Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Her Mad Money


Her Mad Money

After Sherri died, Hannah and I sorted through her stuff. What to set aside, what to keep for ourselves, what to throw out. We started with the stuff on her side of the bed. Sherri and I slept on a bed with drawers; a kind of combination bed and cabinet. The drawers on her side of the bed were crammed with a chaos of trash and treasure.
There were lots of canisters of medicine, some empty, most expired; there were old copies of The Nation, turned to the crossword page, all filled out in ink; there were burnt-out vibrators (to the trash), a used one (ditto), and one still in its box (Hannah got that); there were lots of books; and there was a lot of jewelry, some of gold, some of glass, some in boxes, some loose.
Sherri told me to never open the top right drawer; an order that I obeyed while she lived, but now I was her heir and executor. In that drawer was the clutter listed above, but there was also a large ziplock baggie. That baggie held envelopes; those envelopes held cash. About $2155. I wondered aloud what it was, and Hannah explained that it was Sherri’s mad money. Hannah told me that Sherri had advised Hannah that, when she lives with a man, she should always have some mad money around. This is to help her leave him, if necessary.
I was impressed by the feminist logic of this, for this was the first that I had ever hear of it. I mentioned it to my big sister Debby; she said that our mother Marjorie had said the same to her. I am now doubly impressed; for it seems that there is a world of mother-to-daughter cultural transmission that I knew nothing of.
A third thing impressed me. During our 20 years together, Sherri could have left me at any time. But she didn’t. She must have loved me.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Blog Off Tomorrow Til 2019


Blog Off Tomorrow Til 2019

Tomorrow, November 20, 2018, I will be 61 years old. On that day  I will blog “Her Mad Money”, a tale about my wife Sherri, of blessed memory. Afterwards I will cease to blog until at least 2019.
The reason why is because I have mostly run out of material. I have some cat photos, and “Impeach Trump” hand-made car signs, and a few poems and stories. These can wait until I have accumulated more writings. It turns out that I can blog faster than I can write. This blog went through decades of my production; now at last I am blogged out.
So after tomorrow, adieu until next year.

Friday, November 16, 2018

On Abyss Wagers, 5 of 5


VI. Epilogue

Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem states that, due to the paradoxes of self-reference, an arithmetical deduction system is consistent, if and only if it cannot prove its consistency.
Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem implies that the validity of arithmetical reasoning – and by extension, all reasoning – cannot be guaranteed within reason itself. Therefore reason must be taken on faith.
This article argues that it is reasonable to do so, by an argument akin to Pascal’s Wager.

Footnotes
*Nathaniel Hellerstein is Adjunct Instructor of Mathematics at City College of San Francisco in San Francisco, California. He is an iconoclastic logician by trade and inclination, and author of books such as “Diamond – A Paradox Logic”, World Scientific Series on Knots and Everything, Volume 23 (2010).
**Kurt Gödel, 1931, "Ãœber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I", Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, v. 38 n. 1, pp. 173–198.
—, 1931, "Ãœber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I", in Solomon Feferman, ed., 1986. Kurt Gödel Collected works, Vol. I. Oxford University Press, pp. 144–195. ISBN 978-0195147209. The original German with a facing English translation, preceded by an introductory note by Stephen Cole Kleene.
—, 1951, "Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications", in Solomon Feferman, ed., 1995. Kurt Gödel Collected works, Vol. III, Oxford University Press, pp. 304–323. ISBN 978-0195147223.