There's a huge amount of utterly useless meta-discussion in Gillies' book. He writes about his writing without providing any meaningful enlightenment whatsoëver.

An editor should have put his or her foot down, and told Gillies to trim away all this fat. But, again, there doesn't seem to be much editing of books these days, except when done by authors themselves.

A lot was and is again being made of Alexander Haig's declaration on 30 March 1981, when the President was shot and rushed to hospital, I'm in charge here. Frankly, I think that his remark at that time was willfully misinterpretted by various hostile parties. On the other hand, I remain disgusted by something that Haig said just twelve days earlier, on 18 March.

In 1980, El Salvador was caught-up in civil war, with the United States supporting the Salvadoran state against left-wing insurgents. On 2 December, four American church-women (a lay missionary and three nuns) were beaten, raped, and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard.

As these events were being uncovered, Haig was called before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives. Haig told the Committee

I'd like to suggest to you that some of the investigation would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicles the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock, or was accidentally perceived to have been running a roadblock and there may have been an exchange of gunfire and perhaps those who inflicted the casualities may have tried to cover it up, and this could have been at a very low level of both competence and motivation in the context of the issue itself.

(Underscore mine.) By referring to an exchange of gun-fire, Haig tried to creäte an impression that these women had tried to shoot it out with the National Guard.

Haig went to his grave mocked for attempting to tell the nation that the White House was under active leadership while the President was incapacitated and the Vice President was in-transit. Haig faced minimal consequences for having attempted to depict four unarmed victims of torture and murder as guerillas who had simply died a gun-fight.

Over the last few days, my hyacinths have begun their annual reëmergence.

When I dug them up on 23 November, I found five ordinary bulbs, one conjoined pair, and a pitiful little thing that might not even be a bulb. I replanted them (including the pitiful thing) that same day, with better placement in the pot.

Originally, I had just one plant, which had been forced when I bought it. In theory, it should not have had the resources to reëmerge the next year, but it did. It divided and its offspring have divided. And the largest of the bulbs has each year been larger and each year produced larger leaves. Not every bulb produced has survived; I lost at least one little one, and I have almost no hope for the pitiful thing even if it is a bulb. But the little family has grown to the point that, after the bulbs again retreat, I am going to begin colonizing more pots with them.

I first encountered symbolic logic when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, I had great trouble following the ostensible explanations that I encountered, and I didn't recognize that my perplexity was not because the underlying subject were intrinsically difficult for me, but because the explanations that I'd found simply weren't very well written. Symbolic logic remained mysterious, and hence became intimidating. And it wasn't clear what would be its peculiar virtue over logic expressed in natural language, with which I was quite able, so I didn't focus on it. I was perhaps 16 years old before I picked-up any real understanding of any of it, and it wasn't until years after that before I became comfortable not simply with Boolean expression but with processing it as an algebra.

But, by the time that I was pursuing a master's degree, it was often how I generated my work in economics or in mathematics, and at the core of how I presented the vast majority of that work, unless I were directed otherwise. My notion of an ideal paper was and remains one with relatively little natural language.

Partly I have that notion because I like the idea that people who know mathematics shouldn't have to learn or apply much more than minimal English to read a technical paper. I have plenty of praise for English, but there are an awful lot of clever people who don't much know it.

Partly I have that notion because it is easier to demonstrate logical rigor by using symbolic logic. I want to emphasize that word demonstrate because it is possible to be just as logically rigorous while expressing oneself in natural language. Natural language is just a notation; thinking that it is intrinsically less rigorous than one of the symbolic notations is like thinking that Łukasiewicz Polish notation is less rigorous than infixing notation or vice versa. I'll admit that some people may be less inclined to various sorts of errors using one notation as opposed to another, but which notation will vary amongst these people. However, other people don't necessarily see that rigor when natural language is used, and those who are inclined to be obstinate are more likely to exploit the lack of simplicity in natural language.

But, while it may be more practicable to lay doubts to rest when an argument is presented in symbolic form, that doesn't mean that it will be easy for readers to follow whatever argument is being presented. Conventional academic economists use a considerable amount of fairly high-level mathematics, but they tend to use natural language for the purely logical work.[1] And it seems that most of them are distinctly uncomfortable with extensive use of symbolic logic. It's fairly rare to find it heavily used in a paper. I've had baffled professors ask me to explain elementary logical transformations. And, at least once, a fellow graduate student didn't come to me for help, for fear that I'd immediately start writing symbolic logic on the chalk-board. (And perhaps I would have done so, if not asked otherwise.)

The stuff truly isn't that hard, at least when it comes to the sort of application that I make of it. There is a tool-kit of a relatively few simple rules, some of them beautiful, which are used for the lion's share of the work. And, mostly, I want to use this entry to high-light some of those tools, and some heuristics for their use.

First, though, I want to mention a rule that I don't use. This proposition, normally expressed in natural language as A is A and called the Law of Identity, is declared by various philosophers to be one of the three Principles of logic. But I have no g_dd_mn'd idea what to do with it. It's not that I would ever want to violate it; it's just that I literally don't see anything useful to it. Ayn Rand and many of those for whom she is preceptrix treat it as an essential insight, but I think that it's just a dummy proposition, telling me that any thing can stand where that thing can stand.[2]

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[1] There's an idiotic notion amongst a great many mainstream economists that the Austrian School tradition is somehow less rigorous simply because some of its most significant members eschew overt mathematics in favor of logical deduction expressed in natural language. But most of the mainstream is likewise not using symbolic logic; neither is necessarily being less rigorous than otherwise. The meaning of variables with names such as q_t can be every bit as muddled as those called something such as the quantity exchanged at this time. There are good reasons to object to the rather wholesale rejection of overt mathematics by many Austrian School economists, but rigor is not amongst the good reasons.

[2] [Read more.]

Essai philosophique sur les probabilitiés was published a couple of years after Théorie analytique des probabilitiés, as a popular introduction to that earlier work. Objecting that Essai is not in fact a very original work, given that Théorie was the summary of more than a century and a half of mathematical research together with important developments by the author, is a bit absurd.

An editor should have brought this dissonance to Gillies' attention. I don't quite know what editors do these days, beyond deciding whether a given work may be expected to sell.

The Gallup Organization has acknowledged that the President's disapproval rating and approval rating are now matched, at 47%. I am highly skeptical that it took until now for that to happen.

[Correction and Up-Date (2010:01/24): It seems that initial reports were slightly off, that Gallup reported a 48% approval level and 47% disapproval level. And to-day they report both as simultaneously holding steady, skating against each other. (2010:01/25): Well, no, the Gallup Orgainzation indeed had them equal in their report for 20-22 Jan; then they showed his approval rating ticking up to 48% while the disapproval rating held steady.]

The Financial Times explains that things are almost certainly going to become more awkward for the President. The Republicans smell blood; moderate Democrats feel more free (or obliged) to say no. The Secretary of the Treasury is enmeshed in scandal over his actions when with the Federal Reserve; the Chairman of the Fed may not have the votes for reconfirmation.

I'd note other things. Unemployment has stayed high; some of the President's defenders say that there isn't much that he can do about that, but he and his party hugely increased the deficit on the claim that they could, with few people now believing that the money were well spent. The American automotive manufacturing industry has no real prospects for long-term health. The two wars that so many voters expected to be neatly or quickly resolved (one of which Obama said must be fought to victory) are still grinding-up American soldiers. Russia and China want Iran to continue to be a problem. The Guantanamo naval prison is still unclosed, and the ACLU has denounced the plan to continue holding prisoners without trial once they are relocated. Skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is growing, and supposed points of no return have been passed. The world still treats America with disdain, and much of it is on the cusp of telling us that Obama is a failure or that he's better than we deserve or both.

It is very likely that the Gallup Organization will one day report that this President's disapproval rating has passed 50%.

Readers of this 'blog might recall the Decimator. Well, according to Hugo Chávez, the United States has one.

I'm just hoping that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands, and get directed at the Amsterdam Fault. Meanwhile, maybe I can become one of the Rocket Men. At my age, hopes of becoming a super-hero have dimmed, but I at least look younger than Jeff King.

When one installs rar in Red Hat Linux,

yum install rar

and then attempts to run rar or unrar, one is likely to get a failure with the diagnostic

rar: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.7' not found (required by rar)

In various fora, the recommendation has been to install a newer version of glibc or somesuch. Such updating would be a signally bad idea, likely to disable the operating system.

Instead, note that the rar package came with rar_static. Use that in place of rar. (If it makes you happier, you could delete rar and rename or alias rar_static with rar.)

By way of zenicurean I learn that Google has announced its horror that the Chinese regime has, in fact, not much respect for the right of political dissent.

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There's a sort of underground, which is perpetually trying to draw attention to the fact that various corporations from the United States and elsewhere provided support for Nazi Germany prior to relevant nationalizations or declarations of war. For example, IBM supplied information technology, which was subsequently used for such things as tracking-down Jews.

But the Nazis didn't have the first or the last regime to violate human rights, and the firms that sold the means for them to do so weren't the first or last folk to try not to think too hard about whom they were helping. American firms sold war equipment to both sides during the First World War. After the Second World War, businesses sold resources and technology to repressive regimes, variously communist or anti-communist; the United States government often subsidized or otherwise promoted such sales, depending upon what soul-less pragmatists thought to be in the national interest. And it isn't as if American sales have to be to foreign states to support repression.

We need to judge the present and the past with a perspective that doesn't lose sight of either, to understand that doing business with Hitler or with Stalin is part of the same sort of behavior as doing business with Hu or with Putin, and vice versa. We need to see that there isn't some simple discontinuity of acceptability that places Hizzoner on one side and der Führer on the other.

I'm not here telling anyone whom to condemn and whom to excuse. Rather, I'm saying that one should be reluctant to try to draw lines of any sort on slippery slopes. As to one's own behavior, I suggest that a line be drawn before one is on the slope at all.