It Gets Done

Once again, I've managed to figure a good deal of goofing off into my schedule. I have serious work work at 9, but then no sort of work until 2 or half past two. What was I thinking?

This chunk of time is supposed to be a way to catch up on materials I haven't yet familiarized myself with, or to get some writing done, or research, or whatever. Okay not whatever. Or give advice, for that matter. This is the sort of notion that occurs to you when the fact is many moons away, saying to yourself "Oh, yeah, I've got that down. I can get myself motivated to switch tasks back and forth during the day. And it's so exhausting to block things together like I have them now..." I give you Wishful Thinking 101.

(One result and exemplar of the problem is this very post.)

This morning I managed to:
1. Photocopy four articles
2. Realize that I have no questions about another fifth article, even though I was supposed to come up with some
3. Rasterize Salvador Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony
3a. Reject the rasterized picture as a candidate for decorating my house
4. Read some recipes I will never have the skill to cook properly
4a. Decide that I will leave Okra to the professionals
5. Forget my lunch but not have time to get carry-out

You'll notice that none of this looks like work. On the other hand, I've been keeping up with the actual workload much more efficiently than in the past. It feels good to get done with something and get to sleep before the sun begins to rise. I have to do a lot of reading of texts that are, at best, impossible. Plus I read about the rate of a snail swimming on molasses. But can you blame me?

(b) Suppose that S is a sentence which satisfies the proposed criterion, whereas N is a sentence such as "The absolute is perfect," to which the criterion attributes no empirical meaning. Then the alternation SvN (i.e., the expression obtained by connecting the two sentences by the word "or"), likewise satisfies the criterion; for is S is a consequence of some finite class of observation sentences, then trivially SvN is a consequence of the same class. But clearly, the empricist criterion of meaning is not intended to countenance sentences of this sort. In this respect, therefore, the requirement of complete verifiability is too inconclusive.
--C. Hempel

So, ¡Mas Cafe! ¡Mas!