On Versions and Presentation

The paragraph below the box con­tains the full, u­su­al­ly long­er, ver­sion of the same note. It is pre­sent­ed with­out at­tempt­ing to a­chieve a com­plete right-a­line­ment* for any screen, win­dow or frame wide e­nough to ac­com­mo­date any two successive words or or­tho­graph­i­cal syllables in the text on one line. (Such a text jus­ti­fi­ca­tion can on­ly be ac­com­plished correctly by means of soft or 'shy' hy­phens which may make pos­si­ble search terms im­pos­si­ble to find.)

• where there are spelling variants priority will be giv­en to the pho­ne­mat­ic and mor­phe­mat­ic prin­ci­ples over the et­y­mo­log­i­cal principle

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Primary versus Secondary Importance

Normists defend the primacy of norms or values over authority, divine, devilish, a mixture of the two, or other. If, and when, they re­gard authority as important (that is, of secondary importance), then only in an instrumental, not in a primary, fundamental sense.

Is 80 Any Interesting?

So long as 80 deserves no more attention than 79, 81 or any other number, integer or natural num­ber, 80 is simply a number which equals 79+1 and 81-1 on the zero-level of iteration, which is the level of ad­di­tion and sub­trac­tion (where nothing is re­peat­ed). Also on the first level of it­er­a­tion, the one of multiplication and division, 80 is just 1*80, 2*40, 4*20, 5*16 or 8*10 and vice versa, while 80 (unlike 4, 8 and 16) does not play a role on the higher levels of it­er­a­tion. When 80 arouses an at­ten­tion for which there is no in­de­pend­ent substantive reason, it is because 80 is in a sense thought or felt to be 'numerically significant'. What counts in the radix-10 system is that 80 = 8*10, a multiple of 10, albeit an or­di­nar­y one. Nev­er­the­less, the fact that 80 = 5*16 as well gives the number 80 the same type of nu­mer­i­cal significance in the radix-16 system. From the point of view of numerical sig­nif­i­cance 80 attracts more attention than 71 to 79 and than 81 to 89 in the radix-10 system, but not more than 70 and 90. In the radix-16 sys­tem, how­ev­er, 80 attracts more at­ten­tion than 65 to 79 and than 81 to 95, but not more than 64 and 96. Whether the number 80 also deserves the extra at­ten­tion it arouses depends ultimately on the quality of the reasoning by which the radix(es) of the numeral (su­per)sys­tem were or —more im­por­tant­ly— will be chosen.