Making Light:  Open thread 40 ::: May 06, 2005, 09:53 PM

Julia Jones:

  I obviously haven't quite shaken off the Papal extravaganza, because
  my first interpretation of the following comment by Dan was rather odd:

  it's true that multiplying any two infinite cardinals gives you the
  larger of the two

Thanks for helping me understand why I felt so weird with the
language.  So when I saw your post, I looked back to where this
thread introduced the term, and there was Cardinal Law--gack!  Now
I'm imagining something like the law of sines--"when the big guy in
a dress multiplies with the little guy in a dress...."  Eww, I must
apologize; I feel like the frothy senator who starts talking about
public policy but can't evade his obsession with interspecies
sexuality.

To cleanse our mental palates, let me consider Vicki's comment,

  Aleph-2 is defined as the smallest cardinal greater than aleph-1,
  and I think that if you find a provable use for it, you've got a
  publishable doctoral dissertation.

Of course, the usual issue with dissertations is not so much whether
they are publishable (all are "publishable", but few would interest
a publisher that doesn't think the song is about them) but whether
you can get a degree with it (and we may want to distinguish here,
too, between real universities and the other kind).  If you buy your
dissertation from Terpmapers.com and submit it to Degree Mill U, can
you use it to embarrass Public Shamerica afterwards?