OD Productions

Argh, another unexpected hiatus from blogging. Things have been busy, what with being out west for 3 weeks, and then school starting, and all the things that go along with all of that. But I'm here, again, this time on a regular basis. Promise.

Okay, so what's the deal? It's Saturday night and I don't know if I really feel like going out anywhere. This would be one of those ideal nights to just stay at home with the significant other and just do nothing, but that's obviously impossible because of those pesky three provinces that are currently in our way. Other couples are doing couple-y things in all their couple-ness tonight, and there's a party at a club I was invited to but dammit, I just don't really feel like dancing tonight. Blah blah social commitments blah blah being lame blah blah. Part of the problem is that with the new year and the departure of several prominent members of last year's social group, be it due to finishing the program or getting "coupled" out of existence, and with attempts at integrating new people, the social dynamic is still unstable, and it kind of sucks. Meeting new people is good, I like doing that, but I wish everyone could just be friends right away, and not have to go through that initial awkward stage.

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Lucky you, you get a dual-entry, one written initially when sober, the other when coming back from the bar slightly inebriated.

I decided tonight that while poetry, in its broadest sense, may be valuable for the individual reactions it induces, and while cultivating an ability to respond in certain ways to said poetry is valuable, creativity lies in writing the poetry, not reading it. The analogy is obvious, at least to me, to philosophy: those who study philosophy historically can get some value inasmuch as they are personally affected by what is said, and the process of trying to figure out exactly what that is, but the creative philosopher is not just the one who studies, but the one who performs. The creative philosopher is one who does philosophy, the historian is one who studies it for their own benefit.

The XX - "Infinity" is my favorite track of the moment.

Goodnight.

Posted by Ken at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Listening to old songs from my playlist make me think of when I first moved into this apartment, coming up on a full year ago, when it was more boxes than anything else, when it smelled more like Ikea than anything else, when it still smelled like someone else's home.

The girl at the burrito place in Kensington takes my order and gives me a coy smile. I never know what to do when I receive coy smiles. Not that I'd do anything in my current situation, anyway, but what's the correct follow-up in such a situation? "So, you like burritos, eh?" or "Your mouth says 'mild, medium, or hot sauce?' but your eyes say that you think I'm totally cute"?

I show up to my tutorial session and there is exactly one person in a 200+ capacity lecture theatre. Eventually more people show up, but most are there just to kill time before class. A focused session of 5 students turns out to be far more productive than an unfocused one with 25 students. Whenever we finish a long derivation, the one original attendee claps.

There is no one around today. No one. And I really don't have that much to do, other than waiting for my next TA session at 6. I read through bits of a friend's blog about cycling across Canada. It sounds incredible, and makes me think I should do something like that...before it's too late? I suppose before I have commitments like a job and children and stuff. I mean, presumably in, say, 10 years, I'll have a job and (maybe) children and stuff. Youth feels indefinite, to the point where it's easy to procrastinate. Should I be taking these opportunities while they're still viable?

Posted by Ken at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So it may have seemed like I took an unannounced hiatus from blogging, but actually a few things happened:

1) I was having major problems with the people I get my webspace from, and it took them a while to fix it.
2) After (1) had been resolved, it had already been a while so I sort of forgot to blog.

Well, those are really the only two things that happened.

So how are things?

Well, at this moment they kind of blow, as Mags has left for Edmonton after living here in TO for the last two months, and the apartment feels incredibly empty. I'll be going out there in a few weeks after I finish up TAing for the summer, so it's not that bad, all things considered. But these last two months have been really, really great, and now they are less great, so in comparison to recent times, current times seem pretty lame. So yeah.

School is school. Still no word on scholarships for next year. I am going to apply for conferences in:

1) San Fransisco
2) Somewhere in Scotland
3) Cambridge

and maybe

4) Regina?

but I've got to pull this paper out of some place or another in the next two weeks in order to do it.

You've missed a lot. My first year of my PhD is over. The events of Mags' being here. Summer concerts and music reviews. More conferencing. My becoming a best man. I'm not going to recap it all here right now. But soon. Hold tight.

Posted by Ken at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm not usually one for academic gloating, but since I've received no positive academic news in the past, oh, six months, I was really jonesing for something, anything to make me feel better. So I got an acceptance to the CPA for a paper I submitted, and this lovely e-mail:

"As the member of the 2009 CPA program committee in charge of Mind & Language submissions, I am writing to inform you that your submission has been accepted for presentation at the conference in Ottawa in the last week of May. Congratulations on making it through at this first cut – only the very small minority of submissions which received two completely positive reports have been accepted at this point."

Super awesome! Only a small minority? Congratulations? These are the kinds of words I like to see together in my e-mails. Well that just sounds...

...wait...

..."Mind & Language submissions"?

Dammit.

See, you're allowed to send two papers into the CPA for refereeing, as long as they're in different sub-areas of philosophy. So you could send in one paper in ethics and another in metaphysics, for example, but not two ethics papers. Being the budding epistemologist that I am, I sent in an epistemology paper I'd been working on. And then I thought, well, since I can send in another paper, I might as well throw in something that's been lying around for a while. So I submitted what I thought was a pretty cut-and-dry philosophy of language paper.

That I wrote three years ago.

And haven't looked at since.

And that's the one that got accepted so quickly. Which is not bad by any means. But what it does mean is that I have to entirely reacquaint myself with material I have not thought about in a long time.

Posted by Ken at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I couldn't sleep last night. I don't know what it was, maybe too much coffee during the day, but I had a nasty bout of staring at the ceiling wide awake with my mind racing. I sometimes have this problem, where I won't be able to sleep because I'm stressed, so I usually try to occupy my mind doing something that's just taxing enough to get me to calm down without being overly distracting. Basically it's like counting sheep, except more interesting.

Last night I wondered how many unique numbers I could express on one hand by putting up various combinations of fingers. So for example, if you put up one finger at a time, you can represent 5 different numbers. Putting up no fingers and putting up all 5 represent 2 other distinct numbers. Putting up different combinations of different numbers of fingers can uniquely express different numbers. So how many can you do? Well, it surprised me to learn that you can actually represent 32 distinct numbers on one hand. The math is actually pretty obvious. With 0 fingers you can represent 1 number, namely 0. With 1, you can obviously do 5. With 2, you can do 10 (try it). Same with 3. With 4, it's 5 again, and with all 5 it's obviously just 1. This is just 5 choose 0 + 5 choose 1 + ... 5 choose 5. It's the fifth line of Pascal's triangle and equal to 32.

So then I thought, damn, that means that with all 10 fingers you can actually represent 1024 numbers in unique ways. Include your toes, and you're over a million. A million! Just with the digits God gave you (and as a man, ahem, I can do over two million)! It's just 2 the the power of how many digits you're using (why 2 to the power of your number of digits used? Think of each finger being in a binary state of either up or down, that's where the 2 comes from. If we added another state of, say, being bent in half, then the possible numbers represented would be 3 to the power of how many digits you used. Try it!).

What a waste of time for an obvious result! But it helped me get to sleep, so it got the job done. And, surprisingly, it had a direct application in my philosophy of science class today.

The issue was that you can't assign equal probabilities to an uncountable infinite set of possibilities. Let's say that you have 10 possible outcomes. Without any prior information, you could say that each outcome has a chance of 1/10 of occurring. So it seems like a natural strategy would be to assign a probability of 1/n for a set of n possible outcomes. When you get to uncountable infinities (these are really large infinities) you can't do this anymore, because 1/really big = 0. So basically what you'd be saying is that every possibility has probability 0, which means that none of your possibilities are actually possible. And that's just kooky.

So a class member asked why we couldn't partition an uncountably infinite set into countably many intervals. This is akin to looking at the real numbers and grouping them by the natural numbers. The problem with this is that for every partition you make, you can partition it again, and doing enough partitions on the natural numbers you end up with the real numbers, and this is once again uncountably infinite.

Long story short, splitting a probability space in two over and over again is like putting up or down an finger if you had an infinite number of digits. The number of unique numbers you can represent on your fingers is 2 to the power of n for n fingers, but when n gets to infinity, 2 to the power of infinity is an uncountable infinity, in other words an infinity larger than the infinity of the natural numbers. So partitioning doesn't get us out of the problem. It was just weird that counting fingers at 4 a.m. helped me understand why standard probability axioms fall apart when you get to large enough infinities. Try it at home!

Posted by Ken at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)