science. Around 70% of the global workforce — 2.4 billion people — are now at high risk of extreme heat, it said._"

🔗 doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-024

@science @climatechange

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