Cornflowers – Too Blue for Logic

My axioms were so clean-hewn,
The joins of ‘thus’ and ‘therefore’ neat –

But, I admit
Life would not fit
Between straight lines
And all the cornflowers said was ‘blue,’
All summer long, so blue.
So when the sea came in and with one wave
Threatened to wash my edifice away –

I let it.

“Cornflowers” by Marianne Jones

[via James (Gerry) Gerard-Wolff]

Too true – need to work on this dichotomy between the real-world logic and complexity with all it’s emergent semantics and properties and the human rationalisation towards simple syntax and neat rhetorical “logic”. Rational and Logical are becoming overloaded words !

[I have a long standing reference to Wolff’s pages on “SP” and “Compression” on my resources pages – avoided further direct reference due to the politics, but this remains an interesting resource. What does Wolff make of Lomborg, I wonder ? I see Wolff presented recently at the BCS special interest group on AI at Peterhouse Cambridge (10th/12th Dec 2002) – the plot thickens. Wolff makes references to early Pinker and reacts against Chomsky’s “language is too complicated to simulate” stuff.]