Royal Society exhibition revives 18th-century debate about shape of the Earth
“Some members of the French Academy of Sciences interpreted measurements taken in Paris by scientists including Jacques Cassini as supporting the idea that the Earth was elongated at the poles, resembling a lemon or a melon.
By contrast, Isaac Newton had proposed that the centrifugal force caused by the Earth’s rotation would result in the planet being flattened at its poles, thus having a similar shape to an orange.”
Royal Society exhibition revives 18th-century debate about shape of the Earth
“_Some members of the French Academy of Sciences interpreted measurements taken in Paris by scientists including Jacques Cassini as supporting the idea that the Earth was elongated at the poles, resembling a lemon or a melon.
By contrast, Isaac Newton had proposed that the centrifugal force caused by the Earth’s rotation would result in the planet being flattened at its poles, thus having a similar shape to an orange._”
Linked article below gives an introduction and link to an article that appeared in the June 20, 2024, issue of the #LondonReviewOfBooks (#LRB), a magazine based in the #UnitedKingdom.
Shatz addresses the false conflation of #antiZionism with #antisemitism by #USA politicians and others. He explains that argument is not new, and it has never been shared by all #Jews. The books he reviews in this essay single out #Jewish voices that were sharply critical of the main leaders of #Zionism in the years before Israel was established, as well as after 1948.
Does a cave beneath Pembroke Castle hold key to fate of early Britons?
“One of the issues that scientists are seeking to resolve is the question of whether or not Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens in Britain, as they did in other parts of the world. For good measure, they also want to know if the two species lived alongside each other or whether they replaced each other in successive waves.”
Last year on Mastodon we featured this story from the BBC about Gladstone's Library, the U.K.'s only residential library. Fediverse folk were so enthusiastic that when we discovered the library is offering scholarships to be taken in 2025, we had to share the information (see the second link in this post for all the details).
The Making and Unmaking of a Presidency: Envisioning Empire in British Bencoolen, 1685–1825
“The effort to transform Sumatra into a productive constituent of a larger imperial nexus depended on many of the same processes that were to shape modern capitalism. Not only did British officials in Bencoolen deploy coerced and enslaved labor, they did so with the intent of wresting control of the production, consumption, and circulation of valuable commodities such as pepper and sugar. Practices of slavery, transplantation, and agrarian change typically associated with British colonies in the Atlantic world fundamentally shaped Bencoolen.”
Bains, T. (2024) ‘The Making and Unmaking of a Presidency: Envisioning Empire in British Bencoolen, 1685–1825’, Journal of British Studies, pp. 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.142.
53% of UK Parents Don’t Buy Books for Their Children
“The survey found that 28% of parents cited affordability as a barrier to purchasing books for their children. For many families, budgeting for essential needs takes precedence over buying books, which might be seen as a non-essential expense.”
“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
“Four factors are found to be significant predictors of the position of primary stress: endings, word complexity, the segmental structure of the final syllable, and syllable count. Moreover, this study confirms previous observations on the tendency for American English to have more final stress in French loanwords than British English.”
Dabouis, Q. and Fournier, P. (2024) ‘Stress in French loanwords in British and American English’, Journal of Linguistics, pp. 1–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000136.
"This paper studies the constitutive role of cartography apropos law, territory, and social order, in a specific historical context, by examining the crucial political role played by the British East India Company's cartographic practices and maps in aspiring and imagining the transplantation and establishment of English sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent."
"The ultimate goal, I suggest, was a translatio imperii; the establishment of an imperial monarchy in the west that could rival the Habsburg empire, and which in time, perhaps, might even come to imitate the universal glory of the Roman imperium. Not the American Atlantic seaboard, but rather the continent of Europe, with its arms, its learning, and its treasure, was the goal of Bacon’s early imperial vision."
#Image attribution: Yale Center for British Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_-_Sir_Francis_Bacon,_1st_Viscount_St_Alban_-_B1977.14.9772_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art.jpg
🇬🇧 🇪🇺 "Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth."
Green, J. and Pahontu, R.L. (2024) ‘Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit’, British Journal of Political Science, pp. 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123423000728.
🇬🇧 🇪🇺 "Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth."
Green, J. and Pahontu, R.L. (2024) ‘Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit’, British Journal of Political Science, pp. 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123423000728.