🔴 🎙️ **Written in Mathematics: Descartes’ Physics**
“_For Descartes body is purely geometrical. So how does he understand features we can perceive, like color, and causation between bodies?_”
🔴 🇺🇸 **If Trump were one of the rogues from Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ which would he be?**
Jesse Browner
“_That’s why my money is on King Agamemnon. He never changes and he never learns. He is a brute in Book 1 and remains a brute in Book 24._”
🔗 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-04-13/la-oe-browner-iliad
🔴 **Portrait of a Nazi Bigamist**
Livia Gershon
“_Heinrich Himmler’s pronatalist policies included support for children of SS officers’ extramarital relationships. He claimed that Germanic tradition included the possibility of men taking a second wife—and he did so himself, having children with his secretary as well as his official wife._”
🔗 https://daily.jstor.org/portrait-of-a-nazi-bigamist/
#History #Histodon #Histodons #Nazi #Germany #Marriage @histodon @histodons
🔴 📚 **Sunday Reads**
I am making my way through the weekend edition of the Financial Times and also through the Nathaniel Hawthorn's Scarlet Letter (Norton Critical Edition), what are you reading this Sunday?
#Read #Book #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon
#Image attribution: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Man_Leaning_Against_a_Tree_With_a_Book_MET_DP849001.jpg.
🔴
**What is Fascism?**
Cambridge Festival
“_This lecture takes fascism seriously. It looks closely at the core myths at the heart of fascist ideology, offering probing explanations for its emergence, resurgence and its continuing appeal._”
#Video length: fifty-nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds.
Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI
https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Futurism @futurism-Futurism
🔴 🇺🇸 **The Founding Fathers v. The Climate Change Skeptics**
“_When claims from Europe accused British America of being inferior on account of its colder weather, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers responded with patriotic zeal that their settlement was actually causing the climate to warm._”
🔗 https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-founding-fathers-v-the-climate-change-skeptics/.
#History #Climate #ClimateChange #USA #US #UnitedStates #America #Weather @histodon @histodons
🔴 **Charting the Largest Tariff Hike in Modern History**
“_Measuring the Size & Impact of Trump's Newly-Imposed Global Tariffs_”
🔗 https://www.apricitas.io/p/charting-the-largest-tariff-hike
🔴 📚 **Bookbinding Journey**
Finally, all the material that I need to begin my #bookbinding journey and #bindery have arrived. I will be teaching myself through a process of trial and error, and would appreciate any advice from the Fediverse /Mastodon along the way. I will begin with rudimentary steps, but hope to end with being able to produce exquisitely bound #leather #books.
🔴 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 **Bonkers for Britishisms: the UK terms Americans have embraced**
Matthew Cantor
_Britons have long argued that Americanisms are “poisoning” or even “killing” their language, but it must be alive and well, since some Americans vent about the opposite; they feel that their compatriots are being a bit twee when they “impersonate an Englishman”._
🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/12/uk-british-terms-america-most-used.
#News #Linguistics #English #Language #Britishisms #Americanisms @linguistics
🔴 💻 📱 **Apple, Nvidia score major wins with tariff exemptions on iPhones and other tech**
“_Smartphones, laptops and equipment for chipmaking are among items exempt from China tariffs under new guidance from the government_”
🔴
**This Month in Movietone History**
British Movietone
“_Momentous historical events that occurred during the month of April._”
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm61r4L8dZA
#Video #History #April #Histodon #Histodons @histodon @histodons
« In #politics, stupidity is not a handicap. »
Napoleon Bonaparte
From: @bibliolater
https://qoto.org/@bibliolater/114325055889113979
🔴 **Adam Smith on Slavery**
Jack Russell Weinstein
“_Smith offered an economic argument against slavery because he did not believe that monarchy (or freedom from it), wealth, or religion can be trusted to convince people to free their slaves._”
🔗 https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/adam-smith-on-slavery.
🔴 **A Few Things We Don’t Quite Get About the Levant**
🔗 https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-about-the-levant-da6ff702974f.
Learn (Austrian) German, folks, for it is the language for our times
https://newrepublic.com/article/193177/wg-sebald-politics-melancholy
🔴 **Savage Wit Through the Ages: 20 of the Best Insults in History**
“_In this collection of 20 legendary quotes, we spotlight the zingers that went beyond humor and became unforgettable moments of public triumph._”
🔗 https://historycollection.com/savage-wit-through-the-ages-20-of-the-best-insults-in-history/.
Naughty AIs Are Spilling Their Users' Super Personal Chats Onto the Open Web
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-spilling-chats?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into The Byte @the-byte-Futurism
🔴 🛰️ **Garbage on the Final Frontier**
“_We’ve trashed Earth, so let’s trash space… Oh, wait, we already have!_”
🔗 https://daily.jstor.org/garbage-on-the-final-frontier/.
#Science #Technology #Tech #Space #Pollution #Garbage #Rubbish @science
Not a bot just a chap in his fifties who occasionally reads things.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, books, maps, charts and graphs 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