[FRIAM] anonymity/deniability/ambiguity

[Steve Smith]

Frank -

> Clinicians often call that "being oppositional". 

I think "oppositional" is one *motive* for contrarianism, and maybe
contrarianism is one *mode* of being oppositional?  I'm far from up on
the clinical definitions, and my own *contrarianism* tends toward
nitpicking and hairsplitting (this is an example of that?), for what *I
perceive* to be removing minor occlusions incurred by the specific point
of view that a specific word (especially drawn from a highly specialized
lexicon like DSM2?) creates.  

I don't remember if you were actively tracking/participating "back in
the day" when Doug was (hyper?) active here and his last words were
(probably paraphrasing mildly but I hope capturing the essence) "Glen,
you can be SUCH an a****** sometimes!" which shocked but did not
surprise me.   (these were, I'm pretty sure literally his last words on
the list, but not his last words in life, which I hope I can get out of
Ingrun someday, though it will probably involve sharing a full bottle of
scotch...  a taste all three of us shared, but with differing levels of
quality/price amongst us... anecdotes abound). 

Back to the anecdote at hand...   *I* didn't find whatever Glen had said
(it is all in the record but I have a sort of anti-nostalgia that keeps
me from digging it out) as him "being an a*******" but rather simply
being *contrarian*....   Doug (IMO) was generally pretty *oppositional*
himself (if my read on the term is at all appropriate) so Glen's
contrarian style (which is only one of his modes) was received by Doug
*as* oppositional (in the extreme?).   *I* thought Glen was just
sparring with Doug in the mode I think he spars with everyone here from
time to time.  I didn't get the word for some weeks after that incident,
but it was Ingrun who shut down his FriAM access (not literally).  She
put her German foot down that  Doug had "done his time" with his LANL
Blogs which were probably more of an outlet than an irritation.  I don't
know what she threatened him with, but I'm sure it was the same tone of
voice I'd heard more than a few times, and it started with a slightly
elevated in volume, but pitched slightly lower in tone "Douglas! .... "
   He went back to gaming the stock market, talking to his birds and
cats, gathering peacock feathers from their property in Nambe, having
his knees replaced, riding his motorcycle, playing Sax with one or two
bands in town, and rigging up media servers from Raspberry Pis.

FriAM was definitely a source of morbid (irritation) fascination for
Doug, from our private conversations...  It is definitely a morbid
fascination for me as well, but not particularly irritating nor
frustrating (with a few very minor/fleeting exceptions).   I never
learned to play well with others as a child (or a teen)...  I learned to
move semi-fluidly between cliques and "pass" in most of them if needed,
but I almost always had to either minimize my engagement or eventually
"fire myself" from the clique because I could feel the cognitive
dissonance/mismatch.   My cohorts through 12th grade probably remember
me as a mildly "odd duck" but not to the extreme some of you here
probably find me.   Here, I trust that most can (and do) simply click
<next> or <delete> and that a few choose to skim, while others find a
germ of interest if not truth in my ramblings.  For the more
sophisticated, there are mailtools that would automatically route me to
a spam (or similar) folder.

> You say that I've known authorities.  I was just talking to John Baez
> about my advisor Errett Bishop, often called the inventor of
> constructive mathematics
One of the great boons of this list for me is to flesh out (in my mind)
the intellectual/social networks of influence that impinge here.  You
and I have shared our "Erdos" numbers which I understand to be nearly
irrelevant by many measures, but nevertheless "of interest" in *this*
regard.   Your Erdos number of 1 (as his habitual bouncer from the UCB
library in grad school?) is similar to a friend of mine whose Bacon
number is 1 because his old pickup truck was enlisted on-set for the bad
SciFi movie "Worms", and Bacon's stunt double wasn't on set (and Kevin
couldn't drive stick) when the director was  ready to film the scene, so
my friend *played* Bacons character for a few seconds as his old pickup
careened through a scene.   I in turn "stood in" in a play my friend's
wife wrote and directed in which he *also* stood in while trying to
develop it as a film.   I believe the film *was* finally made (not a
major release or even screened at any indie festivals except maybe here
in SF) so when pressed I like to claim a Bacon number of 2 (thin as it is).
> .  Here is a constructive proof, with no use of the excluded middle,
> of the irrationality of sqrt(2) that I found in Wikipedia.  Apologies
> to those who don't care:
>
> In a constructive approach, one distinguishes between on the one hand
> not being rational, and on the other hand being irrational (i.e.,
> being quantifiably apart from every rational), the latter being a
> stronger property. Given positive integers /a/ and /b/, because
> the valuation
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singly_and_doubly_even#Definitions> (i.e.,
> highest power of 2 dividing a number) of 2/b/^2  is odd, while the
> valuation of /a/^2  is even, they must be distinct integers;
> thus |2/b/^2  − /a/^2 | ≥ 1. Then^[17]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_root_of_2#cite_note-17>
>
>     {\displaystyle \left|{\sqrt {2}}-{\frac {a}{b}}\right|={\frac
>     {|2b^{2}-a^{2}|}{b^{2}\left({\sqrt {2}}+{\frac
>     {a}{b}}\right)}}\geq {\frac {1}{b^{2}\left({\sqrt {2}}+{\frac
>     {a}{b}}\right)}}\geq {\frac {1}{3b^{2}}},}{\displaystyle
>     \left|{\sqrt {2}}-{\frac {a}{b}}\right|={\frac
>     {|2b^{2}-a^{2}|}{b^{2}\left({\sqrt {2}}+{\frac
>     {a}{b}}\right)}}\geq {\frac {1}{b^{2}\left({\sqrt {2}}+{\frac
>     {a}{b}}\right)}}\geq {\frac {1}{3b^{2}}},}
>
> the latter inequality being true because it is assumed that /a///b/ ≤
> 3 − √2 (otherwise the quantitative apartness can be trivially
> established). This gives a lower bound of 1/3/b/^2  for the
> difference |√2 − /a///b/|, yielding a direct proof of irrationality
> not relying on the law of excluded middle
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle>; see Errett
> Bishop <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errett_Bishop> (1985, p. 18).
> This proof constructively exhibits a discrepancy between √2 and any
> rational.
>
This is the chewy nougat of FriAM for me... stuff outside my specific
interest but within the liminal boundaries of my ken otherwise. 

I don't read FriAM because it feeds the things I am most interested in,
I read it because it expands the things I am interested in (or reminds
me of things I forgot I was interested in).  

- Sieve

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