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Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of...

The decisions by governments around the world to engage in massive spending sprees and money printing during the Chinese coronavirus crisis is the central cause for persistent inflation, a leading central banker has admitted. The head of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Agustin Carstens has acknowledged that governments and central banks throughout the world were to blame for the current economic hardships felt by working and middle-class people through inflationary policies such as governments giving massive handouts to businesses and workers to stay home during the lockdowns and central bankers engaging in quantitative easing schemes to generate more...

Getting vaccines to people who need them isn’t always easy. Many vaccines require cold storage, making it difficult to ship them to remote areas that don’t have the necessary infrastructure. MIT researchers have come up with a possible solution to this problem: a mobile vaccine printer that could be scaled up to produce hundreds of vaccine doses in a day. This kind of printer, which can fit on a tabletop, could be deployed anywhere vaccines are needed, the researchers say. “We could someday have on-demand vaccine production,” says Ana Jaklenec, a research scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer...

Sen. Bob Casey’s campaigns have funneled more than half a million dollars to a printing company owned by his sister and brother-in-law, raising ethics questions about a family business arrangement spanning more than 20 years. Casey (D-Pa.), 62, has spent more than $500,000 on services from Universal Printing Company over the course of his nearly three-decade political career — more than $200,000 of which was paid between 2005 and 2022 by Bob Casey for Senate, Inc., according to Federal Election Commission filings. Universal Printing’s owner and CEO, Margi McGrath, is the oldest sister of the Democratic senator, has also donated...

In 15th-century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press, a machine that allowed for mass production of texts. It is considered by many to be one of the most significant technological advancements of the last millennium.Though Gutenberg often receives credit as the inventor of the printing press, sometime earlier, roughly 5,000 miles away, Koreans had already developed a movable-type printing press.There is no question that East Asians were first. There is also no question that Gutenberg's invention in Europe had a far greater impact."What is not known is whether Gutenberg knew about the Korean printing or not. And if we...

I still cant fully understand how the printing of money causes inflation. Economies are normally driven by supply and demand at the basic level. . If I need something that everyone else needs, it tends that the people who make the product or supply the service will raise prices to make profit when fulfilling the sale side of this, the need of that product or service making more profit for the provider. . Supply can affect price, also, the scarcity of the product means it costs more, generally, because new means to provide the initial raw materials or shipping of...

M2 Money Velocity (GDP/M2 Money) peaked in Q3 1997, but after several bouts of Fed money printing, M2 Money Velocity is near the all-time low at 1.1216 In Q1 2022. And M2 Money stock is still growing at a torrid pace of 9.9% YoY. But the massive overreaction of The Federal Reserve in response to the Covid outbreak has led to near zero money velocity. Now with The Federal Reserve considering removing the monetary stimulus, what will happen to US GDP left to survive on its own? An example of how The Fed’s expected tightening of monetary policy can be...

Link only: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-04/sam-zell-buys-gold-with-inflation-reminiscent-of-the-1970s

If you’re tired of binge-watching Netflix, there are likely a few restaurants in your neighborhood who would love to hire you. A job might help relieve the boredom. On the other hand, why work when one can just be one of the more than 6 million former workers now collecting “pandemic unemployment insurance”? Those millions are in addition to the 3.6 million former workers collecting ordinary unemployment insurance. For many workers, these benefits now total $300 per week. In March, President Biden extended the program until September. And then there are the many millions more who have recently received a...

The Bible is America’s best-selling book, annually outpacing the top 20 best sellers combined. Yet a single Chinese company has a near monopoly on Bible printing, meaning that any rupture in the supply chain—say, from U.S. or Chinese government policies—would lead to a Bible shortage in America. This poses a serious threat both to American Christians’ fundamental religious liberty rights and to national security. More than 20 million Protestant and Catholic Bibles are printed annually by America’s largest Bible publishing companies. But few are aware that most of these Bibles are printed in China, by Amity Printing Company.

President Donald Trump has ramped up his rhetoric about voting fraud to include foreign interference — specifically making the unfounded claim that “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” resulting in a “RIGGED” election. Voting experts say there are numerous logistical hurdles, such as reproducing ballots in multiple jurisdictions, and security safeguards, such as bar codes and signature checks, that would prevent a foreign government from slipping large numbers of fraudulent ballots past election officials. Those safeguards make such a plan highly unlikely to result in fraudulent votes being cast, experts say, and certainly not enough to...

In what has been called a once-in-a-generation event, a complete and original copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sold for a record-setting price just under $10 million at auction earlier this week. The First Folio, published in 1623, was the first complete printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Published seven years after the author’s death, the book marked not only the first complete collection of Shakespeare’s works, but also the first time those works were organized as comedies, tragedies and histories. There are around 235 copies known to exist, and only six complete ones owned privately.

The Federal Reserve, saying “the coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States,” cut interest rates to zero on Sunday and launched a massive $700 billion quantitative easing program to shelter the economy from the effects of the virus. Facing highly disrupted financial markets, the Fed also slashed the rate of emergency lending at the discount window for banks by 125 bps to 0.25%, and lengthened the term of loans to 90 days. The Fed also cut reserve requirement ratios for thousands of banks to zero. In addition, in a global coordinated...

Victor Hugo on Gutenberg's Press, "The Invention of Printing ... is the Mother of Revolution." HISTORY OF WRITING The invention of "writing" was around 3300 BC. Richard Overy, editor of The Times Complete History of the World, stated in "The 50 Key Dates of World History" (October 19, 2007): "No date appears before the start of human civilizations about 5,500 years ago and the beginning of a written or pictorial history." Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in the Cosmos TV series (2014, natgeotv.com, episode 10, "The Immortals"): "It was the people who once lived here, around 5,000 years ago, who...

Christian leaders are hailing the Trump administration's decision to remove Bibles and other religious books from its lists of Chinese goods facing a 10 percent hike in tariffs. The office of U.S. Trade Ambassador Robert E. Lighthizer said Tuesday that the 10 percent tariff hike on Chinese goods starting Sept. 1 won’t affect Bibles, according to multiple reports. On Tuesday, the USTR released two lists of items that will be subject to tariffs starting Sept. 1 and items in which tariffs will be applied on Dec. 15. * * * Christian publishers are also welcoming the development because of how...

Desperation approaching!

Printing the next generation of rocket enginesby Jeff Foust — July 19, 2018Additive Rocket Corp. combines additive manufacturing with a tool called generative design, where computer algorithms develop thousands of different designs that meet a set of constraints and then iterate on them to find the optimal solution. Credit: ARC This article originally appeared in the June 25, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine.New technologies, when first introduced, often get applied in traditional ways. For the last several years, aerospace companies have been examining ways to use additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, to aid the production of rocket engines. A prime...

Do you still print stuff out? If so, you're undoubtedly like most of us who, at least periodically, still need to print out a hard copy of some digital document – whether for archiving, legality, to put into a cookbook, or whatever. Yet we've been promised for years that all of us using computers would mean that all those beautiful trees could be saved, presumably so we can hug them and live in them in the green paradise envisioned by some. What happened? Reality happened. And because of that, at least in part, our forest workers can still feed their...

When you put your gun on in the morning and leave the house for the day, are you concerned about printing? The above picture was shared with me on Twitter. Taken by a man in a checkout line behind a woman whose firearm is only being thinly veiled by her light pink t-shirt, she could obviously care less about printing. It’s a topic of discussion I’ve had with several instructors and an issue I’ve had myself – should we be concerned with whether or not our gun “prints” through our clothing? Yes, but mostly because if you’re carrying concealed,...

As 3D printing continues to develop and evolve, we’ve begun to see it branch off quite a bit from the typical image of a machine depositing layers onto a flat build platform. 3D printing has been adapted to print onto preexisting objects, onto fabric, and in multiple directions. Machines capable of doing these fancy tricks are still rare and expensive, though, and not quite accessible to the average maker, but that may not be the case forever. A group of UK researchers recently published a paper about their efforts to develop an affordable system that can 3D print onto uneven,...