Category: Miscellaneous

Computational Philosophy CFP – AISB/IACAP World Congress – July 2012

Call for Papers: Symposium on Computational Philosophy

To be held as part of the

AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012
in honour of Alan Turing

July 2nd to 6th, 2012
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

See http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/turing12

The Big Bang Theory (T.V. Show)

I have been watching some episodes of this show recently and two scenes particularly caught my attention.

Firstly, Sheldon Cooper makes an unexpected reference to Gottlob Frege: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_TQea0aOnE(1:39)

Secondly, here is some dialogue from one scene:

Howard Wolowitz: [after everyone cheers for him and his team design going to space] It gets better! Someone has to go up with the telescope as a payload specialist, and guess who that someone is!
Sheldon Cooper: Mohammed Lee. [everyone’s looking confused]
Howard Wolowitz: Who’s Mohammed Lee?
Sheldon Cooper: Mohammed is the most common first name in the world, and Lee the most common surname. As I didn’t know the answer, I thought that’d give me a mathematical edge.

For someone who is supposed to be a genius, Sheldon seems not to be familiar with basic laws of probability. I think that this scene provides a cool example of the fact that it does not necessarily follow from two things A and B each having a relatively high probability below 1 that their conjunction shares a high probability.

In fact, it can be zero. I wonder if there are any Herman Lee’s out there.

SQL Server Error Message

Developing some code recently for a local intranet application that uses ASP and SQL Server, I came across the following error:

Error Message: A column has been specified more than once in the order by list. Columns in the order by list must be unique.

So basically, if you give SQL Server a query like


SELECT * FROM Example ORDER BY Example_Column1, Example_Column1

you get such a message.

I am wondering, is there any logical reason why SQL Server does not tolerate a column being specified more than once in the ORDER BY clause? I would think that ORDER BY should just obey something like idempotence, so that the above query simply reduces to:


SELECT * FROM Example ORDER BY Example_Column1

This doesn’t happen with MySQL. As well as the above example, I also tried the following in MySQL and it didn’t complain:


SELECT * FROM Example ORDER BY Example_Column1, Example_Column2, Example_Column1

The Reasoner — call for papers

The Reasoner is a monthly digest highlighting exciting new research on reasoning, inference and method broadly construed. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the sciences.

If you are a PhD student or a young researcher, you may want to submit a What’s hot column to alert readers to your new exciting research area. Contact [email protected] for further information

Continue reading “The Reasoner — call for papers”

Upcoming Talk

I am giving a talk next Friday at my department’s logic seminar series. Here are the details:

Title: The Logic of Knowledge and the Flow of Information

Abstract: In this talk I cover some work still in development which concerns the notions of information and knowledge as exemplified in Fred Dretske’s ‘Knowledge and The Flow of Information’. In particular, I cover (1) some work on the logic of information flow and (2) the issue of developing an epistemic logic which captures Dretske’s notion of knowledge as a semi-penetrating operator.