The images I've shared are from a Latin incunable titled Flores Albumasaris.
An incunable is a book printed in Europe during the earliest days of the printing press, before 1501. This book was printed in Augsburg by Erhard Ratdolt on November 18, 1488.
The book's textual roots stretch back to a world much older and broader than Germany. The text belongs to a tradition translated into Latin by John of Seville in the 12th century. The illustrations, however, were created with a 15th-century German woodcut aesthetic.
The work is based on the astrological tradition of Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, known in Latin Europe as Albumasar. Abu Ma'shar was born in Balkh in 787 and worked in Baghdad in the 9th century.
Abu Ma'shar wasn't just a writer of horoscopes.
In his world, astrology was a broad field of knowledge linking celestial movements to climate, disease, governance, war, harvests, human character, and the timing of events.
Few weeks ago, I found something mislabeled in a second hand shop. Turned out to be a box full of slides from Vietnam war (1968-1970). I managed to scan around 300. Here its a small selection of somebody's memories I bought for 5,99 🧵
A surge of genetic data from the skeletal remains of Neanderthals disproves some assumptions and generates fresh questions about these ancient hominins
https://t.co/KfomoTVyCt
🚨 WE ARE GETTING DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO ANOTHER YEN INTERVENTION.
The Japanese yen just hit its weakest level against the US dollar in 40 years, with USD/JPY trading at 161.96.
This matters because the Bank of Japan can't let the yen stay this weak.
A weak yen feeds directly into Japan's inflation, and inflation is already the BOJ's biggest concern, which is exactly why they've been hiking rates. A weaker yen works against everything they're trying to fix.
If they intervene, they'll likely do what they've done before: sell US dollars and sell US Treasuries to fund it. Japan is one of the largest foreign holders of US debt, so this isn't a small lever, it's a major one.
If the BOJ dumps Treasuries at scale, US bond yields spike. Higher yields pressure US stocks.
At the same time, yen strength unwinds the yen carry trade, the practice of borrowing cheap yen to buy other assets, forcing investors to sell stocks, metals, and crypto to repay those yen loans.
Kodansha giving money earmarked for teenage Japanese mangaka to a 30-year old foreigner who makes Netflix “anime” to serialize a manga specifically about how exclusionary and bigoted the manga industry is is actually a pretty good summation of where “cool Japan” is rn.
A payphone was put in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and another payphone was put in one of the poorer neighborhoods
The pay phones call each other, it went exactly how you would expect…
This is one of the first calls that was made:
"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher Bishop is one of the best books in modern machine learning (almost 800 pages of content).
Although it was published in 2006, it remains a standard reference on the subject. It develops machine learning from first principles, with a strong emphasis on probability, statistics, optimization, graphical models, neural networks, kernel methods, mixture models, and Bayesian inference.
It also includes one of the clearest mathematical introductions to multinomial logistic regression and the softmax function. Microsoft Research makes the complete PDF freely available:
https://t.co/k54s7sKCQ5