Hobgoblin? Brian Davies is a professor of
mathematics at King's College London. In the December Notices of the
American Mathematical
Society, he claims that arithmetic may, for all we know, be
inconsistent: "Gödel…
For St. Andrew's Day
"The miraculous enters....
When we investigate these problems, some fantastic things happen...."
-- John H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane, Sphere Packings, Lattices and
Groups, preface to first ed…
The Way of the Pilgrim,
Part III: For the Birthday
of C. S. Lewis
The Tao, Chapter I
"The Chinese... speak of a great thing (the
greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all
predicates, the …
The Way of the Pilgrim,
Part II: Einstein's Orgy
In a recent Edge article, "The Vagaries of Religious Experience," a
Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, quotes Einstein on his own
religious vagaries: …
The Way of the Pilgrim,
Part I: For John Bunyan's
Birthday
Click on picture to enlarge.
"AS I walk’d through the wilderness of this
world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me do…
Holy Geometry
What was "the holy geometry book" ("das heilige
Geometrie-Büchlein," p.
10 in the Schilpp book below) that so impressed the young Albert
Einstein?
"At
the age of 12 I experienced a second wonder of a…
Rehearsing Hell
Art critic Michael Kimmelman
in today's New York Times:
The Los Angeles veteran Mike Kelley's latest show is a sprawling,
scabrous spectacle of noisome installations and hilarious videos,
occup…
Buckley and Pinochet
Yesterday, William F. Buckley, Jr., author of God and Man at Yale,
turned 80.
Here is an entry from yesterday, postponed until today so it would not
intervene between yesterday's related entries…
Crossroads
In memory of Diego Rivera,
who died on this date in 1957
"... the socialist muralist Diego
Rivera, hired by Nelson Rockefeller to paint a fresco for the newly
constructed Rockefeller Center in New…
For Constantine's Angel Lyrics by Chris
Whitley, who died on Sunday,
November 20, 2005: Angels Even devils too Wait to show How far we come
To joy -- "To Joy (Revolution of the Innocents)" -- mp3 and ly…
Also on Saint Cecilia's Day
(Release date: 11/22/2005)...
Bright Music
Illustrated
Reba #1's
Reba McEntire
Album Length Compact Disc
For Reba,
a very bright star,
the symbol of Venus
always shin…
For St. Cecilia's Day--
A flashback to June 8, 2004:
Dark MusicIllustrated Paul Klee
From today's
Arts & Letters Daily:
Critics in Mozart’s agethrew up their handsat the dark Don
Giovanni,cal…
Cartoon Graveyard(continued)
From yesterday's New York Post:
By LARRY CELONA, JOHN MAZOR and DAN MANGAN November 21, 2005 -- The
former tour manager for superstars Paul Simon
and Billy Joel …
Picasso's
Tragedy:
Detail by Lou Myers,
1915-2005
Myers died yesterday,
the 30th anniversary
of the death of
Francisco Franco.
For the source of
the above picture,
see ZAKS illustrators.
Origina…
An Exercise
of Power
Johnny Cash:
"And behold,
a white horse."
Adapted from
illustration below:
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate's
unanswered question '…
It's still the same old story,
a fight for love and...
Glory
Wikipedia on the tesseract:
"Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox, a hyperdimensional packing
case that was bigger inside than outside."
…
Crank Power!
One night in Bangkok
and the world's your oyster... Tonight's Bangkok Post
on a new $100 laptop
from an MIT designer: No logo for the initiative has yet been released,
but designers could
…
All the King's Men
(See also Time and
All the King's Horses.)
LEAR:
Now you better do some thinkin' then you'll findYou got the only daddy
that'll walk the line.
FOOL:
I've always been different …
For a Man in Black
Related material:
Log24 Sept. 1-15, 2003
and
State of Morelos.
Images
Adam Gopnik on C. S. Lewis in this week's New Yorker:
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images...."
"The best of the books are the ones... where the allegory is at a
minimum and the images just flow…
Windmills Upper part of above picture--
From today's New York Times,Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.
Lower part of above picture--
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:
"This magical place, according …
Spider Woman "Time traveling, which is not
quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me
when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the
open doorway…
Culture Wars
'Chicken Little' Lays Golden Egg
(Dean Goodman, Reuters)
'Bee Season' Anxiety
(Leonard Klady, Movie City News):
The mixed bag of limited release preems was highlighted by an excellent
respon…
Reunion:An Introduction
to Multispeech
From Log24, Oct. 31, 2005:
"They don't understand what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once."…
Structure "Sunrise--
Hast thou a Flag for me?"
-- Emily Dickinson
From a
Beethoven's Birthday entry: Kaleidoscope turning...Shifting
patternwithin unalterable structure...-- Roger Zelazny, Eye of C…
Ten is a Hen
"Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON."
"'Tikkun Olam,
the fixing of the world,'
she whispers. 'I've been
gathering up the broken vessels
to make things whole again.'" -- Mir…
Nine is a Vine
Representation
of a quaternion
Related material:
"Oh, I wasn't about to hole up
in a monastery. I still wanted-- What did I want? I wanted a Roc's
egg...."
-- Robert A. Heinlein…
Seven is Heaven,
Eight is a Gate
(continued)
"... problems are the poetry of chess.
They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize
all worthwhile art:
originality, invention, harmony, co…
State of Grace
On this date in 1929,
Grace Kelly was born. Enough -- the first Abode On the familiar Road
Galloped in Dreams -- -- Emily Dickinson "Nonbeing must in some sense
be, otherwise what …
Glory Season
"...his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly... on high
shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent
and Siva Worship in Central America,
there were two long…
720 in the Book
(continued) From today's
New York Times: Phil Bray
Transcendence through spelling:
Richard Gere and Flora Cross
as father and daughter
in "Bee Season."
Word…
The Rhetoric of
Scientism
Kansas, Where "Ignorant"
is the New "Educated":
"... the Board of Education went as far as to
redefine what science is: it's no longer just a search for natural
explanations fo…
Butterfly Effect
From today's
online New York Times:
John Fowles on two of his novels:"I wanted to show the seeds of an
intense future evolution in a particular period."
Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Th…
In honor of the 120th anniversary
of the birth of Hermann Weyl:
Verbumsatsapienti?
Escher's Verbum
Solomon's Cube
Geometry of the I Ching
Review: A Constant Idea and
A Constant Idea: 759.
Butterfly and Wheel
The illustration for the previous entry,
taken from fowlesbooks.com,
suggests more links:
1. To Butterflies and Wheels* (banner below),
a site that attacks Mary Midgley, and
2.…
Tick Tick Hash
On Saturday, November 5, 2005,
author John Fowles died. From Log24
on the date of
Fowles' death: Coincidence and Design Related material:
The Collector and
Speak, Mem…
But seriously... "Sir Frederick Gray,
Minister of
Defence, is a dignified, upper-class gentleman who is well respected in
intelligence circles. However for most of his appearances, Gray is a
strict by-the-book perso…
For Mike Nichols,
whose birthday is today:
Angels in Arabia
Yesterday's entries discussed an angel and a fugue; this suggests Clive
Barker's classic tale Weaveworld, which in turn suggests the following
links:
1. …
Contrapuntal Themes
in a Shadowland (See previous entry.)
Douglas Hofstadter on his magnum opus:
"... I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only
shadows
cast in different directions by some …
Coincidence
and Design
Headline from a local newspaper this morning:
Area Catholics Receive
St. Thomas Aquinas Awards Headline from today's New York Times:
Closing Arguments Madein Trial on Intelligent D…
Bond
USA Today on last night's White House dinner:
"In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was 'a reminder of the unique
and enduring bond' between the two countries." From Log24,…
To Serve Man
Starring
Sir Anthony Hopkins
as Smithers
(See previous entry.)
In memory of Lloyd Bochner,
who died on Oct. 29, 2005:
"In his most memorable television role, Mr. Bochner starred as Michael
…
All Souls' Day
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano:
"... Let me see, he was only praelector in my time...." "He was still
praelector in mine." (In my time?... But what, exactly, does that
mean?....)
.... …
The above seal is from an ad (pdf) for an
Oct. 21 lecture, "The Nature
of Space," by Sir Michael Atiyah, sponsored by the American
Mathematical Society.
The picture in the seal is of Plato's Academy.
…
Antidote to Atiyah
In a recent talk, "The Nature of Space," Sir Michael Atiyah
gave a misleading description of Plato's doctrine of "ideas," or
"idealism." Atiyah said that according to Plato, ideas reside
in "an i…