Sound and Fury

In my LaTeX files, I leave myself notes about bits I still need to write. Sometimes they are fairly mundane: “Weyl/Klein on locally Euclidean.” But ocasionally I leave myself a note that makes me laugh when I go back to find out what I still need to do. The note in question was “Giaquinto pacman triangle.” For a good few minutes this meant as little to me as it probably does to you now. I flicked through the book in question (Marcus Giaquinto’s Visual thinking in mathematics) and found what I was talking about. They do indeed look like Pacmans (Pacmen?)…

Pacmen eating an invisible triangle

Just below this is another note which just says “triangles vs space… asteroids?” I still haven’t worked out what I meant by that one. Perhaps I was thinking of having my whole essay structure based around different classic arcade games. It must have been a long day…

I like fruit yoghurts. But I object to buying “healthy option” type foods, because they are preying on this culture of health as lifestyle and it’s all wrapped up with fad-diets and trendy ways to exercise. But I can’t find yoghurts that aren’t promoting themselves as “low fat” or as being packed with “good bacteria” or some such nonsense. It’s all Ski and Activia… Whether or not those claims are true, I object to buying them on principle. I don’t care about low fat, good bacteria or anything like that. I want my yoghurt to taste of fruit and be a yoghurty consistency. Or maybe they should have little bits of cherry or peach or whatever in. I don’t like to think I am paying more for someone to remove fat from my snack, or pump my summer fruits dessert full of “good” bacteria. My only option is to go for the organic fairtrade tree-hugging smiley faces on the packet ones. And they are significantly more expensive. I don’t actually have anything against organic food or the fairtrade movement, it’s just that those labels come at a premium I don’t want to pay. I actually went for some Activia strawberry ones today, because I was feeling cheap and my principles were at low ebb. Also, I bought “be good to yourself” tuna mayonaise sandwish filler because I couldn’t find Sainsbury’s “look out it’s bad for you” range of products anywhere.

I have been ranting a lot recently. I promise I shall post something goodnatured and happy-go-lucky in the next few days…

I thought I’d complain some more, because I’m annoyed by more than just shoes and grammar.

• Hands-free phone headsets (unless you’re in a car, in which case it’s annoying if you’re not using one, not to mention illegal). It just bothers me seeing people walking round talking to themselves. I am particularly annoyed by those bluetooth ones that you stick over your ear. They’re like a little futuristic sign saying “I’m a cock.” Also, if you are wearing one of them and not on the phone, you are doubly cock-ish.
• Top Gear using DJ Shadow and the Fight Club soundtrack as background music. Stop comandeering good if fairly obscure music snippets for your televisual midlife crisis!
• George Lamb. Go away silly man. I have to actually get out of bed to turn off my radio when Shaun Keaveny’s show finishes at 10. So I suppose that’s a good thing. I don’t even know where to begin with Monsieur Lamb. Everything about his show irritates me.
• If I can see your boxers, you are a twat.
• The longer it takes to you to order a coffee the more of a twat you are. “Double Espresso” fine. (Incidentally, if you say “expresso” I don’t like you.) “Large Filter Coffee” no problem. “Latte” Alright. “Decaf Semi-Skimmed Goat’s Milk Mocha-choco-frappe-twatto-soya-latte” You are a twat.
• Those wheely suitcases. But only small ones. I have a big wheely-bag and it is great for carrying lots of stuff around (unless stairs are involved). My issue is with the really small ones, like laptop case sized. PICK THE DAMN THING UP YOU LAZY MAGGOT. If the handle you hold the bag by when wheeling it is longer than the bag is tall, you are a lazy bastard. Also, when you change direction, the people directly behind you to the side are likely to be tripped up by your cretin-bag. And of course, because you’re wheeling a bag around, you are likely to be moving slower than I am. Which is also annoying. Those wheely bags are designed to make it easier to carry around large heavy bags. The little ones can’t possibly be carrying enough that you couldn’t pick it up and carry it, or at least get a shoulder strap. Trailing your laptop or whatever behind you like that is just obnoxious. I hope someone steals your computer and uses your credit cards and sends rude emails to your family with it.

And in other news, I was made aware of another stupid holiday. I like this one. Pretend to be a Time Traveller day.

Happy Pi approximation day! It’s 22/7, geddit? Here is some history of pi.

On an unrelated note, here are some types of footwear that annoy me more than footwear should.

• Crocs. Who cares if they’ve been designed to be 62.6% better than standing barefoot? They look really really silly.
  

  Crocs annoy me

• Sandals with socks. Why would you do this? What goes through your mind? “Hmm, it’s warm enough for sandals today… But I’ll put some socks on in case my feet get cold.”
  

  Sad sad sad.

• Converse. I don’t really know why this one annoys me so much. But it does.
  

  Who'd have thought shoes could annoy me so much

• Goth boots.  I suppose this just kind of follows from the fact I just don’t really “get” the whole goth thing. But I especially don’t understand how wearing huge boots with comically big heels fits with the whole look. What’s next? Punks on stilts?
  

  Platform shoes for the terminally moody

Right, that’s about it as far as varieties of footwear I dislike goes.

I didn’t know google had a “blog search” thing. So I tried it out. I searched for “philosophy of science” (obviously) One of the results was about experimental philosophy. I read it and decided I don’t like “X-Phi” (which is the annoying name that these people have chosen to give to their approach). Bristol university has its own x-phi page here. I mention this out of some kind of misplaced loyalty, not out of any approval for such an endeavour.

Here is some experimental philosophy in action. And here is an NYTimes article about it. It contains the following passage which I think is marvelous:

Colleagues in biology have P.C.R. machines to run and microscope slides to dye; political scientists have demographic trends to crunch; psychologists have their rats and mazes. We philosophers wave them on with kindly looks. We know the experimental sciences are terribly important, but the role we prefer is that of the Catholic priest presiding at a wedding, confident that his support for the practice carries all the more weight for being entirely theoretical.

I don’t take issue with what these people are doing. I just wonder whether the label philosophy really applies… I mean what makes this new experimental philosophy philosophy, rather than, say anthropology or psychology or political science? Obviously philosophers should take empirical findings into consideration. Kant’s view that Euclidean geometry is necessarily the only possible geometry, and therefore necessarily the geometry of the world is cleary untenable in our post-elliptic geometry, post-Minkowski spacetime world. Any number of examples could be given here. But philosophy is still somehow separated off from empirical science. Of course you could just criticise me for having an old-fashioned view of the nature of philosophy. Armchair theorising is out of favour.

OK, here is the problem; what can the results of these polls tell us? If they tell us that some notion, X, is actually pretty much universal, then  philosophers are allowed to say things like “it is clear that X” or ” most people would agree that X.” But if everyone agrees with X, it’s already clear that we’re allowed to assert it. No experiment is needed to demonstrate that everyone thinks X is true. Everybody already knows that: X is pretty damn obvious, right? If the poll gives more ambiguous results, it is unlikely that the notion under scrutiny is the kind of thing philosophers would go about asserting without justification. So this Experimental Philosophy might take its questions from philosophical literature, but its methods don’t seem to fit with philosophical practice.

I’m stressing the philosophical part. Obviously it is interesting to see what people think about the truth value of sentences like “the king of France is bald” or “the king of France is not on a state visit to Prussia” but is it really philosophy to go around asking people?

Here are some grammatical pet peeves of mine. Anyone who makes these kinds of mistakes, I automatically judge to be inferior.

• then/than
• your/you’re
• alot
• less/fewer
• “would of” and variations of it (could of, should of etc)
• there/they’re/their

I’m not a “grammar nazi” or anything. I rarely mention peoples mistakes to them. But is it so hard to learn the difference between mass nouns and count nouns? It’s such a minor thing to learn to get these words right. I mean, these are things people always get wrong. There is no reason not to get it right… Just to show how tolerant and loving I am, here are some things that don’t bother me in the slightest

• split infinitves
• greengrocer’s apostrophes
• ending sentences with prepositions
• starting sentences with “and” or “but” etc
• missing capital letters
• spelling mistakes in general, unless they interfere with my understanding of the sentence

So really, I’m a pretty liberal guy and we would probably get along great. But don’t you ever forget that “a lot” is two words, or I shall hunt you down and kill you in your sleep.

I thought this was too funny not to mention.

I haven’t done a whole lot today. I spent a good long while just sitting here going “Yes, but what is a structure?” Which probably suggests I don’t quite have what it takes to be a structural realist. Shame.

I also spent rather too long trying to get LaTeX to play nicely with Kig. Now, kig can export pictures you have drawn as TeX files. But when you try and \include{thefile} in another file it messes up. So you can also export kig constructions as SVG files, which vector graphics software such as inkscape can transform into EPS, which is what should work with LaTeX. I haven’t actually tried this circuitous route to LaTeX picture perfection, because I don’t have any vector graphics software installed and I forgot to save my kig file of the nine point circle.

I have actually written a little bit today, and planned the next few weeks’ work. So it hasn’t been a totally wasted day.

I was thinking a bit more about my complaint about the kilo. I was wondering whether you could define a kilo in terms of the weight of a certain volume of a pure liquid, say water or mercury. But would that depend on the temperature and pressure? I don’t know. Or by making use of Einstein’s useful little mass/energy equivalence define a kilo as a certain amount of energy? A certain number of electron volts or some such…

Incidentally, I have started assigning tags as well as categories to my posts. This means that going through my old posts and tagging them could well become my displacement activity of choice…

Since Bristol University philosophy department lists, as one of its principal research areas, the philosophy of science, you would expect the unviersity to have access to the journal entitled “Philosophy of Science.” Not so. I have spent some time trying to get at two articles from that journal with no luck. They are listed on Jstor, but the actual article isn’t on there and it directs me back to the Chicago Journals website, which asks me to log on. All in all rather frustrating. In desperation I just tried searching Google for “Psillos structure” and lo! I was directed to the PhilSci Archive which contained a version of the paper I wanted. In fact, the other article I wanted was also available through that archive. So God bless you Pittsburgh! I can’t believe I haven’t come across this resource before. The papers I got were from conference proceedings, but there are also some articles that are forthcoming in various journals. It would be nice to see the PhilSci archive grow into a repository of preprints, much like arXiv has for physics papers.

Rather than actually working on the fundamentals of my dissertation, I have been borrowing books and downloading papers tangentially related to my topic. I have a core idea for my dissertation, and then many sattelite projects. Hopefully I can somehow glue it all into a cohesive whole. More for my benefit than anyone else’s I shall summarise the myriad directions my current project is taking. The main nexus of the dissertation is about geometry and structuralism. So a detailed look at Shapiro’s and Resnik’s accounts of ontology and epistemology in the context of geometry. Often when they are discussing the struturalist’s stock example “the natural number structure” they say things which are supposed to be true of all mathematical structures. In the case of geometry, it isn’t apparent that this is as straightforward as they imagine. My main aim is to look at whether structural interpretations of geometry will work. Some of the intellectual meanderings that I might also write about are:

• The history of geometry, particularly 19th century. Interpreted as a move toward structuralism? (Shapiro argues as much in his 1997 book)
• Bourbaki-type set theoretic structure and Klein’s Erlangen Programme as kinds of structuralism
• Genetic Epistemology. Can how we learn geometry be interpreted structurally? (Piaget wrote a book on the child’s conception of geometry which would be my main source for this.)
• Structural realism about spacetime. How this squares with structuralism about mathematical/axiomatic geometry.
• Shapiro talks of “linguistic resources” limiting what we can do. In the case of geometry, it might be better to discuss “conceptual or imaginative resources” instead.
• Our limits as a benefit. Why it is good for structuralism that we aren’t aware that any circle isn’t perfect and that any line we draw actually has a thickness. These defects in our perception make pattern recognition and abstraction easier.

So that should keep me going. All I need to do now is read all this stuff and then write loads. Pff. Easy.

All SI prefixes that are positive powers of 10^3 end in an “a” except “kilo-” I propose we change it to “kila-” because it won’t really make a difference to how people talk; a kilagram and a kilogram would be pronounced similarly by most people. What about people talking about “a kilo of rice” or whatever? Well, “kilo” can be adopted as a non-SI measure of weight much like “pound” or “ounce.”

Similarly, all SI prefixes that are positive powers of 10^-3 (or negative powers of 10^3) end in an “o” except “milli-” We should change that to “millo-” again with little or no need to alter how we talk.

Surely the Système International d’Unités is all about consistency. This is a a huge oversight on their part. Also, having a kilo, or kilagram, in Paris which is what we use to define what a kg is is quite unsatisfactory. If you want to know how long a second is, you look it up on wikipedia:

the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

You can get an atom of caesium 133 and do it yourself. With that measurement in place you can find out how long a metre is:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ¹⁄_299,792,458 of a second. It follows that the speed of light in vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second.

You can procure a light source and a vacuum and find out how big a metre is.

But the kilagram, not so. If you want to know how big a kilo is, you have to go to Paris and weigh something against the International Prototype Kilogram. And while we’re at it, why does the SI unit have a prefix. That’s annoying too! I’m glad there are at least proposed future definitions. I don’t know if I’ve got my physics all backwards here, but here is perhaps another approach: Define a kilagram to be the mass a proton has when accelerated to speed X. Since distance and time are both well defined without recourse to an artefact like the IPK, this would put the kilo on the same level as them. This is an impractical definition, but no more impractical than counting osscilations in a caesium atom to measure a second or the proposed “counting atoms of carbon” approach to defining the kilagram.

Here’s a good quiz question: what do Liberia, Myanmar and the US have in common? They are the only 3 countries that have not adopted SI units as their primary method of measurement.

How cool is it that I can copy/paste text from wikipedia into wordpress and all the links automagically still work. That is really neat. Is that wordpress’ doing? Or wikipedia’s? Or firefox’s? Or Ubuntu’s? Whoever is responsible, you are now my heroes!

So apparently, science and maths exams are harder than arts subjects. Someone has done some research into differences between exam grades in science and arts subjects and found that “There were “substantial differences in the average grades achieved by the same or comparable candidates”.” This is really silly research. First, the average mark isn’t a very good indicator of the difficulty of the exam. Obviously, the difficulty of the exam contributes to the grades achieved, but the quality of teaching and probably several other factors also have an important effect. Secondly, I bet they found that the standard deviation in science subjects was much bigger too. It’s possible to do exceptionally well on more objective topics like chemistry and also exceptionally poorly. In, say, English the difference between a very good paper’s mark and a rather poor exam script will probably be smaller. And is a direct comparison of the type being made here even legitimate? “Easier” and “harder” are surely subjective and dependent on the individual pupils. Some people (myself included) found maths and science subjects at school to be fairly easy but struggled more with “soft” arts subjects. And the flipside is also true, some people who are gifted linguists for example might struggle with maths. So science and maths exams are harder for whom? I don’t think that comparing average grades across subjects and across pupils gives you any kind of meaningful conclusions.

The lower grades in science subjects is at least in part due to the dearth of properly qualified science teachers. As I said above, the quality of a teacher has a big impact on how well the students do in exams. And then there’s all the noise about dumbing down of exams; “maths exams are too easy” and so on. So what should we believe? Those who set the syllabus have the unenviable task of pushing the gifted kids, without leaving those who are struggling behind. But I think they should ignore all this noise in newspapers demanding easier/harder exams.