New Haven
The eye's plain version is a thing apart,
The vulgate of experience. Of this,
A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet--
As part of the never-ending meditation,
Part of the question that …
Centre
In the punctual centre of all circles white Stands truly....
... and Bloom with his vast accumulation
Stands and regards and repeats the primitive lines.
-- Wallace Stevens,
"From the …
Sunday Morning
Today is the Chinese New Year, 4074.
Memorial of
St. Thomas Aquinas:
Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S. J.
St. Thomas Aquinas,
by G. K. Chesterton
Log24, Epiphany 2006
Mozart, 2006Mozart, 1935
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeg…
In honor of Paul Newman's age today, 81:
On Beauty
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty (pdf), page 21:
"Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the
search for something beyond itself, something larger or someth…
Born Today
and playing with a full deck:
Alicia Keys
"... it's going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in the scheme of things."
-- Anne McCaffrey, Radcliffe '47,
To…
ART WARS
for Michael Harris
(See previous entry.)
Related material:
A classic book in a postmodern
("free-floating signs") cover -- This is my Princeton Companion
to Mathematics, from the dayswhen …
In Defense of Hilbert
(On His Birthday)
Michael Harris (Log24, July 25 and 26, 2003) in a recent essay, Why
Mathematics? You Might Ask (pdf), to appear in the forthcoming
Princeton Companion to Mathematics:
"Mathe…
The Case
An entry suggested by today's New York Times story by Tom Zeller Jr., A
Million Little Skeptics:
From The Hustler, by Walter Tevis:
The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she …
Natural Hustler (jpg, 283 KB)
Play
On this date in 1938, Thornton Wilder's
"Our Town" premiered at the
McCarter Theatre, Princeton University.
Related material: St. Patrick's Day, 2005, St. Patrick's Day, 2003,
and, for
Pi…
Fourstone Parable
(continued)
Alms for Oblivion:
In memory of Akkadian scholar
Erica Reiner, who died at 81 on
December 31, 2005.
"Erica combined a tough-minded commitment to intellectual e…
Mathematics and Narrative
Jews on Fiction
See Tony Kushner and E.L. Doctorow in today's New York Times, Rebecca
Goldstein's talk from last summer's Mykonos conference on mathematics
and narrative, and Martin Buber on the Bible.
Fourstone Parable
"Wherefore let it hardly... be...
thought that the prisoner... was at his best a onestone
parable... for... pathetically few... cared... to doubt... the
canonicity of his existence as a tesserac…
Logos Alvin Plantinga Philosophy
logo Harry Plantinga …
The Man Who Was Thursday:
An Introduction
"Wallace Stevens's remarkable oeuvre is a quasi-spiritual quest for the
supreme fiction, for a poetry that 'must take the place / Of empty
heaven and its hymns' and thus he…
Plato and Shakespeareat Breakfast
"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.
Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not
startle
you with any more. But imagine what it would be to liv…
BBC News Jan. 17
Related material:
Log24 Sept. 27 and
Sept. 28, 2005,
as well as
The Harvard Crimson,
Jan. 13, 2006:
"President was resolute--
'This is bullshit'"
Mathematics and Narrative
Rebecca Goldstein, Mathematics and the Character of Tragedy:
"It was Plato who best expressed-- who veritably embodied-- the tension
between the narrative arts and mathematics."
Veritab…
InscapeMy entry for New Year's Day links to a
paper by Robert T.
Curtis* from The Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering (King Fahd
University, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia), Volume 27, Number 1A, January 2002.
From tha…
Diamond Jubilance
(See previous entry.)
"A (very brief!) lit search reveals very little on the intersection
between probability theory and modal logic.... probability and modality
are such big topics one wo…
Beyond the Fire
"Who Needs a White Cube These Days?"
-- Headline in today's New York Times "That Nature is a Heraclitean
Fire..." -- Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins …
Time in the Rock
"a world of selves trying to remember the self
before the idea of self is lost--
Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,
speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble
of all these …
Monster BBC News today:
Reese Witherspoon
was the winner of
the leading lady award
at the People's Choice
ceremony in Los Angeles.
"Walk the Line could turn out
to be a monster chick flick,
because …
Chick Flicks
From NT Gateway Weblog,
Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005:
Question: What does Chicken Little
have in common with
The Passion of the Christ?
An anonymous commenter's answer: "The title charact…
Ten is a Hen
(continued)
From Nov. 12, 2005:
"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 mak…
Click on picture
for details.
Cornerstone
"In 1782, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler posed a problem
whose mathematical content at the time seemed about as much as that of
a parlor puzzle. 178 years passed before a complete solution was fo…
For Stephen Hawking's Birthday
Epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos:
God does not play dice with the universe. --Albert Einstein
Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws
the…
Strange Attractor
Epiphany Star
(See also the star as a
"spider" symbol in the
stories of Fritz Leiber.)
For Heinrich Harrer,
who died today...
Harrer was one of the 1938 team that first climbed …
Cross
Today's birthday:
E. L. Doctorow, author of City of God
"In the Garden of Adding
live Even and Odd."
-- City of God
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt
"... I don't write exclusively on Jewish theme…
Epiphany "A related epiphanic question,
second only in interest to the
question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The
religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish
…
Whirligig (continued) "Thus the whirligig of
time
brings in his revenges." Twelfth Night, Act V, Sc. I [text]
See also January 5 in 2003 and 2005.
Hamilton's Whirligig
For details, see Visualizing GL(2,p).
"Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere
formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.
It was a thin nec…
Dark City
I stood in the cold on the porch And could not think of anything so
perfect As man's hope of light in the face of darkness.
-- Richard Eberhart,
"The Eclipse"
Dragon School
In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended
The Dragon School. Carpenter died a year ago today.
From Log24 on Nov. 16, 2005:
Images
Adam Gopnik on C. S. …
The Shining
The Shining according to
the Catholic Church:
"The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public
life.... Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a
high …
Step Three
of January, 2006
From St. Andrew's Day,
November 30, 2005: See also Step One -- "Happy Six,"* and Step Two --
"Then a Miracle Occurs."**
The miracle occurred on the
Feast of the …
Then a Miracle Occurs The New York Times on
Sunday, New Year's Day, 2006, by John Horgan-- "Einstein Has Left the
Building"--
"Down the hall from my office, Albert Einstein's electric-haired visage
beams fr…