Tootfinder

recent-ish reading/rereading. #books @…

This book is so cool. 650 pages with amazing screen shots and descriptions of each game.
#books #videogames #jrpg

OAPEN blog: Two Years On: A Conversation with DFG on Supporting #OpenAccess #Books
#ScholComm

Two Years On: A Conversation with DFG on Supporting Open Access Books
It has been two years since OAPEN launched a dedicated collection of DFG-funded open access books. Part of this collection is supported by the DFG Open Access Publication Funding programme. To mark this occasion, OAPEN’s Funder Relations Manager, Laura Bandura-Morgan, interviewed Michael Geuenich, Programme Officer, Scientific Library Services and Information Systems, and Dr. Angela Holzer, … Continue reading "Two Years On: A Conversation with DFG on Supporting Open Access Books"

"I rejoice greatly that I find there is patience in my soul for quite a long time yet, that I desire no earthly possessions, and need nothing but books, the possibility of writing, and of being daily for a few hours alone." - Fyodor #Dostoevsky, letter to N. D. Fonvisin, March 1854.
#books #solitude #writing #quotes

Archive of all German detective novels above Cafe Sherlock, Hillersheim, Eifel.
#books #detectives #library

Snow widows by Katherine MacInnes focuses on the women left behind when Scott's expedition did not end as planned.
One of few #books that focus specifically on the lives of the women involved in the male business of antarctic exploration in class-sensitive Edwardian times.
#book

Yesterday I got for myself the #book "The Ecology of Freedom" (a Spanish translation, I quite liked this particular edition ).
#books

new book about medicine history, "droplets" theory etc
"Science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book is a brilliant history of medicine that takes us from Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of the 19th century to present day. Along the way, it offers an anthropological study of medical culture — a culture capable of ignoring science when it wants to. ...
"If COVID-19 spread in droplets, then it was worthwhile to keep people two metres apart, to put up plexiglas barriers around checkout stands, and make supermarket aisles one-way. Sanitizing countertops could break the chain of infection.
"But if COVID-19 was airborne, all those measures were pointless."
Bit of an exaggeration in that part of the article. The 2m distance does put you outside the densest clouds of exhaled breath, and sanitising countertops helps against other diseases. But yeah. A lot of effort wrongly expended due to the prevailing myth.
#CovidIsAirborne #books #history

Written in 2012, very soon after Googles and Facebooks of the world started to create information bubbles for us to trap ourselves in. It will be annoying, but I think useful to see the perspective at the time.
#books #nextread

can they really claim to be "Authors" is the question....
#AI #plagiarism #lazy #writing #literacy #books https://mastodon.social/@dtgeek/114616913983544628

The Wolf Tree, by Laura McCluskey
#books #Crime #Meh #Mystery

"Browsers Welcome. Old and unusual books bought and sold" Kim's bookshop, Arundel, #WestSussex #bookshop

I'm giving away some technical #books, preferably around #Osona / #Vic , but any #Catalonia town around the R3 line down to #Barcelona is also ok. I don't have a car and I'd prefer not having to package and send them.
The publisher made some mistakes so I have duplicates, the ones I'm giving away:
- Math for Security
- The Shape of Data
- Statistics Done Wrong
- The Rust Programming Language (2021 Edition)
I'd also prefer giving it to people who can't afford buying expensive books often, for economical fairness reasons.
⁨#Giveaway⁩ ⁨#donation⁩ #bookstodon #freebooks

Graafdier door Nikki Dekker is een interessante boek. Hier is mijn review:
#books

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

"I rejoice greatly that I find there is patience in my soul for quite a long time yet, that I desire no earthly possessions, and need nothing but books, the possibility of writing, and of being daily for a few hours alone."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky in Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Ethel Colburn Mayne)
Ohh, is that all?
#books #writing #reading #dostoevsky #solitude