Saturday, February 25, 2006

goooooooooodle

It probably seems like a small and unimportant thing but there should be an umluat over the letter =o= in Godel, the famous (to eggheads with a penchant for tring to suss out the universe with exquisitely short lengths of twine) Viennese mathematician who in 1931 published a paper, fairly incomprehensible to damn near everyone , that more or less said you couldn't really trust math or logic. Mathematicians and logicians will explain at length that the proof demonstrates nothing of the sort, but they haven't got a leg to stand on. But that's not the point. The point is, there ought ot be an umlaut, that's two dots like a colon (:) only on its side (. .) on top of the =o= in Godel's name but there isn't for reasons that are not appropriate for discussion at this time. The Kingdom Come Institute is not in the business of explaining missing umlauts. The point is, even without this explanation it is fairly obvious to anyone who knows math history who I mean when I say Godel, and to anyone who doesn't it doesn't matter anyway. This is what Godel, and for that matter Bertrand Russell, are about. The tedious construction of an explanation of something that those in the position of understanding know instinctively, and the rest by definition will not understand and will not care. Nor should they: the symbolic logics of Russel, Whitehead, Leibniz, Godel and the rest are tedious in the extreme. You would do just as well to simply ponder what transpires when the inexhumable force meets the incontinent object. But for the sake of accuracy, try to imagine two dots over the =o= in Godel's name wherever it appears, unless in fact it is in reference to some other Godel who's name is spelled without an umlaut.

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