Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

28 Mar 2002, 13:16 p.m.

I find it rather amusing that my logic homework includes…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I find it rather amusing that my logic homework includes schematizing and translating into English such sentences as "Every self-respecting student who adulates no professor is respected by some student whom no professor respects."

I had more fun schematizing "There is a real number between every two non-identical real numbers" with only the predicates "x is less than y" and "x is identical to y" (assuming that the universe of discourse is real numbers, that is). I think that woulda been harder had I not done all those exercises in Gödel, Escher, Bach over the winter break.

I'm almost done with the homework that's due eight days from now. Either it was easy, or I'm quite good, or I've made a lot of mistakes in thinking problems were easier than they actually are. I remember hearing this "ten hours a week" figure bandied about during the first lecture with regards to "time spent by most students on this class". So far it's been more like four, if that, not counting my work as a logic tutor for another guy in my class.