[FRIAM] anonymity/deniability/ambiguity

[Frank Wimberly]

The last thing Doug said to me on Facebook was, "Growing old gracefully is
an oxymoron."

Sorry about the munged part of the constructivist proof.  It looked fine in
my mail client when I sent it.

By the way, who was evicted for non-payment of rent?  I lost the context.

Frank


---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 21, 2020, 12:17 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> 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}}},}[image:
> {\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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