Curious Legal Conditionals

The paper examines the use of the modal verb SHALL in the if clauses of conditionals found in legal English. The study traces the history of such usages and compares them to two uses of WILL attested in the same grammatical environment: a temporal use and a nonepistemic modal use. The comparison provides the foundation for examining the use of SHALL in Biblical translations, where this verb has outlived its demise in general English, and both of these sources inform the analysis of SHALL in legal conditionals. Specifically, it is claimed that SHALL is not inherently deontic in legal English but is used as an explicit marker of the authority vested in the author or authors of spoken and written texts. This approach explains why authority conscious drafters can use SHALL in the if clauses of conditionals and in temporal clauses whenever they want to and why the proponents of the plain language movement advocate simply deleting SHALL from legal writing and not replacing it with more popular modals expressing deontic meanings, e.g. HAVE TO, MUST, etc. It is claimed that no such replacements are recommended because there is no deontic meaning to replace and the authority designated by SHALL can be inferred from the context

Four curious supergravities

We consider four supergravities with 16+16, 32+32, 64+64, 128+128 degrees of freedom displaying some curious properties: (1) They exhibit minimal supersymmetry (N=1, 2, 2, 1) but maximal rank (r=7, 6, 4, 0) of the scalar coset in D=4, 5, 7, 11. (2) They couple naturally to supermembranes and admit these membranes as solutions. (3) Although the D=4, 5, 7 supergravities follow from truncating the maximally supersymmetric ones, there nevertheless exist M-theory compactifications with G2, SU(3), SU(2) holonomy having these supergravities as their massless sectors. (4) They reduce to N=1, 2, 4, 8 theories all with maximum rank 7 in D=4 which (5) correspond to 0, 1, 3, 7 lines of the Fano plane and hence admit a division algebra (R,C,H,O) interpretation consistent with the black-hole/qubit correspondence, (6) are generalized self-mirror and hence (7) have vanishing on-shell trace anomaly.Comment: 16 pages late

The Beauty of the Ethical: An Everyday Ethics that Brings Grace to Life

Excerpt: Malcolm Muggeridge entitled his reflection on Mother Teresa Something Beautiful for God. Perhaps the force of that expression does not immediately strike us, but consider how curious a statement it is: that here was something—an act, a project, a life—beautiful for God. By far the most curious aspect, and the hardest to see afresh and not as mere formula, is that it was for God; but I leave that to a subsequent essay, with only the saints, here Teresa and Irenaeus, to point toward my sequel. For now note instead that it was something beautiful