The Surprise Hanging Paradox

I read a version of this paradox many years ago, thought it was nonsense, but couldn’t work out why. Recently I read a different version and understood why it was a silly paradox. Here’s the usual formulation:

A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.

Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.

He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday noon, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning, he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all. The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said came true.

The mistake is to pay any attention to all that pseudo-logic. You’ve been told that one day next week, you’re going to be hung. And that it will be a surprise.

No it won’t.

You know it has to be one of the days next week, and at the moment you hear it you know each day has a 14% chance of being the day. As each day passes, the probability increases. That’s no basis for surprise. You can only be surprised if you think there is a 0% chance of it being the day.

On the day itself, your proper, downright cool reaction should be Wednesday, huh? Well, it had to be some day.

But what about all that nonsense-logic? The Judge’s ruling, is contradictory. Your hanging can't be a surprise if you know it's what awaits you. Real logic tells us that you can prove whatever you like from a contradictory statement. No wonder you can twist a bunch of noodle-logic to prove that you’re not going to be hung. The reason you can’t find anything wrong with the argument is that there isn’t anything wrong with the argument. The flaw is in the premises, and the argument distracts you from that.

Or you could say, it’s what happens when you treat a probabilistic concept like surprise as if it is a two-valued one. You can be a little surprised.

The Long Goodbye / The Fabulous Baker Boys - Dave Grusin

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the great films of the 1970’s. For many, many reasons, only one of which is the John Williams (he of Star Wars) soundtrack. It’s one tune played a dozen different ways. The soundtrack album never seemed to be available.

So here’s the best You Tube I’ve found.


That’s Dave Grusin on piano, who also played all Jeff Bridge's piano parts in that other shambling-cool movie, The Fabulous Baker Boys.

OK. If you’ve never seen it, here’s Grusin's tour de force from Baker Boys (it’s Michelle Pfeiffer singing).

Streaming Music vs the CD Collection

CDs, I tell my younger colleagues, are what’s going to replace streaming music. Because that’s my idea of being funny.

I’ve been using Spotify a lot. It’s awful how much identikit music out there. Whether it’s modern pop or soul, or the pap I put on to fall asleep to, or the endless jazz playlists (The JazzUK one is a goodie though) that re-cycle the same tracks from the 1950’s and 60’s, or those playlists that promise one thing and descend into rap. Just how much rap is there in the world anyway?

Radio was and still is the ‘curated’ streaming medium. That’s what saves it from being a stream of new-age piano pieces with the same old major chords. The DJs and producers have to listen to it and don’t want to have to listen to bland twaddle.

A record collection has the same point is the same as a library or a film / DVD collection: it’s mine. Uniquely so. A friend has a vast number of DVDs, including lots of BBC series and classic British films. No such things (except the Smiley series) are to be found in my DVDs. We both have the French New Wave, and Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah. But I have Baise-Moi, Kids and Dogtown and Z-Boys which he would not allow in his house. We will pass over my collection of box sets featuring Eliza Dushku, and in my defence I can honestly say I only have S1 of BtVS (if I even have that).

I have a whole stack of Baroque music CDs, since discovering from reading a couple of histories of music that I like Baroque. And John Digweed. Also Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and obviously Bird and Robert Johnson. The CDs I buy are likely to be music that will stay with me. I’ve lost count of the music I have played out - that moment when suddenly you know exactly where the song is going all the time and it holds no more emotion for you. Unlike Flamenco Sketches which surprises every time.

Spotify has the functionality to build up a list of favourites, and tries to guess at what mine might be. It does as good a job as Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought that’ feature. I suppose I could spend a day adding every record and CD I can ever remember buying, but I don’t want to listen to a lot of them now. Anyway, once you list There Goes Concorde Again, aren’t you pretty much done?


Anyway, a list is not a collection, in the same way that a map is not the country. The point of a collection is that it is of things, and the thing-ness matters. Vinyl was more thing-y than CDs are way more thing-y than a Spotify playlist.

I miss 8Tracks. I used to discover music from those playlists. I’d be nodding along and suddenly look up and say what’s this because it had hooked me. This has yet to happen on a Spotify playlist. If anything I use Spotify to find things that I would not buy on CD, starting with Wagner operas. Which isn’t bad. There’s always been that music that falls between must-have-in-the-collection and can’t-remember-it-five-minutes-later. Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground is exactly that.

Corona- Panic: Wise Words

I've been watching these guys on and off for a while now. Most of the time they make a decent amount of sense. This time, they make more sense than almost anyone else I've read. Happy Lockdown!

Bessel van deer Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score,

Bessel van deer Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score, which I read recently, has confirmed my long-held suspicion that almost all of the crazy, spiteful, selfish, erratic behaviour described by so many men in the Sphere is the result of 3D - dysfunctional development disorder(*). 3D can be caused by anything from lousy parenting to criminal neglect and sexual abuse, and no doubt has sub-categories. The result is the same: an unstable personality, braoken or damaged character, and behaviour which nobody would want around them once the sex was over. The exact details of the damage and behaviours aren’t important and can range from a full-fledged DSM-V personality disorder, through defensive obesity, substance abuse, control freakery, non-stop hypergamy, chronic dissatisfaction, inability to trust, promiscuity, low self-esteem, wilfulness and lack of accountability.

3D-behaviour is for life. It’s a persistent, functional disorder that can be managed, if at all, only by extensive therapy, possibly drugs, and constant watchfulness and management. If those last two sound like a Red Pill Marriage, well, that’s what a lot of Red Pill Marriages are.

One of the problems I’ve had with Rollo’s theories has been the feeling that he’s really just describing 3D-crazy and then saying but crazy survives evolution, so crazy must be sane, if only we look at it right . Surviving unto the second generation is not a reason to think a behaviour is somehow effective or adaptive, let alone desirable and to be expected. It means that behaviour is not sufficiently shunned. The reason for that is simple: even Normie teenagers are slightly crazy and 3D crazy doesn’t begin to stand out from the background until all the Normies start calming down in their twenties. By then, it’s too late sucker, you went and knocked up or married crazy.

This is one reason men should not get married until at least thirty: it gives them time to learn to recognise 3D-crazy and it gives the 3D-crazy of their generation the time to ripen.

Quite simply, crazy or damaged should be shunned. At least for reproduction. If you see a Red Flag, don’t go in the water.

An older man who has retired from the fray can say that. Younger men - and at my age, under forty-five is ‘younger’ - are faced with the dreadful fact that a high proportion of the women they will meet will have Red Flag behaviour. What do they do?

Well, some of us ain’t no saints neither. Decent folk didn’t have much to do with me, unless they were fooled by my smile for a while. Some of us are 3D as well, and as a social service we should stay with our own kind, so we don’t spoil the decent folk. If you’re a pig, get down in the mud with the other pigs.

But don’t marry them. Don’t have children with them. Don’t co-habit with them. If you’re in the USA, don’t do anything that a Family Court anywhere has decreed implies your intention to support her. (That can be as little as saying “Let me get that” about a cup of coffee.)

If you’re a regular man, you won’t want a lifetime of fooling around. Racking up a spectacular notch count is for dysfunctionals. You’ll want to have a bit of fun, and then pair up with a Good Woman. You may not be able to find one of those, and may not want to move from where the jobs are to where the Good Women are. Understandable.

Regular men who missed the Good Women train, or 3D-men who should not be on it, need to accept that they’re going to be living the Bachelor Life: intermittent affairs with women who as the years go by are increasingly crazy and decreasingly attractive, until you decide that your dignity is more important than getting your dick wet. (Some men never do, and I guess they’re happy.)

If you’re a regular man, you will regard the lack of your own family as you would never getting that job at an FTSE 100 company, but winding up at some random but reasonable employer instead. It will cause a sigh every now and again, but won’t spoil your life. That’s the way Normies roll: they adapt to circumstances, don’t see those circumstances as being about them in any way, and consequently nothing matters so much to them that they will have emotional hangovers about it. They are pretty much fully-assembled when they come into adulthood and don’t need anything to complete them.

Someone who thinks they need a family, or a partner, or a job in a particular company, or a fast car, or any other damn thing, to complete them, give their life meaning or otherwise make them feel better about themselves, well, that’s a Red Flag right there. For one thing, treating partners and especially children, as a kind of therapy is abuse. Literally. Ab-use. Improper use. Children are not therapeutic tools, and neither are partners. Child-raising is twenty-one years of work that causes sixty years of expense for the taxpayer if it’s done badly. For another, fixing doesn’t work: nothing makes it all better again.

Although I’ve used the ‘damaged / broken’ metaphor, and it is widely used, it’s misleading. 3D people aren’t damaged and they aren’t broke. To be damaged or broke, we have to have been made, assembled, more or less correctly in the first place. Like Normies are. Normies can be damaged or broke and can try to mend themselves, because Normies were made whole at some point. 3D people were never assembled in the first place. 3D people are a bunch of parts put together into some Heath Robinson machine. They need putting together properly. What’s misleading about the idea of 3D’s being ‘damaged’ is that it implies there is a ‘whole’ version in there somewhere. There isn’t. The main task of a 3D’s life is to assemble themselves into a viable person. Sadly, the therapists and pop-culture mavens are still telling the 3D’s that the answer lies in connecting to people, and finding friends and relationships, when in fact, neither of those things will work. The only people who will connect with 3D’s are other 3D’s, and more crazy is not what they need.

Instead of hearing women do this and that, I now hear 3D-women do this and that. Crazy people gonna crazy. Nasty people gonna nasty. Spoiled brats gonna be spoiled. People who can’t trust gonna throw shit tests and run surveillance. Unstable people gonna get bored and file for divorce. None of that is news.

The news is the dismaying prevalence of 3D people. You want one estimate? Forty percent of sixteen-year-olds in the UK are not living with both biological parents. I know, kids are ‘resilient’ and if they aren’t, they should be. So it’s not on the parents, but the damn snowflake kids who can’t take a few missing hugs and the odd temper tantrum. Which is a darn convenient belief parents, relatives and teachers. So there you are. Forty per cent of any generation are not suited to the eternal combat utter bliss of domestic relationships.

I think it explains a lot.



(*) Not in the DSM-V. But you know it’s real.

Lending Libraries, Downloads and Bookshelves

Am I the only reader who now has more recently-read e-books in their Calibre catalog (or Kindle + iBooks) than they have recently-read paper-books?

I buy novels in paperback, since I think fiction writers and publishers need supporting and I prefer to read fiction on paper. Also because my local bookshop is Foyles. I download academic books, since academic publishing is a swindle on the public and the academics are not making a living from their textbooks on differential geometry. Best-selling pop-culture authors are also quite rich enough without needing me to trigger another 50p in royalties. I accept these are beliefs that fit my needs. Like I’m the only person who does that.

In the past there were things called Public Libraries, and there was one on your high street. It might not have the book you wanted on your shelves, but it could order that book from a library that did. The weekly visit to the library to get a couple of books to read was as fixed an occasion as the weekly shop or cleaning the bicycle chain. (You never cleaned your bicycle chain? What kind of person are you?) A lot of the books I read were from the public library, or from the Senate House Library which I could use as a graduate of the University of London.

It’s been a long time since I went into my local lending library, and it wasn’t very good back then. The academic books I want are postgraduate mathematics and philosophy textbooks and I have a feeling no-one would be able to get a copy of Jean-Pierre Serre’s Local Fields from a regular suburban lending library.

So the website I get my academic books from is like the local Lending Library, except of course authors don’t get royalties from it. But then they didn’t get a lot from Lending Libraries as I remember. Maybe a bit more than musicians do from Spotify, and certainly more than a £0.00 Kindle, but a writer who was more borrowed than bought back in the day needed to be frugal with the gas central heating.

And I have donated to Philip Tagg, author of Everyday Tonality. I’m going to write about that at some stage. If you want hardcore music theory, that’s your book. Because, you know, you’ve already read Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. Right?

If you don’t have Calibre, you should definitely look into it.

About once a year I clear out books I realise I am never going to read again. Many of those are pop-culture best-sellers. Some are novels, and a few are academic books. So my limited bookshelf space doesn’t have a history of what I have read, but of what I have read that I think is worth keeping. The last clear-out was of books that made me think why did I buy that exactly?. I felt much better when I cleared those sources of regret off the shelves and away from my eyes. And if I’m prepared to do that to books, you can only imagine what I’m prepared to do with people. But I digress.

The bookshelf was the thing that spoke about you to yourself (I am he who has read all this), and to others (Jesus Christ, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony?). But now part of me is hidden on my iPad or Calibre library. I don’t use Kindle as much, but when I do,I’m always surprised at how much I’ve read on it. Because it’s not there to remind me.

Cloud Drives, Backups and Time Machines

The things I over-think! How difficult is to store your digital files: photos, books, music, movies and documents?

In the old days we put books on shelves or in boxes; photographs in albums, or in boxes; records and CDs on shelves, or in boxes; and any documents we generated in files, or in boxes. How easy was that? Then computers came along and made everything simpler by making it more complicated. Everything was stored on the hard drive - passing over the days of floppy drives and diskettes - but what happened if the hard drive packed up? Hence backup which meant taking a copy of everything on another disk and storing that somewhere safe. Real Men did backups daily, weekly, and monthly. The daily and weekly ones were cycled, the monthly ones kept forever. On tape. Lots of people didn’t do backups, and every now and then they wrote to Jack Schofield at the Guardian about the disaster, and Uncle Jack scolded them lightly.

Backup is copies you make on a storage device and then leave alone unless disaster strikes, when you copy them back to wherever you copied them from. You never edit backup copies. Ever. You should keep at least two generations of backups.

Cloud drives in particular and synching services in general, are not backup. Do something dumb on one synched device, like delete everything, and all the other synched devices will lose everything as well. iCloud, One Drive, Google Drive and all the other services have this feature. To make up for it, some of them add a versioning, recovery or history feature that gets over this. When I tried using the versioning on Pages on my 4GB Mac Air, it choked so bad I had to turn it off.

A Cloud drive is what you use when you want to access, edit and save back your work-in-progress files from a number of different devices. Put your photos up in the iCloud and you can regale everyone with your holiday snaps on your iPhone, iPad, Macbook or even Windows device. Ditto music, though why you would when you can get it from a streaming service is another question. Unless it’s a recording of your band, or a track you’re working on. Same for videos.

Cloud drives offer you the assurance that even if your device gets lost, goes crazy or gets broken, you won’t lose your files, which will be there waiting for you to re-connect to them after you have bought a new device. But that’s not backup.

What to backup on? Storage is the physical medium on which you place the files. Internal hard drives, pen drives, external SSD’s, Network drives and NAS, cloud drives, tape, CD’s. You can also store files on a disk in some company’s cloud service, effectively renting a hard drive from them. You have to backup to a physically different device, which you should then keep somewhere else. (So if someone drops something on the computer, the backup is in another room.)

How to backup?

Both Apple and Microsoft offer a continuous backup service: Time Machine for Apple and File History for Windows 10. Setting these up requires an external drive that can be configured for Time Machine / File History: that’s not always a given. Note also that both those are complex pieces of software. If you take your Time Machine disk to someone else’s computer, good luck if that other computer is a Windows 7 device. Time Machine and File History are good insurance against something stupid happening to your files, but not against something stupid happening to your computer.

A good backup sits on a drive that any computer can read and copy from. Since every operating system can read Windows file system disks, put your backup on a NTFS drive, in other words, get an off-the-shelf external drive from Amazon, PC World or any other major retailer. I am not going to get involved in USB types at this point. Roughly, make sure the USB port on the drive looks like one of the USB ports on your computer. Or use a NAS, which plugs into the router so you connect over Wi-Fi.

How to get the files over? There are back-up programs available that have nice user interfaces, but there are also much simpler options. On Windows 10 (and any other version) look up the xcopy command. This is a thing of wonder. There seems to be an OS X version called rsync that does the same thing. Both these tools only copy new or updated files relative to the destination folder. So the first one is painful, but the following ones can be quite fast. At work I use a Powershell script to sync my local drive to a personal network drive at the end of each week, or whenever I’m taking the laptop to and from work.

What to backup? Your ‘data’ of course. You may want to backup the software you’ve downloaded (the files in your Download directory) so you can re-install it if need be: this may be sensible if the latest versions are not compatible with your machine or operating system (OS X users will understand).

So let’s take a work-in-progress document. It’s in my iCloud drive, and hence on my laptop, maybe another device, and on Apple’s servers. iCloud is a synching service, not a backup. So I need a backup in case I do something stupid on iCloud. The laptop drive is the first stop: I save from the iCloud drive to my Documents folder daily. I backup my Documents folder up to my NAS at least once a week. And I backup my NAS to an external drive every month, or straight after I add significant amounts of data to the NAS (by ripping a bunch of CDs). I have two external drives and rotate them.

A professional photographer, video-maker or musician may want to take archive copies of the original files before even thinking about importing to the editing software. In the future it will be those archives that scholars want, not the finished product, which will reflect the fashions of the moment.

Having reviewed all this, my shortcomings are not so bad. I’ve understood the correct role of cloud drives, and the limitation of the Time Machine / File History technology.

I need to backup my Mac Air Documents and Photos folders to the NAS more frequently than I do. I’ll do that with rsync. I need an external drive to backup my NAS, and I’ll do that with xcopy. I could do with tidying up the NAS and taking the plunge of doing a soft reset because I forgot its admin password (!).

(Later). I sorted out the NAS. The filesystem works fine, but the bit that runs diagnostic tests and sets up a Time Machine volume seems to have gone astray. Or it isn’t compatible with Catalina (I updated to Catalina after finding enough people who said it worked fine on their Early 2015 Air. It does.)