Peter Smith is writing “a book on Gödel’s Theorems”:http://www.godelbook.net/, and he’s been kind enough to make “most of it available for download”:http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/godelbook/download.html. Thanks to “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/09/28/The_Antidiagonal_of_the_Primitive_Recursive_Functions for the link, and interesting comments on the book.

I wanted to quibble with one thing Prof Smith wrote.

bq. You can, for the moment, freely download these draft 16 chapters. However

bq. *The deal is that — if you actually read them — you send any comments you have, however brief or general, to comments at godelbook dot net[1].*

bq. I note — not entirely with surprise but with disappointment — that for the last versions, the ratio of downloaders to those who’ve sent comments seems to be well over 200 to 1. OK, no doubt a good many download in a speculativve way, and find that the book isn’t for them. Still, if that ratio doesn’t improve a bit, I guess I’ll go back to just circulating my friends and relations! :-)))

My ratio of readers to commentators is frequently in the 1000 to 1 range. This kind of thing isn’t unusual. If you really want comments, you should send manuscripts to friends with begs for comments _and_ post things online. I think from the smileys Prof Smith knows this, but I thought it worth pointing out that his situation is not particularly unusual.

fn1. I’ve replaced a live email link here with a description of the email address because I’m a little afraid this page is scanned regularly by robots looking for spammail addresses, and I thought I’d spare Prof. Smith that pain.