Structure and Logic
The phrase "structural logic" in yesterday's entry was applied to Bach's cello suites. It may equally well be applied to geometry. In particular: "The aim of this thesis is to classify certain structures which are, from a certain point of view, as homogeneous as possible, that is which have as many symmetries as possible." -- Alice Devillers, "Classification of Some Homogeneous and Ultrahomogeneous Structures," Ph.D. thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles, academic year 2001-2002 Related material:
In Devillers's words, the above spaces with 8 and
16 points are among those structures that have "as many symmetries as
possible." For more details on what this means, see Devillers's thesis and Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
The above models for the corresponding projective spaces may be regarded as illustrating the phrase "structural logic." For a possible application of the 16-point space's "many symmetries" to logic proper, see The Geometry of Logic. Posted 4/30/2007 at 6:24 PM |
Rite
"The coffin of the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich seen
inside Christ the Savior Cathedral during a farewell ceremony in
Moscow, Sunday, April 29, 2007. Hundreds of Russians on Sunday came to
bid final farewell to the great cellist and conductor Mstislav
Rostropovich who won world fame for his masterly play and his courage
in defending human rights. Rostropovich, who fought for the rights of
Soviet-era dissidents and later triumphantly played Bach suites below
the crumbling Berlin Wall, died Friday at age 80. (AP Photo/Mikhail
Metzel)" --AP News
"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality." --Allan Kozinn in Friday's New York Times Posted 4/29/2007 at 7:00 AM |
Cubism See last year's entries for 5/10 -- My Space and for 2/23 -- Cubist Epiphany "This is a crazy world and the only way to enjoy it is to treat it as a joke." -- Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast Posted 4/28/2007 at 11:07 PM |
Production Credits: Thanks to the Pennsylvania Lottery for today's suggestion of links to the dates 9/15 and 6/06-- -- and to Hermann Weyl for the illustration from 6/06 (D-Day) underlying the following "gold medal" from 9/15, 2006: . Posted 4/27/2007 at 9:48 PM |
It's still the
same old story... From today's online New York Times: Photo by Carol T. Powers for The New York Times Also in today's online Times: "Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died in Moscow today. He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland.... Mr. Rostropovich... was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian)...." Related material: I. "Established on 8 November 1943, the Order of Glory (Orden Slavy - Орден Славы) was an Order (decoration) of the Soviet Union.... The Order of Glory... was modelled closely upon the Tsarist Cross of St. George...." --Wikipedia II. Also on the 8th of November, in 2006 and 2002: Grave Matters and Religious Symbolism at Princeton. III. "Mr. Rostropovich will be buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where on Wednesday his friend, Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president, was laid to rest." --New York Times IV. "A graveyard smash." --Bobby (Boris) Pickett, who died Wednesday. Posted 4/27/2007 at 1:00 PM |
Religion at Harvard continued from Devil's Night, 2006 Click image to enlarge. Related material: I Yesterday morning's entry (on David Halberstam) with its link to Log24 entries of 2005 on II The Way of the Pilgrim (Nov. 28-29, 2005), and III Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, on a dinner following a lecture by Halberstam at Berkeley on Saturday night, April 21: "No one wanted to leave. It was kind of like the Last Supper." See also The Crimson Passion. Posted 4/25/2007 at 10:30 PM |
Quote "You're a persistent cuss, Pilgrim." -- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Related material: Log24, Nov. 28-29, 2005 Posted 4/24/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Posted 4/23/2007 at 10:15 PM |
Ben Brantley in this morning's New York Times: "Television mows down a titan in 'Frost/Nixon,' the briskly entertaining new play by Peter Morgan* about the 1977 face-off between its title characters, the British talk show host (as in David) and the former American president (as in Richard M.).... Structured as a prize fight between two starkly ambitious men in professional crisis, 'Frost/Nixon' makes it clear that the competitor who controls the camera reaps the spoils." Another application of this "control the camera" philosophy: the multimedia manifesto of the Virginia Tech author of "Richard McBeef" (a play excerpted above). (of "Frost/Nixon," not of "Richard McBeef")-- "[The
author] had a particularly difficult time connecting with his peers...
due in large part to the language barrier, which made communication
with classmates nearly impossible. Though standing apart from the pack
can at times be a deeply troubling experience for a youngster, it
provided the imaginative [author] with a unique perspective not
afforded to the vast majority of his peers." Posted 4/23/2007 at 2:45 AM |
Built
continued from March 25, 2006 In honor of Scarlett Johansson's recent London films "Match Point" and "Scoop," here is a link to an entry of Women's History Month, 2006, with a discussion of an exhibition of the works of artist Liza Lou at London's White Cube Gallery. That entry includes the following illustrations: This work might aptly be retitled "Brick Shithouse." Related material: The artist's self-portrait See also this morning's entry -- "She's a brick... house... The lady's stacked and that's a fact, Ain't holdin' nothin' back." -- and last year's entry on this date: "Her wallet's filled with pictures, She gets 'em one by one." The bricks and "white cube" above and in this morning's entry may be contrasted with the bricks of Diamonds and Whirls and the cube of On Beauty. Poetic allusions such as these may help provide entertainment in the afterlife for Beavis, Butt-Head, and other inmates of Plato's Cave: "The Garden of Eden is behind us and there is no road back to innocence; we can only go forward." -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Earth Shine, p. xii Posted 4/22/2007 at 8:31 PM |
Shine On, Hermann Weyl -- "Be on the lookout for Annie Dillard's sequel to Teaching a Stone to Talk, titled Teaching a Brick to Sing." William Butler Yeats -- "Poets and Wits about him drew; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' 'The work is done,' grown old he thought, 'According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought'; But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'"
Posted 4/22/2007 at 11:09 AM |
Epigraphs to
The Shining: Shine on... shine on... There is work to be done in the dark before dawn There is work to be done so you've got to shine on -- Daisy May Erlewine of Big Rapids, Michigan Related material: Shine On, Hermann Weyl and the five Log24 entries of Saturday, April 14, 2007 Posted 4/21/2007 at 8:23 PM |
Speech
In Grand Rapids today... "... Bush spoke and answered audience questions for nearly 90 minutes inside East Grand Rapids High School in suburban Grand Rapids.... After leaving the school, Bush's motorcade stopped at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, where he stood silently for a few moments after placing a bouquet of white roses at Ford's burial site on the museum grounds. The 38th president, who grew up in Grand Rapids, died Dec. 26 at age 93." Multispeech
For the meaning of the lottery icons above, see this morning's entry and an entry that it links to -- Time's Labyrinth continued -- of March 8, 2007. For the meaning of multispeech, see the entries of All Hallows' Eve, 2005: "There is such a thing as a tesseract." -- A Wrinkle in Time Posted 4/20/2007 at 10:31 PM |
Icons Part I
Part IV: Log24 entry of November 7, 2003 -- -- and a student play from Virginia Tech: Part V: Symmetry for Beavis and Butt-Head and The Rhetoric of Scientism: It's a very ancient saying, But a true and honest thought, That if you become a teacher, By your pupils you'll be taught. -- Oscar Hammerstein, "Getting to Know You" Posted 4/20/2007 at 11:07 AM |
Acting Out
From the Library of Congress: On April 19, 1775, troops under the command of Brigadier General Hugh Percy played "Yankee Doodle" as they marched from Boston to reinforce British soldiers already fighting the Americans at Lexington and Concord. Whether sung or played on that occasion, the tune was martial and intended to deride the colonials: Yankee Doodle came to town, There are numerous conflicting accounts of the origin of "Yankee
Doodle." Some credit its melody to an English air, others to Irish,
Dutch, Hessian, Hungarian and Pyrenean tunes or a New England jig.... Father and I went down to camp,"Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.'' "It's not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters... I did it for them.'' From Log24: Eureka! Posted 4/19/2007 at 12:06 AM |
Vigil Andrew Russell, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech, Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Virginia Lottery, Tuesday, April 17, 2007 "I love those Bavarians... so meticulous." -- "In the Garden of Allah" Click on images to enlarge. Posted 4/18/2007 at 2:00 PM |
The Abridgment of Hope Part I: Framework From Log24, Here's Your Sign, Aug. 8, 2002-- "Paz also mentions the Christian concept of eternity as a realm outside time, and discusses what happened to modern thought after it abandoned the concept of eternity. Naturally, many writers have dealt with the subject of time, but it seems particularly part of the Zeitgeist
now, with a new Spielberg film about precognition. My own small
experience, from last night until today, may or may not have been
precognitive. I suspect it's the sort of thing that many people often
experience, a sort of 'So that's what that was about' feeling. Traditionally, such experience has been expressed in terms of a theological framework." Part II: Context "Faith and Fiction-Making: The Catholic Context"-- "Each of us is living out a once-only story which, unlike those mentioned here, has yet to reveal its ending. We live that story largely in the dark. From time to time we may try to plumb its implications, to decipher its latent design, or at least get a glimmer of how parts go together. Occasionally, a backward glance may suddenly reveal implications, an evolving pattern we had not discerned, couldn't have when we were 'in' it. Ah, now I see what I was about, what I was after." Part III: Context Sensitivity From Log24's Language Game, Jan. 14, 2004-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: 373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)
Part IV: Abridgment "Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?"-- Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439 Also from Stone's novel, quoted by Ann Copeland in the above essay:
Posted 4/16/2007 at 4:01 PM |
The Sun Also Rises THE IMAGE The sun rises over the earth: The image of PROGRESS. 10:18:35 AM ET Related material: and today's New York Times obituaries (previous entry) Posted 4/15/2007 at 10:18 AM |
Posted 4/15/2007 at 1:23 AM |
Entertainment Tonight "What is the spirit of the bayonet?" -- United States Army training question, 1964 A partial answer in two parts: Part I -- Another question -- "Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?" -- Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439, cited by page number here this morning Part II -- Today's numbers, in this morning's context, strongly suggest a look at A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone, Knopf, 1981,
The Power of the Great, in the context of a Log24 entry for October 8, 2005. "There is no teacher but the enemy." -- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game Related entertainment: the previous entry and the Vietnam memoir Black Virgin Mountain. Posted 4/14/2007 at 10:31 PM |
Curtain Up, Light the Lights! Cafe Society Part I - Cafe Society Part II - Posted 4/14/2007 at 8:30 PM |
A Year of Magical... Related material: The Log24 entry for this date last year (Good Friday and the opening date of HARD CANDY), and "Apart from that, Mrs. Imus, how did you like the play?" Posted 4/14/2007 at 2:12 PM |
This Way to the Egress Continued from April 12: "I have only come here seeking knowledge, Things they would not teach me of in college...." -- Synchronicity lyrics
"Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?" -- Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page: page 439 Posted 4/14/2007 at 4:30 AM |
"I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in
the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing
this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other
night.... But this is worst of all, to feel your soul
dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has
really died that I feel at the moment something like
peace. Or is it because right through
hell there is a path, as Blake well knew,
and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams
I have been able to see it? ...And this is how I
sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has
discovered some extraordinary land from which he can
never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the
name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but
in the heart."
-- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano Posted 4/14/2007 at 4:06 AM |
King Friday XIII and friend:
For further details, click here. See also The Presbyterian Exorcist. Posted 4/13/2007 at 6:23 PM |
Posted 4/12/2007 at 1:09 AM |
It's Not Easy
Being Green Don Imus, 1974 album Rutgers women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer: "It's about us as people-- black, white, purple or green. And as much as I speak about that, it's not even black and white-- the color is green." Imus flap about black, white, and green David Lieberman, Laura Petrecca and Gary Strauss in USA Today: "So amid all the uproar over Imus' remarks and the national discussion over race relations that they ignited, why wasn't he fired? Stringer and others think that has less to do with relations between blacks and whites than it does with another color. 'The color is green-- if we can tolerate as a society what's just taken place,' she said. 'I don't know how anyone could have heard this and not been offended.' As one of the country's most popular radio talk show hosts, Imus is the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar business that would collapse without him. To get a sense of its size: Advertisers spent $11.3 million last year on his show at just one station, New York's WFAN, according to Nielsen. That accounted for nearly 24% of all the station's ad sales. Sponsors paid MSNBC an additional $8.4 million last year for spots on Imus' show, according to TNS Media Intelligence."Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News, April 11, 2007: "Essence Carson talked about what Imus had said about her and her teammates, and about everything that has happened since. 'It has stolen a moment of pure grace from us,' she said. The moment of pure grace was Essence Carson...."From ESSENCE.com: "Essence Communications Inc. (ECI) was founded in 1968. In October 2000, ECI signed an agreement with Time Inc., a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., to form a joint venture known as Essence Communications Partners. ESSENCE was the majority owner of the venture. In March 2005, Time Inc. acquired the portion it did not already own. The company's name changed back to Essence Communications Inc. The ECI corporate headquarters are in New York City, with offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Detroit. ESSENCE magazine During the past 36 years, the company has grown into a vital business of diverse media properties and communications systems that include ESSENCE, its flagship magazine launched in 1970. Its success is linked to its unique relationship with the readers of ESSENCE magazine and the strong alliances it has forged with America's leading corporations and financial institutions." Posted 4/11/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Symmetry for Beavis and Butt-Head (An illustration from Mathematics and Narrative; the "Book" is The Gospel According to St. Matthew.) "Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty?,"
a review by famed vulgarizer Martin Gardner of the new book by his fellow vulgarizer Ian Stewart in the April 2007 Scientific American: "Associated with every kind of symmetry is a 'group.' Stewart explains
the group concept in a simple way by considering operations on an
equilateral triangle. Rotate it 60 degrees in either direction, and it
looks the same. Every operation has an 'inverse,' that cancels the
operation. Imagine the corners of the triangle labeled A, B and C. A
60-degree clockwise rotation alters the corners' positions. If this is
followed by a similar rotation the other way, the original positions
are restored. If you do nothing to the triangle, this is called the
'identity' operation. The set of all symmetry transformations of the
triangle constitutes its group."
"Is Beauty Truth?"
asked jesting Gardner... The reasoned reply of Beavis and Butt-Head: "Sixty degrees, a hundred and twenty degrees, who gives a rat's ass?" Posted 4/9/2007 at 7:20 PM |
Continued from last April:
ART WARS in Poetry Month Related Log24 entries from last April: 7 8 9 Related Log24 entry from this April Posted 4/9/2007 at 1:00 PM |
Posted 4/8/2007 at 11:09 PM |
Today's sermon Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce: "Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance of numbers. The death of Beatrice inspired nothing less than a highly complicated poem dealing with the importance of the number 3 in her life. Dante never ceased to be obsessed by this number. Thus the poem is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti.... Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should.... the Armistice be celebrated at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell you... He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship. This preoccupation is freely translated in his present work...." -- "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972
See also Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star. Posted 4/8/2007 at 11:00 AM |
Midnight in the Garden
continued from Sept. 30, 2004 Tonight this journal had two Xanga footprints from Italy.... At 11:34 PM ET a visitor from Italy viewed a page containing an entry from Jan. 8, 2005, Splendor of the Light, which offers the following quotation-- From an essay on Guy Davenport-- "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."
The visitor from Italy may, of course, have instead intended to view
one of the four earlier entries on the page. In particular, the visitor may have seen The Star "He looked at the fading light At 11:38 PM ET, a visitor from Italy (very likely the 11:34 visitor returning) viewed the five Log24 entries ending at 12:06 AM ET on Sept. 30, 2004. These entries included Midnight in the Garden and... A Tune for Michaelmas The entries on this second visited page also included some remarks on Dante, on time, and on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano that are relevant to Log24 entries earlier this week on Maundy Thursday and on Holy Saturday. Here's wishing a happy Easter to Italy, to Francis Ford Coppola and Russell Crowe (see yesterday's entry), and to Steven Spielberg (see the Easter page of April 20, 2003). Image courtesy of When you wish Posted 4/8/2007 at 12:00 AM |
Today's birthdays:
Francis Ford Coppola and Russell Crowe Gift of the Third Kind Background: Art Wars and Russell Crowe as Santa's Helper. From Friedrich Froebel, who invented kindergarten: From Christmas 2005: Related material from Pittsburgh: Click on pictures for details. Posted 4/7/2007 at 12:25 PM |
x Posted 4/6/2007 at 3:00 PM |
Posted 4/6/2007 at 2:56 PM |
Poets.org - The Annual Maundy Thursday Dante's Inferno Reading "The reading occurs during the Maundy Thursday vigil, the very hours Dante intended the events in the epic poem to take place." Featured poets: Rachel Hadas, Wyatt Prunty, Rachel Wetzsteon, Rika Lesser, David Yezzi, Annie Finch, Honor Moore, Lynn Emanuel, Paul Watsky, Kate Light, Phillis Levin, Michael Palma, Charles Martin Thursday, April 5, 2007, 9 p.m. to midnight, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue at 112th St., NYC, NY Related material -
The Eight Revisited: Dante Alighieri Academy continues Dante's Christian philosophy of education.... Posted 4/5/2007 at 2:02 PM |
Phrase: Spy Wednesday -- "The Wednesday before Good Friday, when Judas bargained to become the spy of the Jewish Sanhedrim. (Matt. xxvi. 3–5, 14–16.)" -- E. Cobham Brewer, 1810–1897, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898 Fable: Nature morte à l'échiquier (les cinq sens), vers 1655, une narration à valeur symbolique... Huile sur bois, 73 x 55 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris. Related material: April 4, 2001, The Black Queen Posted 4/4/2007 at 2:02 PM |
Our Judeo-Christian Heritage - Lottery Hermeneutics Part I: Judeo
It is perhaps relevant to this Holy Week that the date 6/04 (2006) above refers to both the Christian holy day of Pentecost and to the day of the facetious baccalaureate of the Class of 2006 in the University Chapel at Princeton. For further context for the Log24 remarks of that same date, see June 1-15, 2006. Posted 4/3/2007 at 10:10 PM |
Related material: "But what is it?" "Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!" "After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked disembodied brain, was called 'It' because It stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth which involves the whole of us, heart as well as mind. That acronym had never occurred to me. I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT does not have a heart or soul. And I did not understand consciously at the time of writing that the intellect, when it is not informed by the heart, is evil." "When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words." -- Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books, issue dated May 28, 1998 "Does the word 'tesseract' mean anything to you?" Posted 4/3/2007 at 1:00 AM |
ART WARS in Poetry Month Related Log24 entries from last April: 7 8 9 Related story: Yesterday's April 1 PA numbers -- 407, 214. Posted 4/2/2007 at 4:00 AM |
Doubly Appropriate
From Log24's Xanga footprints this morning:
The first impression one has on clicking "Weblog" is that the visitor was interested in George Steiner, C. S. Lewis, and a game of chess with God-- appropriate topics for today, Palm Sunday. This, however, is just the top entry of the five on the page. A check of the referring link shows the visitor to have been interested in neither chess nor God, but rather in sombreros-- an appropriate topic for today, April Fools' Day. Related material: Posted 4/1/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Stories
and Endings "Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no
true-story teller who would keep that from you." "There is never any ending to Paris...." Posted 4/1/2007 at 12:00 AM |