A previous entry quotes a foot-note from Austrian Marginalism and Mathematical Economics by Karl Menger; that foot-note is tied to a sentence that I found particularly striking.

(musings on the relationship of mathematics to economics)

I am told that, when the concept of Christmas presents was first explained to me, and I was asked what I wanted, I requested a Tootsie Roll. I was not particularly demanding.

But, some years ago, I increased one of my demands, and not just where Christmas was concerned. Specifically, I wanted Tootsie Rolls without trans fat. But I would check the packages, and see trans fat listed (unless the Tootsie Roll in question were sufficiently small to squeak under the limit where the producer is allowed to claim none because the absolute amount is sufficiently small), so I would sadly put the packages back on the shelves or racks whence I'd found them. But I kept checking.

To-day, I checked again, quite expecting to see it listed again. But what I found this time was a 0, Trans Fat 0g for half-ounce Tootsie Rolls. (The Midgees still had trans fat.)

So, for the first time in years, I bought Tootsie Rolls; and, for the first time in years, I ate a Tootsie Roll.

Up-Date (2017:04/06): After consuming the Tootsie Rolls that I purchased on the day of this entry, I found no more Tootsie Rolls other than those with trans-fat, until 6 April 2017.

My most recently activated license for RHEL expired within the last two or three days. I may have an unused license stashed somewhere, but I've been planning to migrate to some other distribution of Linux when this one expired, because I've been so unhappy with Red Hat's past ill-preparedness for demands upon their servers at times of new releases.

Gaal once suggested that I try a flavor of Linux, such as Ubuntu, that used a more-advanced package-management system, but I've been fairly comfortable with the package-management system (as such) used by RHEL, and I'm inclined to stick closer to familiar forms. (It is not the quality of Red Hat's released code that has alienated me.) I think that my decision will be one between Fedora and Scientific Linux.

Fedora is the source from which RHEL is derived; Fedora is bleeding edge. Scientific Linux and CentOS aim to be very close derivatives of RHEL. Scientific Linux seems to be the most effectively maintained; unfortunately, when last I checked, the developers of CentOS hadn't got a stable clone of RHEL 6.0 out the door yet, and some of the changes from RHEL 5.6 to 6.0 have been meaningful improvements for me. (StarCom Linux, another close derivative of RHEL, lags even further behind.)

I downloaded a live CD of Fedora and a live DVD of Scientific Linux, so that I could try each. There seemed to be no non-trivial difference in either case from the look-and-feel of RHEL.

Anyway, the choice would seem to be one of functionality (Fedora) vs reliability (Scientific Linux).

[Up-Date (2011:05/23): On 11 May, I installed Fedora. I've had a few mishaps with fonts, and the system has been a little flakier, but so far the marginal benefits have seemed to out-weigh the marginal costs. I've also been giving some thought to installing a larger hard-drive, with one or more additional partitions, for other *nixes.]

As the stories being told by the White House and by the Pakistani state continue to evolve, to contradict each other, and to contradict themselves, and as the conspiracy theories breed and mutate like irradiated fruit flies, I cannot resist noting that Ossama bin Laden is an anagram for anomalies and B.S..

(Yes, I take advantage here of the ability to transliterate أسامة in more than one way.)

But to assume from the superiority of Galilean principles in the sciences of inanimate nature that they must provide the model for the sciences of animate behaviour is to make a speculative leap, not to enunciate a necessary conclusion.

Until recently, when the subject of cellular phone service arose, my report was always that, while I'd read and heard complaints about Sprint, I'd always been satisfied with their performance. That's no longer the case.

Last year, I added a number with a wireless modem and data plan to my account. That seemed to work pretty well until a couple of billing cycles ago, when I got hit with a huge bill. Since I'd not been monitoring my use, I assumed that I'd somehow gone way over my allotment, and paid the bill. Thereäfter, I started watching my use carefully. During the present cycle, Sprint claimed that, less than half-way through the cycle, I'd already used about 9/10 of my 5 GB allotment. I dropped-back to doing nothing with that connection but text email, and an aggregate of less than a few minutes on the WWWeb. But, a couple of days later in the early morning of 23 April, when I checked my ostensible use, by way of a café WiFi LAN, I found that Sprint was claiming that I'd gone well past the remainder of the allotment. I snapped-off an angry message to them.

Then, as I continued to watch, from the café WiFi LAN, with my modem powered-off and back at home, I watched the reported use climb by about an additional 100 MB! I snapped-off another angry message, and added that it was now plain that the whalloping overage charges of a few cycles ago should be refunded.

I also posted to a Sprint forum, and within a few days learned that essentially the same problem is being reported by other users. Sprint is claiming that powered-off and detached devices are gobbling-down capacity!

On the morning of 23 April, Sprint sent me e.mail

To ensure your needs are addressed, I have forwarded your request to our Account Services department. One of our specialists will contact you within 24-48 hours.

but the promised contact has not been attempted. My own plan had been to wait until to-day or to-morrow before using other channels or beginning the process of using other institutions.

FWVLIW, for the last few days, I've not been able to log-in to LiveJournal using my OpenID. I submitted a support request when it seemed that the problem would persist.

Investigation suggests that the very same problem has affected other OpenIDs at LJ, beginning at least as far back as earlier September, with access never restored once it is lost.

I am not sure, however, that this is actually a bug in the LJ code; I think that the problem might be in the interaction between my OpenID server code and the version of PHP installed by the hosting service that I use.

Until-and-unless the problem is fixed, I cannot read Friends-only entries there, nor comment where anonymous comments are disallowed.

Early on Saturday morning, I submitted my paper to yet another journal. Alas, on Sunday, I discovered a typographical error in one of the formulæ.

The formula should read But instead it read That's because I had been using a vertical bar for such that, intended to replace it with a backwards epsilon (to be consistent), but got lost or distracted and instead dropped-in a second disjunction sign.

Perhaps I should contact the editors, but this formula simply appears in an incidental remark. I can correct things if the paper is accepted, and I will just hope that no reviewer is so offended as to reject the paper based on the error.

[Up-Date (2011:05/23): I've been sufficiently perturbed about this matter that I decided that, were the paper not bounced-back to me before it had been in their hands for a month, I would send them a note, with a link to a correction. (The idea in waiting a month was to ration any pestering of the editors.) I did so a few minutes ago.]

I marvel at the suggested elasticity of demand here.