Peter Smith's Blog, page 72

Witchcraft

A chance find in our favourite, delightfully well run, richly stocked, Oxfam bookshop (the one in Saffron Walden, since you ask) — a copy of Madeline Miller’s recently published Circe. The novel has been very well reviewed (and some readers I follow on twitter have been bowled over). But we weren’t planning on getting this, as — for whatever reason — neither of us really took to the author’s previous best-seller, The Song of Achilles. Still, here was the really beautifully produced hardback of her new book, at a fraction of the price. And after reading the first couple of pages … well, I snapped it up

By another chance, I finished the novel I had been reading the very next day (Philip Roth’s American Pastoral since you ask – much featured in those “these are the five novels of Roth’s which you must read” lists which appeared after his death, and yes, I hadn’t read it before, and yes, I should have done, because yes, it is terrific.) So I picked up Circe again straight away and continued reading. Tales of gods and witches and magic are not usually my thing at all. Nor is writing which can be consciously mannered, sometimes echoing old translations from the Greek epics, oddly mixed with modern vernacular. And yet — by witchcraft! — it works wonderfully well. Once you allow yourself to be swept up in the rhythms of the prose, there is much delight to be found in the writing. And the unfolding of tale itself becomes entirely  compelling. Circe describes the trickster Odysseus as a “spiral shell. Always another curve out of sight”; but what Madeline Miller does is bring vividly into view Circe’s own spiralling journey into the human world. I felt rather bereft when the book ended.

I’m not sure though what happened to the men turned into swine …

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IFL2, back to the drawing board …

Help!

Well, it’s not back to square one, but it is time to radically re-think plans for the shape of the book (and what will go into it, and what will survive as online supplements). Let me explain the problem — as all thoughts and comments will be gratefully received. Being retired has all kinds of upsides, but I can no longer buttonhole colleagues or long-suffering grad students over coffee. So, dear readers, it is your help and advice I seek!

Background info. The first edition of my Intro to Formal Logic has a bit under 350 text pages between the prelims and the end matter. Of those, about 270 pages cover “core” material that will survive in rewritten form into the second edition (introductory chapters on the very idea of validity; PL languages and truth-table testing for tautological validity; extending this to deal with the conditional; explaining how QL languages work; defining validity for quantificational arguments; adding the identity predicate and functions to formal languages). The other 80 pages cover propositional and quantificational trees.

So the only proof system in IFL1 is a tree system. Tree systems are elegant and students find them easy to play with; but many/most teachers think that beginners ought to know something about natural deduction. Indeed I think that too! — but IFL1 was basically my handouts for a first year course given to students who were also going to do a compulsory second year logic course where they would hear about natural deduction, so I then just didn’t need to cover ND in my notes. Still, for a more standalone text, of wider use, very arguably I should cover ND. People certainly complained about the omission from  IFL1, and said that that was why they weren’t adopting it as a course text.

Now, I believed that in revising  IFL I could cut down various parts of the core material, speed up the treatment of trees (in part by repurposing some material as online Appendices) and “buy” myself some thirty pages that way. CUP said they would also allow me an extra 30 pages (maximum, to keep the overall length of the book under 400 pages). So I thought that would give me 60 pages for chapters on natural deduction.

Well, …

It doesn’t seem to be panning out quite like that ….!

In reworking the “core” material in the first part of the book — up to the introduction of quantifiers — I seem to have added to the page length here. Yes, the result is clearer, more readable, more accurate … but not shorter. OK, I have been able to speed up the treatment of propositional trees while improving that too. But it balances out, and the first half of the book is more or less just as long as it was. So I’m not hopeful now of being able to save too many core pages and/or cut down the treatment of trees by much. On the other hand, the material on natural deduction for propositional and predicate logic looks as if it will run to about 80 pages, if I aim for a comparable level of clarity, accessibility and user-friendliness.

So instead of adding 30 pages, I’m in danger of adding something like 70 pages to the book, if I cover both trees and natural deduction — and there is no way that CUP will wear that. Moreover, the sheer length of the book will look rather off-putting, another reason for keeping to length.

I seem to have three options

Find and apply Alice’s magical “Shrink me” potion, and try to cram everything in.
Keep the text as a tree-based text, of much the same size as present, while adding ND chapters as an optional extra available online. (Perhaps using just some of those permitted extra printed pages as an arm-waving introduction to what is spelt out in the online chapters.)
Make the text a ND-based one, of much the same size as present, while offering tree-based chapters as an optional extra available online.   (Perhaps using just some of those permitted extra pages as an arm-waving introduction to what is spelt out in the online chapters.)

I really, really, don’t think that (1) will fly, or I wouldn’t be (this far into the work on the second edition) facing the issues that I am.

Keeping to (2) would, yes, give the world an improved version of IFL, but one still subject to the shortcomings that many perceived, namely that the book wouldn’t have a “real” proof-system.

Moving to (3) is therefore tempting, as I think I can present an intuitively-attractive Fitch-style system in a very user-friendly way.

Yes, I do still think that trees make for a very student-friendly way into a first formal system. But then, I do think natural deduction is more, well, natural — regimenting modes of reasoning we use all the time, so surely something beginners should know about early in their logical studies.

So which way should I jump? Choices, choices …!

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The Pavel Haas Quartet’s Dvorak, another triumph

Photo: Smetanova Litomyšl

Released near the end of 2107, it was my CD of the year; and now the Gramophone magazine have given it their Chamber Music Award for 2018. The Pavel Haas Quartet playing Dvorak  — in this case, the second Piano Quintet Op. 81, with their friend Boris Giltberg on piano, and the String Quintet Op. 97, with their more-than-friend Pavel Nikl as the second viola — is as good as it gets.

Leaving aside an early CD of Beethoven quartets, given away with a BBC Music magazine, the PHQ have now released seven CDs with Supraphon. Their debut CD won the Gramophone award for  Chamber Music disk of the year. And now so too have their last four recordings. This really is a quite extraordinary achievement, as far as I know quite unparalleled in any area of classical music. And it is against the stiffest of competitions, when you think how many stunningly good string quartets there are performing today.

As one  — again bowled over — reviewer wondered, ‘How do they do it?’ That is really for the more musically perceptive than I am to answer. But even the amateur listener, hearing them live, can only be struck by the evident depth of musical understanding and the level of passionate commitment combined with the greatest technical control of fine detail. Long may they flourish with their new violist (above) who seems to bring yet more to the group.

Next up, a year hence, a CD of Shostakovich quartets …

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The Pavel Haas Quartet at the Edinburgh Festival

Pavel Haas Quartet
Photo: Marco Borggreve

With their last CD newly shortlisted for another Gramophone Award, The Pavel Haas Quartet have started their new season with a concert at the Edinburgh Festival, playing Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7, Schubert’s ‘Rosamunde’ Quartet and the Ravel Quartet. You can listen for another four weeks at the BBC site, here. They are in terrific form – who would guess that they have only been playing with their new violist for half a year? – and the Schubert here is quite exceptional. Catch this concert while you can!

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Decaffeinated sets

It is a familiar enough point that while logic texts for beginners often fall into talking about sets (sets of premisses entailing conclusions, sets of objects being extensions of predicates, sets of objects being domains of quantification, etc.), this set talk is doing no substantive work at least in elementary contexts. It can be construed in a decaffeinated way, as talk about no more than virtual classes in Quine’s sense.

I found myself making a few remarks to this effect at scattered places in  IFL2, but doing so distracted a bit from the flow of exposition. So I’ve decided to gather together various remarks into one four-page chapter. Here it is:

A very short word about sets

What do people think? I’d very much welcome comments. I don’t want to avoid distractions of one kind by e.g. being thought distractingly misguided!

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Mesh wifi – Deco M5

Not my usual sort of post, but this might be of interest to anyone out there dithering about getting a mesh wifi system for home. The take home message? Just do it, you won’t regret it — and the TP-link Deco M5 will probably suit you very well.

And for those still with me,  who want more detail ….

We have a two storey Edwardian house, small but extended, with a lot of internal brick walls. Our Virgin broadband gives 100 Mb/s download speeds in theory. In practice, the wifi from the Virgin Hub 3.0 was — on a bad day — delivering a fluctuating 2 or 4 Mb/s in my study or at the back of the kitchen. OK, we were getting better using two old Apple Airports, but one died recently so it really was time to look for a replacement system. Our needs are modest: ideally, a system delivering steady wifi throughout the house, for ordinary laptop use, some iPlayer or movie streaming to the Apple TV, and (what in particular we didn’t have before) enough bandwidth for reliable quality FaceTime video without sitting next to the router. We have no need for fancy control of the system: plug-and-play-and-forget-about-it is what we were after.

Looking at reviews, in the PC/Mac magazines, on review sites, and from purchasers, it seems that there are a number of mesh wifi systems that get a lot of more-or-less five-star reviews. Though in each case, some purchasers report very bad experiences. So you pays your money and takes your chances …

Some of the systems are definite overkill for a smallish house where the incoming broadband is not lightning fast and where we haven’t got dozens of devices. So I went for the TP-link Deco M5 (there’s now a fancier M9, not yet available in the UK; but this is more expensive and again provides more than we could need so I didn’t wait for it). I plumped for the Deco basically on price — and on aesthetic grounds, where TP-link have taken a leaf out of Apple’s book. The small units and their chargers are rather nicely designed, and even smaller (and hence more unobtrusive) than you expect.

Setting up the three Decos on the iPhone app was simplicity itself. (Odd maybe not to have the option of a Web set up, but since there are no fancy controls, I guess it isn’t needed.) Twenty minutes or so and we were good to go.  (A firmware update became available after a couple of days: oh heavens, I thought, am I about to spoil things, now everything is working perfectly? But no, updating via the app went entirely smoothly first time — another  encouraging sign!)

And so to the 64K dollar question: how well does it all work? We are now normally getting 100Mb/s more or less throughout the house (just a bit slower in one bedroom, it seems) — ‘normally’ meaning so long as the broadband feed from Virgin is behaving. In other words, we are getting the benefit of all the speed we are notionally paying for. The wifi connection has been extremely stable and reliable, with no noticeable dropouts at all. Those transatlantic FaceTime video chats work a treat, far from the Hub. The Decos just sit there, performing as advertised.

So, in summary — for our routine needs — the Decos really do fill the bill. I needed a family prod or three to take the plunge; should have done it a year ago.

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Old Glory

Now, how did that happen? Wanting to re-read Jonathan Raban’s Coasting, his evocation of a journey of discovery sailing round Britain, first published over thirty years ago, I just found a couple of days ago that our copy has disappeared from the shelves. A mystery:  I wonder what happened to it. So it is very good to discover that the book has recently been republished, along with four other books by Raban, by Eland, in rather handsomely produced paperbacks. I remember the book as being extraordinarily well written. The blurb on our new copy tells me that  Raban here “moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters. As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a collision course, so he navigates the complex and turbulent waters of his own middle age. Coasting is a fearless attempt to discover the meaning of belonging and of his English homeland.” Which indeed is how I recall the book. I look forward to it!

I’ve been put in mind to read Coasting again because I have recently been re-reading with great  enjoyment two of Raban’s other books that are on our shelves (as it happens, another two of the five that have been republished by Eland). First there was For Love & Money, which is subtitled “Writing, Reading, Travelling: 1969–87”, and which reprints some early reviews and occasional pieces. The writing is consistently humane and insightful, but more than that, it is just so beautifully readable (the number of times I thought, “I wish I could write even half as well”). And then there was Raban’s early masterpiece, Old Glory from 1981, notionally recounting his voyage down the Mississippi in a small boat.

I say “notionally” as this complex work is lightly disguised as a straight travel book, a literal recounting of a journey taken. But the one-time English literature lecturer warns us clearly enough. One of the epigraphs of the book is from T. S. Eliot (writing of the  Mississippi), starting “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god …” The other epigraph is from Jean François Millet: “One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.” So we are set up for this to be a mythic tale, and for the “Jonathan Raban” who features as the narrator and his adventures to be a very inexact rendition of the author and his own journey. And a mythic tale is what we get, an ordeal by water, with auguries and signs, battles fought, a princess won (but also lost, for this is a flawed epic, and the journey ends in emptiness). But woven together with this are encounters with American myths of frontiers and journeys. And, presciently — so striking, reading again now, nearly forty years later —  Raban notes the “deep, unsatisfied capacity for hero-worship” that makes many Americans (far from the artificialities of the coasts) long for a “strong” leader, a saviour. This is a many layered book, artful in the artlessness of its transparent prose. Wonderful.

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Getting it right …

After a bad day battling with my intro logic book and feeling really rather despondent about it, I stumbled over this, from Philip Roth, whose Americal Pastoral I’m currently reading:

“Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.”

Yes, one day, I will get it right …

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IFL2: the introductory chapters again

After a hiatus, back to work on the second edition of my Introduction to Formal Logic. I’ve been tidying and (I hope!) slightly improving again the first tranche of chapters — so here they are again:

IFL2: Chapters 1 – 7

A quick look at the Table of Contents should give you a good idea of what they are about if you don’t know the book. If you do know the first edition, then the main change is that I now take a somewhat different line about the notion of logical validity.

The headline news, anyway, is that these really are introductory chapters (general scene-setting before we start work in earnest on propositional logic in Chapter 9).  So I introduce ideas like: validity, deduction vs induction, showing validity by ‘proofs’, showing invalidity by ‘counterexamples’, logical validity vs validity (necessary preservation of truth more generally). The chapters aim to be accessible and reasonably user-friendly without talking down to the reader. So these chapters hopefully should be of interest and of use to any philosophy student about to start a logic course next term/semester (indeed, they should be of use to any beginning philosopher). Do please spread the word, and do point prospective students to the link!

I’ll leave these chapters online, freely available, for the next couple of months or so. In the meantime, all comments/corrections as always most gratefully received!

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In wonderland

A Cambridge story, from Arnie Koslow.

Back in the day, the Moral Sciences Club met in the rooms of Richard Braithwaite, then the Club’s chairman. A sofa at the front provided the regular seating for the nervous figure of Alfred Ewing at one end and the obscurely oracular John Wisdom at the other.

One meeting, the room is packed, and a latecomer hovers at the door, looking for somewhere to sit.

From the chair, Braithwaite booms “There is space on the sofa … between the March Hare and the Mad Hatter.”

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