[This post - on archives (and their ultimately inconsequential gaps), the mathematical quirks of unexpected hangings and “The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson - was adapted from a post originally published on LiveJournal on 23 March 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.]
Given my habit of filing papers rather than throwing them away (I blame a history of serving as committee secretary topped off with three years of professional training), a search through my archives last week turned up an interesting variety of finds on the way before finding the documents I actually needed.
Some (for example my old college’s grace) are interesting in their own right. Some, marking important events in my life, have personal significance which makes me reluctant to dispose of them. And some seem of little use now, but I harbour an optimistic hope that they might be of historical (for some sufficiently ungrandiose value of “historical”) interest some day. (This might be a reader’s equivalent of the Antiques-Roadshow-inspired but probably forlorn hope that one’s knick-knacks will turn out to be lucrative collectibles.)
(But I’m mildly disappointed that I couldn’t supply a committee representing undergraduate mathematicians with a copy of its constitution which I drafted many years ago, now reported missing.)
[I see that, despite that administrative hiccup, the Mathematics Undergraduate Representative Committee is still running - a Committee now slightly curiously, but presumably for good reasons, constituted as a university society in its own right.]
This excavation of the filing cabinet’s sediments was prompted by the arrival of an unexpected tax return in the post - which is at least less unpleasant than an unexpected hanging [I’m impressed that the link to Mathworld - a great mathematical encyclopedia which pre-dated Wikipedia - still works, but there is also now naturally a Wikipedia article on the unexpected hanging paradox]. That page led me on to the related bottle imp paradox [also at Wikipedia], which I hadn’t come across before. It comes from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson: in summary, you have the opportunity to buy a bottle containing an imp which will grant you whatever you desire, but before you die, you must sell the bottle for less than you paid for it (or, warns the elderly man who sells the bottle to Keawe, burn in hell for ever). You won’t accept the bottle for free (because you will never be rid of it); you probably won’t buy it for one penny (because that assumes you’ll find someone who will accept the bottle for free); is there any price which one might pay? (I find myself reminded of the greater fool theory to justify buying overpriced shares: one knows somebody is going to end up holding them when the time the bubble bursts, but hopes it won’t be oneself… However, the negative utility of eternal damnation doesn’t fit terribly well into traditional investment appraisal methods.)
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New blog post: A recovered 2004 post from LiveJournal, on archives (and their ultimately inconsequential gaps), the mathematical quirks of unexpected hangings and "The Bottle Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson, and seeing El Greco at the National Gallery: https://t.co/PDAflA5RVZ pic.twitter.com/HPR0us7NsU
— Terry Boon (@terryboon) March 21, 2022
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