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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoPlainText>Thanks, Lee.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>See larding below. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Nick <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Nicholas S. Thompson<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Clark University<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>-----Original Message-----<br>From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com] On Behalf Of lrudolph@meganet.net<br>Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 6:53 PM<br>To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com><br>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis</p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Nick:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> Well, Ok. I can see that it's sort of like Carl Tollander's<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> "Let there be a spherical cow," which always makes me smile.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> Or<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> Even the micro economists',<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> "Let there be a fully informed consumer."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>I don't claim to be a native speaker of PhysicsEng, much less of EconoEng, but I've frequently hung out with some of the former, and I've always seen it stated "Assume a spherical cow".<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText> Further, if either of those one-liners were to be expanded to a longer joke-about-jargon-and/or-idealization, my strong intuition suggests that they would have to be expanded to something along the lines of "Let X be a spherical cow", "Let C be a fully informed consumer", followed by some fanciful bloviation (or bovination) about X and C, using fancy jargon (or pseudojargon; for instance, somewhere around here I have a very old photocopy of a parody astrophysics article, typeset in the style of--I believe--the Astrophysical Review, purporting to be "On the Imperturbability of Elevator Operators" by Chandrasekharan: the joke in the title rests on the facts that "operators" and "perturbation" are standard jargon in mathematical physics, and could quite reasonably appear near each other in MathPhysEng, but "elevator operators" is just a bit of slapstick). Just plain "Let there be", without providing a place-holding name for the assumed cow or consumer, rings very false. But (as before) this is empirical stuff, and if you've really heard them that way (and can prove it...), then they can occur that way and my skepticism is unwarranted. On the other hand, if you're *recreating* the material in quotation marks *as a representation of what you understood to be the joke*, then I think you're in the position of the (typically) British man who, in a meta-joke, tries to re-tell an American joke and gets it hilariously wrong.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><b><i><span style='color:black'>[NST==>Oh, well. I tried. In my defrocked English-Majory sort of way, I find it hard to see the difference between “Assume a…” and “Let there be…” I guess perhaps the latter has more of an order of Bible-speak, as we would say in Lee-Speak. <==nst] </span></i></b><span style='color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> But how do we tell the jokes from the foundational insights:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> Like: "Let there be a number which when multiplied by itself equals -1.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> Or that howler of mathematical howlers: "Think of a number greater <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> than any number you can think of."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> Or Knewton's Knee-slapper: "Calculate the acceleration at an instant."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Well, we do have the proverb "Many a true word is spoken in jest", and "kidding on the square" is an old and honorable idiom, whereas "kidding on the square of the hypotenuse" is just a quip, and "kidding on the hypothesis" might be a translation of "Hypothesis non fingo" but not a very good one. From your point of view as a pragmatist (Jamesian or Pierceian, take your pick), what should it *matter* whether we can or can't "tell the jokes from the foundational insights"? J: an insight that sees no inwardness is no insight. P:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>If something (a discourse fragment; a stone; a dream--well, not one of those, in your case) is a "foundational insight", that will (eventually) be found to be the case *because it became a foundation of something* in the long run. If something is a "joke", *that* will (eventually) be found to be the case because it made you laugh, most often--but not always--in the short run (and, yes, I have at least several times in my life suddenly "gotten" a joke decades after hearing or seeing or reading it, as I bet you have, too; conversely, I've more than several times realized that something an earlier "I" found to be a real side-splitter wasn't funny at all).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><b><i><span style='color:black'>[NST==> Well, you absolutely correct about all of the above. In the Knewton Kneeslapper case, I have built my career on criticizing category errors in biology and psychology, and if “acceleration at an instant” isn’t a category error, I don’t know wtf a category error is. Seems like all of higher math is based on category errors. So we calculate the acceleration at a point, and then we do all sorts of operations with it, and then we build a bridge with those calculations and the damned bridge stands up, no matter what Nick Thompson says about its logical provenance. You are also correct that, as a pragmat[ci]st, I ought to be completely happy with that. So, whatever the joke is, it’s on me. <==nst] <o:p></o:p></span></i></b></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>How’s the poetry going? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>Nick <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>============================================================<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com"><span style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none'>http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>archives back to 2003: <a href="http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/"><span style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none'>http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/</span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none'>http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</span></a> by Dr. Strangelove<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>