Eggplant.place

235d

This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- I bought a second-hand copy of #Isotopes: Principles and Applications, published by Wiley. Isotopes are hugely important in various branches of science, and I have it in mind to get to grips with the finer details at some point.
- I found a copy of Simon Lamb's Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes at a local charity shop, a classic from @princetonupress
- And I bought a copy of Paul Thagard's Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? from @themitpress for basically the price of a packet of crisps.
#Chemistry #Physics #Geology #EarthSciences #Orogeny #CognitiveScience #Cognition #Intelligence #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, Isotopes: Principles and Applications, showing a chunky hardback book with a bluish-black cover. A band of large ochre and brown pixels is running diagonally across the bottom-left corner. Though no explanation is given on the cover, this is a close-up of a colourised schematic plot that shows nuclides and their decay products

In the middle, Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes, showing a colour photo of a group of small, single-storey concrete buildings on a barren hillside with a huge mountain range with snow-covered peaks in the background. This photo is reproduced in the book, with the legend explaining that this is a small cemetery on the road to the Zongo Valley in the Cordillera Real, just north of La Paz. The peak in the background is the 6088 metre high peak of Huayna Potosi.

On the right, Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?, showing a colour photo of three figures, a small white robot, a woman, and a dog, in a grassy field facing the viewer, the out-of-focus background showing a blue sky.

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Edited 235d ago

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158d

"Writing is thinking" 👈 Excellent!

📝 https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-025-00323-4

I have always seen #writing as more than mere expression. It constitutes active #cognition, integrating #memory, #reasoning, and meaning into a coherent structure. Delegating this process to eg #LLM risks reinforcing the opposite: passive consumption instead of structured thought.