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No low-fertility country has ever raised its fertility rate as much as Somalia’s has fallen in the last quarter century.

familyinequality.wordpress.com

CACKLING FARTS. Eggs. CANT.

A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)

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#books #literature #dictionaries #history #society #crime #language #slang @histodons

In the 90s, we went on the Internet in an attempt to escape the real world. Nowadays we go to the real world in an attempt to escape the Internet.

"Phoenix is arguably facing one of the most extraordinary heatwaves ever recorded in American history, both in terms of duration and intensity." – via Nahel Belgherze bsky.app/profile/wxnb.bsky.soc

IPCC on one of the areas most at risk as we heat. Places where:

"species and people exist close to their upper thermal limits." (See par. B.3.2, pg. 13 ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloa)

#ClimateCrisis #Heatwaves

🔴 🇯🇵 Return to utopia? Vision and practice of the Japanese right at Yasukuni shrine

"As argued elsewhere, right-wing ideologies are constructed on a distinctive ontology and explanations for political phenomena.[67] In Japan, this has emerged around the issue of war-history: exonerating Japanese colonial history is not only a matter of national pride but considered to be central to political power. This emerged in the 1980s in response to issues such as history textbooks, territorial disputes, and re-writing the constitution, and carries on today. [68] It was around this time that the Yasukuni shrine also reemerged as the focal point for such reactionary historical revision in popular consciousness."

Narita, K. (2024) ‘Return to utopia? Vision and practice of the Japanese right at Yasukuni shrine’, Journal of Political Ideologies, pp. 1–22. doi: doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2024..

@politicalscience

🔴 🎥 Frankish Encounters with Paganism (with Prof. Alex Sager)

"Prof. Alex Sager (University of Georgia) returns to talk about Frankish records of Germanic paganism and the conversion."

length: one hour and forty six minutes.

🔗 youtu.be/pkplfVd2DPE

@religion @histodon @histodons

🔴 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 A pound of raisins

"The practice of senior students extracting gifts or tribute from new students was common in medieval universities across Europe. The ‘bejaunia’ was a lavish feast paid for by the new student as part of their initiation into university life. It is thought that the St Andrews Raisin traditions may have developed from these roots."

🔗 special-collections.wp.st-andr

🔴 How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero

"To use zero in calculations, mathematicians had to establish all sorts of rules. You can’t divide any other number by zero, but you can divide zero by any other number. A nonzero number to the power of zero gives you one; zero to a power of a nonzero number gives you zero, but zero to a power of zero gives you a calculator error — and a headache."

🔗 quantamagazine.org/how-the-hum

@science @biology

🔴 🇺🇸 Would Americans choose communism or fascism?

"American registered voters who support Kamala Harris in the 2024 election are more likely to choose communism (43%) than fascism (11%), while Americans who support Donald Trump are more likely to choose fascism (28%) than communism (16%)."

🔗 today.yougov.com/politics/arti

🔴 🎥 The future under Amazon’s reign | The World According to Amazon (2020)

"This investigation tunnels into the workings of the company and its philosophy through insider interviews with business owners, employees and a former founding executive, and seeks to reveal the sky-high ambitions of the company run by the world’s first centi-billionaire."

length: one hour and seventeen minutes.

🔗 youtu.be/vBbY0QRasic

🔴 🇺🇸 🎥 Why Economists Hate Trump's Tariff Plan

"He wants to put across-the-board 60% tariffs on everything from China and 10%-20% on everything else from the rest of the world. It’s an extreme trade policy that he wants to use to generate revenue to cut taxes. But how would they work?"

length: eight minutes and seventeen seconds.

🔗 youtu.be/_-eHOSq3oqI

@economics

🔴 🇮🇪 Three letters, one number, a knife and a stone bridge: how a graffitied equation changed mathematical history

"Yet Hamilton’s revelation changed the way mathematicians represent information. And this, in turn, made myriad technical applications simpler – from calculating forces when designing a bridge, an MRI machine or a wind turbine, to programming search engines and orienting a rover on Mars."

🔗 theconversation.com/three-lett

@science

🔴 The Land at the End of the Empire: The Roman Eastern Border in Mesopotamia

"The impressive archaeological remains of the city — enclosed by massive walls and spatially organized by insulae (habitation blocks) — have yielded records of a multi-ethnic and religious settlement, with rich civilian houses flanked by a military quarter with baths and a small amphitheater, with temples and shrines dedicated to local deities, but also a synagogue and a church."

🔗 anetoday.org/roman-eastern-bor

@histodon @histodons @archaeodons

🔴 X-ray evidence of Black maths scholar portrait reveals snubbed genius

"It has long been mistaken for a satirical painting that mocks its Black subject for having the temerity to pretend to be a Georgian gentleman and scholar. But it is now thought to have been commissioned in 1760 by Williams himself to immortalise his brilliance as a trailblazing astronomer who, the clues in the painting suggest, successfully managed to compute and witness the trajectory of Halley’s comet over Jamaica in 1759."

🔗 theguardian.com/artanddesign/2

@histodon @histodons @science

🔴 How Streaming Elevated (and Ruined) Documentaries: A Statistical Analysis

"It's not as if Netflix conjured demand out of thin air—they just ruthlessly optimized the artform until it reached its logical conclusion—which is a four- to eight-part docuseries about a celebrity, cult, sports star, serial killer, or all of the above. And you know why they keep making them? Because we watch them (didn't think about it that way, did you?)."

🔗 open.substack.com/pub/statsign

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