The Last Word From an album cover: From Feb. 20: Relativity Blues and Hunter Thompson Commits Suicide -- Stephen King -- Hunter S. Thompson Posted 12/31/2005 at 2:20 PM |
Rhapsody in Indigo or: We are stardust, We are golden, continued 1971: Joni Mitchell, Blue 1994: Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo "Some call them 'Emissaries from Heaven,' others say the 'New Kids' or even the 'Children of the New Earth.' They are best known as the Indigo Children...." -- Brood Indigo Children of the Damned (1963) (Set at St. Dunstan-in-the-East Church, London) Related material: Shining Through on May 19, 2005, St. Dunstan's Day-- This was the opening date for the final episode of Star Wars. Posted 12/30/2005 at 10:10 PM |
"Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you." -- Sinatra 404 - Page Not Found From Elfwood Related material: "An Instance of the Fingerpost" at Log24 and Log24 on 4/04 2003, 4/04 2004, 4/04 2005. Posted 12/30/2005 at 4:04 PM |
Expression Expression is an impossible word. If you want to use it I think you have to explain it further... -- Ad Reinhardt, Art as Art "... an equation is a very abstract expression of knowledge about something." -- The Hidden Side of Visualization Well, yes. For example: Abstract Expression, pixels on screen, 12/30/05
For more on zero and other entities, see Is Nothing Sacred? For more on Davidson, see Shema. Posted 12/30/2005 at 1:00 AM |
Express You've got to make him
Related material on trains:
Davenport's Express Related material on 162: Dogma Part II: Amores Perros, Related material on
"This world is not conclusion; a sequel stands beyond." -- Emily Dickinson Posted 12/29/2005 at 6:29 PM |
Parallel Lines
From Log24, Dec. 6, 2002, Well if you want to ride -- Lonnie Donegan The Rock Island Line's namesake depot Posted 12/29/2005 at 3:31 PM |
"Diebold. Because shit happens." -- caption on a poster ridiculing Diebold voting machines The shit that happened yesterday to the family of the late John
Diebold, automation expert and management consultant, is the following
paragraph from his obituary in the New York Times:
"In addition to the Diebold Group, he started John Diebold Inc., an investment firm, in 1967. It financed such ventures as a computer leasing company and a well-known manufacturer of polling machines."This was written by Jennifer Bayot, who ordinarily covers business news for the Times. Her sly reference to "a well-known manufacturer of polling machines" is apparently to the widely scorned Diebold Election Systems. It appears to have no basis in fact. Supporting this view-- Larry McShane, Associated Press: "... his consulting firm John Diebold & Associates.... had no connection to electronic equipment company Diebold Inc."Richard Waters in the Financial Times: John Diebold "was not related to the [late] Charles Diebold, a 19th century entrepreneur whose company, named Diebold, has gone on to become a leading maker of automated teller machines and voting machines." Posted 12/28/2005 at 5:14 AM |
Dance of the Numbers (continued) The Pennsylvania lottery on St. Stephen's Day-- Midday: 105 Evening: 064 From a new branch of theology, lottery hermeneutics: See Log24, 1/05, Death and the Spirit, and the 64 hexagrams of the box-style I Ching. From the Wikipedia article on hermeneutics: "One prominent theme which arises in contemporary philosophical hermeneutics (i.e., the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer) is a serious calling into question of scientism. Scientism
is the more or less unquestioned belief in the supremacy of the natural
sciences when it comes to serving as models of knowledge. By calling
scientism into question, hermeneutics is arguing for the legitimacy of
(among other things) aesthetic, literary, spiritual, and philosophical
knowledge, alongside (but not instead of) scientific knowledge."
Posted 12/27/2005 at 12:11 PM |
In memoriam John Diebold Diebold died yesterday, Boxing Day: From Rand Careaga, The Diebold Variations Click on the above for related posters. Before passing judgment on John Diebold's immortal
soul, the reader should note that it is not clear whether he was in
fact connected with the controversial Diebold voting machines, although today's New York Times says that his investment firm, John Diebold Inc., "financed such
ventures as... a well-known manufacturer of
polling machines." The Times has been known to err.
Related material from June 2005: Pandora's Box and The Barest Vocabulary "Visionary" -- Today's New York Times Posted 12/27/2005 at 4:30 AM |
Language Game on Boxing Day In the box-style I Ching Hexagram 34, The Power of the Great, is represented by . Art is represented by a box (Hexagram 20, Contemplation, View) . And of course great art is represented by an X in a box. (Hexagram 2, The Receptive) . "... as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness" "... at the still point, there the dance is." -- T. S. Eliot
For those who prefer technology to poetry, there is the Xbox 360. (Today is day 360 of 2005.) Posted 12/26/2005 at 7:00 PM |
Wren Day "St. Stephen's Day [Dec. 26] is a national holiday in Ireland, but the celebrations have little connection to the Saint." This day in Ireland is instead devoted to a barbaric ritual, "the hunting of the wren." Let us therefore recall a more civilized figure-- St. Christopher Wren-- whose feast day is Feb. 25. From Log24 on that date in 2005: ... Only by the form, Posted 12/26/2005 at 3:00 PM |
Eight is a Gate (continued) Compare and contrast: Click on pictures for details. "... die Schönheit... [ist] die richtige Übereinstimmung der Teile miteinander und mit dem Ganzen." "Beauty is the proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole." -- Werner Heisenberg, "Die Bedeutung des Schönen in der exakten Naturwissenschaft," address delivered to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, 9 Oct. 1970, reprinted in Heisenberg's Across the Frontiers, translated by Peter Heath, Harper & Row, 1974 Posted 12/25/2005 at 8:00 PM |
Nine is a Vine (continued) The figures are: A symbol of Apollo from Balanchine's Birthday and A Minature Rosetta Stone, a symbol of pure reason from Visible Mathematics and Analogical Train of Thought, a symbol of Venus from Why Me? and To Graves at the Winter Solstice, and, finally, a more down-to-earth symbol, adapted from a snowflake in an online Christmas card. Those who prefer their theological art on the scary side may enjoy the Christian Snowflake link in the comments on the "Logos" entry of Orthodox Easter (May 1), 2005. Posted 12/24/2005 at 9:00 PM |
High Concept "Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)-- theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" -- index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162 Then there is the Daughter's procession: For the String Theory Appreciation Club, see Raoul Bott, 1923-2005. For another imaginary club, see The Club Dumas (below). For a non-imaginary club, see the organization that included Noon (above). Posted 12/24/2005 at 12:00 PM |
The Stone of Power "Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers.... often
depicted as a dazzling light. It's a symbol representing power, a
source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds,
strikes down.... Some have thought of it as the philosopher's stone of
the alchemists...."
-- Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, Professor of Semiotics
"Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: 'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'" (Faust, Part Two) -- Carl Gustav Jung Posted 12/24/2005 at 12:08 AM |
From Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: "Now," said John eagerly, "turn out your pocket and let's see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives." Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him. "Not so bad," cried John, enthusiastically. "They aren't very big, but-- Hello!" His expression changed as he held one of them up to the declining sun. "Why, these aren't diamonds! There's something the matter!" "By golly!" exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. "What an idiot I am!" "Why, these are rhinestones!" cried John. From The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan: "What are we going to do now?" Susan Hawkline said, surveying the lake that had once been their house. Cameron counted the diamonds in his hand. There were thirty-five diamonds and they were all that was left of the Hawkline Monster. "We'll think of something," Cameron said.
Related material:
"A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short
story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of
images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This
grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of
implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists,
Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative
continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in
order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences
among eras, ideas and forces."
-- When Novelists Become Cubists: "T.S. Eliot's experiments in ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament. Davenport's text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets." "At the still point, -- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "As Gatsby closed the door of Posted 12/21/2005 at 4:07 PM |
Posted 12/21/2005 at 1:35 PM |
"Heaven-- Where Is It? To air on ABC
"And we may see Posted 12/20/2005 at 12:00 AM |
Posted 12/19/2005 at 11:00 PM |
Conversation,
continued From last night: "There is an underlying timelessness in the basic conversation that is mathematics." -- Barry Mazur (pdf) "The authors of the etiquette book The Art of Civilized Conversation say that conversation's versatility makes it 'the Swiss Army knife of social skills.'" Then there is the broken beer bottle school of etiquette: Posted 12/19/2005 at 2:00 PM |
"There is an underlying timelessness in the basic conversation that is mathematics." -- Barry Mazur (pdf) It's Quarter to Three (continued): "I could tell you a lot
but you gotta be true to your code." -- Sinatra Today is the birthday of Helmut Wielandt (Dec. 19, From MacTutor: "In his speech accepting membership of the Heidelberg Academy in 1960 he said:- Permutation groups are still not without interest. See today's updates (Notes [01] and [02]) to Pattern Groups. Posted 12/19/2005 at 2:45 AM |
For the birthday of Steven Spielberg, director of "1941"-- Sunset for Sydney Leff, who died at 104 on December 10, and is said to have drawn the illustration below. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hurries to its place where it rises. -- Ecclesiastes 1:5 From Log24 Sunday a week ago: a link to Satori at Pearl Harbor and to Posted 12/18/2005 at 6:00 PM |
The Meadow "Heaven-- Where Is It? To air on ABC By Trevanian, who died on
"And we may see Posted 12/18/2005 at 8:11 AM |
Thirst for the Absolute -- Emily Dickinson From John Spencer's birthday, December 20, in 2003: Riddled: The Absolutist Faith White and Geometric, but not Eternal. (See previous entry.) The title of this entry Posted 12/17/2005 at 6:02 PM |
Fade to White For John Spencer, who died on December 16: "He was a kind, sweet, funny man... a man who made your words come to life in ways you would never expect." -- James Mangold, quoted in today's Los Angeles Times Related material: Entries from the date of Spencer's death and White, Geometric, and Eternal (from Dec. 20, 2003-- Spencer's birthday). Posted 12/17/2005 at 3:17 PM |
Fade to Black "...that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent." -- Trevanian,
"'Haven't there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?'
'Even black has various subtle shades,' Sosuke nodded." -- Yasunari Kawabata, "The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless." -- Yasunari Kawabata, Posted 12/17/2005 at 1:01 PM |
A Wintry Friday Afternoon Three years ago today in the New York Times: "The book was Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, and I was 12 or 13 when I carried it home from the library one wintry Friday afternoon. I cannot even remember the novel that accompanied it. But I remember that I was curled up on our beat-up old couch, the one with the huge embarrassing rip where my older sister would position me to sit demurely, my dress fanned out over the damage, when her dates arrived. I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.) The Forms are abstract but real, I read, graspable only through the
eyes of the mind, pure reason. And it seemed to me, that dark winter
afternoon as I read, that I was grasping them; that I, a yiddishe
maidel of questionable worth, was seeing with the eyes of my mind
exactly what that ancient Greek philosopher had seen; that just like
him I was out beyond the phantasmagoria, suspended in formal
perfection; that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost all touch
with who I even was, and it was . . . bliss." -- Rebecca Goldstein
Posted 12/16/2005 at 5:00 PM |
Jesus vs. the Goddess:
A Brief Chronology In 1946, Robert Graves published "King Jesus, an historical novel based on the theory and Graves' own historical conjecture that Jesus was, in fact, the rightful heir to the Israelite throne... written while he was researching and developing his ideas for The White Goddess." In 1948, C. S. Lewis finished the first draft of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, a novel in which one of the main characters is "the White Witch." In 1948, Robert Graves published The White Goddess. In 1949, Robert Graves published Seven Days in New Crete [also titled Watch the North Wind Rise], "a novel about a social distopia in which Goddess worship is (once again?) the dominant religion." Lewis died on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was killed. Related material: Graves died on December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day), 1985. Related material: Jesus died, some say, on April 7 in the year 30 A.D. Related material:
Posted 12/16/2005 at 2:00 PM |
The Cinematic A scene from "Frida" Related material: For the Man in Black See also the utopia in Robert Graves's novel, Watch the North Wind Rise-- "New
Crete, where the ritual murder of the Victim-King makes murder for less sacred
ends seem unthinkable"-- and the Log24 entry "Magical Thinking" of Pearl Harbor Day, 2005. Posted 12/15/2005 at 10:00 PM |
"Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2. In Mahlburg's work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime. Mahlburg's work 'has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,' Ono says. 'Each step in the story is a work of art,' Dyson says, 'and the
story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama
built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'" -- Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005 This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for "a
story that works." (See previous entry.) Whether the muse of
dance (played in "Xanadu" by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born--
see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.
Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.
Posted 12/15/2005 at 3:48 PM |
From Here to Eternity For Loomis Dean See also For Rita Moreno on Her Birthday (Dec. 11, 2005)
Related material:
Posted 12/14/2005 at 1:00 AM |
Adam Gopnik on Narnia in The New Yorker: "Everything began with images," Lewis wrote. "We're not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We're here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction." Images for Julie Taymor: Today's New York Times on Debora Arango, an artist who died at 98 on Dec. 4 at her home near Medellin, Colombia: "She made dramatic paintings of prostitutes, which shocked midcentury sensibilities...." Related material: Yesterday's entry "Modestly Yours" and entries on Johnny Cash, horses, and Julie Taymor of September 12-14, 2003. "Words are events." -- Walter J. Ong, Society of Jesus "They are the horses of a dream. -- The Hex Witch of Seldom, page 16 Posted 12/13/2005 at 3:15 AM |
Modestly Yours
American IV: The Man Comes Around "The virgins are all trimming their wicks." -- Johnny Cash From a Dec. 9 Mona Charen column promoting modesty: "Modestlyyours.net is an antidote to the vulgarity that is shoved in our faces from magazine covers...." Related material (click on covers for details): "For Jennifer Connelly on Her Birthday," and "For Rita Moreno on Her Birthday." For Frank Sinatra on His Birthday: or... Modesty, my ass! Posted 12/12/2005 at 12:06 PM |
For Jennifer Connelly on Her Birthday: Collector's Edition And the price is right! Related material: Music of the Dark Lady, ART WARS: Dark City. Posted 12/12/2005 at 12:00 AM |
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday: Sex and Art in a Chinese Poem In the box-style I Ching Hexagram 34, The Power of the Great, is represented by . Art is represented by a box (Hexagram 20, Contemplation, View) . And of course great art is represented by an X in a box. (Hexagram 2, The Receptive) . The combination of these three symbols may be viewed as "Power in a Box," or, according to some scholars, "The Art of Great Sex." From Xinhua News Agency tonight: Xbox 360 meets cold shoulder in Japan. But in another time and place... Posted 12/11/2005 at 10:00 PM |
"And Jesus was a sailor meets the timeless "Mercilessly tasteful." Related material:
Posted 12/11/2005 at 6:00 PM |
Intelligence/
Counterintelligence continued: Intelligence: A file on James Jesus Angleton at namebase.org, a site run by Daniel Brandt. Counterintelligence: Hollywood on James Jesus Angleton-- "From a
screenplay by 'Forrest Gump' screenwriter Eric Roth, 'The Good
Shepherd' tells the mostly true story of James Wilson (a character
reported to be based on legendary CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton,
and played in the film by Matt Damon), one of the founding members of
the Central Intelligence Agency. Beginning as an scholar at Yale, the
film follows Wilson as he is recruited to join the secret Skull and
Bones fraternity, a brotherhood and breeding ground for future world
leaders, where his acute mind, spotless reputation and sincere belief
in the American way of life render him a prime candidate for a career
in intelligence." -- Edward Havens, FilmJerk.com, 8/30/2005 The Forrest Gump Award goes to Good Will Hunting* for this choice of roles. Counterintelligence Forrest Gump (l.) and JFK (r.) * See Log24, April 4, 2003, Mathematics Awareness Month. For some related material, see Mathematics and Narrative. Posted 12/11/2005 at 2:02 PM |
Midnight Blue "Midnight
Blue's your online source Related material: Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge: and from Log24 -- Roger Shattuck, Scholar, Recommended Reading Posted 12/11/2005 at 12:00 AM |
Prequel on Celebrity Obits, Nov. 22, 2005 -- Intelligence and
See also the previous entry, and this follow-up: "Shattuck's death on Thursday... was reported by his
nephew, John Shattuck, head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation,
The Boston Globe reported Saturday." Related material: "The White Witch rules Narnia, and the foundation of the
Shemp Posted 12/10/2005 at 3:00 PM |
Roger Shattuck, Scholar,In his honor, some excerpts from previous entries: |
The photo of Nicole Kidman
is from Globe Song
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2005).
The Times says Shattuck died
on Thursday (Dec. 8, 2005).
Here, from 4:00 AM on the
morning of Shattuck's death,
is a brief companion-piece
to Eight is a Gate:
Tanner may have stated it best: “V. is whatever lights you to (Tony Tanner, page 36, She's a mystery -- Foreigner 4 |
She's in midnight blue,
still
the words ring true;
woman in blue
got a hold on you.
For the birthday of Emily Dickinson:
Santa's Riddle
How do you add a single point to a plane to give it the shape of a globe? Hint: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet...." Answer: See Russell Crowe as Santa's Helper. Posted 12/10/2005 at 3:00 AM |
Intelligence and
A film by Robert De Niro,
"Will follow James Wilson, a Yale graduate recruited
as one of the founders of the CIA. The character is
said to be based on the legendarily shrewd but paranoid
counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton." Recommended Posted 12/9/2005 at 11:00 PM |
Fairy Tales "It's all in Plato." -- C. S. Lewis Talking Narnia to Your Neighbors ChristianityToday.com by Keri Wyatt Kent "The summer Lindy Lowry was 20, she rejected the Christian faith she'd had since childhood-- dismissing it as a fairy tale that made no sense in a world full of evil." Tales from The New Yorker: “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” by ANTHONY LANE"This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western...." The Chronicles of Narnia: "If the movie has to forgo Lewis’s narrative tone, with its grimly Oxonian blend of the bluff and the twee ('And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story'), that is fine by me. And, if there is Deep Magic, as Lewis called it, in his tale, it resides not in the springlike coming of Aslan but in the dreamlike, compacted poetry of Lewis’s initial inspiration—the sight of a faun...." Concluding Unscientific Postscript From The Circle is Unbroken, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), quoting Socrates--
See, too, Q's quoting of Socrates's prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker: For a discussion of the music that Pan is playing (today's site music), see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002, "The Sound of Hanging Rock." Posted 12/9/2005 at 5:01 PM |
Posted 12/9/2005 at 3:14 PM |
Aion Flux From Jung's Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein: "... Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime.... At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self...."
Related material: "Although 'wholeness' seems at first sight to be
nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is
nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in
the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the
quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of
modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated
in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their
significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply
confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What at
first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that
exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori
presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that
confronts the subject independently of him... Unity and totality stand
at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their
symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality." -- Jung, Aion, as quoted in Posted 12/8/2005 at 2:56 PM |
Working Backward "Death itself would start working backward." -- Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia "'Memory is
non-narrative "Work as if you were in the
Posted 12/8/2005 at 4:00 AM |
Matchwood The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, February 2, 2003: Cover illustration by Stephen Savage 'A Box of Matches': A Miniaturist's Novel of Details In Nicholson Baker's novel, things not worth noticing eventually become all there is to notice. Posted 12/8/2005 at 2:02 AM |
Magical Thinking (continued) 1:00:19 EST The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe premieres tonight at the Royal Albert Hall. Log24 Dec. 2: Hexagram 19 in the Cullinane series: Log24 Dec. 3: -- Katherine Neville, The Eight
Posted 12/7/2005 at 1:00 PM |
Headline in today's New York Times: 'Year of Magical Thinking' Headed for Broadway which suggests... Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood (continued) "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell." -- The Eagles, Hotel California "There are no facts, there is no truth-- just data to be manipulated." -- Don Henley, The Garden of Allah Data: The New York Lottery numbers on Joan Didion's birthday, Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, were Mid-day 729, Evening 439. Since that day's Log24 entry, Magical Thinking, interpreted the previous day's (Sunday's) NY lottery numbers as a date and a page number, it seems appropriate to do a follow-up. Date 7/29: See Log24, 7/29/05, Anatomy of a Death: Page 439: See Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 1919, p. 439: A man’s ingress into the world is naked and bare, His progress through the world is trouble and care; And lastly, his egress out of the world, is nobody knows where. -- John Edwin (1749-1790) Related material: The Log24 version of "This Way to the Egress," Directions Out, linked to in yesterday's Magical Thinking. Posted 12/6/2005 at 1:00 PM |
Lasso
In memory of... CUERNAVACA, Mexico - Spanish singer Gloria Lasso, who made her name recording romantic ballads in Latin America and Paris, died in her sleep on Sunday at her home in Cuernavaca. She was 83.
For more on Balanchine, Olivia Newton-John, Sunday, and Eliot's "still point," see the previous entry. For more Harvard humor, see The Crimson Passion. Posted 12/6/2005 at 3:33 AM |
The Associated Press on the Kennedy Center honors yesterday: "Dancer Suzanne Farrell was feted by her former colleague at the New
York City Ballet, Jacques d'Amboise. The company, led by George
Balanchine, 'was the center of American ballet and she was the diamond
in its crown,' d'Amboise said."
The New York Lottery yesterday: The mid-day number was 926; the evening number was 373. For the significance of 926, see 9/26 2002 and Balanchine's Birthday. For the significance of 373, see Art Wars, May 2, 2003, White, Geometric, and Eternal, Dec. 20, 2003, Directions Out, April 26, 2004, Outside the World, April 26, 2004, The Last Minute, Sept. 15, 2004, and Diamonds Are Forever, Jan. 25, 2005. See also the link at the end of yesterday's entry. For related material that is more personally linked to Joan Didion, see Log24, June 1-16, 2004. Posted 12/5/2005 at 1:00 PM |
Posted 12/5/2005 at 2:08 AM |
For Cinderella 12/4 Related material: From Log24, back in time a year and a day: On December 3... In 1953, In 1960,
Posted 12/4/2005 at 1:06 PM |
Works and Days "So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two.... For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due." On this date in 1944, "A bitter civil war broke out in Athens...." "Cambridge was colder and darker and offered even fewer distractions than before the war. By June, 1943, Minakis had done the maths tripos with honors.... He read Cavafy and Seferis and T.S. Eliot: There will be time, there will be time Minakis was happy for his colleagues when the war ended but felt little on his own account or that of the country he had left; the Greek government was a British prop that could not feed its people, the Communists and the Monarchists were at one another's throats like savage dogs, and civil war was inevitable. Better to return to grim Cambridge...." "There will be time, there will be time"-- Posted 12/3/2005 at 3:00 PM |
"... a purely
harmonious concept of beauty is not enough.... Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the
guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no
longer sufficient." Discuss the following symbol of Apollo as the source of a Christian symbol-- the Greek Cross. Related material: The play "now then again" (Time-Bending Love Story Comes Home to Fermilab) with cover art by Roz Francis illustrating the time 8:05:19, Hexagram 19 in the Cullinane series ("A dance results" -- Marie-Louise von Franz), and Paul Preuss on Apollo, quantum physics, and the isle of Delos. Posted 12/2/2005 at 8:05 PM |
Proof 101 From a course description: "This module aims to introduce the student to rigorous university level mathematics.... In the December Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Brian
(E. B.) Davies, a professor of mathematics at King's College London, questions
the consistency of Peano Arithmetic (PA), which has the following
axioms:
Peano's fifth axiom particularly troubles Davies, who writes elsewhere: I contend that our understanding of number should be placed in an historical context, and that the number system is a human invention. Elementary arithmetic enables one to determine the number of primes less than twenty as certainly as anything we know. On the other hand Peano arithmetic is a formal system, and its internal consistency is not provable, except within set-theoretic contexts which essentially already assume it, in which case their consistency is also not provable. The proof that there exists an infinite number of primes does not depend upon counting, but upon the law of induction, which is an abstraction from our everyday experience.... Exercise:
Cite the following passage in your discussion. It will be clear by now that, if we are to have any chance of making progress, I must produce examples of "real" mathematical theorems, theorems which every mathematician will admit to be first-rate. In discussing Davies's claim that the above proof is
by induction, you may want to refer to Davies's statement that Geometry was a well developed mathematical discipline based upon explicit axioms over one and a half millennia before the law of induction was first formulated and to Hardy's statement that the above proof is due to Euclid. Posted 12/2/2005 at 5:55 AM |
x Posted 12/1/2005 at 4:07 PM |
Campion's Day Today is the feast of the Catholic saint Edmund Campion. Campion, a Jesuit with a graceful prose style, would perhaps not be too deeply offended by the fact that his surname is now best known in some circles as that of a fictional character-- the "Albert Campion" of Margery Allingham's detective stories. The following is from a web page devoted to Allingham's fiction, Roger Johnson's "Thoughts on Mr. Campion and His Family." "Campion" may be a family name.
At any rate, several explanations have been offered for it. Jack
Morpurgo notes that it was her husband Philip, drawing on the
history of his own school, "who suggested for Marge's
hero his pseudonymic surname. (The Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion,
is the most surprising alumnus of Christ's Hospital, a determinedly
Protestant foundation.)" This is not of course to say that Albert Campion's family are Roman Catholics: indeed, all the evidence is that they are Church of England. However, the fact does suggest a couple of interesting minor parallels with Mr Rudolph K--. St. Edmund Campion necessarily spent most of his mission in England incognito. And, perhaps more pertinently, the campion is a small hardy English wild flower - like the scarlet pimpernel, in fact. And the younger Albert Campion is strongly in the tradition of the apparently effete aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney, who achieved fame as the dashing hero known as the Scarlet Pimpernel. Richard Martin says that the name is "a barely disguised sign," being the old French word for "champion." The non-fictional St. Edmund Campion is of course remembered also, for instance in the names of Campion College in suburban Sydney, of Campion College at the University of Regina and of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford. Posted 12/1/2005 at 9:00 AM |