For dinner last night, I went to a local restaurant that is part of a larger chain. I was given a number to place on my table, and a cup to fill with tea or with soda at a dispenser.

I placed the number on a table, filled the cup, and returned to the table to look through an art-supply catalogue that I had brought with me.

The catalogue is about 8 in × 10 in × ½ in (20.3 cm × 24.5 cm × 1.3 cm) — roughly the size of a residential telephone directory for a medium-sized American city — and illustrated with pictures of, well, art supplies.

At about the time that I'd got to the mannikins, I had emptied my cup, so I went back to get more tea. As I was taking care of that, I noticed that my food was delivered to my table.

When I returned, I discovered that some fellow had happily sat himself down before the plate, his smart phone to one side, and was looking at the pictures of mannikins in the catalogue.

So, suddenly, he hears a deep, very angry voice, asking You're going to take my food? and he looks up to see me. I'm not sure just how I looked to him, but probably like someone on the edge of violence. After a momentary pause, his mind apparently now wonderfully concentrated, he got-up quickly, explaining that he was at the next table, and thought that they'd brought his food while he was away.

Let's back-up a sec: This fellow hadn't merely mistaken one table for another — something that I suspect most of us, and certainly I, would be capable of doing — he was looking at the pictures in the rather large art-supply catalogue. One doubts that he actively imagined that a restaurant were in the habit of presenting such a catalogue along with one's meal. Rather, his mind was simply disengaged. Here's the food! And, what's this? Oo! Shiny!

I have such low expectations of the mindfulness of other people that I believed his claim immediately, and indeed his order was brought to that next table not long afterwards. But I didn't much enjoy my meal nor the rest of the catalogue; my body was still geared-up for a fight.

There's a lot of talk these days about the political center, especially on the part of pundits who express concern about the lack of a centrist Presidential candidate amongst the Republicans. Rarely if ever does this talk explain what is meant by the references to the center, let alone why, really, one should want someone or something to be there.

In fact, people aren't talking about the same thing when they use this term.

For some people, the center means a center of mass of some sort. To the extent that one could average the political opinions of the voters or of the adult citizenry or perhaps of the adult population, the center would be this average. There's some real problems in locating this center. Some things resist averaging of any sort. And, because its determination has become significant in influencing opinion, people are all too quick to confuse the results of some collective decision-making process with a quantification of opinion; one sees this phenomenon in how election results are interpretted, and pollsters often design polls to advance the views that they want to promote.

For some people, the center is more tightly defined as a region in which the people whom they do not despise could reach agreement. It's still something of an averaging, but now the averaging excludes the opinions of the far left or of the far right or of both; and if these people acknowledge political opinions that are neither left-wing nor right-wing, the center will exclude those who are far out in any other direction. Of course, different people will regard different sets of opinions as far (which really means disagreeable to the persons in question); there is no common agreement amongst them as to where the center is located.

People such as I want to define the center in terms of the conceptual possibilities. For example, one might ask whether the state should redistribute wealth from rich to poor or from poor to rich. The center would seem to be to favor neither redistribution, either opposing both or being indifferent to either. Now, I say seem advisedly, because the mid-points are determined by the taxonomy. If the center is to be naturally defined, then, the taxonomy must be a natural taxonomy. And reasonable people might use different taxonomies. But what would surely make a taxonomy inappropriate would be for it to make it difficult or impossible to discuss something that otherwise could be discussed — for example, state redistribution from poor to rich (which is a very real phenomenon) or no state redistribution.

Not only do we see most people failing to be clear which of these notions of a center they are using; we see evident confusion — sometimes deliberate confusion — of their properties. The right- or left-wings of different jurisdictions will be implicitly defined based on local culture, but then lumped-together across jurisdictions as if ideologically equivalent. The center of mass for some culture (especially that of the writer) will be treated as if it is moderation. Whatever view the speaker favors is asserted to be the unbiased perspective and whatever policy the pontificator wants is called the balanced approach.

In most cases, whether some approach to policy falls in any one of these aforementioned centers is utterly irrelevant to whether it is a particularly good policy. The policies of the center of mass might be the best policies that one can get in the face of democracy or of a populace inclined to civil war, but they'll only be good on the assumption that there is a symmetry of insanities within the population. The policies of those whom one tolerates are only good on the assumption that one is genuinely wise in whom one excludes (which assumption begs the question). And there is no reason to see good policy in the conceptual center; nothing says that swallowing half as much arsenic as one might is better than swallowing none at all; all of the good policies with respect to some things are at or near extremes.

If you’re actually trying to install another version of Firefox, then click on the Firefox tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

The installation method that worked for Firefox 8.0.1 under Scientific Linux 6.0 and 6.1 works, mutatis mutandis, for Firefox 9.0 under Scientific Linux 6.1, and therefore ought to work for Firefox 9.0.x under RHEL 6.x and under CentOS 6.x.

So here are the steps that I recommend:

1. Download the archive, firefox-9.0[.n].tar.bz2.
2. The tarball contains a directory, firefox, which should be dropped-in as a sub-directory of something. If you want to ponder where, then study the FHS. As for me, as root, I put it in /opt:
   

   tar -xjvf firefox-9.0[.n].tar.bz2 -C /opt/

   (Omit that [.n] if it isn’t in the name of the archive that you downloaded. Replace it with the actual number from the name of the archive if such a number was included.)

3. You’ll need a .desktop file for Firefox (though you may already have one). As root, edit/create /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop, ensuring that it reads
   

   [Desktop Entry]
   Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base;
   Type=Application
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Firefox
   Comment='WWW browser'
   Exec='/opt/firefox/firefox'
   Icon='/opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png'
   Terminal=false

   (If you didn't install in /opt, or changed the name of the firefox directory, then you'll need to change the above accordingly.)

4. Restart the GUI, by logging out and back in or by restarting the system.

I collided yester-day with Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem while writing a program that aids artists in creating on-line web galleries.

There's a notion in art of complementary color. The lighter a color is, the darker is its complement, and v.v.. And, if one locates a color on a color wheel, this complement is its diametrical opposite on the wheel. Complementary colors are used, well, to complement things. So, for example, a dark red object is thought to look best against a light green background (if one uses the classic red-yellow-blue color system) or against a light turquoise background (if one uses the red-green-blue system).

I thought (and think) that it would be a fine thing if an image should be automatically displayed on a page whose background color were the complement of the average color of the image. In keeping with this complementarity, it might seem to be a good idea for the page text to be the complement of the background, which is to say that original average color. Well, here is where Brouwer pokes his head in the room and suggests a problem.

Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem tells us that every continuous function f from a closed ball onto itself has a point x such that f(x) = x. A color wheel is a closed ball in two dimensions. Grey-scale is a closed ball in one dimension. Half-way between black and white is a shade of grey which is its own complement. The color dead-center on a color wheel is its own complement. So the center of the cylinder formed by the Cartesian product of light-and-dark with the color wheel is its own complement. And any colors near this center have their complements also near this center, which means that there isn't enough contrast for real usability. Color schemes such as medium grey text on a medium grey background just don't cut it.

I don't know what the best adjustment is; I'm not even sure that there is a unique best to be found. But I believe that the proper adjustment would be to alter the lightness — and only the lightness — of the foreground text, making sure that it were different from that of the background by increasing any existing relative difference. (In cases were the brightness is dead-center, a movement in either direction should be fine.)

As previously noted, I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 28 July. On 11 August, the reported status of the paper was changed to With Editor. Yester-day, 12 December, that was changed to Under Review, which indicates that the paper has been sent onward to one or more reviewers.

Editors generally have the authority to reject papers on their own authority. If they think that a paper might be appropriate to the journal, then they send the paper on to one or two reviewers, with ostensible expertise in the specific area of the paper. These reviewers judge the paper to be suitable as it stands, or suggest revisions that would make it suitable, or decide that it is unlikely to become suitable even after revision. At some journals, editors have the authority to over-rule reviewers, but such is rarely done.

Most submitted papers are rejected by editors before they reach reviewers. Most papers that reach reviewers are rejected by those reviewers. Most that are not rejected are required to be revised in some way, small or large.

I don't know why the paper was listed as With Editor for almost exactly four months. The editor may have been too busy to evaluate the paper at all, or may have spent a fair amount of time in his-or-her own evaluation of it, or may have had trouble finding a reviewer for it.

If you’re actually trying to install another version of Firefox, then click on the Firefox tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

Once again, I was distracted as Mozilla released a new version of Firefox; this time, version 8.0.x. The installation method that worked for Firefox 7.0.1 under Scientific Linux 6.0 and 6.1 works, mutatis mutandis, for Firefox 8.0.1 under Scientific Linux 6.1, and therefore ought to work for Firefox 8.0.x under RHEL 6.x and under CentOS 6.x.

So here are the steps that I recommend:

1. Download the archive, firefox-8.0[.n].tar.bz2.
2. The tarball contains a directory, firefox, which should be dropped-in as a sub-directory of something. If you want to ponder where, then study the FHS. As for me, as root, I put it in /opt:
   

   tar -xjvf firefox-8.0[.n].tar.bz2 -C /opt/

   (Omit that [.n] if it isn’t in the name of the archive that you downloaded. Replace it with the actual number from the name of the archive if such a number was included.)

3. You’ll need a .desktop file for Firefox (though you may already have one). As root, edit/create /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop, ensuring that it reads
   

   [Desktop Entry]
   Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base;
   Type=Application
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Firefox
   Comment='WWW browser'
   Exec='/opt/firefox/firefox'
   Icon='/opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png'
   Terminal=false

   (If you didn't install in /opt, or changed the name of the firefox directory, then you'll need to change the above accordingly.)

4. Restart the GUI, by logging out and back in or by restarting the system.

In eartly August, I wrote of how most of the political left had lost its sense of conviction in the decades following the '60s, of how their ability to believe had been restored by the 2008 Presidential campaign of Barack Hussein Obama, but of how that sense of belief was disintegrating in the face of the actual Presidency of Mr Obama. Well, a large share of the left has since found something new from which to draw Hope — the Occupation movement.

It's widely noted that the Occupation movement lacks a programme. They've made it plain that they think that there's a 1% who are the Enemy; but, aside from the intention to somehow beat wealth out of this group,[1] the movement as a whole is short on specifics. Individual members or groups within the Occupation movement may espouse something more precise, but other members deny any sort of responsibility for those proposals. There isn't even meta-agreement within the Occupation movement on a protocol for agreement.

In lieu of a programme, what the Occupation movement gives us is a sort of attitudinal posture. That ought to remind people of something. In particular, it ought to remind people of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. Granted that, in his case, the ambiguïty was a deliberate choice, whereäs in the case of the Occupation movement it results from collective indecision. Still, once again, a large share of the political left has invested itself in a cypher.

[1] The urging of state action may not itself be immediately violent, but the whole point of using the state is to employ its capacity for violence, to threaten or worse.

Ariel
photographed by Maurice Goldberg
modelled by Dorothy Lee
from Theater Magazine 1924 November

I recently acquired a copy of this image as a page removed from an issue of Theater Magazine. I'm not sure that I would have got it had I known that it came thence; I'm not comfortable the practice of dismembering old books and magazines for their images, except in cases where there is truly negligible interest in the volume or issue in question being held together.

In any case, I think it a very nice picture.

Paul Krugman walks into a bar, and asks How much for a scotch, neat? The bartender looks at him, and thinks What could a Keynesian know about money? So he says One trillion dollars. Krugman gets on the phone, calls the Fed and the White House, and they send over $1 trillion. As Krugman is drinking, the bartender remarks You know, we don't get many Keynesians in here. Krugman replies Well, with these prices, it's no wonder!

[This post was delayed from yester-day, as my hosting service had a technical failure, and it took me rather a long time to persuade them of such.]

I read

This past week it was reported that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous claimed credit for taking offline over 40 websites used for sharing pedophilia — and for exposing the names and identifying information of more than 1500 alleged pedophiles that had been using the sites.

But the actual list is of user aliases, not of personal names.

Not only are pædophiles not being exposed here, but non-pædophiles who've had the misfortune of pædophiles' using the same aliases (by chance or from malice) are going to come under suspicion by those who think that they recognize them on this list.

Further, if agents of law enforcement were themselves working to track-down the actual legal identities of the pædophiles, their investigation has now been severely compromised, possibly fatally so.

Once again, Anonymous has done less good than they have led the gullible to believe, and have caused more damage than they have acknowledged.