Benedict Eastaugh

Edge of Darkness - Series 1: 1. Compassionate Leave Thriller set in a world of obsessive state security. Ronald Craven is haunted by the murder of his daughter and begins his own investigation into her death.

Great news - one of the best mini-series ever with a dazzling & eccentric screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin & superb direction by Martin Campbell is back on iplayer.
If you haven’t seen it then you’re in for a real treat.
Come for Bob Peck, stay for Joe Don Baker.
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

A pair of hands both showing the characteristic four fingered V used in Star Trek.

What do you think when you see this hand sign? Live long and prosper? Well this is a headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt maybe 400 years old. It’s the sign of the kohanim priestly blessing, which Leonard Nimoy is said to have remembered from his childhood, and which he adopted for Spock.

I realised yesterday that, if I want an accurate picture of how bad Man Utd currently are, I can track 27 live match stats on the BBC. People CAN in fact comprehend complex numerical information - it takes real effort to create and maintain economic ignorance at the level our media does.

A slide with her name and title

A smiling woman with glasses wearing a black t-shirt and black trousers.

Paua Quinon @ludolphine.bsky.social gives a keynote at the British Logic Colloquium on "Is the Concept of Computation a Conceptual Fixed Point?"

When the MP nomination threshold in leadership contests was doubled in 2021, many of us warned this move was designed to keep left-wing candidates off future ballots.

Sadly, this contest has proved us right.

We should have had a conversation, not a coronation.

We cannot out-Reform Reform. But we can be more Labour.

We must stand up for working people with clear policies that tackle inequality, protect communities and put peace, justice and welfare at the heart of all we do.

We must take a much harder line with Israel.

In 1953, the aging German Communist playwright Berthold Brecht wrote a poem poking fun of the KPD leadership. It ends suggesting: "Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?"

It seems that those UCU HEC members who voted for the hare-brained scheme of balloting for a strike, which will cost us 200k, likely fail, and which has been roundly criticized - those HEC members are displeased with our condemnation & call us "undemocratic."
Reminds me of Brecht's little poem:

I was lucky enough to be a guest a few times. Right before starting he would say, "our audience is very well informed, so go as deep as you want, and if need be I'll ask you to clarify." Thought that was pretty amazing, like, the opposite of saying "dumb it down please."

I think this is quite interesting.

Still not really sure what to make of the imo surprising results.

Huge thanks to Gabe Goldberg and Pen Maddy for quite different forms of generous assistance.

A poster for the Feminist Logic workshop at the Bochum university U-bahn station!

I am obviously never really going to see displays of English flags as anything other than weird and unsettling, because that's how it's been for my whole life. I live in Devon near lots of places with space for a flagpole so I daresay I will get used to it ...

My paper ‘Arrow’s theorem, ultrafilters, and reverse mathematics’ appears in the latest issue of the Review of Symbolic Logic. doi.org/10.1017/S175...

Arrow's theorem, ultrafilters, and reverse mathematics This paper initiates the reverse mathematics of social choice theory, studying Arrow's impossibility theorem and related results including Fishburn's possibility theorem and the Kirman--Sondermann the...

I should mention that the paper is open access, and preprints of both submitted versions are available on the arXiv. arxiv.org/abs/2306.06471

This was something I enjoyed digging into when I was writing the paper, but I kept it very short in the submitted version because I was worried the paper was already long. We often complain that referees make papers worse, but in this case they definitely made it better, at least in my view.

I very much appreciate the job the referees did, not just because they found a few small mistakes in the submitted version, but because they asked me to expand on history of how Arrow’s theorem was extended to infinite, computable societies by Alain Lewis in the 1980s and Reiju Mihara in the 1990s.

One corollary of the results in the paper is that Arrow’s theorem is provable in PRA, the formal system of primitive recursive arithmetic. I suspect it’s actually provable in a weaker system still.

In the paper I show that arithmetical comprehension is exactly the axiom needed to construct infinitary counterexamples to Arrow’s theorem. In doing so I set up a framework of countable societies that can be used to analyse the strength of other theorems in social choice theory.

My paper ‘Arrow’s theorem, ultrafilters, and reverse mathematics’ appears in the latest issue of the Review of Symbolic Logic. doi.org/10.1017/S175...

David Lodge did this joke already in 1984 in ‘Small World’ with the ELIZA chatbot.

I realise editors need a shorthand for encouraging authors to polish their language but this can be done without using nativist language. Some of us who learned English later in life are bigger snobs about it than many native speakers. Let’s just encourage attention to clarity of expression.

A precise result here is: The statement that there exists an ultrafilter on every countable algebra of sets of natural numbers is Weihrauch equivalent to the jump of weak König's lemma.

I suppose I worry that readers might see the word 'theory' associated with ultrafilters and come away with the mistaken impression that these are things we can reason with, rather than objects which are in general non-computable.

Also unfortunate not to have any mention of computability-theoretic issues, although the axiom of choice is discussed. The existence of ultrafilters for Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras of countable languages doesn't require choice, and in fact is provable in a system conservative over PA.

I read the abstract and wondered why a journal was publishing results we'd known since the 1920s (ultrafilters) or the 1950s (ultraproducts), but then I realised it was in Philosophy Compass. Shame not to have anything on measurable cardinals, though!

Mangraviti also has a paper in the AJL on Plumwood's "liberation argument" against classical mathematics which you might find interesting. doi.org/10.26686/ajl...

Lovely endorsements for my forthcoming book!

“brilliant and vivid biography” @emilyherring.bsky.social

“a joy to read” @nigelwarburton.bsky.social

Out in November. Preorder now: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Forms of constructivism are also widespread amongst computer scientists. It's just that they usually don't bother to make the accompanying metaphysical or epistemological assertions, since their practice is by its nature restricted to computable functions.

That being said, the point about conservative reappropriation on page 2211 is well taken. A classic example might be Kreisel's unwinding programme, which aimed at mathematical goals (e.g. finding explicit bounds) through constructivising prima facie non-constructive mathematical proofs.

The Grundlagenstreit between Hilbert and Brouwer seems like such a natural case study that I'm a little surprised it wasn't addressed more fully. Hilbert was certainly very worried about the destabilising effect Brouwer seemed to be having.