In 1992, Tim Burton made a movie, Batman Returns, in which his alleged Batman sees a woman fall from a ledge on a building. The supposed Batman waddles to the edge, looks over, and watches her fall to her death.

If the actual Batman sees a woman tossed from a building then he immediately jumps after her pushes off something because she's been accelerating under gravity and figures-out what he'll do on the way down because he's the g_dd_mn'd Batman, when there's no hope…

…except him.

Moon of the Wolf, by Len Wein, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano, from Batman #255 (April 1974), is reproduced at a Grantbridge Street entry for 18 May.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Thus begins Adam Smith's first book, in its editions of 1759, 1761, 1767, 1774, 1781, and 1790. In other words, he was saying this both before and after his more famous work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, 1778, 1784, 1786, & 1789). At some point, I may write a lengthier entry on what Smith was doing with the Wealth of Nations, but I wanted to make the point that Smith didn't make his case for a free market based upon a personal belief that one only cared for others based upon their effects on one's own material well-being. Rather, he made his case (in the Wealth of Nations) for the optimality of a free market without availing himself of the proposition that people otherwise gave a d_mn about each other. Then, as now, many opponents of a free society held that an economy without extensive state control could work only if people had more fellow-feeling than they actually do.

Those who used to follow my LJ (long since deleted and purged) might recall that I find Rush Limbaugh deeply offensive, and began actively avoiding listening to him after he blamed the 1992 Los Angeles riots on Rodney King.

But is it funny to accuse Limbaugh of treason for expressing a hope that the Administration fails in its programmes of state expansion? Is it funny to suggest that Limbaugh is a henchman of Osama bin Laden? Is it funny to express a hope that Limbaugh suffer from kidney failure?

Apparently our current President thinks that it is.

There should never have been any acceptance of the entwined notions that bald hatred, utterly lacking cleverness, counts as comedy, and that so long as it's labelled as comedy it somehow doesn't count as hatred.

The toe that I injured more than six weeks ago still hurts when flexed in some ordinary ways. I'm fairly sure that I broke the thing. According to what I've read, it may take up to a year to completely heal.

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Recently, two different people at different places on different days have asked me about my having a foreign accent. As far as I'm concerned, I have a very generic American accent. The Woman of Interest and I speculate that the lack of more precisely identifiable regionalization is what has people wondering about my being from elsewhere. That is to say that I cannot be placed from my speech as from the South, Northeast, Midwest, or whatever.

I don't think that I was ever much inclined to adopt regionalisms. For example, my mother had a very strong Arkansan accent when I was a child, my father has a Missouri twang, and from some time in my fourth year until some time in my seventh, my family lived in North Carolina; yet it was noted that neither my brother nor I developed southern accents. Much later, I became very consciously deliberate in selecting the characteristics of what amounts to my personal accent. I wasn't interested to appear to be from a particular place or of a particular social standing; I was interested in things such as clear enunciation and as respect for the language.

Various people on the WWWeb have used the word peosis or peotic. In all the cases that I have examined, these uses appear to be typographical errors, with the intended word being poesis or poetic.

FWIW, the word πέος is Greek for membrum virile. Thus, for example, wax peotic would be equivalent to wax penile.

Working on that less formal explanation of my paper has paid another dividend.

The model in the paper has involved six propositions, which function like axiomata, specifically about choices concerning lotteries. I have known for some time that these weren't orthogonal — that there was overlap amongst what they said. It is at best unfortunate to have that sort of redundancy in foundational propositions. But I'd not seen how to reduce it.

This morning, after describing those propositions less formally, and then considering what to say about the theoremata that follow, I started to see how to turn one of those propositions into a theorem. After a bit of musing and fretting, I've effected the change.

Yester-day, as I was in the course of writing-up a somewhat less formal discussion of the ideas in my decision-theory paper, I reälized that I had fudged something important in that paper.

More specifically, I had erroneously treated an important property of one relation as ex definitione. That property does follow from the combination of the definition with some propositions in the paper, but it's not a fully observable property, whereäs I had tried to make each of the relations as observable as was possible, even at the cost of using somewhat cluttered definitions.

I was, unsurprisingly, very unhappy with the reälization. The confusion had been an act of incompetence on my part, in an area where competence is quite important to me. It meant that I had increased the potential burden upon those who have been or will be kind enough to check-over that work. And I didn't immediately know how much work I would have to do to repair the model.

As to the last, when I buckled-down and started the revision, it proved to be fairly easy. I removed the mistaken assertion in the discussion of the definition, and inserted a quick proof of the property amongst the theoremata.

Had the error not been caught before the paper were submitted to a journal, it might well have caused the paper to be rejected. A referee might have been bright enough to pick-up on the mistake, but (for various possible reasons) not seen that it weren't truly fundamental to the work.

One lesson that is reïnforced by this experience is the value, for one's own understanding, of explaining ideas to others.

Yester-day, I found a rat's nest under the hood of my car. Literally.

I visited my parents in Tucson from late March until last Tuesday. I parked outside, just off their drive-way, and didn't use my car very much during that time. They live far east of the city center, out amongst the cactus, gilla monsters, and pack rats. I spotted the occasional pack rat under my car, but thought very little of it.

On my way home, I was pulled-over by an officer of the Arizona Highway Patrol, because my passenger-side head-light was out. (He was simply concerned that the problem be addressed, and gave me a written warning rather than ticketting me.) I went to an automotive store on the next day or the day after that, and bought new bulbs. But, when I popped the hood to replace the bulb, I found that the wires to the bulb were frayed and broken. There was nothing there to bang-around. The Woman of Interest suggested that they'd been chewed by a mouse. Rodent damage seemed plausible, and I couldn't think of a good rival explanation. Anyway, I decided that the best way to effect a repair was with a new connector and some butt connectors (metal sleeves, which are in turn ensleeved in plastic, and which are crimped to join wires or cables).

Apparently, I was operating with a sort of tunnel vision when I discovered the chewed wires. Although the rat's nest was quite big, I didn't spot it, sitting on the engine behind the valve cover, until yester-day, as I was effecting the repair. The nest was built of twigs, sticks, and some soft fibrous material. I was puzzled about why I hadn't had an engine fire, until I reälized that the soft fiber was produced by shredding swatches of the hood insulator. That rat really did considerable damage.

None-the-less, its actions weren't malicious, and I rather hope that it either wasn't in the car at all when I was driving, or leapt out before I was going more than a few miles per hour. Otherwise, the pack rat almost certainly was cooked to death or was killed when it hit the pavement. Had it cooked, I probably would have found a body. And if the nest was built between my previous use of the car and when I was loading it to go home, then the rat probably fled as the car shook from that loading.

Another one of the many perturbing errors in Jeffrey's Subjective Probability, this from §4.1:

If I am sure that it was one of the years from 1951 to 1959, with equal probabilities, then my ex(X) will be 1951
9 + 1952
9 + … + 1959
9, which works out to be 1954.5.

One doesn't even have to do any arithmetic (I didn't) to spot the error; for a sequence of an odd number of equally-spaced integers, the average is the middle-most value, in this case 1955.

Some people try to light a candle. Some people curse the darkness. Me? Part of me wants to model the darkness.

I was led to this reälization upon reading the latest entry from zenicurean. In response to news reports about the latest swine-flu concerns, he writes

Plenty of first reactions appear to heavily involve doing things actual health care experts are not chiefly concerned about getting done, but that's how it always works, isn't it?

And I almost immediately thought about why those first reäctions are what they are. For example

• Officials want to be seen as doing something.
• People, including officials, often greatly over-estimate their understanding of issues that have (or seem to have) a significant bearing on general welfare.
• Officials with axes to grind are quick to find excuses for the grinding.
• Politicians can exploit the prejudices and desires of voters who are predisposed to support various measures (such as blocking foreign trade or travel, or subsidizing some profession).

So, could we pull this altogether, and surely other things that don't come so quickly to-mind, perhaps into a mathematical model, or perhaps into something less formal, that would have some predictive efficacy, or at least some distinctive explanatory efficacy?