Get Started Reading Books and Articles on the Cheap

the mail for free. Here’s how to find a public library in your area. 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 selec…

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How Time Really Passes

…eories do not replace our notion of passage. Rather, physics provides a reliable account of the regularities underlying our common experience of time passing. It does this by providing us with a concrete relationship between any given now, together with its future and past. 1. We Experience Time Passing We can apprehend the passage of time through the succession of three mental states, in this order: the expectation of an event; the experience of…

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Special: What’s With the Economy.

…two parts explain what’s actually going on. So here it goes. PART 1: SECURITIES. There’s a hamburger joint on your street called BurgerBee, and they do pretty good business. But they need some extra cash up front (say, to get a new grill). You have cash up front. So the two of you strike a deal: you will give BurgerBee some money (say, 1000 bucks or so). In return, BurgerBee will give you a little certificate, which says that every day, you get 1…

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Could You Have Defended Galileo?

…elocity in free fall is proportional to distance fallen, which was the traditional view at the time. I call this the ‘Jesuit law’ of free fall. There was no agreed upon experimental evidence in the 1640’s that could verify one law and falsify the other. (Each side claimed to have experiments that vindicated their law, and disproved their competitor’s law.) However, a clever theoretician might still try to use purely theoretical means to prove one…

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Fundamental Rubik’s Cube Problem Is Nearly Solved

…programmer with a huge super-computer on the case. Rapid Recent Progress. In 2006, Tom Rokicki showed that there are cube configurations requiring at least 20 moves to solve; this gave us a lower bound. Then last year, Kunkle and Cooperman proved (pdf) that any cube configuration can be solved in 26 moves; this gave us an upper bound. But in recent months, rapid progress has been made. In March, Rokicki developed and posted a highly effecient sol…

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