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diagonalizable.bsky.social
Choose 30 books, one-per-day, no particular order, that you’ve read that were written by women.
#BookSky 📚 #bookchallenge 🔎 📙
#readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
#buchsky #buchliebe
The Dialogical Roots of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning. [author:] Catarina Dutilh Novaes. [Cover illustration is from Tree Roots and Trunks, 1890, by Vincent van Gogh.] [from back cover:] [Drawing on]...philosophy, history, psychology, cognitive science, and mathematical practice...[Novaes argues] for an overarching conceptualization of deduction as a dialogical practice...[Her account] highlights the deeply human and in fact social nature of deduction, as embedded in actual human practices..."
December 31, 2025 at 3:49 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books #readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
💙📚 Covers of books on your TBR shelf.
The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic. Revised Edition. Richard A. Epstein. [from back cover:] "...Epstein's classic book [kinda old, 1967,1977]] on gambling and its mathematical analysis covers the full range of games from penny matching, to blackjack and other casino games, to the stock market (including Black-Scholes analysis). Epstein is witty and insightful, a pleasure to dip into and read and rewarding to study."
December 31, 2025 at 3:39 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
Choose 30 books, one-per-day, no particular order, that you’ve read that were written by women.
#BookSky 📚 #bookchallenge 🔎 📙
#readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
#buchsky #buchliebe
Defending Science--within reason: between scientism and cynicism. [Author:] Susan Haack [2007 announcement for the original 2003 book:] With a New Preface by the Author [from back cover] "...generously illustrated with examples from the history of science, this new and original approach to familiar questions about scientific evidence and method tackles vital questions about science and its place in society...[offering] a balanced understanding of the value, and the limitations, of the scientific enterprise."
December 30, 2025 at 12:47 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books #readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
💙📚 Covers of books on your TBR shelf.
[On the spine:] Georges Simenon A Maigret Trio HBJ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [title page] Georges Simenon A Maigret Trio Maigret's Failure Maigret in Society Maigret and the Lazy Burglar [HBJ in a box] A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York
December 29, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Reposted
princess-vimentin.bsky.social
I whole heartedly agree!

Science is not simple.
It is so easy to oversimplify something to a point to where it fits a narrative.

Recall that RFK Jr’s MAHA report misrepresented the conclusions of scientific papers to fit the narrative.

We have to fight back.

🧪 www.statnews.com/2025/12/22/r...
Researchers have a moral obligation to push back when their studies are twisted to promote false health claims
NewsGuard has collected 1,000 provably false statements in its False Claim Fingerprints database. Many involve misrepresented research.
www.statnews.com
December 28, 2025 at 9:23 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
Choose 30 books, one-per-day, no particular order, that you’ve read that were written by women.
#BookSky 📚 #bookchallenge 🔎 📙
#readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
#buchsky #buchliebe
Democratic Reason: politics, collective intelligence, and the rule of the many. [Author:] Hélène Landemore. [from the Prologue:] "...what if the reason we use majority rule in the first place is because it is in general a reliable decision procedure? Immediate objections spring to mind, offering examples of deeply mistaken majorities...Another objection runs even deeper, challenging the very notion that there could be a right or wrong answer to political questions....For democracy and democratic decisions to be fully justified, if not legitimate, it seems there has to be something more to it than the values it embodies...The collective intelligence of the citizens--what I call more broadly 'democratic reason'--might in fact be distinct from individual reason writ large...The ideas of wisdom of the crowds and the collective intelligence of regular citizens have...been slowly gaining ground....In light of these [and other] evolutions, I now see my book as a product of its time, gathering a 'knowledge' already present in popular and academic culture, albeit distributed over many sources and many individuals, and expressed in so many different forms as to lose clarity. [This book] gathers, organizes, and synthesizes this common and tacit knowledge and turns it into a coherent argument for democracy. My hope is that it also adds to this knowledge by putting forward a new argument in favor of democracy based on the correlation between inclusive decision making and cognitive diversity."
December 25, 2025 at 1:18 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books #readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
💙📚 Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf
Educating for an Ecological Civilization: interdisciplinary, experiential, and relational learning. [Editors:] Marcus Ford & Stephen Rowe, eds. [from the back cover:] "The new form of civilization we so urgently need will require new ways of thinking and relating--ones that are more socially responsible, ecological, 'mindful', and coherent--and new ways of educating ourselves. The essays in this volume describe features of an emerging, relational vision of civilization and some of the educational practices it suggests." [I seriously doubt the contributors to this volume meant "emerging" to indicate "totally new on earth". I think it's meant in the sense of their perspectives emerging to contribute to an ongoing process.]
December 25, 2025 at 12:58 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
Choose 30 books, one-per-day, no particular order, that you’ve read that were written by women.
#BookSky 📚 #bookchallenge 🔎 📙
#readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
#buchsky #buchliebe
Realism in Mathematics [author:] Penelope Maddy [publishing info:] Clarendon Paperbacks [from back cover:] "When engaged in mathematics, most people tend to think of themselves as scientists investigating the features of real mathematical things, and the wildly successful application of mathematics in the physical sciences reinforces this picture of mathematics as an objective study. For philosophers, however, this realism about mathematics raises serous questions: What are mathematical things? Where are they? How do we know about them? ...Maddy delineates and defends a novel version of mathematical realism that answers the traditional questions and refocuses philosophical attention on the pressing foundational issues of contemporary mathematics."
December 21, 2025 at 4:40 PM
Reposted
nickyschwenzer.bsky.social
WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE!?

Where is Congress? Where are they?

I want to film this for my kids & my grandkids. I want them to see the day democracy died in Washington, D.C.

Even George is upset 🦮
& we should all be shocked!
No one is here to say this is wrong!

I was born here.
I'm Andrew Howard.
1/5🧵
December 21, 2025 at 10:06 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books #readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕 #buchsky
A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back. [author:] Bruce Schneier [below author's name:] New York Times best-selling author of Data and Goliath. [from inside cover:] "A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. [unintended by system presumably] The tax code isn't computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them 'loopholes'. We call exploits 'tax avoidance strategies'. And there is an entire industry of...hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys....Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an array of powerful actors whose hacks bend our economic, political, and legal system to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else....Unchecked, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy, and even affect the way we think. And when artificial intelligence starts thinking like a hacker--at inhuman speed and scale--the results could be catastrophic. But for those who would...we can understand the hacking mindset and rebuild our economic, political, and legal systems to counter those who would exploit our society. And we can harness artificial intelligence to improve existing systems, predict, and defend against hacks, and realize a more equitable world."
December 21, 2025 at 2:23 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
Choose 30 books, one-per-day, no particular order, that you’ve read that were written by women.
#BookSky 📚 #bookchallenge 🔎 📙
#readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
#buchsky #buchliebe
Anti-Indianism in Modern America--a voice from Tatekeya's Earth. [Author=] Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. [from Preface by author:] "This collection of essays confronts themes of Anti-Indianism in the history and culture of North America and attempts to assist the reader in recognizing the wide variety of subject matter stimulated through the author's thirty years of working toward the development of Native American Studies as an academic discipline...[such as] Anti-Indianism in America...defined in accordance with specific tribal experiences...Land loss and cultural diminishment, misguided governmental policy and faux morality...the struggle for native sovereignty and survival."
December 20, 2025 at 4:40 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books #readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
💙📚 Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu--and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts [Author=] Joshua Hammer. [from the inside cover=] "In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert farmers. His goal was to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door...[This book] tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction..."
December 19, 2025 at 1:17 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
Choose 30 books, one-per-day, no particular order, that you’ve read that were written by women.
#BookSky 📚 #bookchallenge 🔎 📙
#readers 👀 📖 #booklovers 💕📕📗📘💕
#buchsky #buchliebe
[Title:] Modalities--Philosophical Essays [Author:] Ruth Barcan Marcus. [from inside cover:] "Informed by her earlier ground-breaking axiomatizations of quantified modal logic...papers collected here by the distinguished philosopher...[contain] themes...such as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as 'tags', the Barcan Formula about the interplay of possibility and existence...and alternative interpretations of quantification...[and] putative puzzles about substitutivity...essentialism...moral conflict...belief and rationality...some historical figures." [Picture in center square is of installation by Eva Hesse called "Contingent 1969". There are 8 panels cheesecloth, latex, fibreglass; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.]
December 18, 2025 at 4:53 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf
Introduction by Robert S. Mueller, III. [Title:] Interference--Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation [Authors:] Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein. [from inside cover:] "...Interference is the inside story of the Mueller investigation, told for the first time by Mueller's leadership team. It completes and corrects the historical record of the only federal criminal investigation of President Turmp while he was in office. The authors' account is a real-life thriller. . . Interference shows the importance of making principled decisions in unprincipled times..."
December 18, 2025 at 4:25 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf
[Title] The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel [Author] William Goldboom Bloch [Publisher & date] Oxford University Press 2008. [There are short chapters on various mathy (& introductoryish) topics: combinatorics, small infinites, information theory, topology, tiny bit of Gödel & Turing. After that author offers his own interpretation of Borges' famous story (translated by Andrew Hurley). Re author's use of "unimaginable" in title: he refers us to a philosopher, but it's just that there're things we cannot imagine yet name & reasonably & logically talk about. Hence the mathy stuff.] [The other picture posted is Borges' handwritten first page of the story.] [It's the first handwritten (of course) page of Borges' story with his corrections. In Spanish (of course).]
December 17, 2025 at 5:10 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf
Otto Penzler's Classic American Mystery Library. Ellery Queen. The Siamese·Twin·Mystery. [Nobody credited for the interesting cover design. Two semi-silhouettes in suits & ties in front of large Queen of Diamonds card looking in their direction. Seems to be numerous interpretations of QofD, so why is it on the cover?] [from back cover] "On an isolated mountaintop, a group of travelers is stranded between two evils--a raging forest fire creeping ever closer, and a killer who lurks in their midst. Meanwhile, a strange secret, long buried, lies smoldering beneath all of them." [Interestingly, Ellery Queen is the author of this book about himself Ellery Queen, written in 3rd person; yet "Ellery Queen" is a pseudonym for 2 cousins, one of whom did plots, one of whom the dialogues; don't recall who wrote the other stuff (maybe it was a 3rd person (another Queen? of a 2x2 shape), or maybe both cousins).]
December 16, 2025 at 2:01 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge #books
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Robert Macfarlane author of The Wild Places. [Cover design: Jim Tierney | Cover Photograph: David Clapp] [from back cover:] "...Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond....from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas...he matches strides with the footprints made by a man 5000 years ago near Liverpool, sails an open boat far out into the Atlantic at night, and commingles with walkers of many kinds..."
December 15, 2025 at 11:09 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
💙📚 #booksky #bookchallenge #books Choose books TBR, just covers, with an alt.
Robert Van Gulik | THE HAUNTED MONASTERY and THE CHINESE MAZE MURDERS | Two Chinese Detective Novels | With 27 illustrations by the author. [Cover drawing by Van Gulik: "Judge Dee in General Ding's Library". The so-called "cover design by Carol Belanger Grafton" eliminated Van Gulik's initials, inserted an oval with "Dover Mystery Classics" on a gravestone. (I'm still mourning that Dover no longer makes "permanent books".) I've read "Monastery", and 6 or 7 other Dee books. In "Maze" there're "mysterious garden maze; a hidden message in a scroll painting; a ruthless robber lord who has decreed Dee's death; a hidden murderer with a penchant for torturing" etc., you get the picture. If memory serves, chain-smoking fool (died from it) Van Gulik had Ph.D. in something, was professionally Dutch diplomat, was part-time spy in WW2 helping to defeat fkn nazis, & was just an interesting human. See biography of him. See also recent documentary about him.]
December 14, 2025 at 12:21 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
[TItle:] A Lifetime of Puzzles: honoring Martin Gardner. [Then rectangles & squares of pictures of Gardner & family thruout his life, e.g., a Navy portrait.] [Editors:] Edited by Erik D. DeMaine, Martin L. DeMaine,, Tom Rodgers. [From backcover:] [25 essays]...a tribute...by mathematicians, puzzle masters, and magicians...who are all dedicated to his unique amalgamation of rational thought and magic. Some...contributions celebrate the life of Martin Gardner; some tell about his influence--on individuals or on the field of recreational mathematics in general; some are puzzles or tricks inspired by...Gardner and his work."] [Some contributors: Penrose, Smullyan, Randi to name some famous... I've read some of this excellent used hardback that cost me a few bucks. Interestingly, one of the editors presented this volume as a gift writing: "To Jean, Happy Canadian + American Thanksgiving Marty Demaine". Apparently.]
December 13, 2025 at 2:06 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
[Title:] Cain's Jawbone [white sign on bookshelf:] A Novel Problem [yellow circle on right:] 'If James Joyce and Agatha Christie had a literary love child, this would be it' Daily Telegraph [white sign on floor, author:] by Torquemada [yellow rectangle bottom of cover:] The world's most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle [cover design by Mecob, cover illustration by Tom Gould] [from backcover:] "Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations [I think publisher meant 'permutation' since order matters, & there seems to be well over a million possibles]...but only one is correct. ... In 1934, the Observer's cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada [yet, oddly, called 'Bill' by his friends]), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written...The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible--through logic and intelligent reading--to sort them into the only correct order...[O]nly three puzzlers have ever solved the mystery..." This gift from my daughter will probably be on my TBR shelf forever. It's interesting alright but I dislike dismembering my books. You need to cut the pages (each page has a dash line for you to scissor neatly) to physically arrange. Cool. Maybe I'll get to this tomorrow, or the day after, I do like to see logic in action.
December 12, 2025 at 2:14 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
[at the top:] "Compelling with elegant suspense." Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City. [There's a white sticker that indicates 1.50$, the cost of the book at a library sale. & yes, I put $ after the #s, it seems more logical to me. Next is the title:] The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: the true story of a thief, a detective, and a world of literary obsession. [Author:] Allison Hoover Bartlett. [from the back cover] "Unrepentant book thief [John Charles] Gilkey has stolen a fortune in rare books from around the country. . . . Gilkey steals for love--the love of books." Apparently this is a true story of the detective chases elusive thief, bibliodick versus bibliomaniac (using the ancient lingo). According to some Gilkey just wanted to build himself a collection of rare books. His goal merits respect I think. But he could've used some practical thinking advice. If only he had uncovered a lost Aristotle ethics manuscript from the Library at Alexandria and studied it.
December 11, 2025 at 2:45 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
Choose books from your current TBR/TBRA shelves in some general order.
[Top left corner is a price sticker: "2-" for two dollars. Got it at a library sale.] [Author:] John D. MacDonald. [Title:] Five Travis McGee Mysteries. [below the title:] Complete and Unabridged. [This 1985 well-made hardback contains 5 novels: A Tan and Sandy Silence, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, The Empty Copper Sea, The Green Ripper, Free Fall in Crimson. ] [What a deal, 692 pages for 2 bucks of MacDonald's clear, mature, and interesting prose. This book itself has another story. On the "about the author" page, a father wrote "Linne: --Merry Christmas 1988 --From Your Father, Phil Laurie" And now it's my turn to read this, for which I thank both Linne and Phil whoever wherever however. It's in excellent shape and it's still traveling.]
December 10, 2025 at 4:35 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
[Author:] John Rogers [Title:] This Other London: Adventures in the overlooked city. [From back cover:] "...he ventures out into an unchartered London like a redbrick Indiana Jones in search of the lost meaning of our metropolitan existence. Nursing a dodgy knee and a can of Stella, he perambulates through the seasons in search of adventure in our city's remote and forgotten reaches." He consulted an "old Atlas of Greater London", an "atlas of the overlooked", he takes public transportation, then walks ten miles or so. Another anti-tourist exploring the usual.
December 9, 2025 at 1:22 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
Choose books from your current TBR/TBRA shelves in some general order.
[This is the cover page inside] [Title]: The Devil's Mode [Below that is musical notation which I've forgotten how to read. Then below that is]: Stories by Anthony Burgess. [Publisher]: Random House New York. This is a collection of 9 stories. I've read a few so far. It seems to me there's a difference between writers who can charge language and even play with it until itself is musical, by which I mean the language sounds are a pleasure, the syntax is a pleasure, and writers who don't or can't. I prefer musical writers. But especially those who with abstract capacity for content and also to make the language itself a focus so the actual words and sentences must be the way they are and any paraphrase is destruction: like math & logic proofs, like music, like poems. [On the spine Title]: The Devil's Mode [Author]: Anthony Burgess. [Publisher]: Random House [On the cover]: A B. This is a collection of 9 stories. I've read a few so far. It seems to me there's a difference between writers who can charge language and even play with it until itself is musical, by which I mean the language sounds are a pleasure, the syntax is a pleasure, and writers who don't or can't. I prefer musical writers. But especially those who with abstract capacity for content and also to make the language itself a focus so the actual words and sentences must be the way they are and any paraphrase is destruction: like math & logic proofs, like music, like poems.
December 8, 2025 at 5:49 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
December 6, 2025 at 1:11 AM