MishMash

Spectacular photographs of electrical storm in the dust cloud from Chaitén

Fotos Tormenta eléctrica en erupción del volcán Chaitén. linked to by Earl Mardle.

2000 Terrorists. Don't trust anyone!

Craig Murray in fine fettle:

The truth is that since September 11 Islamic militants have killed about 70 people in the UK. That's 12 people a year in a country of 60 million. Every death is terrible, but a threat to our existence it is not. You have a much better chance of drowning in your own bath, of being struck by lightning or of winning the national lottery than of being killed by a terrorist. But that wouldn't persuade you to give up your civil liberties, or that we have to invade more oil rich countries for our security.

And from a commenter to Murray's post:

Perhaps the government could give us a fear list, from 1 to 10, of the things we should fear most. Then we'd know where we are, and could start some serious and structured fearing without having to worry about whether we're fearing about entirely the wrong thing.

Half price!

That's a long queue for half price chips. Are they really worth the wait?

School or factory?

Who needs personal contact when we can monitor pupils using RFID tags (via Schneier on Security). *Shudder*.

San Francisco in jell(y|o)

Thanks Heather for a pointer to Liz Hickok's jelly model of San Francisco. Sadly the earthquake doesn't test it to distruction ...

Child obesity = global warming = terrorism = fascism

Mick Hume in the Times:

We were officially told this week that obesity is as big a threat as climate change. Not long ago we were told that global warming is as big a threat as terrorism. And earlier, that terrorism is as big a threat to the British people as the Second World War. So: child obesity = global warming = terrorism = Fascism. Ergo, those crisps in your child’s lunchbox are today’s moral equivalent of the Nazis. Now do you feel guilty?

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O

The Onion:

CHICAGO—In what is being called the first conceptual terrorist attack on American soil, the landmark Sears Tower was encased in 18 million tons of strawberry gelatin early Monday morning, leaving thousands shocked, angry, and seriously confused.

Digital information is different

This is beautifully done, and hits a few nails on the head:

Merlin has a few worthwhile comments on the strengths of paper. Also missing, from my point of view, is the fact that a lot of what we do with computers now (pretty much everything that's off the web, for a start) needlessly recreates the limitations of paper and adds a few new problems for good measure. Now where did I put that file ...

Newcastle University Compromises on Excellence

High hopes for our new Vice Chancellor take something of a battering with this latest news:

Key themes of the discussions centred around how the pursuit of excellence should be balanced with relevance to student vocations, business and society in general.

Er ... pardon?

Looking forward to the next announcement:

After careful consideration, Newcastle University has decided that it can best provide relevance to student vocations, business and society in general by striving for unequalled mediocrity in all of its activities.

What is uncertainty?

A couple of recent activities have forced me to explore my discomfort with with the way the word uncertainty is used in flood risk management. One of these activities was a refinement and extension of the wiki on methods for handling uncertainty in flood risk management that I have been involved in putting together as part of the Flood Risk Management Research Consortium. The other is an ongoing attempt to write a paper, which also deals with, among other things, uncertainty. I find writing incredibly hard, not least because I can't stop thinking about things like this.

I have assumed, since I first thought about it, that certain and its various cognates (certainty, uncertain, uncertainty, ...) referred originally to a state of mind, and that through a process of metonymic transfer they had come to be used to refer to the object of that state of mind: the thing about or because of which one was, or was not, certain. A trawl through the OED, to which the University subscribes, presumably hoping that doing so will result in a net productivity gain among its employees, suggests that this is not the case.

For all of these words, the first definition (and I presume order is significant) given by OED is related to something being "determined, fixed, settled". For certainty, the mental state which I assumed was the primary meaning appears only in the fourth, "the quality or fact of being (objectively) certain", and fifth, "the quality or state of being subjectively certain; assurance, confidence; absence of doubt or hesitation" definitions.

The etymology given for certain makes things clearer

a. OF. certain (= Pr. certan, Sp. and It. certano), repr. late L. or Romanic type certan-us, certan-o, f. cert-us determined, settled, sure, orig. pa. pple. of cern-ere to decide, determine, etc. The sense-development had taken place already with L. certus.

(OED)

So the root meaning of certain would appear to be "having been decided/determined", and the metonymic transfer, if anything, proceeded in the opposite direction from that which I had supposed, from the fact of my having decided something to my state of mind having done so.

In launching myself into the OED, I was looking for justification for using uncertainty in a constrained sense to refer only to a state of mind. I didn't find it, which leaves my original problem unsolved. To design software which supports a more explicit treatment of uncertainty in flood risk management requires that we address all of the many aspects of uncertainty, and these go far beyond the numerical-computational treatment provided by the tools of quantitative uncertainty analysis. To do so, or even to explain the need to do so, we must be able to distinguish these many aspects in both thought and language, in turn requiring the use of a vocabulary which recognises these distinctions. Using uncertainty to refer indisciminately to both the object of a state of mind and that state itself renders clarity of thought, and with it communication, impossible.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

(Albert Einstein)

True objective certainty is only possible in the context of formal systems such as mathematics and logic. Everything else, including the results of modern science, is subjective. The use of certitude, according to the OED, has since Hobbes been increasingly restricted to "the quality of being subjectively certain" [my emphasis], and is thus the opposite of doubt. Science allows us to develop justified certitude, which might tend towards objective certainty but cannot ever get us there. Flood risk management draws heavily on modern-scientific methods and results; this injects a certain amount of "objectivity" into the process, but in the end most decisions still have much more to do with certitude, subjective certainty, than with objective certainty.

Perhaps, then, I can use doubt and certitude to refer to the states of mind of participants in the decision-making process and uncertainty, in the manner familiar to most of my potential readers, to refer to the objects which, by their uncertainty, inspire doubt.