After posting my last entry, I realized that my website looks a little off. I apologize! It seems my upgrade from Movable Type 4.01 to 4.1 changed a thing or two. I may have some time this weekend to address the problem.

I will take a moment to break from my frenetic studying to write a word or two about the Cantor Diagonal Method, which one might use to prove there cannot be a bijection between the reals and the naturals.

To this point everything in my five-day-a-week, 5-hour-a-day mathematics course, while not always intuitive, has at least been proven or presented with elegant mathematics. The Cantor Method, though, lacks that elegance. I cannot deny its usefulness, or even indispensableness, however, a proof written with his method, rather than flowing elegantly from one statement to another, relies upon a hideous morass of numbers in an equally hideous table.

I can only hope some other mathematician comes up with a more deft way to do what George managed.

Just under a month ago, I commented on John McCain's loony idea to give the Federal gasoline tax a summer vacation. Since then, the people in Hillaryland decided to support the same nonsensical idea. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, came out in strong opposition to the temporary gas tax hiatus. They cite, among many other excellent reasons, the fact that most mainstream economists do not support the gas-tax hiatus because it makes virtually no economic sense as a basis for their position.

What disturbs me most about the current debate between the Obamites and the Hillaranians, though, is the Clinton campaign's constant dismissal of economists' ideas. (See this excellent post on the Freakonomics blog.) Economists, the Clinton campaign opines, tend to be the sort of people whose incomes make the whopping $30 savings insignificant and unimportant. As the Freakonomics folks note, this is probably true, given that the average economist makes about 85% more than John Q. Employee.

If these economists were taking their positions based solely upon their individual self-interest — that is to say, if economists oppose the gas tax hiatus because their individual financial circumstances make the cost (fewer dollars in the hands of the government for infrastructure) higher than the gain ($30 that would otherwise have paid for gasoline) — then the Clinton campaign's logic might hold. But these economists believe, based upon their apolitical economic analysis, not through an analysis of their personal finances, the broad macroeconomic impact of this absurd gas tax hiatus will have a bigger negative than positive impact. So, in essence, the Clinton campaign discounts the ideas of highly-trained experts (economists) not because their actual economic analysis is somehow flawed or incorrect, but rather because the experts themselves happen to be more affluent than the average person.

That some voters go along with this logic is also worrisome. Of all the people who could make a high-impact decision, a qualified expert in the field — say an economist, in the case of tax policy — seems to me the best choice. Some voters, however, appear to believe someone less-qualified, but more amenable to throwing a backyard barbeque, is the best candidate. By that logic, it would make more sense for a law firm to take a fifth grader, rather than me, as an intern, because the fifth grader is cuter and somehow friendlier. Does this make sense? I think not.

Addendum: Perhaps my favorite politician, Michael Bloomberg, chimed in with an astonishingly insightful analysis of the gas tax holiday: "Michael Bloomberg said giving drivers a break from the gas tax is 'the dumbest thing I’ve heard in an awful long time.' "

Pardon the brief (and entirely unplanned) hiatus…

One need not look further than France to realize that language is fluid and malleable. While a lexicographer might scoff at a word like "obeausity" or "splendiferous," people will, if the word sticks, call someone obeause or something splendiferous. The Académie française can insist French speakers use the "correct" term for email, "courriel," but, as the French have shown, such mandates can be blissfully ignored.

There is, however, one word whose usage has spiraled out of control recently and that has absolutely no function whatsoever in improving the English language. That malicious word is none other than "oftentimes."

Frankly, I find it astounding just how much the use of oftentimes has exploded. As an extremely corse and mostly unscientific measurement of oftentimes' use, I observed that a Google search for the string, "oftentimes 2008" garnered just over 2 million hits, whereas "oftentimes 2002" produced just over 1 million. Even taking into consideration the fact that, in all likelihood, more writing was published online in 2008 than 2002, the statistic astounds. The year 2008 has not even hit the halfway point in its march to December 31.

Of course, just because more people use a word does not necessarily mean it has no linguistic value. In most cases, a words' increased usage would tend to indicate it had more, not less value, as I implied. But, from my perspective, the word "oftentimes" has, in and of itself, no linguistic merit.

Oftentimes and its linguistic parent, often, have the exact same meaning: frequently. In fact, my dictionary defines oftentimes as often. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to introduce an extra syllable if it adds no extra depth or meaning. It serves only to add extra and entirely superfluous weight to a sentence.

I suspect people use oftentimes for the same reason they employ utilize, rather than use: to sound academic, pretentious and authoritative. It is somewhat ironic, then, to learn that utilize and oftentimes actually have newer etymologies than their more "formal" counterparts. Use comes from the Old French verb user, whereas utilize comes from the much younger French verb, utiliser, which, as it happens is still used today. Often has its roots in Middle English, a derivative of oft, while the painfully long oftentimes comes from what my dictionary calls, "late Middle English," making it at least a few years younger its parent. So much for deriving authority from the ancients.

Even Thomas Jefferson, not someone with a reputation for penning concise or straightforward prose, kept his writing free of oftentimes' infectious presence. A search of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive turned up exactly zero documents with the string "oftentimes." (Often, by contrast produced 21.) If Jefferson managed to live without that extra pretentious syllable, the rest of us can too.

Over the past week, two fantastic events took place. On Tuesday, the goofballs at Crocs, Inc, manufacturer of the ugliest products ever to exist, gave disappointing guidance for the 2008 fiscal year. That wonderful news sent Crocs' share price into a nosedive. The stock closed at $10.22 today, down from about $17 on Monday. Is the Croc sandal on its last legs? I sure hope so! Those foot coverings are hideous.

In another blow to corporate America, it looks as if the FCC may force sneaky ISPs to disclose the true speed of their Internet access and the restrictions they put on that access. Never have I heard of a customer receiving the "potential maximum possible" speed cited in ISP advertisements. Most people celebrate when their access moves at even half of the promised speed.

More importantly, though, it is essential that customers know which types of network traffic their ISPs either retard or stop altogether. Peer-to-peer file sharing systems, such as BitTorrent, have a bad reputation for allowing unscrupulous people to trade music without a penny going to the artist whose blood and sweat produced the work. In reality, they have the potential to make the Internet much more efficient, and allow innovators to make the Internet even more useful and powerful. Many people use peer-to-peer technology in completely legitimate ways.

The VCR too can be used to violate the intellectual property rights of a television studio or some other such organization. Yet, fortunately for consumers, the Supreme Court ruled that the Sony Corporation could continue selling the VCR because so many completely legitimate uses exist. I find it quite saddening that our nation's lawmakers has become so obsequious to their financial backers that peer-to-peer technology has suffered the opposite fate.

If consumers know their service provider prohibits their legitimate use of technologies with a plethora of legitimate legal uses, they can abandon those tyrannical providers. With any luck, those backward-thinking providers will, through the power of competition, be forced to open their lines to the use of powerful technologies with a potential for illegitimate use.

Cynics take note! Martha Stewart's kitchen is not the sole province of good things.

Rather than comment on Mr. Obama's handling of flag pin questions, I shall turn my attention to a measure proposed by that maverick from Arizona, Senator John McCain. Yesterday, amid a flurry of Pope-related minutiae analysis, Mr. McCain proposed a gaggle of economic initiatives designed to help America's current economic malaise. And among his many proposals was a measure designed to make gasoline more affordable by temporarily removing the 12 cent Federal tax on gasoline. In theory, such a measure would take, as the Senator put it, "A few dollars off the price of a tank of gas every time a family, a farmer, or trucker stops to fill up," and thus bolster the economy.

For someone who means to take a strong stance with respect to climate change, the environment and government spending, this hardly seems a good idea.

On the climate change issue, I see any increase in the price of gasoline, especially in a direct way to the consumer as very good indeed. Higher gas prices do not benefit the economy in the short run, to be sure. They do, however, have a fantastic long run effect on the environment, and our national and economic security. It would be folly to make a marginal improvement to our economy now at the expense of the environment and our long run economic future. Cheaper gasoline means more invisible greenhouse gasses nebulously floating around in the atmosphere at the environment' expense and a less competitive market for alternative energy solutions.

As for government spending, it hardly strikes me as financially prudent to remove another chunk of government revenue without a replacement at hand. Mr. McCain speaks of balancing America's budget, while simultaneously giving every American individual and corporation a tax cut. Any reduction in so-called "pork barrel spending" he manages to effect will quickly be offset by the gigantic tax cuts he proposes, which — working under the wildly speculative assumption that the cuts equal one another in size — still leaves America with a budget deficit deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Climate change is, to use the almost platitudinous phrase, not a partisan issue. While I hope Mr. Obama manages to scrape together a victory in November, I think the dialogue and discussion needs to emphasize change now, rather than change in 2025. Perhaps I should have said, "John, Don't Even Think About Thinking About Doing It."

The more I fly, the more I wonder why America's once-great airlines can barely manage to move me from point A to B without an excess of insanity, much less transport me cross country with a dash of class and a pinch of excellence. While I appreciate modern aviation innovations, such the pressurized cabin and the stratospheric cruising altitude, I have a yen for the elegance one associates with Pan Am in the 1930's. People must call it the "golden age of aviation" for one reason or another. I know I would rather cram myself into a cramped metal tube filled with besuited gentlemen and haute couture clad ladies sipping Champagne than a cramped metal tube stuffed with people who constantly redefine the meaning of raunch. (Perfection falls somewhere in the middle of that continuum.)

I always think of Southwest Airlines' now-infamous questionable ensemble incident. Whether the wonky woman's choice of clothing justified the airline employee's action or not, the simple fact that she was wearing something that prompted an employee to think twice about allowing her onto the aircraft says something less than positive. I do not mean to say people should don their Sunday Best just to board an aircraft. It would, however, be nice if people would — as much for their own sake as for the comfort of the other passengers — think twice before boarding the plane in a mini-mini-mini skirt. Granted, I suppose that example speaks more to some Americans' questionable taste — a societal problem of sorts — than to something directly related to the airlines. Not that people wearing mini-mini-mini skirts make my life at 35,000 feet any more pleasant.

Certainly, high jet fuel prices, health insurance costs and post-9/11 security superfluity contribute to the dismal quality of US commercial aviation. But those three costs alone cannot explain the enormous chasm that lies between US carriers and their far superior foreign rivals. It is not as if Air New Zealand has some kind of special agreement with oil producing nations to buy jet fuel at below-market prices. Or, if they do, I don't know about it.

Of course, I will concede that healthcare costs and superfluous security spending do not burden the rest of the industrialized world — one of the many reasons I, the loony free market devotee, support a universal healthcare system. And I will admit that many top-notch foreign carriers receive generous subsidies from their respective governments, which give them some insulation from fuel costs. Curiously, though, as Western European governments have adopted more laissez-faire rules and moved further from their old socialist policies, their airlines have, by all accounts, suffered very little or even improved. In other words, as partial or wholly owned government airlines receive fewer government dollars, their products' quality has either diminished marginally or improved. If state subsidies were the root of these foreign airlines' high-quality product, then, logically, their high-quality product should have either worsened or, at best, remained identical.

That said, I am not the Oracle of Delphi: I have no idea what business wizardry makes flying Lufthansa so much less painful than suffering through torture on United. I do, however, have a suggestion.

As it stands, all airlines flying domestic routes in the US (i.e., New York to Los Angeles or Portland to Atlanta) may not have more than 25% foreign ownership. That nasty little regulation explains why British Airways flies from O'Hare to Heathrow, but not from O'Hare to San Francisco International. Thus, at least on domestic routes, American carriers face no genuine competition. JetBlue, I will admit, does a far better job than U.S. Airways, but I would switch my allegiance to Lufthansa in a heartbeat if they flew domestic routes in the United States. As the people in Frankfurt like to say, "There's no better way to fly."

A healthy dose of competition would do the US carriers a favor. In the one space where US airlines must lock horns with their vastly superior foreign counterparts — on international routes — US carriers step up to the plate and offer a much better product. Take the Miami-Seattle and Boston-London routes. Miami, Florida sits about 2,700 miles from Seattle, Washington, and Boston, Massachusetts lies some 3,300 miles from London, England. The jet stream, however, evens out their flight times, such that each flight takes about six hours to complete. Nonetheless, not a single US carrier offers "international-grade" business- or first-class — the sort of swanky cabin with lie-flat hybrid bed-cum-seat apparatuses and snazzy snacks — on their Miami-Seattle route. On the other hand, virtually all US airlines offer those sorts of amenities on their Boston-London routes, and those who do not are in the process of making those services available. Why? Competition from foreign airlines, who all offer those kinds of amenities to their first- and business-class passengers on international routes. (Note: This paragraph has been edited for factual accuracy post-publish. See the extended entry for the original language.)

No doubt, some lunatics would oppose such a brilliant stroke of deregulation either for fear that Qatar Airways will conspire to destroy Mount Rushmore on an Atlanta-Portland run, or that a handful of American jobs will be lost in the transition. To the conspiracy theorists, I say, buck up and tolerate. From what I hear, Qatar Airways — official sponsor of the weather on England's Sky News — does a marvelous job moving people in flying metal tubes. To the protectionists, I say deal with it. People in the agriculture business (i.e., farmers) were probably none to happy when the industrial revolution reduced the nation's need for farm laborers a hundred some odd years ago. But with a dollop of education and a sprinkling of determination those people managed to migrate — for the better — into the emerging industrial sectors, such as automobile or textile manufacture.

So what are we waiting for? Deregulate already!

The political number crunchers and so-called "strategists" may have their theories. But, so far as I am concerned, the Democratic party's presidential nominating process has no presumptive winner. Of course, that does not mean I cannot vociferously advocate that Barack Obama ought to receive the nomination.

Given Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton's nearly identical policy prescriptions and political positions, some might point to Mr. Obama's charisma or his "electability" in a potential McCain-Obama "death-match" as reason enough to make him, not Mrs. Clinton, the Democrat's choice for November. Frankly, though, I hardly see those as the most important factors to consider. Rather, I feel he ought become the Democratic nominee because his supporters are several orders of magnitude more insane than Mrs. Clinton's.

Ask one of Mrs. Clinton's supporters why he or she supports the New York Senator and, from my experience, one receives an enthusiastic, but somewhat tempered response. The same question posed to an Obama supporter, on the other hand, elicits an avalanche of exuberance. His eyes dart skyward, as if to catch a glimpse of Mr. Obama's divine presence, and his hands wave excitedly in a burst of avid gesturing.

It says quite a bit about a candidate when he can inspire so-called "young people" to spend thirty minutes of their precious time watching him speak about race, in lieu of zoning out to a "Friends" rerun or a meaningless mélange of sport statistics on ESPN. People discussed (and, for that matter, continue to discuss) Mr. Obama's race and unity speech in Philadelphia with the same kind of unbridled enthusiasm as the latest episode of Lost. And goodness knows many people speak about that program with an astounding amount of zeal. (Not that I have a problem with the Lost-obsessed set; in many ways I count myself among them.)

Whether Mr. Obama merits the level of enthusiasm his supporters display, I cannot be sure. (Though I would not complain if he took the Oath of Office in January.) From a pragmatic political perspective, however, that is unimportant. If Mr. Obama becomes the Democrats' nominee, the party will have access to his relatively more well-educated, more financially powerful base of insane supporters to make sure he receives enough votes to put him in the Oval Office.

With Mrs. Clinton, the party has a base of enthusiastic supporters, to be sure, but not the kind of hyper-committed folks Mr. Obama's campaign brings to the table. Meanwhile, the Democrats have to contend with a group of ex-Obama supporters who will likely not crisscross the country with the same ardor to support Mrs. Clinton.

If the Democrats intend to exploit this golden opportunity to turn the political tables, they need to learn from their past errors and realize the electorate will not simply hand them the presidency on a silver platter. Howard Dean and his cohorts need to work to win it. And it seems clear to me that the Obamamaniacs will be far more willing to go that chimerical extra mile to ensure Mr. Obama's wife has final say on the White House Christmas décor.

While I have something of an affinity for the English language, I do not have an affinity for the "art" that is literary criticism. Nothing, save perhaps the handful of utterly idiotic errors I made on my second mathematics exam, in my one semester of tertiary education has caused me more grief than my French literature class. To be sure, I feel much more intelligent having read such big names as Baudelaire and Appolinaire in their original unfiltered French. Analyzing their poetry, however, has caused me a great deal of mental pain, albeit mental pain for the better.

Mathematics, on the other hand, is perhaps the most pragmatic subject around. It is, for the most part, utterly useless by itself, but, when coupled with a real world problem — particle physics or microeconomics — mathematics manages to solve big problems without messy ambiguity.

As such, when my French literature course turned its attention to Oulipo, I was intrigued. For Oulipo — whose name constitutes a shortened form of "ouvroir de littérature potentielle" or "the workshop of literary potential" — strives to bridge the divide between literature and mathematics.

Of all the avant-garde literary movements producing bizarre, conceptual writing, Oulipo is, without question, the least insane. The writing created using the various Oulipo constraints, while often entirely nonsensical, is at least founded in good mathematics. Moreover, much of the more nonsensical pieces are hilarious, and the more serious pieces are technically breathtaking.

Georges Perec — one of the more well-known "Oulipiens" — penned La Disparition without using a single "e." But, while one might imagine, out of sheer necessity, a 300 page novel without a single "e" would be a meaningless blob of jibber-jabber, French book critics failed to notice the lack of "e" on first glance. Frankly, I found skimming La Disparition a tad frightening. Had I not known Perec omitted the letter "e," I would never have noticed its absence.

One of the more amusing Oulipo works for the mathematically inclined is Cent mille milliards de poèmes or One hundred thousand billion poems. The printed book itself is no larger than a standard hardcover, which, when first I saw it, made me cast doubt on the whole Oulipo movement. I figured the title was nothing more than superfluous literary hyperbole.

Inside, however, the book contains a series of manipulable strips, each printed with a line of poetic verse. I liken it to magnetic poetry. Granted, unlike those absurd magnetic poetry kits, which manage to combine my hatred of refrigerator magnets and completely ambiguous poetry, any permutation of the lines in Cent mille milliards de poèmes actually makes sense. More importantly, it is actually possible to produce about one hundred thousand billion poems, given the number of interchangeable lines in the book.

Whether Oulipo manages to truly bridge the realms of literature and mathematics, I cannot be sure. Nevertheless, Oulipo is easily my favorite way to play with words in a way founded entirely in mathematics.

(For the French-speakers out there, a visit to the Oulipo website at oulipo.net cannot go amiss.)