Re: OT: Where? and What?

Bruce C. Baker wrote:
> ...
> Are you too young to remember Dien Bien Phu and Algeria, or have you just
> (conveniently?) forgotten?

A slightly longer view would recognize that the Brits during the heights of their Empire also got their butts kicked in places like the Crimea and South Africa. And the Dutch, Portugese, Italians, Spaniards, Romans et al during their times of fame. I have lived mostly in Canada which has never shown the arrogance of Empire per se, although it has sided with a few countries that did but I'll bet it would do so all by itself if it could. Just as smug as the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, maybe more so.

I would say the historical issue for many in this group ought to have to do with RT and not geopolitics. No experienced historian would predict RT's survival but we know something the historians don't. While it is not fragile, it is minimal and subtle. I say minimal because when I've sallied forth against against various facets of it, I've eventually come to see its sensibleness, once I learned to go a little slower and not miss seeing the pebbles underfoot. I say subtle because proponents of a programming technique regularly attack it, which seems about as apples and oranges as you can get. Those people seem to get neither point.

No doubt the deeper thinkers can come up with better issues than I can, but among my list of open questions that concern the development of RT, I would include the conflict of view updating with closure, rva's and the fact that some relations that use them can't be expressed in table form, whether some second-order or other variation could accomplish a transitive closure neatly and last but not least, whether as a practical matter it makes sense for an RT language to try to be a replacement for the non-RT languages.

RT's survival will depend on it happening to be dominant at some point of crisis because the history of the world shows progress based only on retreat from crisis, not on reason.

p Received on Mon Feb 19 2007 - 02:17:29 CET