If you annoy me...

If you post anonymously and annoy me, I shall have your ass tossed in jail:

Whoever utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person who receives the communications shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both. (U.S. Code, Sec 113)

Nah, I wouldn't do that. Even the anonymous posters in this blog are usually cool. And I value free speech just a little too much. Harrassment I deal with privately (as in, "I have the managers of the private property known as LiveJournal deal with you") and threats, naturally, will be taken seriously. But "annoy"? How does one legislate and prosecute being "annoying?" Can we send Adam Sandler to jail?

There's probably some legal definition of "annoy" that has nothing to do with Adam Sandler.

Mathematics as Hermeneutics

One of the more common themes among the mathematically inclined writers like Greg Egan and Ted Chiang is that of mathematics and hermeneutics: the notion that much of what we think of as advanced mathematics, the kinds of stuff done by people with Erdos numbers (if you know what that is, you're really a math geek), is just the bottom floor, and that the stuff we'll be interested in next is too complicated, too big, and just too damned hard for the human brain. Mathematics will become hermeneutics ("The study of the methodological principles of interpretation.") as we try to grasp exactly what it was our computers are telling us about the world, as the proofs for the various interesting parts of mathematics become more than can fit into a single human consciousness.

Now, it seems mathematicians have started to understand that that's what it may come down to. Many people are familiar with the quote: "The universe is not only queerer than we think, it's queerer than we can think." I would move the emphasis now: "The universe is not only queerer than we think, it's queerer than we can think." But not our descendents.

Steven Strogatz addresses the question of mathematics as hermeneutics in his essay, The End of Insight.