Re: Resistance to Change LO1251

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Tue, 16 May 1995 22:25:24 +0059 (EDT)

Replying to LO1194 --

On Sat, 13 May 1995, Michael McMaster wrote:

> Replying to LO1168 --
>
>
> one - unity
> two - harmony (thru discord)
> three - relationship
> four - order
> five - transformation

It's funny about numbers. I noticed some years ago (and made a joke of
it among my colleagues) that I'd been hanging around assembly language
too long: I could only understand the number 3 as the log base2 of 8.

> In that language, there have only who said, who they said they heard
> it from (in sometimes very long strings) and who actually saw the
> original event. A very useful tool and an interesting challenge to
> live in that way of thinking/speaking for a while.

There's an interesting congruity between this and something from formal
logic. In the context of showing what a "truth function" is, one commonly
sees examples of what a truth function _isn't_. For example, "John says
that Harry stole the money" is _not_ a truth function of "Harry stole the
money". In other words, the first sentence can be true or false
independently of whether the second one is true or false. It seems to me
that the language you describe is a very prudent one... . In fact we would
do well to adopt such a convention. I'll confess that I try to keep such
distinctions always, and never allow myself to deduce from "A says 'B'"
that B must in fact be the case.

Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen
jamzen@world.std.com
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