Harumph... please don't kill my accounts?

Dear Gmail Team,

I can't find your address, and you seem to have delegated the task of user support to supportive users, so... an open letter in the aether.

I don't know how or why you did it, but the physical keys ↑, ↓, Home, and End no longer produce any effect upon the gmail page, though mouse-fiddling the scrollbar does what it should. This is, as I'm sure you understand, annoying as an inaccessible mosquito bite. For reference purposes, I'm using a 6.0 Firefox browser within a linux-based X.Org environment -- not that those last two points should matter.

Please fix.

Thanks,
a user who tries to be knowledgeable

Enough Muddling

Your Majesty,

--- and all ye younger majesties heir to the body, hearken and take note --- I don't often question your wisdom in matters of your own craft, but I weep to think whatever on earth can be holding your wrath in restraint at this moment.

Your civilian police are effectively on strike; your parliament and prime-minister are in revolt (and quite possibly have even lost their pragmatic get-re-elected sense), and an uncomfortably large segment of your subjects have gleefully lost all self-control. If the rain does not fall soon (rorate coeli desuper!) to quell these flames, it will be to your greater ignominy and imperial humiliation if you do not risk physical humiliation and lead your cavalry in containing the wanton burglary, theft, and destruction that are even now entertaining so many stupid and cruel urchins. They desperately needed their mother or grandmother to step in and give them a proper scolding! And since their natural mothers and grandmothers seem also to have quit, gradually we find the need devolves up to the head of the First Family --- the Royal family. That is, your majesty, you.

I see today the prime-minister has sought the counsel of a non-subject who says "thugs must be taught to fear the Police"; certainly that will be a necessary first step, but really, these thugs must be taught to love their neighbor. This means they must be taught that their neighbors are lovable; this they will not learn if you, their mother-in-figure, do not act to protect their neighbors from wild stupidity.

Humbly yours,
A colonial observer

Sanity is a wonderful thing, yes?

Dear Gil,

Such a wonderful thing, that I'll not think too much about it, just now (it's too good to contemplate closely, if you know what I mean?) but celebrate a particular instance of sane writing, in this case by the authoring of one Rob Schneiderman. It has, as is (alas!) all-too-necessary, a tone edging on polemical; but it reads nicely for all that and is just so delightfully chock-a-block with common sense.

The thing is presented as a PDF, by the American Mathematical Society here, called "Can One Hear The Sound of a Theorem". This is a play, at the very least, on famous old analysis papers, titled "Can One Hear the Shape of a ..." --- "Bell" and "Drum" have both appeared, but there may be others. (In case you're interested, the answer in the "Drum" case is "Yes, if..."; such answers are annoyingly frequent in analysis.)

I can't help but wonder if the mischievous Hoftsadter isn't indirectly resposible for some of the nonsense fried up in the present article, what with his Crab reading squiggles as beautiful music (or bad) that Achiles thought were arrithmetic theorems (or wrong ... or nonsense); they were prevented by tea-house etiquette from playing the Goldbach Conjecture to see what it sounded like. I thought old Douglas had clearly meant it as a joke, you know? But, anyway...

Won't you drop by for tea, some time?

some sort of chap

An opposite limit theorem

This is something that those who ought to know these things usually do know, and eventually figure out in any case. So if it isn't usually part of your work to know these things, don't fret; I really ought to have learned it much sooner!

Suppose $D$ is a category with a terminal object, say $z$, and let $F:D\to C$ be any functor. Then the natural transformation $F0 : F\to Fz$ is initial among the category of objects $x$ of $C$ with natural transformations $F\to x$.

That is all.

Samuel Clemens once quipped...

So, I live in a region which is laughably called the "temperate zone". The name must have been invented in Southern England. Anyways, what this means is that we get all sorts of horrible for our weather (or we like to think so... or it comforts our frailty to 'brag as though that were so) whereas people in more "extreme" places only get one or two sorts of horrible --- desert heats, or monsoon half the year, or glaciers... A friend has reminded me that this means we don't get those noxious toxic tropical insects: it's too complicated for them. I might counter that Monarch Butterflies spend more than half their lives as tropical insects, but they're so pretty it doesn't matter.

Anyways, all that is preface or context for

$$\begin{array}{rl}
\mathrm{XXI} &\mbox{Rain, in proportion}\\
\mathrm{XXII} & \mbox{Wind, with or without bicycle}\\
\mathrm{XXIII} & \mbox{Electricity}\\
\mathrm{XXIV} & \mbox{Devices that exploit [23] to effect [22]}\\
\mathrm{XXV} & \mbox{Night quiet}
\end{array}
$$

With all due deference

Dear Prof. Zmirak,

I have not a whole lot to say, against Austrian Economics generally, or Roepke's writings specifically, or any of that; but I will raise my concern now about the well-foundedness of the "price system", what I'd prefer to call the Monetary Standard: as with all things democratic, it's only as smart as the average vote, and people both rich and poor can be terribly stupid. Not only is "the last whiskey you're willing to pay for" often much too late to stop buying whiskey. Furthermore, as with all things democratic, nobody really knows enough to make infomed judgments about what the next or last whiskey or mobile phone service plan or college application or mortgage really costs him, before he's had it and waked up again the next morning, or until all the peripheral missed opportunities and consequences have echoed around him again. So how can he tell if 5€ really is not too much?

As examples of things which would cost far too much even if you were paid to take them with you, which yet seem to move lots of money around, here is a very short list:

recreational opiates

pornography

idle speech

Anyways, there we are. As Churchill said of democracy, it might well be the worst system imaginable, except for all the rest.

A Subsidiarist

Totally Weird

echo >& /dev/null <<eof

Poking, in a self-indulgent way, through recent blog visitor statistics, it seems that during the recent scribal torpor ("hiatus" sounds like something a TV network or production studio would plan--- planning is beyond me, on this blog) perhaps half of my visitors come from websites that sell useless and/or imaginary things. OK, so maybe I'm a bit rough with my sarcasm; sarcasm is easy, on the internet, after all! Nonetheless, I've a sneaking suspicion that someone is investing modest ammounts of website design and traffic redirection to collect the attention of lonely amateur blogifiers skimming through their traffic statistics... a new a subtle form of spam designed to prey upon the incautious and/or self-alienated-and-inclined-to-intelectual pride? Or is it just that the internet is alive and stupid? I don't know. It makes me wonder how many cloudy terminals out there have fake PhDs awarded by fake schools? And how many of those bought their dissertation essays from web-enabled "editing" firms using phfished-out credit card numbers?

If the internet could speak, would it have troche fixation?

anyways, sleep well.

eof