October 2015 archive
Stambovsky v. Ackley,
a case often taught in US law schools, dealt with the sale
of a house which the seller had previously described as haunted.
The buyer wanted his down payment back after finding out
about the house's reputation. He won on appeal.
The contract said the house was sold "as is"; the seller said
that clause should apply to more than just the house's physical condition.
The court's remarks on that point include my favorite line in
the ruling:
Finally, if the language of the contract is to be construed as broadly
as defendant urges to encompass the presence of poltergeists in the house,
it cannot be said that she has delivered the premises "vacant" in
accordance with her obligation under the provisions of the contract rider.
Back in 2010, air traffic controller Gregory Gish assigned five‑letter
names related to Donald Trump to a bunch of
waypoints
near the Florida coast.
At the time, some pilots were offended enough that they
refused to fly departure routes through those waypoints.
(Mr. Gish has since retired.)
A 2010
newspaper article about the waypoint names said Trump was flattered,
having said "It is my honor." In July of this year,
when Trump was in the news for crude remarks he'd made about immigrants,
the FAA
said
it would rename the waypoints. Trump made like this was no big loss,
saying that the waypoint names were "an honor I never knew I had."
I leave to readers the question of whether Trump forgot about the
waypoint names or is simply full of shit.
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I was wondering what the new names would be. The FAA finally
issued them
this month and alas they are not memorable:
old name |
new name |
latitude |
longitude |
UFIRD |
CRRMN |
26.6790° N |
80.0122° W |
DONLD |
RIDRR |
26.7492° N |
79.9352° W |
TRMPP |
RBACK |
26.8122° N |
79.8715° W |
IVNKA |
SLIDZ |
26.9236° N |
79.7085° W |
And just to finish with something not Trump‑related,
a departure route
from another southern Florida airport uses one of my favorite waypoints:
ZAPPA, at 26.6300° N 79.0979° W.
In 1989, I told my friend Brian that if I should ever say
I was thinking about moving to San Francisco, he should remind me that
it's cold and damp there. A year later I said I was thinking about
moving to San Francisco and Brian reminded me that it was cold and damp.
I said I was going anyway.
Living in SF in 1990 was the first time I took an extended break from
programming work. I was still coming to terms with being
HIV‑positive, I was burnt out on working, and I was looking
for a change of scenery. There was no guarantee that living in SF would
be to my liking, which made it all the more pleasant when it turned out
well. I rode my bike a lot, I lucked out finding a boyfriend,
I had time to read lots of stuff I wanted. I felt better all
around and was rejuvenated when I went back to work around the end of the year.
I have some affection for every city I've lived in and also
for many cities I've only visited—but largely for
different reasons in each case.
I found SF remarkably livable in the sense of having clean air
for a city of its size, a mild climate, and great topography. But that
description doesn't do justice to why I liked it. There's more,
some of which is hard to put into words.
I'm visiting friends who have
a Rhodesian Ridgeback.
The distribution of prime numbers is related to the values at which
a certain function ("Riemann's zeta function") evaluates to zero.
Long story, but it's a big deal to mathematicians.
From The Penguin
Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers:
Riemann conjectured that, considered as a complex function with complex roots,
[the zeta function's] roots all had real part equal
to 1/2. So important is this possibility that many mathematical
proofs have been published that assume that Riemann's hypothesis is true.
This profound conjecture is generally considered to be the outstanding
problem in mathematics today. It is known that the first
1½ billion roots
are of the conjectured form. However, many phenomena of this type
are known in which trends for small numbers are misleading.
Suggesting that 1½ billion instances constitute a
small‑numbered trend: humor possibly lost on one Christopher Hirst, who
called
that book "a volume which none but propeller‑heads
will find either curious or interesting". (Mr. Hirst is
"an award-winning
food writer".)
A proof of the Riemann conjecture would apply to an infinite number of roots,
dwarfing the 1½ billion examples (and no known counterexamples)
verified so far. This looks like a chance to segue back to Pascal's
wager. 1,500,000,000 versus ∞:
the number of seconds in an earthly lifetime versus eternity.
(I've passed the 1½ billion second mark,
although Pascal and Riemann each only made it to about 1¼ billion.)
In section 233
of Pensées where Pascal describes
his wager, he also speaks of the incomprehensibility of the infinite:
We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we are also
finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite, and
are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits
like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God,
because He has neither extension nor limits.
Thanks to Cantor,
we are no longer ignorant of the nature of the infinite.
A girl in my brother's
AP Calculus
class named her cat Riemann.
A couple days after my
recent posting
on Pascal's wager, the NY Times ran
a column
by Professor Gary Gutting that describes a variant:
I propose to reformulate Pascal's wager as urging those who doubt God's
existence to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference.
This means, first, that they should hope—and therefore desire—that
they might find a higher meaning and value to their existence by making
contact with a beneficent power beyond the natural world. There's no need
to further specify the nature of this power in terms, say, of the teachings
of a particular religion.
The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier
by making appropriate contact with such a power. ...
Well. I might really like there to be a fountain of youth,
but that doesn't mean I should go all Ponce de León.
And if, in an ordinary spring,
I found what I believed was a fountain of youth,
I'd be living in fantasy at the cost of overlooking
how fine spring water is for its own sake.
Professor Gutting proposes a doubt of desire rather than a
doubt of indifference. To the extent he means desire
for a particular seductive result, I can't accept his proposal.
I'm with Bertrand Russell:
Why not admit that metaphysics, like science, is justified by intellectual
curiosity and ought to be guided by intellectual curiosity alone?
The desire to find comfort in metaphysics has, we must all admit,
produced a great deal of fallacious reasoning and intellectual dishonesty.
The tower I get cell phone service from
(19000' away). And yeah, a rainbow.
The code of the spy has always been,
"Never celebrate your successes or explain your failures."
- Spy Dust
(ISBN 0-7434-2852-8), p. viii
I'd rather have dinner with a spy than a politician, and
not just because they'd have more interesting stories to tell.
I'd be interested to see what kind of person has the
austere discipline it takes to work in the shadows.
Spies are highly trained; politicians not necessarily.
Missteps in espionage can kill you or worse;
missteps in politics need not be any impediment to advancement.
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