@karlgalle
Historian of science, mostly medieval to early modern astronomy & mathematical arts. Things German, Polish, Egyptian, or hey that looks interesting. Ex public policy + occasional tuba. Copernicus book in progress. Don't get long covid, it sucks.
TBH type #9 just sounds like a description of a pretty typical academic -- "helplessly becomes crazy, everything that he knows, sees, or hears, he presents openly to everyone." 🧐 🍺
My university received a few years ago the promise of the largest single gift to a public university in U.S. history. It was equivalent to 12 hours of bombing Iran.
Lagaan is excellent, as long as a cricket match but you actually actually get the rules explained along the way 😆
See also 👀 👇 bsky.app/profile/hunt...
There used to be an old sign by the path, warning passers-by of the local sleeping willow, which would trap the unwary with fatigue, engulf them while they slept, and release them a hundred years later.
There was a new sign:
"This sleeping willow is full."
And a map of other locations to try.
Join us on 10 March at 5:30pm for a GHIL Lecture by Karin Friedrich (University of Aberdeen) on 'Between Republic and Dynasty: Transnational Governors and Noble Agents between Poland-Lithuania and the Duchy of Prussia' taking place at the Warburg Institute (online participation possible)! 📅
1/4
Field biologists who also love rare books, your time is now! 😂
Yes, thank you!
LA, where you have to define if you want Lebanese-Oaxacan or Egyptian-Mexican as your Mexico<->Middle Eastern crossover food restaurant
And of course there's also a male counterpart in the 'materia medica' adjacent genre. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi is known among historians of astronomy for his mathematical devices, but while looking up what else he wrote during his career, suddenly I was like wait, what? 👀 indiepubs.com/collections/...
The next deadline to apply for our short-term research fellowships is April 1! Learn more about this program for doctoral and postdoctoral scholars here: www.ghi-dc.org/programs/doc...
ANOTHER LATE-BREAKING JOB:
TT Assistant Professor, History, Purdue
History of Science & Technology in East Asia
www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/deta...
To me this says FUND LIBRARIES‼️
Fund collections. Fund staff. Fund more folks working in reference and research. Fund teen library space & teacher in the library programs
We ALREADY have a wildly popular institution that helps kids learn, respects their privacy, and teaches critical thinking 📚
Managing Pandemics in Early Modern Germany, edited by Peter Hess, is out now with Berghahn books, and I've just learned that the introduction (which I wrote) is free to read on the website! www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HessMa...
Job opportunity! 🚨
Curator or Associate Curator of Maps and Geography @bplmaps.bsky.social
#maps #jobadvert #geography
RETVRN www.theguardian.com/books/2014/m... #MedievalSky
Talk poster reading SIGMA 4 March (Wed) 4:00-5:30 pm (GMT) 2026 SIGMA Seminar Upside-down Cuneiform: The Depiction of Babylonian Mathematics in Games. Erica Meszaros Wentworth Institute of Technology Poster also includes a QR code and some Babylonian imagery.
I'm so excited/honored to give a SIGMA Seminar this Wednesday, March 4! Join me to learn about how Babylonian maths are depicted in games. I promise the math content will be cool and approachable.
Explore the Faces of Ancient Roman Egypt in Getty's New Volume on Mummy Portraits | Getty News
www.getty.edu/news/explore...
Just finished reading this collection of somewhat dark & twisted fairy tales by Kelly Link last night, if anyone is looking for appropriately diverting reading for these extremely dark & twisted times. 📚 bookshop.org/p/books/whit...
Fun fact: the dining room at Mar-a-Lago, built in the mid-1920s, was dubbed "the Mussolini room" by its designer because it was intentionally modeled after Rome's Chigi Palace that was occupied at the time by Il Duce.
Please, I'm not *that* old, we had modernized to using stylus and clay tablets! I think @moudhy.bsky.social wrote about some of my early lecture notes in her book. 🤣
@dbellingradt.bsky.social always speaks truth! 😂 At least even if folders aren't perfectly organized, long file names usually makes it possible to hunt something down via "search," as opposed to my grad school days when names were capped at 8 letters (& saber-toothed cats still roamed the earth)...
Thanks! I've been pretty good about keeping up with these, though I somehow either missed the "Editing and Analysing Numerical Tables" volume or else downloaded it but gave it an indecipherable name that I now can't find on my computer, which is also entirely possible. 🙄
Crikey, had not yet looked at today's news. I miss a world when it was occasionally possible to browse one's feed for academic developments & book news without rapidly stumbling across something that makes one go, $@#! what's happened now... 😔
#astrohistory #histsci #medievalsky
Many thanks! Had not seen that another PAL volume was out. 👀
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
Was interesting to see an example of the spot an interesting idea --> pitch and write an article pipeline in real time! 😄
Thread: imagine you're a historian surveying 16th century copies of the world's most famous ancient astronomy book, and you see one where somebody with handwriting VERY similar to GALILEO (!?) has transcribed... a psalm.
"Galileo, a prayer? That's something that doesn't work," Ivan Malara thought.
Fantastic work from our amazing @newberrylibrary.bsky.social colleague Megan Kelly!