Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

What are numbers?   Are some numbers more real than others? More rational? Just … better? No, of course not! You reply. It is absurd to make a moral or quasi-moral judgment about or classification of numbers. Numbers are just … numbers.   Numbers are simply sums or aggregates. Each is a very short way of saying something about a collection of things, events, or people, as in the perfectly comprehensible sentence, "a number of people were hurt in the accident." There is no need to make heavy water out of this. But then, why do categories of numbers have the strange and sometimes stigmatizing names they do? Some numbers are called “irrational,” in contrast to the “rational.” Others are called “imaginary,” in contrast to the “real.” What is irrational about the former or unreal about the latter? It is a tricky question. But it is worth unravelling this knot. It is worth so even if you took no pleasure in mathematics at school, or since, and even if you are co...

A little more than a century ago, Italian social scientist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80 percent of the land in Italy was the property of 20 percent of the population. Furthermore, this 80/20 relationship works fractally: that is, 80 percent of the land within that 80 percent (64 percent of the land in Italy) was the property of 20 percent of that 20 percent (4 percent). It was a Romanian-American business consultant, Joseph Juran, pictured to the left, who generalized this to the principle of "the vital few." Twenty percent of the causes are generally responsible for 80 percent of the effects; your 20 percent most enthusiastic or wealthiest customers will buy 80 percent of your product, and so forth, he wrote in the middle of the last century. The Pareto principle, in its post-Juran form, has obvious affinities with fractal geometry. The 80/20 pattern keeps recurring the further down you dig. I'm beginning to suspect the principle applies in the world of litigat...

For my week-by-week desk calender through 2013, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's Amex calender, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. One of the early pages tells me, for example, with reference to the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, that their "rich diversity" is reflected in several traditional dances, which it proceeds to list (but I won't.) While the Seychelles get January, the city of Marseille in France gets February, with an early reference to its use in the 1970s as the seedy setting of a great movie, The French Connection . But the city, we are assured, has come a long way since then. Separately, I have two month-by-month calenders for the coming year, For my office, I have one from Amber Lotus Publishing, providing me with fractal art. Artist Alice Kelley creates these images through a compu...