Special: What’s With the Economy.

…erBee first became a restaurant. They wanted to buy a building to make and sell burgers in. The wealthy Scrooge McDuck had enough money to buy buildings. So they struck the following deal. McDuck gave BurgerBee the money to buy a building for their burger joint (say, 100,000 dollars). In return, BurgerBee gave McDuck a little certificate, which says that BurgerBee will pay McDuck MUCH MORE than the original amount (say, 200,000 dollars). But the p…

Read more

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…

Read more

Accuracy, Applicability, and Tarskian Semantics

…cause, however, the theory’s equations of motion stop being accurate long before, in a precise sense, the quantity loses definition in the theory, any semantics that rejects the inaccurate models in which the term still is well defined will not be able to account for that part of the term’s meaning. Thus, an adequate semantics for physical theory must be grounded on notions of meaning derived from relations in some sense prior to the accuracy of t…

Read more

Improving the Peer Review Process

…ing philosophy and HPS, could immediately adopt the first idea to great benefit. The second idea requires some structural changes to raise the funds. To this end, I’d only suggest: Stop printing paper-copies of journals. It’s a waste of money. Everybody prefers to access articles electronically anyway. The primary role of a journal should be as a peer-review agency. Spend the money on incentives for high-quality reviews instead. Any other ideas ou…

Read more

Hyper-intelligent fish and black hole thermodynamics

…plausible: an analogy can tell us whether or not scale is relevant to the effect. According to Unruh, sound-based experiments are really teaching us that black hole thermodynamics is about essentially macroscopic effects. So, our prediction of thermal effects like Hawking radiation won’t change when a new theory of quantum gravity comes along, and modifies our picture of the (microscopic, high-energy) Planck scale. It’s a bold and intriguing sugg…

Read more