The map is not the territory

My new job on the Erewhon Project is largely based upon the work of my predecessor Arno Mittelbach.

In a series of posts leading up to the new OxPoints Arno rediscovers the issues around using first order predicate calculus on continuous dimensions such as time.

This would appear to be a rediscovery of the Yale Shooting Problem: the real world cannot be modelled in a monotonic logic. Locations are not points but areas, names are not simple properties but have implicit usage start and end times. Only in maths is something as simple as its description: the map is not the territory.

amd64 "no such file or directory" error with Android and Skype

Using an amd64 debian (lenny and kubuntu jaunty) install I came across the least informative error message yet:

bash: adb: No such file or directory

and similarly for skype.

This appears to be due to not yet having installed the i36 compatibility libraries:

apt-get install ia32-libs

and it goes away.

Bye then Pepper. Good girl.

On Wednesday morning, at about 8.15, Pepper died.

Whilst she was rather young (eleven maybe) to die, for a mongrel, her timing was pretty good. It was the first day of my new job and as it was all of us were stroking her as she stopped breathing, twitched and was gone.