A few notes from around the web while wondering whether the 43 hour long unabridged version of Ulysses is possibly a good idea.

Fritz Warfield sent a link to this story in the NY Times about the standard kilogram slowly shrinking. There’s lots of fun philosophical issues that arise. Isn’t it a priori that the standard kilogram has a mass of one kilogram, so it couldn’t possibly be shrinking?! While we’re there, is there as much of a philosophical problem about intertemporal mass comparisons as intertemporal location comparisons? The article also verifies an intuition that several philosophers have shared – you really can’t tell whether a perfectly homogenous sphere is spinning. Finally, there’s a conditional that should challenge a few theories, if it is meant to be true

If the earth were this round, Mount Everest would be four meters tall

I think that works, as long as ‘Mount Everest’ is a descriptive name for the tallest mountain.

Chris Bertram links to a story in the Guardian that uses Wittgensteinian rule-following considerations in a discussion of the Enron accountancy shenanigans. It’s interesting, if long, but I tend to agree with Matthew Yglesias that the references to Wittgenstein were probably not essential to the story being told.

Kieran Healy has a good post about the growing disconnect between risk and reward in the American economy. Kieran’s main point here, that markets are social constructs with enough variable parameters that many outcomes we see are the result of more or less explicit social choice rather than an essential consequence of having a free market economy, shouldn’t really be news, but probably will be to too many bloggers.

And Wo has a series of good posts about fiction and fictional objects that I should have linked to earlier. The latest two are on fictional objects (defending the idea that they are just possibilia) and fictional truth operators.