I never actually noticed it before, but the gas station where I buy sodas every morning has a sign out front showing the current jackpots for Powerball and Mega Millions.
Both of the jackpots were three digits this morning (nine digits if you add six zeros for the millions) — one a little more than 200 and one a little less. Maybe that’s why I noticed them today, because there were so many digits. Or maybe it’s my destiny to win the lottery and the hand of fate turned my eyeballs to the jackpots.
“I noticed the numbers out front,” I said to the clerk. “Give me a ticket for Powerball and Mega Millions.”
“That’s a lot of millions,” he said.
“It sure is. I’ll still stop by in the morning for sodas though.”
The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled — the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor — refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired. . . .
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Most days I park on Level 5 of the office parking structure because that’s where the open spaces are at the time I arrive.1
This morning I got a spot on Level 1! A guy was pulling out just as I was pulling in and I got the spot. 🙂
Unfortunately, when I went out for lunch, I walked up four levels out of habit and couldn’t find my car. 🙁
1There are actually a lot of open spaces on lower levels but they’re “reserved” for people who aren’t there, which is rubbish. If you’re really that important, you should be the first person in every morning and you can have any parking space you want.
What does it mean to say that you “know” something is true?
According to traditional philosophical thinking, you can be said to know that some proposition P is true if and only if:
P is true.
You believe that P is true.
You are justified in believing that P is true.
These three conditions jointly form the concept of justified true belief (JTB).
As an example, let’s examine my claim that I know Paris is the capital of France. Unless an edict to the contrary has come down in the last few minutes, Paris is the capital of France, I believe that Paris is the capital of France, and I’m justified in believing that based on available evidence. So according to the concept of justified true belief, I know that Paris is the capital of France.
Gettier Problems
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say I wake up in the morning, look at the clock (let’s make it an old-fashioned analog clock), and it shows the time as 7:30. And let’s say that the time is in fact 7:30, but that, unknown to me, the clock has stopped. Do I “know” that the time is 7:30? My belief that the time is 7:30 is correct, but is it knowledge — or is it more of a lucky guess?
Another thought experiment: Given the following scenario, do I “know” that my wife is in the house? I come home from work and see my wife in the kitchen. As it happens though, what I see in the kitchen is actually a perfectly rendered hologram. My wife is in the house though, but she’s upstairs where I can’t see her. Again, the three JTB conditions are true, but my justification for belief has nothing to do with the truth of the matter.
These types of thought experiments are called Gettier problems, named for Edmund Gettier, who in 1963 published a paper called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”
Photogravure of Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In democratic societies, there exists an urge to do something even when the goal is not precise, a sort of permanent fever that turns to innovations (which) are always costly.
This picture was taken just after I said to Mark Twain, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
And Twain said, “That’s a good one! I’ve got to write that down!”
Actually, the Twain statue is just inside the main entrance of Doe Library at UC Berkeley. I asked the nerdy-looking Asian girl at the front desk, “Who’s the guy on the bench?” She stared at me for a second. “Kidding,” I said.
“At first, I thought it was Albert Einstein,” she said, “so it doesn’t surprise me when people don’t know.”
From Salon, before the bombers were identified, captured and/or killed:
Shame on everyone who assumed that the bombers were Muslims from a foreign land! Wait — what? They were Muslims from a foreign land? OK, never mind.
Calling out “far-right extremists” for “demonizing bogeymen” is either hilariously ironic or depressingly symptomatic of American decline. Since Salon is not known for its satire, I have to go with the latter.
Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They’re Better — PBS NewsHour
An academic says that Silicon Valley is “not a meritocracy.”
He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce.
The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X.
In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do.
Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to see them sometimes?
The fact that more men than women are founding startups is not evidence that women are being discriminated against. The simplest explanation is that women just don’t want to do it as much as men do.
These people who see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
There’s an unwritten rule in the software business that any integration between two systems must be described as “seamless,” the result being that the word no longer has any meaning.
My favorite seamless integration storyline took place years ago when IBM had a joint marketing pact with Vignette, and offered “seamless integration” between the WebSphere application server and the Vignette content management system. In fact, the two systems weren’t integrated at all by any definition of the word “integrated” that I know about. We had to write our own interfaces to move data between them.
The funny thing is, that is seamless integration if you think about it, in that there’s no seam between two things that are not connected at all.
For example, my shirt neatly integrates sleeves, cuffs, pocket, collar . . . but not seamlessly. There are seams all over the place. Whereas the shirt is seamlessly integrated with my pants. I can stuff the shirt in there and if I don’t move around too vigorously, it will stay there and not come out.
I was checking out at Staples with my new purchase of a spiral notebook. The checker scanned the barcode and I started to swipe my credit card.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t swipe it yet.” Time passed.
“Okay, go ahead.”
After I swiped the card, she said, “Can you read me the four-digit security code on the front of the card.”
I read it to her. More time passed. “Can I see the card please?” she said.
“I thought this was supposed to be easy.”
“It is easy.”
“Okay, sorry.”
Along with my Staples receipt, I was given a coupon for 40 percent off a different, more expensive brand of notebook. I had actually looked at the other brand of notebook when I was in the store, but didn’t think it was worth the extra cost. If I’d had the coupon at the time, I might have used it to buy the more expensive brand.
The coupon expires in three weeks. I’m not going to need another notebook in the next three weeks. What’s the use of giving me a coupon for a notebook when I just bought a notebook?
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. — I Corinthians 13:11
