Joined February 2012
- Tweets 6,746
- Following 1,011
- Followers 2,031
- Likes 977
1,166 Photos and videos
I’m off elsewhere.
It was fun for a while. I have made friends, exchanged ideas and found inspiration here. But no more.
Adieu.
Here, by way of envoi, are some favourite blue sky paintings. #DutchLight
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Hugh Aldersey-Williams (hoooaw.bsky.social) retweeted
15 Oct 2024
I’m in this article @guardian about how median author pay has fallen 60% since 2012: theguardian.com/books/2024/o…
What the piece doesn’t get into is *why* author pay has fallen when revenues across publishing are the highest they’ve ever been.
So here’s a bit more about that 🧵
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Enjoyed The Office? Loved Horrible Histories? But felt they both somewhat neglected the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? Problem solved: #1670netflix. One for @17thCenturyLady @DrFrancisYoung
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Just Coleridge begging a pdf from Humphry Davy:
‘When you do write (& do write soon) tell me how I can get your Essay on nitrous oxyd.’
One of the many unexpected treasures in scientists’ correspondence through the ages in @Of_Lost_Time’s Great Scientists anthology.
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On the joys and dangers of ‘writing intelligence’. Happy to have written an introduction on the history of scientific letters for @Of_Lost_Time @BloomsburyBooks’ new anthology.
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‘Facing the end of the world is neither here nor there’ –
With these immortal words Judge Christopher Hehir secures his place on the wrong side of history.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c880…
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Starting a campaign to rename Norwich as Liz Truss International Airport . . .
11 Jul 2024
✅ L’aeroporto di Milano Malpensa è ufficialmente intitolato a Silvio Berlusconi.
Grande soddisfazione per un grande italiano.
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Wow yes. She hd so many friends. (And how did I not know about this amazing resource: an impressive Who knew who in the Dutch Republic.)
Nearly 20 times inscribing in Alba Amicorum: hvnf.nl/alba-amicorum-met-fr…
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Not mental pride nor graceful form drove me
To engrave my features in everlasting copper.
But since my rough graving tool could do no better here,
I would hardly turn sooner to more important subjects.
Read here about the talented Anna Maria van Schurman: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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They knew how to blurb in 1659:
‘So largely hath the Divine bounty powred forth it self upon one person. . . . And though she most deserveth Praise, yet (which is above all Praise), She desireth no thing less.’
publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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The incidental death of an alchemist.
My latest for @PublicDomainRev. publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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Now that spring is properly here (I saw my first swallow today – weeks later than usual), it’s a good time to catch up on Robert Marsham and his landmark #phenology project, ‘Indications of Spring’. See how many you can spot. publicdomainreview.org/essay…
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What special powers does ‘occult chemistry’ possess. Can it see atoms? Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater thought so: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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When science sets out to describe the invisible, whose description comes closest? “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’ . . . It is formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.”
publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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Ha! Yes, that’s a good one. Nevertheless he went on to father a dozen children!
3 Apr 2024
Or alternatively from Browne, ‘I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition.’
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My debut for @BylinesEast. Be more like Thomas Browne: ‘we are not Magisterial in opinions, nor have we Dictator-like obtruded our conceptions; but in the humility of Enquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them unto more ocular discerners’
eastangliabylines.co.uk/how-…
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To be read in the spring: another Norfolk scientific hero of mine (it’s not all Sir Thomas Browne).
7 Mar 2024
NEW ESSAY — “From Snowdrop to Nightjar” in which @HoooAW explores Robert Marsham’s ‘Indications of Spring’ (1789)”, a lifelong calendrical project by the Norfolk naturalist considered Britain’s first phenologist — publicdomainreview.org/essay…
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Perfume👃, revolution🪧 and the beginnings of total synthesis. Read my review of Theresa Levitt’s Elixir and Catherine Jackson’s Molecular World: sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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Hugh Aldersey-Williams (hoooaw.bsky.social) retweeted
2 Dec 2023
Dutch light.
Ben begonnen in dit boek van @HoooAW en het is een prachtige vertelling.
Over de familie Huygens, in het bijzonder de wetenschapper en uitvinder Christiaan.
Het is ook vertaald, maar ik vind juist de blik van buiten wel bijzonder.
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Inspired by the Brazilian rainforest, Darius Milhaud, Paul Claudel and Audrey Parr created a now neglected masterpiece. Here’s how it came to be: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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