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Suppose Alison has been playing a game of solitaire, but has left the room. A little while later, Trevor, aged 4, notices the cards lying on the table and reaches for them. Another member of the family calls out, "Trevor, don't touch those, they're Alison's!" A straightforward case of teaching a young person about property rights, isn't it? Perhaps not. The deck of cards may belong to the family rather than just Alison. And in any case, it's really not the ownership of the cards themselves that's the issue, it's their arrangement on the table. If that arrangement is significantly disturbed , the game will be ruined even if the cards themselves are not at all damaged. So why do we construe this as an issue of property rights? I believe the reason is that we find it much easier to express property claims than to describe the real issue, which is respect for other people. Perhaps we might have said, "Trevor, don't touch those, Alison is play...

We all know that the probability of some condition can lie anywhere between a sure thing (which we represent as a probability of 1) and a flat-out impossibility (0). But it turns out there are several other points of interest along the way. Let's take a tour. When we say that something is a sure thing, we mean it is bound to be so. For example, the probability that a bachelor is unmarried is 1. This is a logical sure thing because, by the definition of 'bachelor', it couldn't be otherwise. (It could also be called an apodictic sure thing, however that's pretty much guaranteed to sound pretentious—but I'm getting ahead of myself.) Now consider the statement that an object with a positive electrical charge is attracted to an object with a negative electrical charge. This is a physical sure thing : though there may be a universe where this isn't true, it is true in ours. Now let's move from sure things to things that are pretty much guaranteed . For ex...