Archive for October, 2007

« Older Entries

Leopard, first impressions

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Leopard arrived today, in its rather cool box. And I installed it by the book — the book in question being the useful, confidence-inspiring, and very inexpensive e-book Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard. So I used SuperDuper! to clone my MacBook Pro’s hard-disk onto a bootable external drive (well, two different ones actually), did an “erase and install” of Leopard, and then used the set-up assistant to migrate all my files back from one of the external drives. Doing things the longest way round like this, the whole business, after the initial cloning, took about two and a half hours. But much better safe than sorry. (The only hiccup was that the installer initially took a long term to recognize the presence of my laptop’s hard disk, which would have been distinctly alarming, had I not seen talk of the phenomenon on MacRumors. And apart from losing the Cisco VPN Client — the university computer services say they’ll have a Leopard-compatible replacement available in a day or so — everything seems to be working again just fine.)

What strikes you first, of course, is some of the eye-candy — e.g. the new dock, semi-transparent menu bar and menus, the folder icons. Quite a few mac reviewers have hated all these (e.g. see the ars technica review which is very informative about the under-the-bonnet improvements). Well, I’m all for the dock and I quite like the semi-transparent menu bar; the transparent menus are I think are far too transparent; and the “recycled cardboard” folder icons seem quite out of keeping with the space-age look of the rest of the UI. Or at least, that’s my two-pennyworth. And it is only worth about that much fuss (especially as my bet is that these things will be subtly adjusted in an early update for Leopard). Otherwise, the cleaned-up look of the windows across the system is all pretty neat, and the new Finder windows are that bit more useful. On the whole, things look terrific.

Still, looks aren’t everything: here are four things I instantly really like about Leopard, and which even just by themselves make the upgrade worthwhile:

  1. The whole system is consistently quite a bit snappier (e.g. one bounce and iCal with seven calendars is open, similarly for Mail).
  2. Cover Flow and Quick Look are amazingly useful, as well as very pretty. For example, I have a folder into which I park PDFs and other documents as I download them. I can now just instantly browse through the folder to see what is in the various documents without opening the relevant application(s), and can eventually file them away or trash as appropriate.
  3. Spaces is a very nicely implemented way of getting much cleaner work-spaces. I’m an immediate convert. (One space for Safari, Mail, etc.; another space for TeXShop windows; etc. Very uncluttered.)
  4. Time Machine is wonderful. I was already pretty good about cloning my hard disk to a pair of external drives, one at home and one at work. But inevitably you do foul up and accidentally delete stuff. So I’ve set up a new big external drive to be an automatic Time Machine archive whenever I’m in my little study at home (drives have become so cheap, there’s no reason at all not to err on the side of caution — it would just be too painful now to lose everything): and I will still carry on cloning onto the other drives. Feels very virtuous!

Worth waiting for (and it can only get better).

Posted in Geek stuff | No Comments »

G. C. Lichtenberg

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Fellow local blogger James Warren recently posted a seemingly depressing list of “top books” listed on Cambridge students’ Facebook pages. But I’d not be too downhearted. Probably the moral is: don’t believe all you read in Facebook entries! I know that when I was still a college fellow and “director of studies” and so able to get to know a few students very well over their three years here, I’d repeatedly be surprised when they eventually opened up about the books that they really loved and which meant something to them. I learnt a lot that way, about the students themselves, and about books too.

Just a couple of weeks ago — I can’t at all recall how it came up — one of our graduate students warmly recommended to me the Hollingdale translation of excerpts from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books. This version was quite new to me, and is a real delight. I had a much shorter collection of excerpts translated by Franz Mautner and Henry Hatfield almost forty years ago; and I first came across the aphorisms and their author in a favourite book that I had when a student, J. P. Stern’s Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions. But the pleasure of re-discovery after a good few years is enormous.

I was moved too — having found a number of enthusiastic reviews — to send off for another book, Gert Hofmann’s novel Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (this indeed was the contents of the packet that should have contained Leopard!). But I found this really rather disappointing.

The novel is based on Lichtenberg’s relationship with Maria Stechard, the thirteen year old girl he met selling flowers (he, a hunchback, was by then in his mid thirties); she became his housekeeper, then his lover, and died shortly after her seventeenth birthday to his intense distress (the story, though, is Beauty and the Beast, not Lolita). But the Lichtenberg in Hofmann’s tale is just too far from the Lichtenberg I thought I knew from the Waste Books — he seems a diminished and much less substantial figure than the highly successful and popular teacher, the science professor at Göttingen, who inhabits Stern’s pages (he lives in too distant an alternative possible world). And die kleine Stechardin remains almost as blank in Hoffman’s novel as she does in Lichtenberg’s handful of references to her.

Posted in Books | No Comments »

The art of ordinal analysis

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

I’ve just come across Michael Rathjen’s 2006 paper The art of ordinal analysis. A useful and pretty clear survey.

Posted in Logic | No Comments »

Not Leopard

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Sigh. This was going to be the post where I gave you my calm, judicious, balanced, critical appraisal of the truly awesome OS X Leopard. So imagine my frustration — or at least, fellow macheads will be able to imagine my frustration — to find that (i) the announced package in my pigeon hole which I’ve at last been able to go in to pick up wasn’t the expected one from Apple, and (ii) in fact the carrier tried to deliver the genuine article today, and there happened to be no-one in or around the Faculty Office to sign for it just at that time. How was that possible? Delivery rescheduled for Monday. It’s not been my week.

Ah well. I’m on the mend from the earlier unpleasantness. Life goes on. And patience is a virtue. They say.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Mocking the pomos

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I was amused to (re)discover Communications from Elsewhere’s wonderful Postmodern Generator. Just refresh the link and you are served up each time with a new generous helping of a randomly generated postmodernist-style word-salad: very clever and very funny. And yes, intellectual rubbish should be mocked and parodied and satirized wherever we find it.

Much more seriously, but of course not unrelatedly, you are also served up with a constant link to Alan Sokal’s page on the “Social Text Affair”: if you don’t know what that was, then exploring Sokal’s page will be a very instructive treat. (Oh, and I was delighted to discover that Sokal has a another forthcoming book announced for next year.)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

In bed with a Trollope

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

I’ve been struck down over the last few days, and – judging from previous experiences with the same unpleasantness – it will be a few more days before I’m really up and about again, and a while yet before really 100%. Still, I’m on the mend, and have gone through the stages of just about managing a Michael Dibden, then devouring a second, and now I am up to the delights of a Trollope again (so back to Barchester Towers).

And also, thanks to wireless networking, I can idly surf the web in bed. I hadn’t previously noticed this excellent letter from Richard Dawkins, which ends:

Of course, university departments of theology house many excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects. These academics would be welcomed into appropriate departments elsewhere in the university. But as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.

Spot on. It is depressing to find, though, that some comments on Dawkins would put philosophy in the same boat as theology. Now, a few ignorant remarks in this vein wouldn’t matter in themselves — but I suspect that they are symptomatic of a much more widespread deep ignorance of what analytical philosophy is about, even among those who should perhaps know. How else do we explain that the powers that be at Cambridge (of all places) think it is perfectly respectable to peg the philosophy faculty here at just twelve for the last nineteen years while our student numbers have grown by almost 80% — and indeed, they proposed to cut the number of faculty a few years ago — while there are twenty one(!) theologians in the divinity faculty. Sigh.

But Trollope would have been no more surprised by the oddities of ancient universities than by those of ancient churches.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Anjan gets real

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

Continuing the project of bankrupting my readers by recommending unmissable books to buy, let me add another warm recommendation, for Anjan Chakravartty’s A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism which has just appeared on the new book shelves at the University Press’s bookshop. On a quick browse through, it looks predictably terrific: Anjan is certainly tackling the right issues, and I’ve liked other things that he’s written about realism. I see that I come in for stick in Chapter 7 for some overhasty stuff I wrote a decade ago, and probably quite right too.

(It’s a handsome bit of book production too, as is usually the case with CUP. That’s more than can be said for the “Schilpp” volume on Dummett which has just arrived: the typography is an insult to the eyes.)

Posted in Books | No Comments »

Harmless geekery

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

I was going to sound off on the subject of tripos reform: but on second thoughts, it’s probably safer to indulge in harmless geekery instead. So … (roll of drums):

  1. There’s now another much bigger, much better edition of the LaTeX Graphics Companion. It has, inter alia, some worryingly enticing/timewasting things to do with Beamer presentations … I suspect this might be fun.
  2. And from today you can pre-order Leopard which will of course make us all* so very much more productive, clear-thinking and happier. I just know this will be fun.

*For “all” read: all right-minded Mac users.

Posted in Books, Geek stuff | No Comments »

Semantics, Toyota style

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Our math logic reading group is going through Manzano’s Model Theory as therapy/revision before tackling Hodges’s Shorter Model Theory. I’m not sure that Manzano was, after all, a good choice; though equally it isn’t clear what would have served our purposes better.

Anyway, I was struck again by the still-standard logician’s habit of treating the formal semantics of first-order languages by explaining how to extend an interpretation by assigning values in the domain to each and every variable of the language — and then later proving that e.g. different assignments to variables other than those that appear in the wff being evaluated don’t make any difference. I know this is how Tarski did things, but isn’t there something inelegant about stocking up on assignments of objects to variables only not to use infinitely many of them?

It is reminiscent of the bad old overstocking habits of industry! Toyota-style “just in time” production, where we only stock up with what we actually need next, is better!! Likewise, surely, giving a semantic story where we deal with e.g. “AzFz” by talking about alternative ways of extending an interpretation by assigning an object to “z” (treated as a parameter/temporary name) is more elegant and more intuitive. That way, we just talk about alternative extensions of an interpretation to cover particular variables as and when we need them.

Is there a good reason, other than historical piety for doing things the first, Tarski, over-stocking way, rather than the Toyota way? We couldn’t think of one.

Posted in Logic | 2 Comments »

Gödel: chapter one online

Friday, October 12th, 2007

I’ve put Chapter One of my Gödel book — very short, and hopefully accessible — online at the book’s website here. Perhaps not of terrific interest to too many visitors here, as it is very introductory, but you can always tell your students!

Posted in Logic | No Comments »

« Older Entries