This picture was taken in low light, and thus with a long exposure; the cat is a bit blurred because it was in motion, eating.

Unfortunately, there's nothing truly extraordinary about this story. Policies driven by common intutions — especially those entangled with a morality of the collective — often have very different effects from those expected, sometimes opposite effects. And people actively resist any scientific argument that runs counter to those intutions. In the cases of imposition and of sacrifice for an ostensible collective good, the underlying theory seems to be that it's more important to inculcate an acceptance of imposition and a habit of sacrifice than it is otherwise to effect beneficial policy.

The vendor from whom I originally ordered a Habitrail Mini and some accessories has failed to deliver.

I'd placed an order on 08 October with Fresh Marine, I was provided with a URL for checking on the status of my order. When, after ten days, the Mini and accessories had not arrived, I went to the page and discovered that the order status was simply blank, so I sent an e.mail query. To-day I received e.mail stating

Unfortuantely your order is cancelled as we do not have an eta when hagen will have the items.

All-in-all, this is markèdly poor performance from Fresh Marine. The order status page could have reported that they were waiting on word from Hagen, were that the case. It appears that Fresh Marine were completely inert until my query.

I have found another vendor, Critter-Cages, offering the same products, and at lower prices. And, fortunately, I do have the Crittertrail Mini Two, and I even recently acquired Expansion Kit 3; so there will be much for the mouse when I get one, even if I don't have a Habitrail.

For what it's worth, my orders from Better Homes & Gardens (Crittertrail Mini Two), UPCO (water bottles), and PetCo (expansion kit) have all gone well.

I notice that a number of people have found their ways to this 'blog because they've installed OpenOffice under RHEL, but OpenOffice doesn't seem to launch.

This is probably an SELinux issue. If so, then it should be resolved either if one goes to the directory containing libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1 and (as root) runs

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1

to get SELinux to accept the interface, or if one up-dates to OpenOffice 3.0.0.

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

Here's my suggested procedure for installing OpenOffice 3.0.x under RHEL 5.x:

1. If you don't have a JRE installed, then install one. OpenOffice 3.0.0 is being distributed with JRE 1.6.0 update 7; Sun is already at update 10. (I suggest that one use jdk-6u10-linux-xxx-rpm.bin, rather than jre-6u10-linux-xxx.bin.) The remainder of these instructions assume that one has a JRE installed.

2. Remove any earlier installation of OpenOffice. As root, enter these two commands:
   

   rpm -qa | grep openoffice | xargs rpm -e --nodeps
rpm -qa | grep ooobasis | xargs rpm -e --nodeps

3. Unpack OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz (or the version appropriate to a devil-language, if you use one of those) to your filespace.

4. Go into resulting OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.xxxx/RPMS/ (or to the OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_xx-xx.xxxx/RPMS/ corresponding to your devil-tongue).

5. As root, run

   find . -maxdepth 1 -name "o*.rpm" | xargs rpm -U

6. As root, run

   rpm -U desktop-integration/openoffice.org*-redhat-menus-*.noarch.rpm

   (NB: You will need to log-out and back-in for the Applications menu to be up-dated and list the OpenOffice components.)

7. As root, run

   rpm -U userland/*.rpm

8. Tell OpenOffice which JRE to use:

   • Launch OpenOffice:

     /usr/bin/openoffice.org3

     (It will not be listed on the applications menu unless you have logged-out and back-in.)
   • Select

     Tools | Options… | OpenOffice.org | Java | Use a Java runtime environment

   • Choose one of the environments that is then listed.
   • Click the OK button.
   • Shut-down OpenOffice. (The change will be in effect upon next launch.)

There do not appear to be any issues with SELinux this time. I didn't have to use chcon on anything to get OpenOffice working.

NB: This post was edited on 2009:09/13, to improve the procedure, though most readers should not be installing version 3.0.x, as version 3.1.1 is available.

I have twice now eaten at Ramesses, a new restaurant for Mediterranean cuisine in Hillcrest. Both times, the food was excellent. To-day, the sandwich that I had there was so good that I would have immediately ordered a second one were it not for the fact that I'd like to lose a few pounds. (Instead, I made a plan to go back to-morrow.)

Ramesses is at 3882 4th Avenue, in a small shopping center in the south-west orthant of the intersection with University Avenue.

Up-Date (20 October): Unfortunately, they stop serving sandwiches at 16:00, and I didn't get there until after 18:00. I ordered the same thing that I'd had on my first visit. This time, the quality was even higher, and the portion was notably more generous.

The American Apparel site in Hillcrest is safe from terrorists and from fence-jumping illegal aliens.

While searching for editions of She by H. Rider Haggard, I discovered that the Non-Classics division of Penguin Books has begun publishing a line of Red Classics. One might argue that the Red Classics are not classics, or that the Non-Classics division publishes classics after all; but, really, something here ought to give way.

While I was doing some research to-day, I ran across yet another article that classified John Maynard Keynes as a subjectivist when it came to probability theory. I feel moved to explain why this is incorrect.

First, let me explain something about the general issue. There is an outstanding question about just what a probability is. One could take many courses about probability without ever being alerted to the question. The textbook and lecturer might not ever touch on that basic question, or might present a definition of probability as if it is universally accepted by all Wise People. But Wise People are not in agreement. When it comes to answers to the basic question, the two dominant answers are very different one from another.

One answer is provided by the frequentists, who say that a probability is some sort of frequency of occurrence. They don't agree amongst themselves as to the precise answer, but the gist of their answers is that if a process is repeated m times, where m is satisfactorily large, and results in some particular outcome n of those times, then the probability of that outcome is n/m.

One problem with this notion of probability is that it is only useful in cases where we are concerned with a sufficiently large sample. If one is concerned only with a single instance, then there is actually no logic to get us from a mere probability to a course of action. A single patient won't have average mortality; she will either live or die.

Another answer is provided by the subjectivists, who assert that a probability is a degree of belief, formed subject to certain rationality constraints. These constraints can be largely motivated in terms of avoiding probability assignments under which believers would accept gambles that they are sure to lose. The rationality constraints themselves are ostensibly objective — rules that should hold for everyone; amongst other things, these rules are to constrain the evolution of one's degrees of belief, as new information is introduced. The subjectivism is present in that one supposedly gets to start with any degrees of belief that don't violate these rules.

One immediate consequence of this notion of probability is that probabilities become largely unarguable. There is no real contradiction in Tim claiming that there is an 80% chance of rain and Bob claiming that there is a 20% chance; each is describing his respective belief per se. (The rationality constraints force a convergence of belief at the limit, but that could take forever.)

The subjectivist notion is often defined in terms such as degree of rational belief or rational degree of belief; it's best to be wary of such terms. The rationality constraints themselves only preclude certain sorts of irrationality; aspects of the degrees of belief permitted are at best not irrational. And if we are not somehow required to assign some quantity to that belief, then the assignment violates Ockham's Razor.

Now, Keynes's position is that we can make meaningful statements about the plausibility of uncertain outcomes for which frequencies are unknown or otherwise inapplicable. And he certainly wants to impose rationality constraints much like those of the subjectivists. But he sees no requirement that one always assign a quantity to belief. Indeed, he sees no reason to treat the set of possible outcomes as even necessarily totally ordered; that is to say that he holds that, when asked to compare the likelihood of two events, sometimes one can only shrug, rather than making claims that one event is more likely or that the two are equally likely.

Under Keynes's theory, a rational person says no more about the probability of an event than the application of objective rules to the information set yields, and any other rational person with the same information set would reach exactly the same conclusions about probabilities (except, perhaps, where one person halted consideration where the other continued). Keynes rejects the very thing that is subjective in the subjectivist framework.

One of the things that I did yester-day was watch An Affair to Remember (1957).

It had been many years since I saw that film, but I'd taken note of one really powerful moment in it, when things click in Niccolo's mind. The dialolgue and Grant's performance at that point are perfectly stated, and that moment makes the whole film work. (There are other moments that shouldn't even have been filmed, let alone made it past the editing process.)

I'd mentioned that moment to the Woman of Interest, who was sufficiently intrigued to rent and watch the film for herself, and seems to have responded to it similarly. Our conversation about it, and later about the unfortunate Indiscreet (1958) put me in mind to seek a copy of Affair when I was in the video section of Fry's Electronics on Saturday.

Out of curiosity, I have ordered a copy of Love Affair (1939).