h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Recumbentman

I'm your sub-editor for Where does Fiction Begin and End?. The new version is here A87809124 - please subscribe!

I enjoyed this! I have mainly just tweaked a few bits for House Style and added in more links, so I hope that's OK. I do have a couple of questions.

Unfortunately, I'm having no luck with your special symbol - in Brunel it was showing up as ?, and in Pliny it wasn't appearing at all. I looked in the GuideML Clinic and found a different code to use, but now it is giving a weird square rather than the symbol you described in Peer Review... I tried to draw the symbol using keyboard characters, but I don't really think that was successful, so I don't know what you would like to do.

I was confused by "a character in Sophie's World can send a birthday greeting to Sophie, while remaining unaware of Sophie's existence." - does it mean that the greeting was sent to the supernatural being Sophie just in case she existed?

Hello Sasha!

Just saw this request now, sorry to keep you waiting.

Gnomon is good at finding ways to incorporate symbols and the like; I'll ask him.

I misremembered Sophie's World. In the story it is Sophie who receives mysterious messages, addressed to an unknown Hilde Knag, care of Sophie. It transpires that Sophie is a fictional character whose exploits are being told to Hilde by her father as a vehicle for an introduction to philosophy.

So I have to rewrite this passage:

Within fiction, any transgression of boundaries can take place: a fictional creation can rebel against his fictional creator, or a character in Sophie's World can send a birthday greeting to Sophie, while remaining unaware of Sophie's existence. She is the girl to whom the narrative-within-the-narrative is addressed; to the character, she is in the position of a supernatural being. He is in her world, but she is outside his.

Let's say

Within fiction, any transgression of boundaries can take place: a fictional creation can rebel against his fictional creator, or a character in Sophie's World can send Sophie a birthday greeting addressed to Hilde, a person unknown to Sophie, who is mystified and cannot pass it on. But the message gets through: Hilde, it transpires, is the girl to whom the story of Sophie is being told. To Sophie, she is in the position of a supernatural being. Sophie is in Hilde's world, but Hilde is outside Sophie's.

And we could add a link :

< LINK HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_World" > Sophie's World < /LINK >

I hope these tags don't vanish when this post is posted. I still write in Brunel. Just in case you use Pliny, I have put spaces around the brackets of the tags, which will have to be removed ... you know the drill!

Well Gnomon replied

"You could try {ENTITY TYPE="#8870"/} (with angle brackets instead of curly ones).

Characters like these unfortunately don't always display in every browser."

As for the Sophie passage, I see I have used 'transpires' a few paragraphs up, so perhaps instead (NB change curly brackets)

Within fiction, any transgression of boundaries can take place: a fictional creation can rebel against his fictional creator. Even more arcanely, a character in {LINK HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_World"}Sophie's World{/LINK} can send Sophie a birthday greeting addressed to Hilde, a person unknown to Sophie, who is mystified and thinks she cannot pass it on; but the message gets through. Hilde, we find out later, is the girl to whom the story of Sophie is being told: the first part of the book is revealed to have been a story within a story. To Sophie, Hilde is a supernatural being. Sophie is in Hilde's world, but Hilde is outside Sophie's.

Aha!

The symbol is displaying now in Pliny and Brunel on my computer - Gnomon is the symbol guru indeed

"It was prefixed to a proposition that was presented as being asserted."

Does that just mean you can write #8870; a equals b ?

Exactly.

I hope I have that stuff about Sophie's World right now; I didn't consult the book which I can't find, just the wiki entry

Thanks Recumbentman

I have a few more questions...

"To say that 'a equals b' is no different from saying 'it is true that a equals b' or 'I assert that a equals b'; "

I think it is slightly different to say that "a equals b" or "I assert that a equals b", but I think I may be misunderstanding, or reading too much into it. If a equals b, I think that it can be proved that a equals b, whereas if I assert a equals b, then it remains to be proved (but that could be because of what you say later - I read "I assert a equals b" as like saying "a equals b is true, honest"!)

I notice "assert" is used later on as well "some critics assert that Fleming gave deliberately misleading advice" - which sounds to me like "some critics claim" (not that I know enough about Martinis to know how much a difference it makes to how they are made as to whether the difference is provable.)

Please could you tell me how you're counting Tolkien Entries in h2g2? - I haven't been able to find exactly 9, but I don't know enough about what is directly about Middle Earth and what is Tolkien Lore...

Footnote 1 is very long. Would you be OK if it were included as another paragraph instead of a footnote?

I was also a bit puzzled by

"This effectively refuted the ontological argument for the existence of God as stated a century earlier by Descartes"

One way I can read it is as "this successfully disproved Descartes' argument" but another way is as "this pretty much contradicts Descartes' argument but doesn't disprove it" - how do you read it?

Quite a challenging subject, but definitely fascinating - I am enjoying thinking about this

Thanks for your insights, Sasha.

Asserting that A equals B is the same, logically, whether it can be proved or not. At the beginning of a logical derivation you commonly assume some fact and see whether this assumption leads to a contradiction (which would disprove the assumption) or not. The question is, is this logically different from asserting it? Some say yes, some say no. I think that's all I'm contending here. The assertion could be treated as a sacrosanct assumption, that is, one you are not going to test. But it remains an assumption -- unless it comes at the end, as a result of of a valid derivation, by which time it hardly needs assertion; merely stating it is enough.

The upshot is, assertion adds no weight to an assumption.

"Some critics claim" is just as good, and maybe better than "Some critics assert". Perhaps best of all would be "Some critics say".

I did a quick tot of Tolkien-related entries, but I'm ready to accept your tot if it is different. I just put Tolkien into the search box, as far as I remember. Doing this again I get eleven at the top of the list:

1 Tolkien's Mystery Element: Where True Powers Dwelt
2 The Life and Works of JRR Tolkien
3 'The Hobbit' by JRR Tolkien
4 Tolkien's Silmarillion - An Overview
5 Hobbits
6 Elrond the Half-Elven
7 The Fellowship of The Ring (2001) - Film Review
8 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' (2002) - Film Review
9 Useful Elvish Phrases
10 The Major Villains of 'The Lord of the Rings'
11 Aragorn - A Character from 'The Lord of the Rings'

and leaving out the two film reviews we get nine about the works. There may be more, if you find some feel free to up the number.

Footnote 1 is liable to be deemed off-topic, if philosophy is to be kept separate from fiction (which it is, even bad philosophy) though it does deal with the central question of 'writing that may or may not be a load of porkies'. I rather like long footnotes myself (after all, the whole sub-plot of The Third Policeman takes place in footnotes) and my preference would be to leave it there.

You are right to think "effectively refuted" is the same as "successfully disproved". If you find the second phrase preferable, do use it instead. "Pretty much contradicts" is not strong enough; the affair is a total rout.

Hi Recumbentman

Thanks for your clarifications.

I changed 'proposition' to 'statement' in relation to 'a equals b', as I think that is what was confusing me - in maths, propositions are statements that are required to be proved rather than assumptions in themselves. Proof by contradiction is one method, but there are other types of proof as well, but yes, the methods all start with a hypothesis that may include assumptions.

Thanks for explaining how you searched for Tolkien-related h2g2 Entries - I found a couple more on the second page of the search (one was a computer game, and it is rather odd that "Lord of the Rings" appears so far down the list, but anyway) so I have tweaked the number

I'll leave Footnote 1 as is (it reminded me of an apocryphal mathematical story about a dinner party where a group of mathematicians created an entirely new field of mathematics with excellent properties that had massive potential, but the next morning they realised that there was nothing that could exist in the field, so the properties of the non-existent objects were irrelevant.)

I'm happy with this now, so if you are, I will send it on its way

Thanks Sasha!

Interesting that there is that discrepancy between logic and maths: in logic any statement of a state of affairs is called a proposition, so p-roundy-bracket-q means 'proposition p implies proposition q'.

That story of mathematicians creating an empty field must be apocryphal; as I understand it, mathematicians are perfectly happy with empty sets. They tend to fill up after a while anyway.

I've sent the Entry off to the Editors

It is interesting indeed about the different terminology in the different but very similar fields - I enjoyed subbing this Entry, as I learned a lot from it

The empty set is fine in itself, and has its uses. Deducing things from the properties of its elements is a different thing, though - for example calculations with the elements of the set of all numbers that are equal to both 1 and 2 leads to being able to deduce things that are known to be false... If the set has an element, then 1=2, so any set with two elements only has one element, which means h2g2=bbc or whatever.

Fascinating stuff and I look forward to seeing your Entry on the Front Page

Much thanks Sasha!

I once wrote to The Irish Times explaining that the use of the concept of eternity in moral arguments is equivalent to division by zero ...

Wow it's there! That was quick! Nice job, thanks very much Sasha

Yes that was quick!

Congratulations!