Zoe ,'The Train Job'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
ok, so I should tell you all that I got a report card? and his behavior was very good in all classes?
Yes. And you tell us when the teacher tells you not only how sweet he is, but how handsome, too. And you tell us when he does something desperately sweet and kind of sad that makes your heart burst. And you tell us when he's a giant goober, too. We can make a comprehensive list, you know. We're Buffistas.
What Cindy said.
(still laughing over "It looked like a tooth, so I ate it.")
msbelle, that's the most marvellous of news. New kids should totally love carrots. No question.
Happy birthday, flea!
(still laughing over "It looked like a tooth, so I ate it.")
Heh. I left out the More Exciting Stories, out of kindness (to msbelle, although we'd sure love to hear those, too).
What they all said, msbelle. I hope you keep telling us this much, or actually more.
I'm also internally squeeing since I might be in NYC for the court date.
Please help me because I'm stupid:
IN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement “all ravens are black”, you could derive the equivalent “all non-black objects are non-ravens”. Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage.
Uh, what's weird about that? I am either too stupid to get it, or too logical (quite possibly both--that's not an XOR there). I worry that if I don't get it, there's no point reading the rest of the article on negative databases. Or maybe I do get it, and wonder why people haven't been databasing negatively this whole time.
Best to keep me locked up on campus, because my first thought was "pq equivalent to ~p~q was hardly news in the 40s".
ok, so I should tell you all that I got a report card? and his behavior was very good in all classes?
Dude, seriously? Love.
No shit.
edit: That was to amych, but works well to Jesse
Okay, some googling reveals:
Hempel's confirmation paradox. According to Boolean logic, "all ravens are black" is equivalent to "all nonblack entities are nonravens". That is,schematically, "(raven --> black) --> (not-black --> not-raven)". This is a straightforward consequence of the standard definition of implication. But is it not the case that, if A and B are equivalent hypotheses, evidence in favor of B is evidence in favor of A. It follows that every observation of something which is not black and also not a raven is evidence that ravens are black. This is patently absurd.
Okay, that makes sense. In that it's not supposed to. Now I'm going to read the rest of the article guardedly.