et cetera – Page 2 – News For Wombats

The bagel disputation

Gary Hardcastle: Necessarily, there is no everything bagel. It would have to contain itself as an ingredient. But, I can buy one at the deli.

P.D. Magnus: A bagel always trivially includes itself.

GH: That way lies madness.

PDM: Take an empty bag. Put a bagel in it. There is nothing in the bag now that was not an ingredient of the bagel. Since the bagel is in the bag, it follows that the bagel too is an ingredient of the bagel.

I feel like I should drop a QED at the end of that, but I also feel like this is the kind of dispute which would get one of us excommunicated if we were medieval monks.

And that’s why I’d make a bad monk.

It has probably been more than a decade since I made any changes to the format of my home page— but today I changed around the CSS and modernized some of the code. It shouldn’t change the functionality, beyond replacing a header graphic with text in a custom font.

It’s possible that I’ve broken something or that it won’t show up properly on your device. If it has become unusable, maybe let me know.

Enacting the plan laid down by my younger self

TL;DR: I cut my hair.

AI is a joke

The genre of post that echoes an interaction with ChatGPT is stale and tedious. As Tom Scott comments, “Telling someone about your fascinating AI conversation is like telling someone about your dreams. They don’t care, it just sounds like you’re hallucinating nonsense.” I swore back in December that I wouldn’t make another post like that, but this one has jokes.

Prequel to Genesis

Satan said unto the Lord, “Hey, God. I was wondering…”

God’s attention turned, and Satan continued: “I know that you’re omnipotent, but I was wondering if you could create a world that had some good things in it, but also an overwhelming amount of toil, suffering, and evil.”

The Lord replied, “Yes, I could do that.”

“But could you, really?” asked Satan, stretching out the final word.

“Look, Satan,” said God, “you’ve agreed that I am omnipotent. That word just means all powerful. An omnipotent god can do anything.”

The Lord added, with the clarity and force of proof, “You’ve mentioned a thing to do. I am omnipotent. So I could do it. QED.”

Season songs’ revenge

One side effect of the pandemic is that I’m out and about less, so I hear less programmed Christmas music. Here’s a flashback to pre-pandemic times, when I did a series of posts about my favorite holiday songs. I’m not sure the list would be any different this year.

🍏🎵

I recently signed up for the free trial of Apple Music. It’s like the old days in some ways. Less so in others.

Current music: Little Simz, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

Current mood: nostalgic

Why I don’t give a definition of “cover”, Christmas in October edition

In a remembrance of his friend Rob Aldridge, Rick Beato recounts being in a band with him. They were playing Christmas songs in a bar. The proprietor interrupted their set and said that he thought they were going to play covers.

Aldridge replied, “What are you talking about? We didn’t write these songs!”

Unamused, the proprietor paid them for the gig on the condition that they stop playing immediately.

an excerpt from “The Case of the Classical Stabbing”

“I say, Holmes, how did you know that the crucial evidence would be in the galley of the yacht?”

“It was an elementary inference, Watson. As you were so quick to point out, the locked room showed that the murderer could not possibly have committed the crime and escaped. Yet the body of the victim and the absence of murderer showed that they had done so. I was puzzled until I remembered that everything follows from a contradiction, and this allowed me to conclude that the crucial evidence would be wherever I looked.”

“I see,” I said, although I really did not see. “But why the galley of the yacht?”

Holmes looked at me as if I were missing the obvious. “Because I was hungry. If I could find the evidence anywhere, then I might as well find it somewhere I could also make a sandwich.”

“Right then! But what about relevance constraints on logical consequence?”

“Watson, you disappoint me. If there were relevance constraints on consequence, then I could not have solved the crime. I did, so there are not.”

Then I realized that I, too, could derive anything from the contradiction Holmes had exploited. So Holmes conceded that I was clever, poured me a cup of tea, and left me alone for the rest of the afternoon.

Let slip the dogs of logic

My open access logic textbook, forall x, has been forked into numerous custom editions. This means that problem sets which I wrote years ago have been picked up and adapted.

The formal exercises are not especially distinctive, but the exercises translating from English into formal logic are about specific topics. Some of these were arbitrary inventions, like the sentences about Eli and Francesca who might or might not be bringing guacamole to a potluck. Guacamole was salient to me when I was writing the book, but I think I chose Eli and Francesca just because they started with E and F.

Category: et cetera