waste

Applying one's knowledge

An interpreter for everyone's favorite obfuscated functional programming language, Unlambda. The interpreter is actually mildly useless in several respects: (a) building the tree on large Unlambda programs takes a surprisingly long time; (b) since Python doesn't do tail recursion, you have the option of having your program hit the recursion limit if it's too low, or segfaulting if it's too high (there can be a "just right", for instance for this quine, but that's really just luck); (c) it's an Unlambda interpreter, so how useful could it be?

But it is admirably short, and was written in an admirably short amount of time.

This ain't no Leibniz shit

This and this (follow the embedded SN-monad link) are the two most comprehensible descriptions of monads I've yet read, and I think part of the reason for that is that, since they're both in Scheme, you avoid Haskell's confusing (to the uninitiated) type-related syntax—also the first one explicitly notes that he has, mercifully, omitted the math.

Moderately relatedly I had the following thought.  Suppose you have a recursively defined function, kind of like the fibonacci series, thus: f(0) = 1, f(1) = 1, f(n) = f(n-1) + 2*f(n-2). Then you could describe the recurrence relation postfixwise thus: n 1 - f 2 n 2 - f * + [it just occurred to me the way this is written presupposes that with binary operations first you pop the right operand and then the left operand, and I have no idea if that's the way it's usually done, but oh well].  Then it seems that there's a more or less straightforward way to read a continuation-passing style version of the computation from the postfix description, if you imagine that the syntax is arg1 arg2 … argn op cont.  Go along, pushing the values until you reach an n-ary operation, pop n values, and instead of pushing the result, pass it to the continuation (obvs. values passed as arguments to continuations will have to count as being on the stack): then you get: n 1 - (\x -> x f (\x' -> n 2 - (\x'' -> x'' f (\x''' -> 2 x''' * (\x'''' -> x' x'''' + k))))).  Moving the functions to the front and replacing the '+' , '*', '-' with CPS analogues kp, kt, km (for plus, times, minus) gets you something that actually works:

f 0 k = k 1
f 1 k = k 1
f n k = km n 1 (\nm1 -> f nm1 (\fn1 -> km n 2 (\nm2 -> f nm2 (\fn2 -> kt 2 fn2 (\fn22 -> kp fn1 fn22 k)))))

This occurred to me because you always see in talk about CPS the remark that it turns "expressions "inside-out" because the innermost parts of the expression must be evaluated first" (presumably the article means written first, because of course the innermost parts have to be evaluated first)—but that's also the case with postfix notation. This leads me to conjecture that Forth programmers and HP calculator users find CPS natural.

Shore Leave

One of the all-time great guitar solos, IMO.

Maybe Stanford has something to say for itself after all

I just saw a throat-singing unicyclist.

Life is wasted on the living

In a feat of improbable organization surpassed only by my still having notes from the classes I took from László Babai (Discrete Math, Algorithms & Combinatorics—I may have learned more in these two classes than in any other I took as an undergrad—now I can't tell if a mere three years after I took the former it's gotten significantly harder or I've forgotten not just how to do some classes of problems, and the meanings of some terms, but also that I ever knew them—a mixture of both, probably), I still have the syllabus from a class I didn't take, as well as some handouts from the first meeting: The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, taught by Jim Conant and Michael Kremer.  It is one thorough syllabus, and one of the handouts is also a doozy.

Now, of course, I consider this an incredible missed opportunity, but at the time I wasn't able to summon up much excitement.  Hélas.

Going for the limit

Boy, do I hate these clocks!  The fine people at Movado know well that you don't need to have numbers on the face as long as you've got hands, so the idea that this clock expresses some sort of saucy insouciance* regarding the keeping track of time is somewhat absurd.  The only thing the numbers on the bottom express is the desire of the possessor of the clock to be seen as someone who doesn't care about his worldly obligations and therefore need not be in thrall to the passage of time—but who really is, and wants to be able to track the movement of the hands across the face of the clock.

Since it's the hands, and not the numbers, that enable one to tell time, I propose an alternative clock. It would have numbers, since it must be apparent what is being denied.  And would be round, of course.  But it would have no hands, no hands at all.

We can, and should, take this further. The clock is to have no hands, but it should have three cylinders at the center, batteries at the back, and a softly whirring motor in between, causing one of the cylinders to rotate a full revolution in 24 hours, one in one hour, and one in one-sixtieth of an hour.  It would be as close as possible to being a wall clock, and lack only the one feature that would actually make it possible to tell time with it.  Indeed, it would just be tacky—pointless, even—without the battery, motor, and rotations.

*aka "insauciance".

The truth in push-polling

I'm reading Raz' The Truth in Particularism—I find the sections on Dancy kind of unconvincing.  (There's one part that I really hope isn't just making the claim that if you think reasons are "generic features of action-types", then you will have problems with particularism, because—of course. And if you take a different view of reasons—or, for that matter, carve up action-types sufficiently finely—the point of that section against Dancy seems to vanish.) But here's a different part. One of Dancy's examples is this: if you have borrowed a book from a friend, and return it, your reason in doing so is that you borrowed it.  But that you borrowed it would not be a reason to return the book to your friend if you discovered that he had stolen it from the library, because in that case you should do something else.  (Return it to the library, I guess. We don't get that part.) So the very same consideration—that you had borrowed the book—is a reason for action in one case but not the other, according to Dancy. And indeed people will tend to cite just the fact that the book was borrowed as their reason for returning it in the normal case.  Raz observes that this doesn't necessarily touch on reasons at all, but just on someone's understanding of a reason; someone who just cites that the book was borrowed may simply incompletely understand the real reason for which he acts. And:

[T]ake the book loan example moentioned above. Most likely when asked people would say their reason for returning the book was that they borrowed it, or promised to return it. But if asked at the time would the fact that the person from whom it was borrowed had the right to possess it, that he did not steal it, etc. be relevant to their reason (i.e. was their reason that they borrowed from someone entitled to lend them the book), most people would say yes. Regarding those people the example fails. Their reason was not one which applies in cases of a borrower who stole the book.

And indeed the real reason (R) to return the book has the form r ∧¬(d₁ ∨ … ∨ d_n), where r is the seemingly main reason, that the book was borrowed, and each d is a defeater (that the book was stolen; that the book describes how to make bombs and you suspect your friend has a more than academic interest in the subject, etc). But even if that is the reason, you can't infer from the results of asking someone about to act "isn't your reason also this?" that it was or wasn't; the effect of asking a question like that is to make salient a possibility that may never have entered the person's mind—why should we not think that, rather than illuminating the reason on which the person was going to act all along, asking the question changes that reason?

I also wonder, to engage in a little slantwise ipsedixitry, if Raz would endorse a parallel to R in the case of justification for belief—that you're justified in believing something to the extent that you can eliminate every possible ground of doubt. Further: how can R serve either the guiding or the evaluative functions of reasons?  The odds that anyone will know that R obtains are very small; in fact, Raz acknowledges that there is reason to think that one could not know all the defeaters for an action.  And there seems to be no way to tell that someone acted for R, rather than for the extremely similar reason S—which isn't the reason to act, in this case—r ∧¬(d₁ ∨ … ∨ d_n-1), where d_n happens not to obtain in this case.  Why think that someone acted for R, but with a limited understanding that only grasped S, instead of thinking he acted for S, with the correct understanding that that was the reason?

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

Frankfurt, in On Caring, shortly after announcing that he isn't certain why volitional constraint "should be so precious to us", gives a description of just that (that features, obviously, in other essays and lectures of his), to wit:

Suppose a man tells a woman that his love for her is the only thing that makes his life worthwhile … The fact that loving her is so important to him will not strike her as implying that he does not actually love her at all or that his love for her is tainted by self-regarding concerns. The apparent conflic between selflessness and self-interest disappears once it is understood that what serves the self-interest of the lover is, precisely, his selflessness. The benefit of loving accrues to him only if he he is genuinely selfless. He fulfills his own need only because in loving he forgets himself.

(The same argument comes up practically identically phrased in The Reasons of Love, is alluded to in Autonomy, Necessity and Love, and is a case of the argument in On the Usefulness of Final Ends and maybe On the Necessity of Ideals.) There are supposed to be lots of good things about love on Frankfurt's account, but the principle service it renders those in its grip is that it settles questions of what to do.  Frankfurt will go so far as to say that the totality of what a person cares about, combined with the order of rank of those cares, answers for him the question of how to live—either because he thinks that the cares and their ordering suffice to guide action all the way down, or because he thinks that, should any gaps remain, there's no way to fill them anyway.  Caring, and loving specifically, are willing captivations (thus not enslavements, as to passions—and willing in the double sense of being endorsed and being internal to the will) that circumscribe the range of reasons one will be able to consider, and not able not to consider; they proscribe some, and prescribe other, actions, in a way internal to the process of any possible deliberation.  This comes about because the lover takes himself to be subordinated to his beloved (or its interests), and it is only because of this subordination, moreover, that loving is important to us for its own sake.

All of which makes it rather striking that, when Jonathan Lear wants, as so many do, to get Frankfurt to admit some carings/lovings shouldn't be considered authoritative for the agent, because they're immoral or even outright evil, he chooses (this is in his contribution to Contours of Agency) the example of a slave's love for his master.  But this—much more than Frankfurt's own favored example of a parent's love for h/h children—is the paradigm case of what Frankfurt describes, because it requires the minimum of creativity on the part of the agent. There is no ambiguity as to how to serve the interests of the beloved, when one is literally enthralled: you do what, when, and as you're told. This language of self-abnegation, of self-forgetfulness, captivation and subordination, it isn't just decorative.

Well I got this bassoon, and I learned how to make it talk

Words can have unexpectedly evocative powers, even when, as with "rue", the evocation is founded in a mistake; the same, evidently, applies to the names of things.  In particular, it turns out that Univers Zero's first album is not called 1313, the name by which everyone knows it and even the name under which it was first released on CD by Cuneiform Records.  (Unrelatedly: the original cover, and the cover of the rerelease on Cryonic, are both superior to the original Cuneiform rerelease (proof—and note the URL), as was the original cover of Heresie, the second album.) It was actually self-titled, with the serial number EF 1313 (it was mixed by Eric Faes, who's commemorated in the title of an improvisation on Art Zoyd's Phase IV).  The new Cuneiform reissue, with bonus tracks (a live performance of "La Faulx"), returns to the original album art and title, and, presumably out of sentiment, the original serial number (RUNE 1313, this time), even though it's actually the 271st release.

But it should have been called 1313, dammit! The name fits, not just because of the repeated "13"s, but because of the sound. Frank Zappa, as is well known, once said that

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball . . . I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.

1313 and Heresie have the medieval aroma too, even though of course things didn't sound that way.  Even the crumhorn, if Wikipedia is to be believed, was mostly used in the Renaissance. Consider, though, "Complainte", the last track from 1313 (dammit) and my favorite thing they've ever done.  Listen to that wheeze!  How, I dunno, dry (vibratoless?) (some of) the strings sound. Totally medieval. Naturally I assumed all along that the name referred to the year.

Now all my illusions have been taken from me and I face the day a broken-minded man, and live in a world of broken ideas.

What I see, when I think of Stanley Cavell

This guy right here.