Gary Robinson's Rants

Funny story about Kurt Godel; Einstein makes cameo

Disclaimer: This is probably only funny for people with an interest in math, because Godel's name regularly comes up in those circles and hardly ever comes up elsewhere.

The following is quoted from Hao Wang, Reflections on Kurt Gödel, p. 115f:

In connection with the interview for his US citizenship, he once told me that for this occasion he had studied how the Indians had come to America. Einstein and O.Morgenstern were his witnesses, and Morgenstern has told different people about aspects of the event. The following account is given by H-Zemanek and E.Köhler (see Zemanek's report, Elektronische Rechenanlagen, vol. 5, 1978, pp. 209-211). Even though the routine examination G was to take was an easy matter, G prepared seriously for it and studied the US Constitution carefully. On the day before the interview G told Morgenstern that he had discovered a logical-legal possibility of transforming the United States into a dictatorship. Morgenstern saw that the hypothetical possibility and its likely remedy involved a complex chain of reasoning and was clearly not suitable for consideration at the interview. He urged G to keep quiet about his discovery.

The next morning Morgenstern drove Einstein and G from Princeton to Trenton. Einstein was informed; on the way he told one tale after another, to divert G from his Constitution-theoretical explanations, apparently with success. At the office in Trenton, the official in charge was Judge Philip Forman, who had inducted Einstein in 1940 and struck up a friendship with him. He greeted them warmly and invited all three to attend the (normally private) examination of G.

The judge began, 'You have German citizenship up to now.' G interrupted him, 'Excuse me sir, Austrian.' 'Anyhow, the wicked dictator! but fortunately that is not possible in America.' 'On the contrary,' G interjected, 'I know how that can happen.' All three joined forces to restrain G so as to turn to the routine examination. [Hat tip to Torkel Franzén.]

Technorati Tags: Godel

Goombah .9606

Well, the day is finally here. We have been revamping Goombah in a big way for a long time. Over the last week or so we've been rolling out the first public updates to ourGoombah beta since version .613 more than a year ago. (It's for Mac and Windows.)

From the outside, I'm sure it may have seemed that we'd slowed down or even moved onto other things. Wrong! The company grew, and we've been pushing hard on all development fronts. The user interface has been revamped, cool features have been added, and the recommendation engine has had major improvements. We just wanted to wait until things were really right before we put it out again.

One of the great new things: we are making available free music that is downloadable to any device including iPods. Every week we have Free Music Friday, when we'll make new music available from great acts such as Richard Thompson, 50 Foot Wave, Aimee Mann, and Janis Ian, all of whom have tracks available now on Goombah.

With regard to the recommendation engine improvements, sometimes I'm actually kind of stunned at how great it's working at this early stage when we're really only coming out of the door. It's based on collaborative filtering, so as our user population grows, it will only get better and better. (That's a reason to tell your friends about us, hint, hint!)

Goombah is still in beta testing, so we don't guarantee you're not going to run into bugs. We DO guarantee that we'll greatly appreciate any bug reports and put a high priority on fixing them. Overall, however, it's stable and works. There's no reason not to use it now.

From time to time I'll be offering tips in this blog.

Tip #1: Tune List Settings for My Library.

Default Goombah recommendations are based on all the music in your collection. But for many of us -- myself included -- a lot of the music in our collections is there for sentimental reasons or because of just checking stuff out. It doesn't necessarily all represent our current tastes. So, we'd like to tell Goombah not to use it for recommendations.

To do this, click My Library in the table on the lower left, and click the tab for List Settings. You'll see a check box next to each track. Uncheck all tracks from the artists you feel aren't representative of your current tastes.

To do this quickly, you can select a number of tracks at once by shift-clicking. Then right-click (or control-click if you have a Mac with a single-button mouse), and select the option to Uncheck.

Tip #2: Make new searches.

My favorite thing to do is click the "+ New List" button in the lower left, and enter a list of artists. Goombah then finds other members who are unusually similar to you in liking those same artists, and generates recommendations for other artists who have something in common with all the ones you entered.

It works really well. Just try it.