Helen of Troy

An objective analysis of Beauty:

One helen is sufficient good looks to launch one thousand ships, and to cause the destruction by fire of an entire city. The objective standards of Ship Launching and Arson may now be used to analyze feminine beauty.

--"Helen of Troy" by David Lance Goines

A very funny piece.

The Unknown

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
-- Socrates

To me, Rumsfeld's musings is not only a clear example of the kind of statement public officials should never make because it is so internally complex that it leaves the listener completely perplexed, but it is also interestingly incomplete.

Let's assume its complexity is self explanatory, so I will deal with the incompleteness.

What he is trying to do, is to enumerate all combinations of facts that are {known, unknown} and the state of our knowledge about the facts.

We can construct a table of all combinations and fill it in with Rumsfeld's quotes, like this:

	What we know about our knowledge of the facts
	We know if we are informed or not	We are not aware of the question
Known facts	There are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
Unknown facts	There are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.	[...] there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know we don't know.

This leaves us one empty square, things that are known or knowable, but we are ignorant of even the question to ask. Isn't it interesting that that is the very permutation he left out? I think it is symptomatic of the whole administration; There are things that could be known, and might even be known, but the Whitehouse is to ignorant to even ask the question.