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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Armillary Sphere, Facade of Santa Maria Novella (Wikimedia Commons)
Another post from the History Book Club, this time based on three books:
Filed under Astronomy, History Book Club
MW: Continuing the recap… Continue reading
Filed under Peano Arithmetic
MW: It’s been ages since John Baez and I discussed Enayat’s paper—not since October 2020! John has since moved on to fresh woods and pastures new. I’ve been reading novels. But I feel I owe it to our millions of readers to finish the tale, so here goes.
Filed under Peano Arithmetic
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Another post from the History Book Club.
Filed under History Book Club
Another post from the History Book Club. It seemed particularly appropriate for today (January 20th, Inauguration Day).
Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison,
by I. Bernard Cohen, W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
Hatcher’s Algebraic Topology unfortunately hadn’t been written when I studied the subject in grad school, but a few years ago I participated in a meetup that went through about half of it. I wrote up notes on things I puzzled over, or just observations I found helpful. Here they are. Besides the homology group mentioned in the title, some other tidbits: a figure to elucidate the calculation of the fundamental group of the complement of the Alexander Horned Sphere, and more details for the intuitive proof Hatcher sketches of Poincaré duality.
Filed under Topology
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
 | riraldi on Epstein Relativity Diagrams |
 | Michael Weiss on Epstein Relativity Diagrams |
| riraldi on Epstein Relativity Diagrams |
| Michael Weiss on Epstein Relativity Diagrams |
| riraldi on Epstein Relativity Diagrams |
Diagonal Argument 