Get Started Reading Books and Articles on the Cheap

…. Or, visit your local University’s library for an even grander selection. Buy very, very cheap books. Ok, so this one’s almost free. There are hundreds of books selling at less than 1 cent on Amazon. They’re not all worth a penny, but there are some real jewels among the noise, which you can get for only the price of shipping. To find them, try browsing by subject, and then selecting “Sort by Price: Low to High.” Reading With Questionable Scruple…

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Special: What’s With the Economy.

…that foreclosed. Nobody’s really sure how much those houses are worth. So lots of banks are invested in lots of houses of questionable value. So nobody’s sure how much the banks are worth — or all the elaborate derivatives — all the way up. Now, when people on Wallstreet don’t know how much something is worth, they often do one of two things: they do nothing, or they sell. They did both last week. And so the stock market fell dramatically. PART 7…

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Get Started Learning General Relativity Online

…s and philosophy of general relativity, all of which is available for free online. If you know of any online resources that are not on this list, suggest them in the comments and I will add them to the list! Contents Non-mathematical introductions to general relativity Mathematical introductions to general relativity Philosophy of general relativity Other general relativity references. Non-mathematical introductions to general relativity Einstein…

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Soul Physics: Best of 2009

…blem here. Another unexpectedly simple failure of determinism. An ill-posed initial value problem of the Norton-dome kind, constructed from a simple mass-on-a-spring system. Possible Positions on the Passage of Time. An illustrated catalogue of your options. Group Structural Realism (Part 4). The last of a 4-part argument that there’s little hope for this kind of view. Best wishes for 2010! — Bryan Soul Physics is authored by Bryan W. Roberts. Tha…

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Curie’s Principle: Not a theorem, Not even for Ismael

…n” be a pair of bijections: one on , and the other on . These are formally different functions, since they have different domains. But I will follow Ismael in a slight abuse of notation, by dropping the subscripts and just writing for both and . The statement of Curie’s principle that Ismael formulates is then the following. Statement. Given a function between sets, and two bijections and , if it is the case that (symmetry of the cause), then it f…

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