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🔴 **Welcome**

Thank you for visiting this humble account. I hope the time you spend here will be informative. If a particular toot brought you here, please do view other toots from different subject areas. You never know what new topics may interest you.

Newly reading "Hamnet" by Maggie O'Farrell and phenomenally impressed from the opening by the sense of immersion and place. I've only felt that so strongly before from Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" series. Tudor too, but that's not the reason. And now "Hamnet" is a real page turner. Enjoying. #Books #Bookstodon #Hamnet #WolfHall

January 11, 1638, birthday of Danish physician Niels Steensen or latinized Nicolas Steno. He popularized the first stratigraphical principles and recognized the true origin of fossils studying "tongue-stones" - petrified shark teeth 🦈 ...

🇸🇪 🇨🇳 **Freedom from China? The mine at the centre of Europe’s push for rare earth metals**

"_Swedish producer is trying to to accelerate the process of extracting the elements vital for hi-tech products_"

🔗 theguardian.com/environment/20.

**Cultural moderation of demographic differences in narcissism**

"_People from higher GDP and more collectivistic cultures reported higher narcissism levels (particularly for admiration), with the latter effect challenging conventional views that narcissism is predominantly a product of individualistic societies._"

Miscikowski, M. M. et al. (2026) ‘Cultural moderation of demographic differences in narcissism’, Self and Identity, 25(1), pp. 111–141. doi: doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2025..

**The junkification of research**

"_As commercial publishing interests converge with new technologies, a system emerges where scholars increasingly bear the costs of low-esteem publishing that limits genuine scholarly contributions._"

Rhodes, C., & Linnenluecke, M. K. (2025). The junkification of research. Organization, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/13505084251399.

188 years ago, on the 11th of January 1838, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail made the first public demonstration of the electric telegraph. The message ‘A patient waiter is not loser’ was sent through two miles (3.2 km) of wires. #otd #history 🗃️

If you leave a comment on any toot, please accept my apologies as is not providing notifications. I have to enter each toot to see if a comment has been left and then reply, at times I may miss your comment.

📖 🎙️ **Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World**

"_Over time, English observers started to assert that the common customs of enslavement among the nations of Africa fit within the Roman model. Englishmen had initially expressed reluctance to take part in the Atlantic slave trade. But once assured that the slave trade could be traced back to customs they understood to be legitimate, they proved keen to profit from it._"

🔗 newbooksnetwork.com/intellectu.

🇪🇸 🇵🇹 🇬🇧 🇫🇷 **1807-09: How The Peninsular War Began**

"_This documentary explores the brutal beginnings of the Peninsular War, from the bloody Madrid uprising to Sir John Moore’s harrowing retreat to Corunna._"

🔗 youtube.com/watch?v=24kwmJGL7a.

📖 **Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent**

"_Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world._"

🔗 press.princeton.edu/books/hard.

📚 **The Lost Art of Reading an Actual Book**

"_What happens when people stop reading books? We’re starting to see what a postliterate society looks like—and it’s very lame._"

🔗 esquire.com/entertainment/book.

🖥️ 🧠 **Slip Through the Chat: Subtle Injection of False Information in LLM Chatbot Conversations Increases False Memory Formation**

"_Results revealed that while the misleading summary condition increased false memory occurrence, misleading chatbot interactions led to significantly higher rates of false recollection_"

Pat Pataranutaporn, Chayapatr Archiwaranguprok, Samantha Chan, Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Pattie Maes. 2025. Slip Through the Chat: Subtle Injection of False Information in LLM Chatbot Conversations Increases False Memory Formation. In 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI ’25), March 24–27, 2025, Cagliari, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. doi.org/10.1145/3708359.371211.

**Science history: Sophie Germain, first woman to win France's prestigious 'Grand Mathematics Prize' is snubbed when tickets to award ceremony are 'lost in the mail' — Jan. 9, 1816**

"_Sophie Germain was a brilliant, self-taught mathematician who won one of France's most prestigious prizes, yet she declined to attend the award ceremony because the committee members didn't respect her work._"

🔗 livescience.com/physics-mathem.

🇬🇱 **Greenland is rich in natural resources – a geologist explains why**

"_Three of Greenland’s REE-bearing deposits, deep under the ice, may be among the world’s largest by volume, holding great potential for the manufacture of batteries and electrical components essential to the global energy transition._"

🔗 theconversation.com/greenland-.

🇿🇦 **Can Black South Africans be Afrikaners?**

"_There are millions of Coloured and Black South Africans who speak Afrikaans as their first language. They share the same taal, eat the same food, tell the same jokes. The numbers tell their own story: today, roughly six in ten Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are Black or Coloured._

_Yet historically, they’ve been excluded from the Afrikaner identity by those who insisted it was defined by race as much as culture._"

🔗 sapeople.com/expats/can-black-.

🇯🇵 🇺🇸 **Samurai and Guerrillas: The First Official Japanese Visit**

_The first Japanese delegation to the US captivated crowds and confounded expectations, as the press cast its samurai as “effeminate.”_

🔗 daily.jstor.org/samurai-and-gu.

attribution: Mathew Benjamin Brady, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil.

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