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Carlton M. Caves
Distinguished Professor
University of New Mexico
PhD in Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1979
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Phone: (505) 277-1850
FAX: Don't bother. Scan to pdf and e-mail.
E-mail: ccaves at unm.edu
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Resource material for promoting the Bayesian view of everything
Version 2.2 posted 2001 August 15
Very outdated---I have changed my mind on many things---but perhaps worth leaving here.
Available as a
plain TeX source or
postscript or
pdf file
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For each event is revealed to us only at the surrender of every alternate course.
I think ... that the dreamer imagined himself at some crossroads. Yet there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw.
Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
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Ask, "How does the incredible variety of the world come to be?" and a disembodied voice replies enigmatically, "Rolls of the quantum dice." Puzzled, ask, "But what does that mean?" and the answer is whispered soundlessly in your ear, "Rolls of the quantum dice plumb a bottomless well of information, giving rise to the variety of the world around you." Still puzzled, but sensing the important question, ask haltingly, "So, where is that well?" and no answer comes forth, not even a whisper, for there is no answer, only a description, the phrase that Gertrude Stein used to damn her native Oakland, "There is no there there."
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You can try to please all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you generally can't please anyone but yourself (and even that's hard, so you better pay attention to it).
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Copyright 2014 Carlton M. Caves. Material on my web pages (URL http://info.phys.unm.edu/~caves or any of its descendants) can be used for noncommercial purposes, provided any such use acknowledges me and cites the URL http://info.phys.unm.edu/~caves as the source.
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