It’s basically consumer week here at TAR, so don’t expect much philosophy. Not even an answer to the puzzle Geoff Pullum raised for me. (Right now I’m too zonked to see why something that’s clearly true, that if (1) is false it is true, is true. So I better leave that one for the morning.)

I decided to become a mobile high-tech kinda guy this week. So I bought an iPod and a treo phone/organiser/go-everywhere-email-thingy.

Naturally I didn’t buy the right cable for the iPod, but luckily I was able to borrow the right cable from linguistics whiz and all round good guy Chris Barker while I ordered another in, so now iPod works. Much thanks to Chris – may you be blessed with counterexamples to all your enemies’ hypotheses! I really like the iPod, unsurprisingly, but it does have a small design flaw. It is much too easy for the controls, especially the next track button, to get pressed accidentally. You can override this with the hold button, but then you can’t do something as simple as change the volume. Maybe there’s a reasonable workaround for this. In any case, it’s a pretty spectacular bit of equipment. A device capable of storing and playing 2500 songs, and counting, that fits in a shirt pocket is pretty wild.

The phone isn’t yet hooked up to a network (that should happen later tonight, I hope) but after that I’ll be back in the world of cell phone connected people. It’s really intolerable to be at conferences without a cell phone, and since I’ll be at a dozen or so conferences in the next few months I really needed the upgrade. Why I needed to buy an imitation BlackBerry I’m not sure, but hopefully I’ll get some use out of all the features I’ve paid for.

Does anyone know exactly how the ‘Personal Network’ at Friendster works? It says it includes all the people that stand in the transitive closure of the ‘Friend of’ relation to me, but if that’s true the actual number of people in it, 3755, seems rather unlikely. I would have thought that once the network reaches a critical mass, say a hundred, it would extend to basically everyone in Friendster. (And I guess Friendster has many more than 3755 users.) If there’s some limit to the length of chains between me and any one of these people (e.g. that the shortest chain has to be at most length 20) this number would be more plausible. But it seems really surprising that all these people are only connected to each other, not to anyone else in Friendster. (I probably shouldn’t do a priori sociology, but a priori science is a hard habit to break.)

In general I think it’s a good thing that I don’t use TAR to report breaking news about hiring decisions and the like. For one thing it would mean constantly having conversations like “Is this on the record?” and I don’t want to be doing that. But there could be some big news coming down the pipe shortly that I can’t resist covering. If you’re interested in that stuff, stay tuned. If you’d rather read about actual philosophy, er, you might be better off changing channels and heading over to Wo’s, because he’s had a bunch of great metaphysics posts up recently.