Monthly Archives: January 2023

Very Unique

My unique (but not very unique) microwave

Everyone has their pet peeves, and peeves about language abound. My pet peeve is with people who object that “very unique” is illogical. For example, this pithy statement:

Uniqueness is a binary condition. Something is unique or it is not. There are no degrees of uniqueness. Something cannot be partly unique, mostly unique, very unique, etc.

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Filed under Logic, Rants

Selections from the History of Astronomy

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Armillary Sphere, Facade of Santa Maria Novella (Wikimedia Commons)

Another post from the History Book Club, this time based on three books:

  • To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, by Steven Weinberg.
  • The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, by J.L. Heilbron.
  • The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia Nova, by James Voelkel.

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Topics in Nonstandard Arithmetic 10: Truth (Part 4)

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Previous “Truth” post

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Filed under Peano Arithmetic

Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 26

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MW: Continuing the recap… Continue reading

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Filed under Peano Arithmetic