Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org

Could the Greenland Ice Sheet collapse in the next 15 years? A new study says more than a fifth of the world's potentially catastrophic tipping points could occur as soon as 2038. Here’s more from Live Science.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
#ClimateChange #ClimateScience #Science

Since we’ve got more arrivals from the birdsite, this directory of directories may be helpful. The spreadsheet dedicated to #histodons , which we started back in November, has now exceeded 1,000 entries, with info on interests, time period speciality, and Mastodon handle. https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon

Regional languages of China

https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/162042043035/languages-of-china

#map #language #china

The Rarest Sounds Across All Human Languages: Learn What They Are, and How to Say Them

https://www.openculture.com/2023/06/the-rarest-sounds-across-all-human-languages.html

"The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence." – Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832)
#quote #mathematics #math #maths

I spent waaay too much time on this 🙈:

A curated list of Mastodon accounts to follow if you're interested in #cartography, #maps, #geoviz'ualisation, visual aspects of #GIS and #geography etc.

Maybe a good way to get your feed going if you are #newhere…

https://cartolab.at/cartography-on-mastodon/

Let me know if you want to be included/removed or feel misrepresented. #gischat

Blaise Pascal, the philosopher born just over 400 years ago, made what is know as "Pascal's Wager" about the existence of #god.

He argued for betting on the existence of God. “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing,” he wrote, positing that although one cannot know for certain whether or not God exists, we are better off believing in God’s existence than not.

His #philosophy is all of life is a wager.

Read more:
https://theconversation.com/400-years-ago-philosopher-blaise-pascal-was-one-of-the-first-to-grapple-with-the-role-of-faith-in-an-age-of-science-and-reason-199659

And would you take his wager?

In Blue Machine, I cover how the structure of the ocean helped produce the vast guano reserves near Chile that were extracted by western nations in the mid-1800s. I’m just reading The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan (recommended!), which includes the grim source of phosphate fertiliser before the guano arrived: human bones from the battlefields of Waterloo, Crimea etc. This extraordinary quote by the biologist Liebig describes his fears about the ruined environment this was creating: #science #books

Drought In Europe Mid-June

Source: European Drought Observatory (EDO), for the period of June 11-20, most recent data available

#News #EuropeanNews #Europe #ClimateChange #Drought #Droughts

Amazing thunderstorm photos captured at 37,000 feet by airline pilot Santiago Borja.

Web: https://www.santiagoborja.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/santiagoborja/

Besides doing a bunch of useless research on the motion of planets, Kepler did some practical work on the volume of wine barrels. The story is interesting! Roberto Cardil writes:

"Kepler had several children before his first wife died. In 1613, he married for the second time in a celebration in Linz, Austria. Kepler bought a barrel of wine for the wedding but questioned the method the wine merchant used to measure the volume of the barrel and thus determine the price. In consequence, afterwards Kepler set out both to determine the correct volume of a wine barrel or cask, and to find the proportions that optimize the volume of such a barrel."

To determine the volume of a wine barrel, Kepler thought of any solid body as made up of thin layers, took the sum of the volumes of these layers, and then took a kind of limit where the thickness of these layers became infinitesimal.

Otto Toeplitz wrote:

"Working out finer approximations of various barrel shapes, Kepler consulted Archimedes and discovered that his own method of indivisibles had enabled him to obtain results in a far simpler and more general way than Archimedes, who had been struggling with cumbersome and difficult proofs. What he did not suspect was that Archimedes, too, had found his results by the same method of indivisibles (for his book The Method was lost until 1906!)."

I guess these "indivisibles" are like "infinitesimals".

For more, read this:

Roberto Cardil, Kepler: The Volume of a Wine Barrel, https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/kepler-the-volume-of-a-wine-barrel

The "optimization" problem is not quite clearly explained here, but it seems to be maximizing the volume of a barrel while keeping its volume as measured by the wine merchant constant! 😈

Tonight's #YouTube watch:

best physics equation | virial theorem | gravothermal catastrophe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CdE5a3xyxE

This person has an amazing sense of comic timing, and a perfect deadpan delivery ("It's fine"), and manages to make physics that I juuuuust barely understand (some of, sometimes) extremely fun.

Unexpectedly delightful.

#map Map showing the different geographical poles of inaccessibility on the globe. A pole of inaccessibility is a location that is the furthest away from a set of geographical features, often the coastline. Red dots represent terrestrial poles of inaccessibility (such as the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility), while blue dots represent oceanic poles of inaccessibility (including Point Nemo).

Produced by Gaianauta in 2008 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/File:Distancia_a_la_costa.png

#geography #cartography