Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Day 2

I don't know if this applies universally, but if you ever fire up Pine to check your email, and all your messages disappear from your other IMAP client, try issuing the respool-email command from the terminal you opened Pine in. Scary.

Last year, in my technical writing class, I had to write up a mock proposal to some person/organization. I happened to address mine to Brian Behlendorf because of his involvement with the Apache Software Foundation. My proposal had something to do with the Apache web server. Anyway, today, I sat in front of him as he gave a talk on software as a service. Cool. Another random note is that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.com fame is strolling around campus recruiting people. The newspaper ran an article on him and how his company is providing substantial salaries to students who leave school and go work for him instead. They're doing pretty well I guess.

In class, we were given examples of logical reasoning patterns. One of the basic ones is that if x is greater than y, and y is greater than z, then x must be greater than z. Except it doesn't always work out in the English language due to its ambiguities. The example was if bad sex is better than nothing, and nothing is better than good sex, then bad sex must be better than good sex.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I bet you can come up with a better example than that. I mean that's just saying that the semantics of the first "is better than" are not equivalent to that of the second "is better than". That's kind of like saying x < y and y ⊃ z implies x ⟩ z. Sure they all look the same, but they mean different things.

But over here it's late at night and I still have 6 more programs to grade so I'll leave that as an exercise. =)

Anonymous said...

bah... yeah that's supposed to be > not <