I saw Rufus Wainwright at the Avalon last night. Rufus’s voice is just as adorable live as on CD (and even more adorable than on MP3) and he can be very funny in his on-stage banter. All in all very enjoyable, and if he’s visiting your town soon (or a town near you) I’d recommend it.
The only downside was that I managed to miss my intended bus back to Providence. The problem was that I forgot the first two rules about public transport in Boston.
- Getting anywhere on the Green Line takes longer than you could possibly expect.
- Even you take into account rule 1, it still applies.
(Apologies to Daniel Davies for ripping off his laws.)
Anyway, those rules and the fact that the evil Bonanza bus left three minutes early meant that I had 2 hours with little to do in Boston. So I repaired to a local bar to watch the Pats game. Fortunately Boston bars are friendly places to be when the local team is winning and you tip well, so the time wasn’t all wasted.
I had brought some work with me, so I even got some logic reading done after the game ended. Now you might think that logic preparation after a night’s drinking will be totally wasted, but actually this isn’t entirely true. For one thing, the numerous typos in Computability and Logic become less annoying in such circumstances.
While on that topic, there is one line in Computability and Logic that I think is a mistake, but it doesn’t seem to be listed in the errata page. Or, more precisely, the only entry for it in the errata doesn’t match up with my impression of what is wrong. (Warning, the following won’t make much sense unless you have the book, and have it open on page 222.)
The line is:
Apologies for the size, that’s a bitmap because it’s so hard to get the symbols in HTML. The penultimate character should obviously be g rather than g, and that has been accounted for in the errata. But here’s what I’d be interested to know from anyone who’s taught from the book. I think the initial ‘G ‘ should not be there. The argument for the line is that diag(a) = g, and Diag represents diag in T. But that would give us the final universal quantification, not the biconditional, right? For what it’s worth, I think if the ‘G ‘ how the next line in the proof is derived is relatively obvious, whereas if it isn’t this is a little hard to see.
So I’m 90% confident that the ‘G ‘ is just a typo. But not 100%, since the people who wrote the book are smarter than me, so I might just be missing something obvious.
While on the subject of typos, it’s probably worth mentioning that in my dissertation I managed to have one of the axioms of probability theory be that for all A, the probability of A was greater than or equal to 1. More bizarrely, in the most recent draft of the truer paper I managed to have one sentence with two errant negations, but because of the way they scoped, the sentence was still false. So I’m sympathetic to those whose text is bogged down with stray symbols, and I’m not exactly in a stone-casting position.
Retuning to the music theme, I started a fun little thread over on Crooked Timber about the greatest rock albums. It turns out my fellow Crooks (or Timberites to use the local lingo) have pretty good music taste. Whether the same can be said of me is a matter of some debate.