I found myself the other day doing what millions of people are doing somewhere every hour: entering an account number for one thing or the other into an online system. And no doubt also like many of those millions, I received this error message: please make sure that the correct number has been entered. This …
Author Archives: rultimo
Saying It and Implying It
Our impulse to write is our wish to say something. In the technical terminology of language and logic, to say something is to predicate it, and that same term (the vowel a pronounced just slightly differently) is used to name the section of a clause which contains the verb. Every complete sentence we write is …
What’s Beneath the Surface
We need to take a deep dive today into the construction of one particular sentence in order to remind ourselves that beneath our common language—in its logical structure and its arrangement of words—lies the thinking by which we make sense of the world we have found ourselves in. And thinking, of course, together with the …
One, Two, Three
The associative property of addition and multiplication (as, of course, we all so smoothly remember from our school days) has to do with how we group what we’re calculating. Adding the numbers 1 + 2 + 3 will sum 6 whether we add the 1 + 2 or the 2 + 3 first. In other …
Space Without and Within
I read the other day that there is no known size to the universe, that as far as we know now, each time we come upon a planet or star or galaxy, we have every right to believe we will see another one past it. There is, in other words, no edge to it all, …