I was watching the new series “Inside Man”, or trying to without jumping off the nearest building, and I came to three conclusions:

1. Moffat should never be allowed to create more than the pilot of a show. He has a (very) cool idea to start with, but the rest of the show has to bend around increasingly unlikely nonsense to make his plot work to the conclusion he wants to reach.
2. Kustin-Miller unprojection is cool, and every commutative algebraist should know it; it gives us a way to normalize the seemingly arbitrary. Thank you Stavros for telling me about it. This just because my head drifted off to greener pastures.
3. People love shitty chess. And they really should not.
4. 
   

Now, let me explain, or rather put up a disclaimer first: By shitty chess, I do not mean the entire Carlsen-Niemann affair. Though perhaps a larger meta-point surrounding deductive (that which is strictly logical) versus inductive reasoning (that is, a game of probabilities) could be made.

Because the reason characters like Sherlock Holmes are so alluring, and the reason we fall for the trap that is Moffat’s skills of giving us a convincing plot, is that we are collectively obsessed with the myth of having everything under control. And perhaps herein lies the issue: when our reasoning invariably fails, we invariably turn to panic and wild plot devices like little men in the derrière. And it is one of the reasons we are collectively anxious all the time (except those that are anyway half in the grave; byebye at this point.)

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