<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> this is what the Oval Office looks like now 🤣🫢</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> Finished a book last year that I can heartily recommend: &quot;A short history of biology&quot; by Isaac Asimov. Super interesting, riddled with crazy theories and what we CS people would call debugging (maybe debunking is a better fit here [strange accidental syntactic and semantic symmetry, no?]). Made some notes, but didn&#39;t get around to posting about it yet...</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://fediscience.org/@BenjaminHimes" class="u-url mention">@<span>BenjaminHimes</span></a></span> Haha, yes, would be quite a … bender, indeed.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> fascinating, thanks for posting this! (Hi from Tartu, which also has a pretty old university, though a spanking new CS Institute building)</p>

<p>12/ Harvey&#39;s work is some of the most exciting and original in science. Think a bit: how would you discover *blood circulation* without vivisection?!?</p><p>If you are at all intrigued, read Andrew Gregory&#39;s brilliant /Harvey&#39;s Heart/.</p><p><a href="https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Personal/Books/Gregory-Harveys-Heart/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">cs.brown.edu/~sk/Personal/Book</span><span class="invisible">s/Gregory-Harveys-Heart/</span></a></p>

<p>5/ The Kitchen was next door to the Anatomical Theater, from where students could view the dissection in progress. Day 1: flesh, veins, etc. Then the body was taken to the kitchen to have all the decomposing bits boiled away, so Day 2 onward was the skeleton. ↵</p>

<p>4/ See, Padova was a leader in dissecting dead bodies (natural deaths, criminals) instead of just reasoning about them from &quot;first principles&quot;. This required not only side-stepping the church but also dealing with the messy realities of decomposition in an era without fridges. ↵</p>

<p>1/ Modern medicine ows an immense debt to the University of Padova. Multiple of my scientific heroes studied here, coming (as they do) from around the world to a seat of learning. We all LIVE their legacy, but you can also SEE it here! A short thread w/ pix: <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Italy25" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Italy25</span></a> ↵</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> assumptions can be hazardous. I have in fact seen a (foreign) birth certificate with &quot;3rd&quot; as a suffix, and on a case by case basis the number 7 or the symbol ? have been allowed (or will soon be) on birth certificates of indigenous people in recent years in Canada.</p><p>A range of symbols as well as numbers are technically supported in most registry systems in Canada although anything other than .,-&#39; are not generally permitted in names without a HUGE amount of hassle.</p>