Happy Birthday Sir Isaac Newton who was born today 381 years ago!
His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz.
"Are not all Hypotheses erroneous, in which Light is supposed to consist in Pression or Motion, propagated through a fluid Medium? For in all these Hypotheses the Phaenomena of Light have been hitherto explain'd by supposing that they arise from new Modifications of the Rays; which is an erroneous Supposition."
Opticks, 2nd edition (1718), Book 3, Query 28
~Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27)
Isaac Newton (England, 1642-1727) derived mathematical laws of mechanics that seemed perfection itself. Although superseded by Einstein's theory, Newton's equations are still used to calculate all but the most extreme motions. "Newton, forgive me," wrote Einstein; "you found the only way which in your age was just barely possible for a man with the highest powers of thought and creativity. The concepts which you created are guiding our thinking in physics even today..."
I just moved to a new instance, so here's a new #introduction
I'm the host of the Grammar Girl #podcast. You may have hit my website searching for something like "semicolons." I love #writing books, #teaching online courses, and I founded the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
@NickEast A screenshot of a post by "Icona" @iconawrites "I love public libraries because they are built on the principle that books are so important and so necessary to human flourishing that access to them cannot depend on your income."
English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died #OTD in 1851. She is best known for writing the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which is considered an early example of science fiction. She edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her historical novels include Valperga and Perkin Warbeck, the apocalyptic novel The Last Man and her final two novels, Lodore and Falkner. via @wikipedia
Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life.
For this of us accused of buying too many #books - Umberto Eco was on our side:
'It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones'
The Japanese, a wise and thoughtful people, have a word for this:
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. A stack of books found after cleaning a room.
Margaret Cavendish English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright died #OTD in 1673. Her utopian romance The Blazing World is one of the earliest examples of science fiction. She was unusual in her time for publishing extensively in natural philosophy and early modern science, producing over a dozen original works; with her revised works the total came to 21. via @wikipedia
This just went straight into my top ten favourite boat names.
I’m in Guernsey (for the first time) to speak at their literary festival tomorrow on Blue Machine, so if you know anyone on the island, do encourage them to come along. #books#Guernsey#ocean#boats
But I seem to recall it being the Starfish Enterprise back when @hachinijuku and I ventured aboard years ago to explore where many had already gone before 🤿
A famous story about the Superman radio show of the 1940s is that it prevented a postwar revival of the Klu Klux Klan because of a storyline in which Superman investigated & defeated a Klan-lookalike gang. This story was widely popular and by portraying the Klan unfavourably, is supposed to have stemmed their growing membership. SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN is a YA graphic adaptation of the story, written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Gurihiru. (1/2)
As someone who has mailed books to an incarcerated friend who was caught up in the USA prison system, I'm happy to be able to welcome @DCBookstoPrisons a #WashingtonDC based #501c3#nonprofit to the Fediverse!
If you would like to help make their presence more visible or to simply show some ❤️❤️ follow @DCBookstoPrisons and boost a post to share with your networks
"Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do."
The novel Emma by Jane Austen is first published OTD in 1815. Emma was submitted to the London publisher John Murray II. He offered Austen £450 for this plus the copyrights of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility, which she refused. Austen published two thousand copies of the novel at her own expense, retaining the copyright and paying a 10% commission to Murray.
Just finished The Internet Con, by @pluralistic , and it's great. If you've ever wondered why we feel so helpless against bad behaviour by the tech giants, and whether there's anything we can do about it, this is the book for you. It'll make you (justifiably) very cross, but it also offers a path forward that benefits the rest of us, not just the power-hungry billionaires. Read it, send it to your elected representatives, spread the word. And the word is "interoperability".
Private companies are the problem! Their profit-first incentives & in-house undemocratic processes undermine democracy. Democracy functions at its best if the electorate is informed. Not, for example, greenwashed by a fossil fuel lobbyist.
Capitalism will end. Cultural evolution continues.
"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain."
Life, p. 6 - Collected Poems (1993)
American lyric poet Emily Dickinson died #OTD in 1888. Although she wrote 1789 poems, only a few of them were published in her lifetime, all anonymously, and some perhaps without her knowledge.
Dorothy L. Sayers English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic died #OTD in 1957. She wrote numerous mystery stories featuring the witty and charming Lord Peter Wimsey combined the attractions of scholarly erudition and cultural small talk with the puzzle of detection. In her later years she turned from detective fiction to writing theological plays and books. She made scholarly translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.
English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale was born #OTD in 1820.
Nightingale became famous for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War (1853–1856). Beyond her work in the Crimean War, Nightingale was a prolific writer and statistician. She used statistical methods to analyze and present data on healthcare and public health, making significant contributions to the field of medical statistics.
#culture#books#history#censorship#politics#religion The quote is actually a paraphrase of a passage from a book called The Book of the Dead by P.D. James
• The original passage reads:
You should never trust people who have only one book. It doesn't matter whether it's Marx or Hitler or the Bible; if they have only one book, they're dangerous. And they've probably never read it anyway.
I just made a donation to the Archive and encourage those who can and care to do the same: all donations until Dec 31st are matched by a generous anonymous donator, so now is the best time to help. It is tax-deductible in the US: https://archive.org/donate
“It shocked me that a district I had grown up in was not only characterizing my identity as a lifestyle, as a choice, but it was calling it alternative and inherently sexual.”
From 2023: This Texas student fought back against #censorship at their school, and became part of a national movement for #books ...
The bookmobiles - Vintage photos of traveling libraries, 1910-1960
The bookmobile was a traveling library often used to provide books to villages and city suburbs that had no library buildings. It went from a simple horse-drawn cart in the 19th century to large customized vehicles that became part of American culture and reached its height of popularity in the mid-twentieth century. via @RareHPhotos
Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius was born #OTD in 1859. He was famous for showing how dissolved salts separate into charged particles ("ions"). In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
In 1889, Arrhenius explained the fact that most reactions require added heat energy to proceed by formulating the concept of activation energy, an energy barrier that must be overcome before two molecules will react, the so called Arrhenius equation.
In 1903 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation."
Some of the most eminent scientific women. Top row, lefth to right: Émilie du Châtelet, Ada Lovelace, Maria Mitchell, Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius, Laura Bassi, Marie Curie. Bottow row, left to right: Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Rosalind Franklin, Hedy Lamarr, Jane Goodall, Katherine Johnson, Lise Meitner.
