Is it Friday yet ?

[venta]

Oh look, it's Elizabeth trying to sneak enormous philosophical issues into a scratty little cut...

I'm currently reading Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. Which has so far been interesting, although it has consistently unsettled me with its strange word-order within sentences. Owing to my unsociable habit of reading while eating, it's also rather more splattered with miso soup than any book on Scottish history should rightfully be.

However, in talking about the behaviour of the Scottish nobility around the time Mary returned to Scotland, it says:

"there is a basic code of human decency, which should not be violated even in times of insecurity" (quote approximate, as I don't have the book with me).

Which struck me as rather a sweeping assumption to just drop into the middle of a pargraph. I'm not even sure I agree with it. I'm wondering if it's the hypothetical should of someone who knows it isn't them whose going to be suffering the insecurity...

Discuss :)

Today's slightly less in-depth question: why, when placing multi-volume books on shelves, do the volumes always seem to go right to left ? It seems an odd convention, in view of the left-to-right nature of our society. I'm hoping addedentry might know the answer to this one.

I'm tired. My neck hurts.

On the plus side, a colleague brought me a CD this morning of what he describes as "home-brew chilled dance/ambient with celtic crossovery things going on" which he made, as is traditional, in his bedroom.

I'm quite liking it so far.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

And a moral code which doesn't make demands of you is probably not worth following.

Do you mean by this that if your code doesn't make demands of you, then it's not worth calling it a moral code, or that for a moral code to be worthwhile it must make demands on you?

(Or neither...)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Yes.

You're a mathematician, so you'd be happy with the idea of the 'null code'. I suspect much of the interest and much of the anger caused in discussing morality comes from attempts to be both complete and consistent...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Is morality a first order logic with arithmetic?

[metame.livejournal.com]

I got to do Maths and Philosophy.

My trained opinion is... Probably. Or 'almost always', to put it more technically.

[triskellian]

'Almost always' is a technical term? Really? Hooray!

almost always

[metame.livejournal.com]

translates as "except for a finite number of cases" when looking at a continuous sample.

Re: almost always

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

No it doesn't.

Or rather, if by "almost always" you mean the same thing as is technically called "almost everywhere", it means everywhere except on a set of zero measure. There do exist infinite sets of zero measure.

So, for example, "everywhere except at a countable infinity of points" is "almost everywhere". "Almost always" is presumably the same thing in the time domain :-)

Re: almost always

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

And, if you really want to know, a set X is of zero measure if and only if there exists a series S(0), S(1), S(2) ... of countable sets of open intervals such that the union of each S(n) covers X, and the sum of the lengths of the intervals in S(n) tends to zero as n tends to infinity.

An open interval, (a,b), is the set of real numbers x such that a < x < b. Its length is defined to be b-a.

The definition can be extended into multiple dimensions by using open circles/spheres/etc instead of intervals, and area/volume/etc instead of length.

Mmm, Lebesgue integration. An entire finals paper's worth of money for old rope :-)

Re: almost always

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Oops, no, the standard approach is probably to use rectangles/cuboids/etc, rather than circles/spheres.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

'Almost everywhere'... Lebesgue measure... Make it stop!