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user-inactivated  ·  3201 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: February 22nd: What are you reading this week?

Sun-Joo Shin, The Logical Status of Diagrams. He objects to the traditional distrust of diagrams in math, and the notion that they can be used as illustrations but not as proofs. He constructs a sound and complete logic based on Venn diagrams to argue that you can do visual proofs. It's a monadic first-order logic (predicates can only have one variable), so you can't express much with it, and drawing pictures is much more cumbersome than writing down expressions, but as a proof of concept it works. You can, indeed, turn the Venn diagrams everyone who does applied logic in contexts where not everyone has taken a logic class hates into a proper logic.

    Any cosmic horror suggestions hubski?

She's moved on to other things now, but Subterranean did a two-volume collection of Caitlin R. Kiernan's mostly-Lovecraftian horror stories. The first is Two Worlds and In Between, the second is Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea.