IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER POST with a quote from his book, Charles Stross emails:

Apropos the snippet of dialogue from THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES that you liked, it’s not so far from the truth!

Back in the mid 1980’s my brother in law was doing a PhD in philosophy of mathematics at Rochester, NY. He’s (a) British and (b) a bit naive outside of a seminar room. He was rather surprised to discover that three fifths of the professors in his department were funded by DARPA or some other Pentagon-related body, for research in his field: he was specializing in Bayes’ theorem and it seems the US military had a strong enough interest in Bayesian reasoning — with particular reference to reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, where there are no prior probabilities — to pay philosophy professors to study it. (Do I need to draw in the dotted line between a theory of uncertainty and the fog of war? :)

Nope. But where’s the Office of Strategic Folklore?