9:25: There’s wireless access in the large lecture theatre, so I’ll take notes and upload comments occassionally through the day. At the moment, Phokion Kolaitis is giving his first short course lecture on constraint satisfaction problems. So far he’s talking about examples of CSPs (graph colourings and 3-SAT are his first examples) and he’s just...

I’ll try this conference blogging thing, to see how it goes. Logic Colloquium has started, with the opening address by Charles Parsons from Harvard. His talk was on Paul Bernay’s later philosophy of mathematics — a subject of which I knew nothing. So I learned a bit. After Bernays’ collaboration with Hilbert at Göttingen, he left Germany because...

Remind me to check legroom on airlines before I book them for the first time – especially if I’m planning to write on the plane. Maersk Airlines has an interesting policy of offering seats in S/M/L sizes. S seats have a tight pitch of 29 inches (73-and-a-bit centimetres). You can upgrade to a roomier seet for a price–a fact that the stewards make...

I’m off to Athens tomorrow. Tonight I catch the train to København, where I stay overnight in a cheap hotel near the airport, to get my 7:30am flight. Logic Colloquium 2005 looks like it will be lots of fun. I’ve been busy writing slides, and I should use the time on the train to put the finishing touches on Day 2. Once they’re done, I’ll post...

I’ve been experimenting with a map using plazes, a neat little doodad that keeps track of where you are when you use a computer to access the net (if you explicitly log in yourself—it’s not spying on you without your consent). It powers the map on the main page here, and you can use it to generate a map of where you’ve been. Read on if you want...

We’re settled in Århus now, while Christine does work with a colleague on a research project. This gives Z and me lots of time for lots of fun. Yesterday’s fun was Legoland (Vibeke and Christine wanted to come too, so we all made a day of it). Z loved the rides, and the displays, and the Lego for sale. We bought a set for him to grow into....

I’ve added a very draft design to the Mozilla wiki page.

We fly later today! The big study leave adventure starts later this afternoon. The first few weeks alternate holidays and work for Christine and for me, and it gives us lots of time to enjoy the company of our young son. Zachary and I are especially looking forward to Legoland in Billund and exploring the surrounds of Århus. Our apartment...

Sometimes music is best heard at volume. A case in point? The second movement of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8. I recommend the Fitzwilliam String Quartet recording. (The Emerson Quartet’s recording is available on iTunes, but the Fitzwilliams’ isn’t.) (Apologies to our next door neighbours. I’m enjoying my last bout of loud music at home...

The Australasian Journal of Logic is firing on all cylinders again. As the managing editor, there was a period in this last semester where I wasn’t managing very well, and things piled up and got the better of me for quite some time. To speak overly frankly for a moment, I got quite depressed over the state that things were in and over my own...

A half hour of php hacking has finally produced a working archive page for the photos I’ve been posting from my phonecam. My little Sony Ericsson T630 phone has a terribly lo-res camera, but it’s fun to take shots now and then when you wouldn’t normally take photos. Now, instead of sliding off the front page when I upload another one, you can see...

I’m teaching some classes on proof theory at Logic Colloquium 2005 and ESSLLI 2005 soon. Spurred on a little bit by discussion of commentary at conferences, I’ve wondered a little bit about how I can get interesting feedback going during/after the presentations. (The material I’ll be teaching is from the book, which is a Work very-much-in...

I’m rearranging stuff around here, in preparation for the Big Trip. Let me know if anything broke in the transition.

This Queen’s birthday holiday moning, cool and clear, was a perfect time for Zachary and me to fly our hot-air balloon. The flight was short but glorious. Flying a balloon like this is not completely straightforward. You need to unfurl the balloon carefully, and make sure no bit touches the little burner on the ground (fuelled with cotton wool...

Since I’m on study leave from July, I’m not doing any teaching in Semester 2 this year. Hooray! (I need a break.)

Next travel thing: I’ve signed up at skype.com and I have an account to make super-cheap voice calls home and almost anywhere else from the computer while overseas at least, when I’m connected to the internet. It looks very well executed. There are clients for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, and at 1.7 euro cents a minute for calls to any landline...

I’ve taught my last classes for 2005. I’m officially on study leave from July 1, until December 31. We’re off on our journey from July 13. First, Denmark, where I’ll be looking after Z, while Christine works with a colleague. (Z and I plan to have some fun in our time there.) Then I’m off to the Logic Colloquium 2005, in Athens, and ESSLLI2005 in...

I’ve put together a very basic prototype with some of the ideas discussed so far.

Like almost everyone else, I’ve installed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it’s a really very good upgrade to the operating system. The system-wide search will be really handy. It’s indexed all of my documents (which includes a 2.3GB library of PDF files of other people’s papers), so being able to find the 29 papers that mention hypersequents (together...

Tomorrow I’m presenting a paper at the staff seminar in the Philosophy Department at the University of Otago. Given Charles Pigden’s delightful account of seminars at Otago, I’m not quite sure what to expect. Wish me luck!

I think that Google’s new search-inside-the-book service will prove to be quite handy to a researcher like me. It’s not satisfactory to read through a book like that on the screen (especially when copyright restrictions do not permit you to keep going after a couple of pages of continuous reading), but it will be a boon to research to be able to...

If you’re like me, you do research on the web, and you browse around different sites for journals, seeing what’s been published, and what you should read. Our library has online subscriptions for lots of these journals, so I can download the papers, file them, read them, etc. It’s all very nice. But it’s not always easy to get from the site to...

Here’s one thing I find comments on a website really good for: trawling for information. My spouse and I were talking over dessert this evening, over some lemon delcious pudding that she had made. She asked the question she asks every couple of years (when a self saucing pudding is made): How do self-saucing puddings work? They really are...

At logicandlanguage.net the author talks a little bit about comments on weblogs. On why one might allow them, or do without them. As you can see, I leave comments open here. (Behind the scenes there is a hardworking comment spam filter. Without that, this place would be deluged with spam.) I can understand why one would want the place to yourself...

I sometimes catch the tram to get to or from the office, and usually it’s a not unpleasant experience. This evening was not one of the usual reasonably relaxing fifteen minute trips down Flemington Road and through Royal Park. It’s remarkable how a violent scuffle between passengers can change the feeling throughout the tram. There was pushing,...

In this paper, we introduce a new natural deduction system for the logic of lattices, and a number of extensions of lattice logic with different negation connectives. We provide the class of natural deduction proofs with both a standard inductive definition and a global graph-theoretical criterion for correctness. We show how normalisation in...

According to the “knowability thesis,” every truth is knowable. Fitch’s paradox refutes the knowability thesis by showing that if we are not omniscient, then not only are some truths not known, but there are some truths that are not knowable. In this paper, I propose a weakening of the knowability thesis (which I call the “conjunctive knowability...

I argue for the following four theses. (1) Denial is not to be analysed as the assertion of a negation. (2) Given the concepts of assertion and denial, we have the resources to analyse logical consequence as relating arguments with multiple premises and multiple conclusions. Gentzen’s multiple conclusion calculus can be understood in a...

In this paper we introduce a distinct meta-ethical position, fictionalism about morality. We clarify and defend the position, showing that it is a way to save the “moral phenomena” while agreeing that there is no genuine objective prescriptivity to be described by moral terms. In particular, we distiguish moral fictionalism from moral...

Minimalists about truth say that the important properties of the truth predicate are revealed in the class of T-biconditionals. Most minimalists demur from taking all of the T-biconditionals of the form “ is true if and only if p”, to be true, because to do so leads to paradox. But exactly which biconditionals turn out to be true? I take a leaf...

Two short entries on two great philosophers of logic (and philosophical logicians) of late 20th and early 21st Century American philosophy, Nuel Belnap and Karel Lambert.

In this paper I consider an interpretation of future contingents which motivates a unification of a Łukasiewicz style logic with the more classical supervaluational semantics. This in turn motivates a new non-classical logic modelling what is “made true by history up until now.” I give a simple Hilbert-style proof theory, and a soundness and...

The wiki is lots of fun. Being able to edit the page you’re on, and freely create new pages by making new links, does seem to foster a new way of writing. It’ll be fun to see if any of my students catch on. If you’re interested in typesetting manuscripts in LaTeX, you might be interested in the notes I wrote up this evening. One on page layout,...

I’ve been pretty busy getting courses up and running for Semester 1. Some of this has involved starting writing my book, and setting up a wiki as a place to encourage feedback on the book and other things. Go and play there… (I’ll be interested to see how this goes.)

… when you fiddle with your book draft and manage to get it to compile with no overfull \hboxes and no underfull \vboxes.

Our friend Darren Rowse is blogging for tsunami relief over a 24 hour period. To make things interesting for him, we’re sponsoring him with a small amount for each different top level domain he uses in a post. It should make his posting nice and eclectic.

Matt Carter and Nick Trakakis are arguing over dialetheism. What’s dialetheism? It’s the view that some contradictory pairs of statements are true. It’s interesting that Nick is trying the line that contradictions (conjunctions of the form ‘p and not-p’) are meaningless. I always find it hard to judge claims of meaninglessness (since I don’t have...

I’m enjoying being back at work, but I seem to be procrastinating rather badly. Instead of writing my grant application and getting through my growing pile of emails, I’m doing research. I blame this on three things: I just don’t want to deal with my emails and my grant application. I’ve recently purchased two black-cover 100 page A4 spiral bound...

Tomorrow I’m back in the office, and back at work after my short Christmas/New Year break. It’ll be time to plough through that 45-email inbox, and see what else is waiting for me. I’ve started converting the news item archive pages to the new template. Expect more fiddling as I try to get them looking clearer. (They seem a bit too busy right...

This semester I am teaching the first-year subject Introduction to Formal Logic and an honours (fourth-year) seminar Logic and Philosophy. I’ll teach the honours class from draft material from my (as yet only in scribbles in my notebooks) draft book.

My redesign for 2005 is in progress now. After some problems (I managed to delete the writing page in a fit of cutting-and-pasting) I have some things on the way. There are lots of changes behind the scene. The linklist in the right column is now powered by del.icio.us, which is wonderful. The sidebars (left and right) contain other information,...

I’ve been rather busy for the last little while, as the absence from the website might indicate. Here is a list of what’s been happening, which involves not a little bit of trumpet-blowing, because a lot of the news has been good and it’s time for me to share. Last week I spent an enjoyable (if rather wet) week in Canberra, touring the sights...

Take these shoes Click clacking down some dead end street Take these shoes And make them fit Take this shirt Polyester white trash made in nowhere Take this shirt And make it clean, clean Take this soul Stranded in some skin and bones Take this soul And make it sing. That’s not a bad album, and not a bad song.

I’ve just bought some sheet music for the first time in 18 years or so. Let’s hope my violin technique is up to this. I know I can play the notes (or close approximations to them). It’s sustaining the technique for 10 minutes that I’m not so sure about.

In the second half of 2005 we’re planning to travel, on sabbatical. The C, G and Z show will be based in Oxford for Michaelmas. Before arriving in Oxford, we’ll be doing some European touring. C will be visiting a colleague in Denmark. I’ll hopefully be presenting at Logic Colloquium 2005 in Athens (July 28 to August 3), and ESSLLI2005 in...

One stroke of good fortune today. In a shopping trip with Z this afternoon, while looking for a Super Secret Present at JB Hi-Fi I found a set of Sennheiser HD 497s on sale. Picking these sweet headphones up for $15 was very very nice. Especially considering that this was approximately 80% off the list price. Oh, and they’re very nice headphones.

Oh well. Sad news tonight, with the conservatives returned with an increased majority here in Australia. Most worrying is the fact that their representation is increased in the Senate. We’re going to have an interesting few years ahead. (Let’s see how the forces for succession develop: Costello, Abbott, Turnbull…)

Stephen Neale, in Facing Facts takes theories of facts, truthmakers, and non-extensional connectives to be threatened by triviality in the face of powerful “slingshot” arguments. In this paper I rehearse the most powerful of these arguments, and then show that friends of facts have resources sufficient to not only resist slingshot arguments but...

In case you were wondering where this site was over the last couple of days: it turns out that both of the domain name servers that were registered for this site are in Florida. Not the best place to be over the last few days. I’ve now got three DNS machines registered for this domain, and they’re not all in the same continent, so hopefully it’s...

Our Federal Election is to be held on October 9. Our current Prime Minister says that this election is about trust. Well, I’m glad that the unannounced election campaign is over and the announced one is on its way. I don’t think that we’ll get a government that we can, or should trust in the result of this election, and I think that trust is...

I’ve been feeling like redesigning this site, yet again. There’s a lot about the design here I like, yet it’s not quite right for some of what I want to do. If you have any likes or dislikes about this place, please leave a comment here. I’ve got some ideas of what the redesign might feature, but I don’t want to get rid of anything that my three...

I suppose I should post something, even though the urge to post seems to have gone for a while over the last months. Let me fill you in on what’s been happening around here. I’ve been doing work with Mark Lance, who’s been visiting the Philosophy Department for a couple of months to do research with me. This has been immensely productive. We seem...

This morning I had my first ever “parent/teacher interview,” with Z’s carers at childcare. They seem to like him, and he generally likes them (though Z is choosy when it comes to who counts as his friend: the select group is pretty small at the moment). So now I know how they take him to be going on emotional, social, cognitive and motor...

There is widespread agreement that the law of non-contradiction is an important logical principle. There is less agreement on exactly what the law amounts to. This unclarity is brought to light by the emergence of paraconsistent logics in which contradictions are tolerated (in the sense that not everything need follow from a contradiction, and...

I’m not here, because I’m elsewhere. Elsewhere is lots of fun, and 1/3 of the way through, we seem to be having a very good time. I’ll report back with some highlights later. But now I’m off to another talk.

This last couple of weeks has been super-busy-hectic. Z and I fly up north this afternoon for a family visit. On Sunday I go off to the AAP Conference at South Molle, and Z stays with his Granddad for a couple of days, to be joined by his mum who returns from her little Europe conference trip. One piece of advice: If you’re preparing a conference...

Is there anyone who wants a GMail account that doesn’t have one by now? If you do, let me know in the comments. I have a few invitations I can burn. Update: This batch of invitations are gone.

Now this is a question which is much more sensible to ask than you might otherwise think: “Why can’t I manage academic papers like MP3s?” (the link is to a pdf of a paper by James Howison and Abby Goodrum). My “paper archive” is a fairly large 2GB (not as big as my “music archive”, I suppose) with about 6000 papers, and it’s catergorised under...

It’s going to be a slow period on the ’net for me in the next little while. My creaky powerbook seems to have developed yet another fault (now its AirPort connection is completely bung, so I’m only online at home when I directly plug in to the ADSL modem, which boots off the other users of the connection). This, together with the wonky right...

There’s no accounting for musical taste. This morning Z was a little upset. I decided to put on some music for him. First selection: Big Red Car. A little voice responds, with a tremor. “Dad.” I ask, “Zack, what is it?” “I don’t want this on. I want your music.” “OK.” Takes CD out. Replaces it. “Is this any better?” He sounds much brighter. “Good!”