Monday comments

Monday, March 22, 2004 at 12:39PM

1. On Saturday night I went to see Fog of War with my brother-in-law, who is visiting Melbourne for a few days. I was absolutely knackered (must have been something to do with staying up until 1:30 that morning getting the book away to the publisher), but I managed to stay conscious for 95% of the movie.

   It was a striking movie in a number of different ways. One I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the reviews I read before the movie was the beautiful Philip Glass soundtrack. It suited the movie down to the ground.

2. It’s nice to see discussion on book publishing continuing. I have 11 comments, over half of whom are written by people who are not me. I like having smart readers who have opinions and are able to articulate them.

3. At Toby’s prompting, I’ve been stuffing around with the stylesheet for this page. He thought (and I’m inclined to agree) that the background colour between the different content rectangles was too “white.” I’ve changed it, but I don’t like the result either. As of today it’s #eff8d1. Any takers for a better background colour?

4. A corridor discussion with Allen Hazen this morning about permission statements, prompted by the well-known observation that when we say “you can do X or Y” we really mean “you can do X and you can do Y”, led me to show that (under certain assumptions) there is a two-place connective (call it ‘erk’) such that “you can do X erk Y” is equivalent to “you can do X and you can do Y.” It’s just that “erk” is not disjunction.

   Now I’m in two minds as to what to do. I want to write this up for public consumption, and this is a nice place to do it. But I also think that setting that topic as an assignment question for my Non-Classical Logic class would be most appropriate. It would be simple to do both, except that I’m confident that some of my students in Non-Classical Logic read this site. (Hi guys!)

   So, what should I do? Post here? Set it as an assignment? Both? Neither?