of the square roots of minus 1. Your choice, if you think it matters. The aim is to “quantify” propositions over an integral Gaussian lattice (q.g.).
T(P) = (x, y) = x + iy, the truth-value of P, is meant to indicate some mix of truth, falsehood, and meaninglessness. With y = 0 (giving T(P) real values), we are close to traditional binary Booleans but with x > 0 meaning true, x < 0 meaning false, and with the added nuance that x1 > x2 > 0 means that x1 is more true than the true x2. Similarly 0 > x1 > x2 means that x2 is falser than the false x1. Reassuringly, all truths, however small, are truer than all falsehoods, however small! For x = 0, y !=0, we conveniently locate all truly meaningless propositions on the y-axis. I’m working on a meaningful metric for meaningless, one that meets our daily intuition that some propositions are clearly dafter than others. Thus, y1 > y2 means y1 is more meaningless than y2. The rules for logical implication must also be carefully extended beyond the traditional (p -> q) = (!p v q). We must retain the old truth tables for real values of T(P), so that true never implies false, but I’ve never been happy with false implies true or false. We would certainly hope to prevent “daft” implying anything “dafter,” while “daft” can safely imply “less daft.” Formally, T(0, y1) -> T(0, y2) for all y1 >= y2 > 0. But T(0, y1) !-> T(0, y2) for all y2 >= y1 > 0. I call this the Limiting Insanity Clause in honor of the Marx Brothers.
The singularity at the origin T(P) = (0, 0) is reserved for genuine, meaningful don’t-knows. Don’t push me on this. Epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld has not returned my calls. Some think they know that the truths or falsehoods of Goldberg’s conjecture (P = NP) are presently unknown but in essence knowable. That is, one day, before the stars lose their glory, 8 we’ll nail them as true or false. Others think they may be in essence undecidable a la Goedel. One thing is certain. I’ll never get a Fields medal unless those ageist bastards increase the MaxAge >>> 40.
High on my list of why-bothers is a recent “translation” by the Australian Bible Society of the Bible into mobile-phone text-speak format. This SMS Bible is ever-so-pre-dictably unclever when u fnd @ da strt of Gnsis: “In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth. Da earth waz barren, wit no 4m of life...” Surely not blasphemous as some sensitive souls have screamed. And you can hardly say that anything is literally lost in translation, since the SMS is almost an automatic token-by-token mapping of the earlier CEV (Contemporary English Version) from the American Bible Society. En route via untold redactions
from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek via Tyndall to the KJV (King James Version and its gender-free Ruler James Version) and on to the CEV, there are paths that many bemoan as undignified dumbing-downs. Is the SMS version just a gimmicky last straw? Or will hoodies dig the message and see the light?
Will this weak rebic9 file-compression scheme ever find a place among all our Zip and archiving tools? I say Stuffit! Incidentally, TTY has reemerged as the abbreviation for this telephone-text mode. Olde Fartes will recall the ancient peripheral as defined in my Devil’s DP Diction- ary (McGraw-Hill, 1981):
TTY n. \pronounced ‘titty’\ [Acronym for Tele TYpe] Any terminal of the teletype vintage in which the restricted character set is more than offset by the unique busy signal, viz., printer noise. See also GLASS TTY.
To save you hunting in your attic for the tattered remains [sic] of my book, here’s the cross-ref:
GLASS TTY n. \pronounced ‘glass titty’\ A CRT terminal so lacking in features that it behaves like a TTY.
CRT n. [Cathode Ray Tube] Originally an important storage device, developed by Prof. F.C. Williams, Manchester University, in 1947, but now relegated to trivial applications in the timesharing and entertainment environments. See also GLASS TTY.
At this rate I could exhaust you and the dictionary tracking overt and covert links. I’ll leave it for now with the oft-quoted daddy of all cross-references:
recursive adj. See recursive.
Thanks for the reader feedback on conflicting apho-rism-pairs. I’ll report the winners in my next column. Q
REFERENCES
1.Understating is not the use of footnotes, which are a few of my favorite things, along with Julie Andrews, the sound of music, and positive reader feedback. Note, too, that understanding really means overstanding.
2. Scouse mothers’ malapropisms are called malapudlian-isms. See “Lern Yerself Scouse,” Stan Kelly, Fritz Spiegl, Frank Shaw (Scouse Press, 1966).
3. “GOTO Statement Considered Harmful.” Letter to Communications of the ACM. March 1968; reprinted in the 60th anniversary issue.
References:
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