As expected, my brief paper was quickly rejected by the third journal to which I sent it. The rejection came mid-day on 19 July; the editor said that it didn't fit the general readership of the journal. He suggested sending it to a journal focussed on Bayesian theory, or to a specific journal of the very same association as that of the journal that he edits. I decided to try the latter.

On the one hand, I don't see my paper as of interest only to those whom I would call Bayesian. The principle in question concerns qualitative probability, whether in the development of a subjectivist theory or of a logicist theory, and issues of Bayes' Theorem only arise if one proceeds to develop a quantitative theory. On the other hand, submitting to that other journal of the same association was something that I could do relatively quickly.

I postponed an up-date here because I thought that I'd report both rejections together if indeed another came quickly. But, so far, my paper remains officially under review at that fourth journal.

The paper is so brief — and really so simple — that someone with an expertise in its area could decide upon it minutes. But reviewing it isn't just a matter of cleverness; one must be familiar with the literature to feel assured that its point is novel. A reviewer without that familiarity would surely want to check the papers in the bibliography, and possibly to seek other work.

Additionally, a friend discovered that, if he returned papers as quickly as he could properly review them, then editors began seeking to get him to review many more papers. Quite reasonably, he slowed the pace of at which he returned his reviews.

The second journal to which I submitted my brief article quickly rejected it (on 11 July) as being unsuited to their readership, and suggested that it may be that your work would be better directed to a journal specialising on statistical theory, or foundations/philosophy. (The journal to which I submitted arguably is one of statistical theory; but it leans heavily towards review rather than towards innovation.)

As 13 July neared its end, I submitted to yet another journal. This time, I'm pretty sure that I'm playing a long-shot, but a rejection should come very quickly if it comes, the paper would get relative many readers if were published there, and people in and around my field would be impressed; so I think that the gamble is a good one.

In the wee hours of 8 July, I rewrote my brief article on one of the proposed axiomata of probability, and sent it to a journal of statistical theory.

The principal reason for doing some rewriting was to add a paragraph reporting an interesting point made by one of my former professors. (I wish that I'd seen that point on my own, but I didn't, so I've duly creditted him.) Additionally, I tightened-up the abstract.

In the absence of being given a reason why my note was rejected by the previous journal, my conjecture is that it was considered to present what would be viewed as a technicality from the perspective imputed to the readership. So I'm turning to a journal with a different sort of readership.

The first journal to which I submitted my brief article on the foundations of probability has rejected it, without providing a reason. This sort of rejection is the most common, and I got one of that sort from the first journal to which I submitted my paper on incomplete preferences.

I will find another journal to which to submit the newer paper, but I have little sense of the the rankings of the sorts of journals in which this paper might be published, and I don't know at the moment to which journal I will next send it.

Years ago, I planned to write a paper on decision-making under uncertainty when possible outcomes were completely ordered neither by desirability nor by plausibility.

On the way to writing that paper, I was impressed by Mark Machina with the need for a paper that would explain how an incompleteness of preferences would operationalize, so I wrote that article before exploring the logic of the dual incompleteness that interested me.

Returning to the previously planned paper, I did not find existing work on qualitative probability that was adequate to my purposes, so I began trying to formulating just that as a part of the paper, and found that the work was growing large and cumbersome. I have enough trouble getting my hyper-modernistic work read without delivering it in large quantities! So I began developing a paper concerned only with qualitative probability as such.

In the course of writing that spin-off paper, I noticed that a rather well-established proposition concerning the axiomata of probability contains an unnecessary restriction; and that, over the course of more than 80 years, the proposition has repeatedly been discussed without the excessiveness of the restriction being noted. Yet it's one of those points that will be taken as obvious once it has been made. I originally planned to note that dispensibility in the paper on qualitative probability, but I have to be concerned about increasing clutter in that paper. Yester-day, I decided to write a note — a very brief paper — that draws attention to the needlessness of the restriction. The note didn't take very long to write; I spent more time with the process of submission than with that of writing.

So, yes, a spin-off of a spin-off; but at least it is spun-off, instead of being one more thing pending. Meanwhile, as well as there now being three papers developed or being developed prior to that originally planned, I long ago saw that the original paper ought to have at least two sequels. If I complete the whole project, what was to be one paper will have become at least six.

The note has been submitted to a journal of logic, rather than of economics; likewise, I plan to submit the paper on qualitative probability to such a journal. While economics draws upon theories of probability, work that does not itself go beyond such theories would not typically be seen as economics. The body of the note just submitted is only about a hundred words and three formulæ. On top of the usual reasons for not knowing whether a paper will be accepted, a problem in this case is exactly that the point made by the paper will seem obvious, in spite of being repeatedly overlooked.

As to the remainder of the paper on qualitative probability, I'm working to get its axiomata into a presentable state. At present, it has more of them than I'd like.

When I went for dinner, I encountered someone slipping into madness. He was polite and pleasant, but going mad.

He was fixated upon improving the world globally. I don't know whether he were going mad because he wanted somehow to improve the world globally, or were obsessively focussed upon improving the world globally because he was going mad; my guess would be that the aspiration and the madness were each feeding upon the other. In any case, he was writing and drawing chaotically with bright marker on loose sheets of paper, and trying to engage random people in his efforts to figure-out How to Save the World. I was a random person.

I sometimes talk to madmen. No less or more comes out of my conversations with them than those with most other people. In this case, I wasn't much occupied at the time with anything else but eating.

He found talking with me to be discouraging. It's not that I don't think that the world might be saved, or that I might do something towards that end. It's that I think that most people, mad or otherwise and including him, fundamentally misconceive the nature of the problem and the potential methods of solution. The Good isn't subject to arithmetic; concern for others is no guarantee against actions that produce horrific outcomes; the meek are capable of over-estimating what can typically be done and thence what they can do; and any attempt to call a convention of the best-and-brightest in each field would attract a different sort (or none at all).

He took his madness to a different table.

In 1980, I had two or three brief encounters with David Koch.

Yes, that David Koch — David Hamilton Koch, younger of the much maligned Koch brothers.

Koch was on the Libertarian Party ticket as the Vice-Presidential candidate. He was there because his candidacy precluded any statutory limit on how much he might donate to the campaign.[1]

One of these encounters was at a meet-and-greet sort of event for Candidate Koch, in Columbus, Ohio. The last was on the main campus of the Ohio State University, where he delivered a speech and then took questions from the audience. There might have been one other encounter that I've forgot. In any case, at the last encounter, he and his entourage got rather angry with me.

In 1980, the brothers Koch were not the bogey-men of the political left that they have become to-day. Their father, Fred C. Koch had been on the radar of those who lay awake at night in the '50s and in the '60s, fearful of what was then called the radical right. Fred Chase Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society, was a wealthy and vociferous advocate of a view that United States policy, domestic and foreign, was largely driven by a Communist conspiracy, and he very much tended to reaction against change, rather than to seeing any of the social and political developments of the 20th Century as genuine advances. But Fred C. Koch, and people like him, were largely forgotten by 1980. Moreover, Charles and David had gone down a libertarian path, making them seem less threatening. Those in the libertarian movement were aware of the Kochs largely because they supplied much of the funding for the Cato Institute.[2] The business world was aware of the Kochs because the company that their father had founded was amongst the world's largest of those whose stock was not offered to the public. And that was about it.

At the meet-and-greet event, David Koch came across both as quite likable and, well, as a bit of a dork — somewhat socially awkwardly. And, no, I didn't get him angry by later calling him a dork. He and others got angry in response to a different assertion, framed as a question.

During the question-and-answer part of Mr Koch's appearance at Ohio State, someone asked him if he'd be up for another run in 1984. His reply was to the effect that he was really enjoying the present effort, and would be positively inclined to being on the ticket again. This response, which I took to be perfectly sincere, made me cringe. And so I raised my hand. I don't remember my exact words — it has, after all, been more than 32 years — but they were to this effect:

It was incredibly generous of you to agree to be on the ticket for this election, and to give as much of your money as you have; but don't you fear that, if you run again in 1984, you will be seen as having bought the party?

Koch, who gave some sort of dismissal (again, I don't remember exactly what), was visibly angry. There were grumblings from other parts of the room. Later, I was told that people (who never confronted me) had expressed their dismay at what I'd said, as if I'd insulted Koch. Which is, of course, not what I'd done. What I'd done was to warn him of how his efforts would be construed.

Well, David Koch didn't run again in 1984. Not because he took my warning to heart, but because the Libertarian Party Presidential campaign of 1980 was largely a waste of the money and effort that he and others had expended; it received far fewer votes than promised.[3] But he and Charles didn't stop contributing to political causes. And the claim has been made that they have bought those organizations and individuals to whom the Koch's have provided funding. The Kochs have been demonized, and the demonization has been used to depict those causes as villainous devices. Any rational calculation of the results of a contribution by the Kochs must account for this effect. And so, in spite of the fact that David Koch didn't run again in 1984, events have illustrated, in specific application to David Koch, the dynamic that underlay the point that I made in 1980.

Except for an episode of crusading against the prostitution of children, I withdrew from political activism in 1981. And, as an economist, I'd rather wrestle with abiding questions of fundamental theory than involve myself in the research of policy think-tanks. So I doubt that I'll ever meet Mr Koch again. And it's unlikely that, after more than 32 years, Mr Koch even remembers that moment. But, if I did talk with him again, I'd be tempted to say I told you so, … you dork!

[1] Campaign finance laws run smack into First Amendment protections of freedom of expression. A right to freedom of expression is no more or less than a right to use one's resources without constraints in response to the expressive content (as such) of the use. Lawyerly distinctions have been drawn amongst the ways that one might use resources to convey the political ideas that one supports, but these are always going to be logically incoherent. And, in the case of the law in 1980 (as still to-day), the absurdity of claiming that there were no infringement in limiting spending of one's own money on one's own campaign was too palpable for such censorship to be imposed.

[2] The Cato Institute is often characterized as itself libertarian, but the word libertarian is best reserved for a more thorough-going (classical) liberalism than that practiced by the Institute.

[3] The mainstream media did what it could to under-mine that campaign, first attempting to displace the LP with Barry Commoner and then, when that didn't take, actively recruiting John Anderson to run as the third candidate. Those who managed the LP campaign had banked pretty much everything on the expectation that the only Presidential candidates on all state ballots would be President Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Libertarian, Ed Clark. There was no planning for the inevitability that the rules would be waived in order to get Anderson on nearly all state ballots. And the Libertarian message had been muddled to make it more appealing to moderates, and stayed muddled even after Anderson was positioned to take those votes.

The other day, I received a copy of Physics Calculations (1952) by Max Wittman.

This is actually my second copy, as I got one in very nice shape some years ago. Mr Wittman was one of my favorite teachers when I went to high school. We didn't use this book in the class that I took from him; it was long out-of-print. But still I'd wanted a copy as a sort of memento of the man. When another copy became available, for a pittance, it occurred to me that I could use it to buffer my first copy, should anyone want to use it. (It's a nifty little book.)

Anyway, this copy came with some writing on the inside front cover. In the upper left is a sticker on which was written

U. S. Vukcevich
204 E. Oak Street
West Hazelton, Pa.

In the upper right was written 5-21-52. And, in the center was ink-stamped

U. SAMUEL VUKCEVICH
Physical Science Dept.
High school

So I though that I'd find what I could about this U. Samuel Vukcevich.

For the first several seconds, the information was fairly unsurprising. Dr. Ukasin Samuel Vukcevich was born on 25 October 1928, in St. Clair, Pennsylvania, to Savo and Stana (née Punosevich) Vukcevich; Ukasin died on 15 April 2008. He was raised in West Hazelton and was graduated from its high school. He was a decorated veteran of the Marine Corps, serving at the end of World War II in the Pacific Theater. He went on to get a degree from Bloomsburg State College, and also earned degrees from Temple University and Rutgers Universi­ty. He taught high school and became principal of a high school. In the mid '50s, he married Anna Pejakovich (who died on 21 November 2011).

So far, so good; then I see the word warden. Because, at some point, U. Samuel Vukcevich transitioned from high-school principal to, uhm yeah, prison superintendent. In fact, he gets special mention in various news articles and books because, on 24 November 1972, shortly after he became warden of New Jersey's Rahway State Prison, they had a riot, in which he was injured and taken hostage. In any case, it seems that he was an ardent advocate of using prisons to rehabilitate criminals, and that his belief in such efforts was what drew him, by the late '50s, into involvement with the penal system, beginning with juvenile reformatories.

At the end of his career, Dr Vukcevich was working as an adjunct professor at Various New Jersey colleges and universities, and as a labor-relations negotiator.

Because LiveJournal has again broken its support for OpenID, I am again locked-out of reading Friends-only entries.

This time, instead of struggling to find a work-around (while the LJ support team does nothing but collect information which will be ignored by the LJ programmers, and then eventually expresses regrets at the lack of action), I am simply done with it. I won't be reading LJ entries.

I won't even bother with the more public entries at LiveJournal. If there's something that my LJ Friends want me to read, then it will have to be written elsewhere.

I am presently undecided as to whether I'm willing to enable LiveJournal to the extent of allowing it to continue to access my RSS feed. If you find that entries from this 'blog stop appearing on your Friends pages, then you might check as to whether that's simply because the 'blog has become quiescent, or because I've blocked the LJ server.

[Addendum (2013:02/06): I am informed that LiveJournal's alleged feed of this 'blog hasn't delivered any of the entries from this year anyway, so the question of whether to permit it to do so might perhaps be put aside.]

Various unhappy things have occurred in my life since my last entry here. The worst of these was the death of the beloved cat of the Woman of Interest.

Some years before she and I had ever had any contact, the Woman of Interest was passing by a dumpster, and heard a cry as if from a tomcat trapped in it. So she went to free the creature. What she found, to her surprise, was not an adult, but a truly tiny little black kitten, with preternaturally beautiful green eyes. He had been closed in a box with a toy, put in the dumpster, and left for death. (We can only speculate about this combination of apparent affection and ruthlessness.)

He was far too young to be properly weened and separated from his mother — the Woman of Interest was horrified when a veterinarian estimated his age — but she became the best possible substitute for that mother. He grew to be a cat with an rather large frame (though she took care not to let him become obese, and put him on a diet when he became a bit pudgy).

Actually, though, he really never ceased to be a kitten, and a pretty rambunctious one at that. And, as far as he was concerned, she was always his Best Mommy. When he and I would be alone in her apartment, he would spend a fair amount of time laying where he could watch the door, waiting for her return; I'd not before seen an adult cat do that. (My family had a cat, and I had a cat of my own, so I'm not without prior experience.)

He was a talkative cat, who usually made something more like the sound of a duck quack than a typical meow; and, if he were awake and she were at home, then he'd usually be vocalizing at her — I think that usually what he was saying could be translated as Mom! — though sometimes he'd just roam-about, engaged in apparent commentary to himself. I'd be especially amused when I'd hear him trying to tell her something after she'd fallen asleep while on the phone with me.

He and I got along quite well. I was looking forward to spending years hanging-out with him. Without conscious categorization, I thought of us as buddies.

I won't here rehash the details of how he was lost. Not long before he died, tests established that he had developed diabetes; this was caught much sooner than is typical in house cats (because the Woman of Interest was very mindful of his health), and she began treating it as per the veterinarian's instructions. But what was also discovered at the same time was that he had a common heart condition. Neither, by itself, would have proved fatal. But, jointly, they were too much. She found him dead on the morning of the fourth.

I'm not writing here to grieve (though I sometimes still cry about him), but because I observe something qua social scientist.

My relationship with the Woman of Interest wasn't well-bounded by just the two of us. Her cat played a significant rôle in our relationship, and it was the relationship more of another person than of an impersonal thing. A relationship that I would have categorized as between two persons was actually somewhat rather like one amongst three persons. With his death, the relationship of the three of us took a terrible hit, and the relationship of the two of us is henceforth informed by that injury. He did not mean — and could not have meant — the same thing to each of us individually, but he meant something shared in the relationship as such; and, even if the loss to the relationship could be fully decomposed into our losses as individuals (an issue that I don't propose here to labor), still it is important to recognize it as a sort of loss to the relationship, albeït not one to cause us to love each other less or to become more distant.

(Many years ago, I lost my dog while I was in a relationship, but the nature of that relationship was different. For my part, I knew that, without radical and unlikely change, I needed to be freed of that wretched woman; and, for her part, she had already been preparing to discard as much of her responsibilities as she might, including any that were had for the dog. He died before she left us, but she was going to leave him too. So I didn't observe then anything analogous to what I observe now.)