I'm a little tired right now. No, I'm very tired. I wonder if I'll remember writing this.
I stroke my hairy chin. On my last trip to Philmont, a leader told our group that if someone has not grown a nice beard by his or her teens, then he or she never will. Maybe I will grow a nasty, scraggly beard. Doing so would fit in with my general plan to end as a lecherous old man with a cane for hitting ungrateful whippersnappers, for what is a lecherous old man with a cane for hitting ungrateful whippersnappers without a scraggly beard? Answer: a lecherous old man with a cane for hitting ungrateful whippersnappers without a scraggly beard.
Ha, ha, ha. Anyway, I just sneezed.
The Boinking Principle: (based on the Drinking Principle discussed in Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book?):
There exists a person, such that if he or she is boinking, everyone is
boinking.
Proof. If everyone is boinking, then obviously that person is boinking.
If that person
is not boinking, then not everyone is boinking; both parts of the
implicaton are false so the whole implication is true.
Is there a property P such that if P is substituted for "boinking" in the Boinking Principle, the resulting sentence is no longer a theorem? I guess the answer is "yes," but I'm tired so nuh!
I wonder what is responsible for one's level of intelligence. It seems there are some ideas that I would never come up with on my own, no matter how long I thought about the facts leading to them. Perhaps this is just because I'm not following a more general, systematic way of exploring all of the possibilities so that I tend to lose most of the information I could have gained from each mistake, sometimes even repeating mistakes.
Most of the "smart" people I know seem to have very good memories (at least for "intellectual" things.) The better one's memory, it seems reasonable to guess, the better a chance one has of drawing conclusions from a body of data, of seeing patterns, because one then has more room to store the whole body of data, previous presently useful results, and intermediate results.
And a better memory could also account for faster speed, at least in situations where the answer may be "looked up" from previous experience. Is memory the most important factor in determining one's level of intelligence?
I had an interesting conversation this morning. (Or perhaps I simply believe it so now because if I didn't believe it to be interesting, then I would be experiencing some freaking cognitive dissonance. Learning about the idea of cognitive dissonance will probably make me suspicious of many such beliefs. Oh, well. It's fun!) Apparently, there is not a hierarchy of rabbis, at least not to certify that one may certify food as Kosher. This reminds me very much of the present situation with signed applets.
Good morning!
I must shower now for Easter lupper (the meal between lunch and supper,
also known as "linner" or "dupper").