In Section 1 below I describe two measures of the complexity of a binary relation. J The theorem says that these two measures never disagree very much. Both measures of complexity arose in connection with Saharon Shelah's notion [5] of a stable firstt order theory; Shelah showed in effect that one measure is finite, if, and only if, the other is finite too. This follows trivially from the theorem below. I confess my main aim was not to get the extra information which the theorem provides, but to eliminate Shelah's use of uncountable cardinals, which seemed strangely heavy machinery for proving a purely finitary result. Section 2 below explains the modeltheoretic setting.

A set mapping on pairs over the set S is a function f such that for each unordered pair a of elements of S,f(a) is a subset of S disjoint from a. A subset H of S is said to be free for f if x∉ f({y, z}) for all x, y, z from H. In this paper, we investigate conditions imposed on the range of f which ensure that there is a large set free for f. For example, we show that if f is defined on a set of size K+ + with always |f(a)| <k then f has a free set of size K+ if the range of f satisfies the k-chain condition, or if any two sets in the range of f have an intersection of size less than θ for some θ with θ < K.

An alternative approach is proposed to the basic definitions of the lassical lambda calculus. A proof is sketched of the equivalence of the approach with the classical case. The new formulation simplifies some aspects of the syntactic theory of the lambda calculus. In particular it provides a justification for omitting in syntactic theory discussion of changes of bound variable.