The collapse of complex human societies remains poorly understood and
current theories fail to model important features of historical examples of collapse.
Relationships among resources, capital, waste, and production form the basis for an
ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance
requirements for existing capital. Societies facing such crises after having depleted
essential resources risk catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction
converting most capital to waste. This model allows key features of historical
examples of collapse to be accounted for, and suggests parallels between successional
processes in nonhuman ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies.
This quote from Charity Majors is probably the best summary of the current state of observability in the tech industry - a total, mass confusion. Everyone is confused. What is a trace? What is a span? Is log line a span? Do I need traces if I have logs? Why I need traces if I have great metrics?
The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database was created to collect, organize, and display historical representations of medieval monuments and cities in southern Italy for the purposes of study and research.
Conventions of presentation are required to enable you accurately to represent a manuscript text, either for your own record, or when you quote from a manuscript source in scholarly work.
"Secretary hand" is the name for the dominant form of handwriting used by writers of the English language from the late 15th through the mid-17th century.
Sine, one of the fundamental trigonometric functions, plays a crucial role in various fields, including mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science. Its calculation is not trivial, especially when it comes to implementing it in electronic calculators, where efficiency and accuracy are paramount.
The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia pre-dates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid expansion of the trade following the discovery of printing in Mainz, Germany around the middle of the fifteenth century is a topic of great importance to the global history of communications, technology, and the dissemination of knowledge.
The project ‘The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages’ will show the importance of medieval reading culture as a European movement by bringing together (digitised) manuscripts produced between c. 500 and c. 1550 from across Europe, unlocking their educational potential by curational and editorial enrichment, using innovative ways for displaying and handling digital objects in an educational context.
A web app that works out how many seconds ago something happened. How hard can coding that be? Tom Scott explains how time twists and turns like a twisty-turny thing. It's not to be trifled with!
The word “manuscript” from the Latin words manus (hand) and scriptus (writing) literally means “written by hand.” Before the invention of printing, copies of books had to be handwritten. A scribe would obtain a book to copy and painstakingly write out every word, in ink with a quill pen.
A destination for discovery, shared exploration, and sheer joy, Oculi Mundi is the online home of The Sunderland Collection of antique maps and atlases.
The Parvum lexicon stemmatologicum (PLS) is a scholarly digital resource providing explanations for technical terms related to stemmatology, a discipline of classical and mediaeval philology aiming at understanding the historical evolution of textual traditions.
The Patrologia Latina covers the works of the Latin Fathers from Tertullian around 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. In 221 volumes, it covers most major and minor Latin authors, and contains the most influential works of late ancient and early medieval theology, philosophy, history, and literature.
A digital archive of the Byzantine monuments located in Istanbul as documented and seen from the eyes of five different photographers The Byzantine Monuments Photographs Archive is an ongoing project by Koç University Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies (GABAM) to create a digital photographic archive of Byzantine monuments in Istanbul.
Hidden data hinders book evaluation. Analysing ISBNs in the Global Register of Publishers gains a powerful tool for bibliometrics, policy development, and nuanced book metrics.
Ce dictionnaire rassemble tous les périodiques de langue française publiés de 1600 à 1789, c'est-à-dire des origines de la presse au début de la Révolution, fixé au 14 juillet 1789. Par périodique, on entendra tout ouvrage imprimé qui prétend, grâce à une publication échelonnée dans le temps, rendre compte de l'actualité.
e carnet Liturgica se propose d’informer la communauté scientifique de mes découvertes et de mes travaux relatifs à l’étude des manuscrits liturgiques, un domaine de recherche très peu connu, malgré le nombre de manuscrits...
As a prototype, eCodicesNL provides free online access to 180 medieval (ca 500 – ca 1600) manuscripts from three public collections. It provides a digital infrastructure, enabling research on these manuscripts. eCodicesNL collaborated with e-codices Switzerland (Prof Dr Christoph Flüeler, University of Fribourg) and Fragmentarium (Dr William Duba, University of Fribourg) to structure the metadata in XML-TEI P5.
By Michael North This post is the second in a series exploring the National Library of Medicine’s rich and varied collection of “herbals,” which are books devoted to the description of medicinal plants (and sometimes other natural substances) with instructions on how to use them to treat illness. The Library’s herbals are some of the…
The Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages:--this subject is of the greatest interest, not only to the man of science, but to the man of the world also. In it, too, "we retrace not only one single period, but two periods quite distinct one from the other."
BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art) is a new, open-access online database of representations of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE, the period encompassing the advent of print culture in Europe and its neighboring regions
Répertoire International des Sources Musicales – The organization, founded in Paris in 1952, is the largest and only global operation that documents written musical sources.
The ease with which certain sounds are produced in different climes plays a role in the development of spoken languages. Christopher Intagliata reports
Since 1999, the Institute for Medieval Research, Division of Palaeography and Codicology (Abteilung Schrift- und Buchwesen, ASBW) at the ÖAW has made available Watermarks of the Middle Ages (Wasserzeichen des Mittelalters, WZMA), a watermarking research tool that provides not only clear image representations but also essential information on the relationships between watermarks and their supporting manuscripts, archival material, and documents.
Die handgeschriebenen Bücher aus Mittelalter und Neuzeit sind unikale Kulturobjekte und einmalige historische Quellen. Das Handschriftenportal (HSP) ist das zentrale Online-Portal für diese Buchhandschriften in deutschen Sammlungen.
Greenough advocated an empirical approach to the early science; his scepticism of theoretical thinking courted controversy amongst some contemporaries, especially his doubts of the usefulness of fossils in correlating strata. He compiled a geological map of England and Wales, published in 1820
LEME searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1755.
Le programme ANR Navigocorpus (2007-2011) se propose de créer et à mettre à la disposition de la communauté scientifique internationale un important corpus sur la navigation maritime, pour l’essentiel entre le xviie et le début du xixe siècle.
An international autumn school "Proof and Computation" will be held from 15th to 21st September 2024 at Aurachhof in Fischbachau near Munich. Its aim is to bring together young researchers in the fields of Foundations of Mathematics, Computer Science and Philosophy.
Every now and then I want to generate normally distributed values in something like Perl, which does not have built-in functions for it. Unfortunately, there’s no easily remembered way to generate numbers from the normal distribution. I just learned the best way to do it: don’t. Generate logistically distributed values instead.
Peut-on se passer de l’expérimentation animale ? Si cela s'avère encore difficile dans certains domaines de recherche, des alternatives commencent à voir le jour. C'est notamment le cas à Strasbourg, où des biologistes travaillent à reconstruire une peau artificielle à partir de cellules humaines. Objectif : créer un modèle qui possède les mêmes propriétés que notre organe et
The LSST Camera is the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and astrophysics. It was completed at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 2024.
One reason there wasn’t an emphasis on reducing hallucinations is because the problem is hard. Some argue that hallucinations are “baked into” AI chatbots.
As a schoolchild, she had delighted in using a pendulum to make drawings in her exercise books, but it was not until midlife that she found in this process a portal to a larger world of ideas. In 1938, using a silver pendulum with a jade end she believed was guided by energy fields — a technique she termed radiesthesia — she began making large-scale drawings in pencil and crayon on graph paper, hundreds of them, to divine diagnoses of physical and psychic ailments and heal people, often with results bordering on the miraculous.
An observer once called the Mandelbrot Set “The Thumbprint of God,” the simple equation that led to the discovery of fractal geography, chaos theory, and why games like No Man’s Sky even exist. In 1994, Arthur C. Open Culture, openculture.com
Everywhere in education, you see incentives at work. The incentives, though, are so far removed from the actual goals of education that they produce perverse results.
Goodhart’s Law is usually stated, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
R. Barnes, и R. Greenberg. The Astrophysical Journal, 665 (1):
L67-L70(2007)cite arxiv:0706.3721Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters. A version with full resolution figures is available at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rory/research/xsp/resstab.pdf.