Utah Logic Highlights (2004)

2004 Meeting Index

• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December

Meetings

December

2004.12.17:

• Participating in Sleep Studies vs. Participating in Sex Studies.
• Philosophical issues raised by the Movie "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"
• The nature of memory loss
• The nature of having memories of having memories you no longer have.
• What memory related drug side effects tell us of how memory functions
• Summary of a recent article implying that the mechanism of long term memory may be be gene expression
• Drugs that interfere with memory as practice for the rest of your life
• Your arm as a model of memory perception, "Perceived depth of memory remains unchanged"
• Thought experiment: "Having it pointed out that you have forgotten your years as a Buddhist Monk"
• Other topics nobody remembers well enough to detail here.

2004.12.10:

• Quine's set theory
• Mistakes in Quine
• Time from a Photon's point of view: "No User serviceable parts inside"
• Set Theory
  • Frankel, Bar-Hillel, Levy
  • Zering and Takiite
  • Bangs Tabscott
• Halmes
• "Larger than large Cardinals"
• Logician jokes: ("Do you own a weed whacker?")
• Pharmacist joke: ("I didn't know you had a prescription")

2004.12.03:

• "Shortest axiomatic bases for various logics" - John Halleck
• On the oddness of "shortest" single axioms for a logic having the same implicational structure - John Halleck
• Frege and Witgenstein: A "Logic alien" as having a hitherto unknown form of madness - Clif McIntosh
• "Is logic alien to formal thought?" - Dylan Pocock
• Strategies of dealing with logic aliens. - LaMar Timothy
• Illogic as the minimum investment / maximum survival alternative - LeRoy Eide
• Skepticism of Tom Reid's position on skepticism - David Bennett
• Hulmes "A Treatise Upon Human Nature" - Clif McIntosh
  • "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them"
  • "Tis not contrary to logic to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger ."

November

2004.11.26: University Holiday, no meeting.

2004.11.19: [No note taker, therefore no notes]

2004.11.12:

• Gambling
  • How Laplace got the casinos to pay him. - LaMar Timothy
  • "Cheat me once, shame on you... Cheat me twice, shame on you." - David Bennett
  • The difficulty of object lessons - LeRoy Eide
• Theoretical underpinnings of the social problems of viruses
  • Social habits of trust in Cyberspace and in the Real World - LeRoy Eide
  • Is the war against viruses winnable? - David Bennett
  • The sacrosanctity of ignorance - LeRoy Eide

2004.11.05:

• "Baldness, 'Eggheads', and Academia" - LaMar Timothy
• "Publish an Ugly proof and leave the clean one for those that come after" - Eric Liechnorwicz (as reported by Eric Hughs)
• Logic Foundations Breakout Group
  • Frege again + ?
  • [ ... No note taker ...]
• Mathematics Breakout Group
  • New Mandlebrot graphics - John Johnston
  • Applications of Koenderijnk's canonical morphogenetic sequences to cartoons - Eric Hughes
  • Alternate Matrix Factorizations - John Halleck

October

2004.10.29:

• Set Theory: The necessity of it having a model - Clif McIntosh
• Set Theory: The lack of necessity for models - John Halleck
• Set Theory: The need of hierarchical models - David Bennett
• ? - John Johnston
• [Note Taker left early]

2004.10.22:

• On LaMar Timothy's new book - LaMar Timothy
• Political "Reasoning" - LeRoy Eide
• Rebellion: Changing times vs Changing rebels (Shel Silverstein and George Carlin) - John Johnston
• "Proofs from THE BOOK" Book review - John Halleck
• Elegance in Proofs vs Elegance in Algorithms - ?
• Flaws in our legal system, and why it is the best in the world - Rod Dixon
• Political notes - David Bennett
• [Note taker left early]

2004.10.15:

• Formal systems without substitution - David Bennett
• Newton's Greek Sources - Eric Hughes
• Aristotle's lost paper "The Method" - Brian Hughes
• Greek numerals - John Halleck, Eric Hughes
• Digit order vs. reading order in early scripts. - John Halleck, LeRoy Eide
• "Frege and the Logical Foundations of Mathematics" - LaMar Timothy
• "A New Look into the Foundations of Logic, Arithmetic, and Set Theory" - David Bennett

2004.10.08:

• William Clark's English as examples of language change - LeRoy Eide, Dylan Pocock, John Halleck
• Lewis and Clark as source for Tolkien's Characters Merry and Pippin? - John Halleck
• Frege's Axiom V - David Bennett, Clif McIntosh, Eric Hughes, LeRoy Eide
  • "Isomorphism is as good as it gets" - LeRoy Eide
  • Isomorphism isn't enough - Clif McIntosh
  • Logic with extensions of predicates, and without
  • Generating arithmetic without extensions but with Hume's principle
  • Generating arithmetic with "potential infinities" instead of infinities - David Bennett
• Bush, remote radio prompting, jammability of communications, the need for encryption - Clif MacIntosh, Eric Hughes
• On creative use of stickers for write-in candidates - Eric Hughes
• Boolean algebra (as given by Quine) vs. Aristotle - Clif McIntosh
• The darkroom as the interface model for Photoshop - Eric Hughes
• "A long and interesting life is the best one can hope for." - Jerry Dixon

2004.10.01:

• Was Frege really a Platonist?
• The sound of chamber music written with vibrato, and played without.
• Frege's Theorem V, vs Hume's Principle, vs. Consistency
• Bush-Kerry debate (Issues raised by the debate)
• "Behind closed doors", movie about Philip (Arnold) Heseltine vs. Peter Warlock
• C.S. Lewis vs. Freud (Issues raised by the PBS Program)
• "Cold Comfort Farm" movie review.
• Felix Mendelssohn: speculations on his medical problems

September

2004.09.24:

• GPS theory
• Learnability of sounds in language.
• LaMar Timothy's book
• (Note taker left early)

2004.09.17:

• Private Languages
• Language Learning, "The poverty of stimulus", and "pre-wiring"
• Sounds native speakers can NOT distinguish, that non-native speakers can.
• Sounds that native speakers can only make in some contexts
• E.T. Languages?
• Recent cryptographic results as "proof of possibility" of certain assumptions on language

2004.09.10:

• Where (if anywhere) is the Demarcation between Logic and Mathematics? - Clif McIntosh
• Tryphonos Olympoos' fiction on holy relics vs his non-fiction Neo-Marxist Information Economy philosophy - John Halleck

2004.09.03:

• "On wanting to not appear on official lists" - [Name withheld by request]
• Argument quality (good vs. bad) wrt language preservation - Clif McIntosh, John Halleck
• "Clear cutting Elephants vs. Clear cutting lumberjacks" - Edward C. Epstein
• Spam and Virus Tutorial - John Halleck

August

2004.08.27:

• "Why bother" and salvage linguistics - LeRoy Eide (Actually presented by John Halleck because LeRoy was unable to attend.)
• Preindustrial levels of lead in Fish - LaMar Timothy
• Language Learning, Chomsky, and the "Poverty of Stimulus" - LaMar Timothy
• Why you can't be creative without rules - David Bennett
• Deviant Logics vs. the Logic of Deviants [or Deviance?] - Clif McIntosh
• Marginalization vs "All progress comes from the margins" - Rod Dixon

2004.08.20

• GPS accuracies - John Halleck
• Meteors, Metals, and Religious Artifacts - Eric Hughes
• Apollo, Orbital Insertions, Kalman filtering - Lamar Timothy
• Pausanias vs. Strabo - John Halleck
• Roman Waterworks - ?
• Mining as the source of the Religion in all Technical Societies - Eric Hughes

2004.08.13 [Meeting minutes missing, from memory:]

• Wittgenstein breakout group... (Clif McIntosh)
  • Were other Faculty Members afraid of him?
  • Interactions with the Vienna circle?
  • Bottsmann's influence?
  • "Logical Space"
• Edsger W. Dijkstra: Proofs of program correctness; His founding contributions, his stagnating influence - Eric Hughes
• Matriarchy breakout group: (LeRoy Eide)
  • Plains Indian traditions (Dakotas)
  • Bavarian "Daughter of the House" traditions
  • Sigmund Freud, and Sigmund Freud's Daughter Ana
• Legal breakout group (Rod Dixon)
  • University Free Speech legal cases: A case for choice of case
  • General theories of Defense vs the Mark Hacking case.
• Retracement of the Corps of Discovery route by Corpses in Recovery - Rod Dixon
• "The brain is a secondary organ. - Campbell": Rod Dixon.
• Logic Library Issues - John Halleck

2004.08.06

• Rod Dixon:
  • Defending the "sacred soil" of the University
  • Jung - Every thought is as real as reality
  • Considerations of buying an automobile
  • "Money is the mother's milk of politics." - Tip O'Neill
• LaMar Timothy:
  • Stories of Sterling McMurrin's Secretary.
  • Frege, Cantor, and the Crisis of Mathematics.
  • History of the ideas of Infinity and the continuum
  • Goedel's participation (or lack thereof) in the Vienna Circle
  • GPS
• Clif McIntosh:
  • Various crises of mathematics.
  • Foundations of Mathematics: "There is no bottom"
  • Technology: Measuring density of people, muscle, bone, and fat.
• Eric Hughes:
  • Types in Mathematics, computer science, and proof theory
  • Kolmogorov's paper: Intuitionist Truth Values, Looking for solutions instead of objective truth.
  • Koenderijnk "Solid Shape": Canonical Morphogenetic Sequences [and singularities]
• John Halleck:
  • Logic Library Issues
  • GPS today: "Absolute coordinates" on a flexible moving world
• David Bennett:
  • Russell and Wittgenstein: Views of logic
  • Current philosophy of Mathematics: Solomon Feferman, Hillary Putnam, Georg Kreisel, Michael Dummet
  • Geometer's sketch pad

July

2004.07.30

• LeRoy Eide:
  • The counter productiveness of learning "I don't speak X" in language X.
  • Steven Pinker's views on the Monogenesis of Language.
  • Very early language learning. (Less than 6 months of age)
  • Non-verbal thoughts and concept of self.
  • Progression from processing Forest sounds to processing phonemes.
• Clif McIntosh: Sense of self.
• David Bennett: Why Languages can't evolve, and why we therefore don't have Language.
• LaMar Timothy:
  • DoD funding of Chomsky's early linguistics work.
  • Lying as the origin of Language
  • Intrinsic difficulties of parsing language.
  • Reviews (and reviewers) of LaMar's new book.
  • Time to frequency domain transformations of language sounds.
• John Halleck:
  • Mother-Child verbal interaction as the origin of Language
  • The "Monty Python" origin of the term "Spam" as applied to email
• Rod Dixon:
  • On mother-child linguistic interaction.
  • Verbs as the primary unit of language.
  • Utah logic group meeting minutes: Missing topics
  • Utah logic group meeting minutes: Topics listed actually the representative ones?
  • The Octopus as god - Threat displays and protective coloration.
• (Note taker left early)

2004.07.23: University closed (Utah's July 24 holiday Saturday celebrated on Friday)

2004.07.16:

• Clif McIntosh:
  • The University's recent Academic Freedom case; Settling vs Fighting
  • Differences in the Advisor-Student relationships in different fields of study
• Rod Dixon:
  • Fishing: bets, experiences, costs, and joys
  • On the epiphany of entering one's 8th decade
  • Human Natural selection (Women not always selecting the strong) as the secret of the greatness of the human race.
• David Bennett:
  • "The Honest Fishing Rod"
  • Dopamine antagonists
• LaMar Timothy:
  • What happened to Niels Bohr's Nobel prize.
  • Harvey Fletcher and "Millikan's Oil drop experiment"
  • "Mathematicians are Platonists until they write papers, and then they are Formalists."
  • Why Kalman filters are only called that on one coast
• John Halleck: "Philosophical Genealogy" proposal: realities and practicalities
• (Note taker left early)

2004.07.09:

• LaMar Timothy:
  • String theory
  • Feedback on his new book
• Clif McIntosh:
  • Quine's (inconsistent) set theory
  • Inconsistent voter reasoning.
  • "Mathematical Genealogy" website and whether there should be a "Philosophical Genealogy" website?
• Rod Dixion:
  • The average person vs. use of logic
  • Relationships (if any) between joy in words, math, and in music.
  • "How I'll find a good fishing hole"
• LeRoy Eide:
  • Fishing: "I've got five that says you don't get three."
  • 4^k+3 vs. the 3n+1 problem (with handout!)
  • "Reductio ad Absurdum" (proof by contradiction) as formal (not natural) reasoning
  • Willingness to pick up quarters as a measure of age.

2004.07.02:

• LeRoy Eide: Case markers and Ambiguity in English
  • "Ann helped Bob and {I | me} set the table." and infinitives, and with "taught" as the verb
  • "I saw a giant tire" (Three meanings)
  • Ambiguity as a political tool
• Rod Dixon:
  • Speculations on planets around other solar systems
  • George Sands: historic inheritance laws and Women.
  • Motorcycle fishing in Utah.
• Eric Hughes:
  • Syntax marking in Chinese and English
  • Syntax as convention
  • Abortifacient herbs in the Coptic "Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch"
  • Legalities of George Washington being unable to free his wife's inherited slaves.
  • The courageousness of "Cicero"
  • The evolution from dialogs to the Modern lecture form: "Lectures only work because EVERYONE is willing to shut up and defer to the 'expert'."
  • Recommended reading: "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves"
• John Halleck: Changes in teaching assumptions, Dialog of Menos to present
• Clif McIntosh:
  • Plato's Socrates vs. Historical Socrates
  • Benjamin Franklin, Cole Porter's wife, and Platonic marriage
  • "People that don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon still wish for immortality."

June

2004.06.25:

• LaMar Timothy: passed out a draft of his new book to those that had previously agreed to review it
• Rod Dixon:
  • "Arguments against formal logic"
  • "What is truth?"
  • New religions are old religions with new words
  • Gainful vs. Useful government employment
  • Getting Reality and hilarity back into law
• LeRoy Eide: more on the "hailstone problem".
• Eric Hughes:
  • Suggests that Bruno Latour's "Pandora's Hope" expands the formal logic view Rod gave
  • Infinitary mathematics without [Cantor] infinities
  • "Computational Reals" and Complexity
  • Factoring and Markov complexity.
  • Recommended reading: Godel's essay on logical truth
  • Recommended reading: "Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity Theory" by Li and Vitanyi

2004.06.18:

• Answering what was asked vs. what was perceived as intended to be asked. - John Halleck
• Cases where truth depends on the speakers belief of the listeners context. - LeRoy Eide
• The nature of "legal truth". - Rod Dixon
  • Why Judge and Jury are also on trial.
  • "Just the straight truth"
  • Believable truth vs. Believable witnesses
  • Truth vs. Credible truth
  • "The worst witness is the one that tries to win the case single-handedly"
  • ...

2004.06.11:

• Platitudes reading - Rod Dixon
• Convergence of specific series - LeRoy Eide and David Bennett (Justified by work on the hailstone problem)
• Unexpected statistical properties of some generated interleaved sequences - John Halleck, Clif McIntosh

2004.06.04: (Joint meeting with the Utah Linguistics Group)

• Marianna Di Paolo:
  • Scottish/Irish Influence on Modern (Utah) American Language
  • History of Utah's importation of Lexical Double Modals
  • Picking Vacation Country X by the [non-]Existence of Local X Restaurants
• LaMar Timothy: (What is science?)
  • "Anything you are willing to quantify over" -- Quine
  • Mature Philosophy -- Russell
  • Predictive Theory -- Planck
  • Plus the announcement that LaMar's new book is almost ready.
• Rod Dixon: Higgen's role in the D-Day landings.
• LeRoy Eide: Endangered Computer Languages: Intercal
• Clif McIntosh: Limits on Kinds of Sets
• [Round table]: Archimedes/Aristotle

May

2004.05.28:

• Some progress on the "hailstone (3n+1) problem" - LeRoy Eide
• Limits on the number of possible sets of three intransitive dice. - David Bennett
• Periodic sequences merged with reversed copies of themselves, and the applications to card tricks - John Halleck
• Saving languages and Cultures - LeRoy Eide
• Poetry - Rod Dixon vs. John Halleck

2004.05.21

• Marriage contracts - Rod Dixon, Clif McIntosh, LaMar Timothy
• Global warming (range of butterflies) - Rod Dixon
• Infinity and Mysticism/Religion (Cantor, et al.) - LaMar Timothy
• Grumpy Combustion - Dana Overacker
• Heritable mutations due to pollution - Dylan Pocock
• Resistance to plague vs Resistance to HIV - LeRoy Eide
• War, viruses, flu - Clif McIntosh

2004.05.14:

• Dave Bennett
  • The axiom of choice
  • The continuum hypothesis
  • Issues of Formalism and the above
• LeRoy Eide
  • Describability of numbers and levels of Infinity
  • Why one can't actually choose an arbitrary integer.
• LaMar Timothy:
  • How game theory won the cold war, and started commercial computing.
  • Infinity, Cantor's [religious] views concerning infinity.
  • Why Sqrt(2) = 2 if your distance metric is Manhattan (Lattice) distance
• John Halleck
  • "Selecting Logic or Mathematical Systems by Aesthetic Criteria - What is 'Interesting'?"
  • Why Pi = 4 if your distance metric is Manhattan distance
  • Intransitive Dice
• Dylan Pocock - "Words cannot describe all the things I have left to write." -Russel Hokes (Wigfield)
• John Desha - The first thing the UUCC folk taught me was that 2+2=5, for sufficiently large 2's."
• Announcement that the Utah Logic Group meeting is moving to noon (from 12:45) for the summer.

2004.05.7: No meeting (UofU Graduation)

• Several topics were therefore not discussed
• Numerous presentations were therefore not given by several folk.

April

2004.04.30:

• Rod Dixon: Philosophy = Appellate Law minus facts ?
• LeRoy Eide: Salvage Linguistics (and culture) as a Genome Search Analogy

2004.04.23:

• Political Responsibility and Leadership (Rod Dixon, Clif McIntosh)
• "Skepticism of Positions defended with excessive vigor" (LeRoy Eide)
• Poetry Corner (Rod Dixon)
• Clif McIntosh announced he is going on sabbatical for research and writing

2004.04.16:

• LaMar Timothy: Language, Meta Language: Genies, Hilbert, and others.
• Rod Dixon: On pursuing "knowing"
• Dylan Pocock: Giving people without money full access to the Capitalist system

2004.04.09:

• "Prior"ness of numbers vs. logic. [LaMar Timothy]
• Deity from Creation to the entropy death of the Universe [Rod Dixon]
• Discussion of the latest edition of "Computability and Logic" (Boolos [& Burgess] & Jefferys)
• Incompleteness vs the "halting problem". [John Halleck]

2004.04.02:

• What is a science (is mathematics a science)? [LaMar Timothy]
  • Does it need a theory? (or is a "best fit" to data enough?)
  • Does it need data (Does Mathematics have data or just theory?)
  • Logic+mathematics+theory+data?
• Things that don't have names... or descriptions.
  • Most irrational numbers have neither
  • Pi has a name
  • Sqrt(2) has a description
  • Computation as description
  • Is it true that most rational numbers don't, but could?
• In what sense can Mathematics be Politically Incorrect? [LeRoy Eide]
• Logic code library requirements [John Halleck, Clif McIntosh]
• Poetry [LaMar Timothy vs. Rod Dixon]
• ... [note taker left early] ...

March

2004.03.26:

• Logic without Logicians present
• Why are Unary operators different than all others for a pattern match.
  • LeRoy Eide's observations on constants as nullary operators.
  • John Halleck's chronic observations on Unary operators vs. search spaces

2004.03.19: No meeting.

2004.03.12:

• More Constructionist Mathematics (Dave Bennett)
• Logic code library requirements discussion (John Halleck, Clif McIntosh)
• Poetry (Rod Dixon)

2004.03.05

• John Von Neumann's work unifying Heisenberg's Matrix mechanics and Schroedinger's wave mechanics
• Constructionist Mathematics, proofs of non-existence
• Poetry

February

2004.02.27 - Minor discussions.

• Degenerate systems with Uniform substitution, but without Modus Ponens.
• Sorted variables and data types vs. Sorted Axioms and axiom types.

2004.02.20 - No logic topics

2004.02.13:

• LeRoy Eide led a discussion about Gravity in spaces with less than three dimensions (assuming gravity is mediated by gravitons). Including:
  • Gravity on an infinite cylinder, as the diameter of the cylinder shrinks to zero.
  • Gravity in one dimension in open vs. closed universes.
• Rod Dixon led a discussion about the relationships between Marriage, Law, and Morality.
  • Is law separable from Morality?
  • Moral interests in Legislation
  • Legal interests in Morality
• John Halleck solicited information from the group as to whether anyone had experience with, or a name for, operators satisfying the equalities:
  • a op (b op c) == b op (a op c)
  • a op (b op c) == c op (b ob c)

2004.02.06:

• John Halleck presented some of his "shotgun logic" work

January

2004.01.30 - "Logic as the hygiene of Mathematics"

Go to ...

• 2003 notes
• 2004 notes
• News page
• Back to Utah Logic home page
• Back to Philosophy Department home page.
• University of Utah home page

This page is http://web.utah.edu/utahlogic/news/news-2004.html
This page was last modified on December 16th, 2005.