Being There "...it would be quite a long walk for him if he had to walk straight across." Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands... together. "Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said, "he would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel." -- A Wrinkle in Time, Chapter 5, "The Tesseract" Related material: To Measure the Changes, Serious Numbers, and... Balls of Fury Posted 8/31/2007 at 10:10 PM |
x Posted 8/24/2007 at 11:07 AM |
6/6/6 Meets 8/14 Today's Pennsylvania Lottery: Related material: The five entries ending on August 9th with The Amalfi Conjecture and Log24, 8/14-- A Writer's Reflections. Posted 8/22/2007 at 11:00 PM |
The Enchanted Twilight The Associated Press Tuesday, August 21, 2007 GENEVA: British-born author Magdalen Nabb, whose crime novels about a quirky Italian investigator were acclaimed by her idol Georges Simenon, has died, her Swiss publishing house said Tuesday. She was 60. Nabb, who also wrote stories for children and young adults, died of a stroke on Saturday [August 18, 2007] in Florence, Italy, where she had lived and worked since 1975, said Diogenes Verlag AG of Zurich.... Nabb published 13 books for children and young adults, including "The Enchanted Horse," "Twilight Ghost" and the "Josie Smith" series about a "girl who always has plenty of ideas."See also, from the date of Nabb's death, Happy Birthday, Robert Redford: A Concrete Universal. "No matter how it's done, you won't like it." -- Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila Material related to Twilight Ghost: Logos and Epiphany and Fire Chaplain. “A twilight ghost doesn’t come to frighten people, though it might want to tell them something. A twilight ghost is just a kind of long lost memory...." -- Magdalen Nabb Posted 8/22/2007 at 10:31 AM |
Shell Game "The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bin/sh on most Unix systems, and is still the default shell for the root superuser on many current Unix implementations." --WikipediaPart I: Overview of Unix at pangea.stanford.edu Last revision August 2, 2004 "The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals. Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix. The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands, and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the public domain that can be installed. The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over
the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up
the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment
in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program.
The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual
cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special
version of the program." (My italics.) Part II: Programs From my paper journal
"...while the scientist sees Part III: The Bourne Shell Afterword: See also the recent comments of root@matrix.net in Peter Woit's weblog. "Hey, Carrie-Anne, what's your game now...." -- The Hollies, 1967 Posted 8/21/2007 at 3:29 PM |
In the Details Symbol from the box-style I Ching Related material: The five Log24 entries ending on August 1 Illustration by Lou Beach in today's New York Times article on science and magic Related material: A Wrinkle in Time Posted 8/21/2007 at 8:14 AM |
Compare and Contrast Posted 8/21/2007 at 8:00 AM |
An Epiphany for Stephen King From the front page of this morning's online New York Times: In the details: Stephen B. King, a Hallmark creative director, with some of the new greeting cards based on topical themes and humor. From yesterday's Log24 entry: When you care enough to send the very best... From a llnk to Aug. 1 in yesterday's entry: Epiphany Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989 (Click on image for background.) Detail: Related material: Logos and Logic and Diagon Alley. Posted 8/20/2007 at 8:01 AM |
Symmetry and Mirroring
Logo design by Anton Stankowski "... at the beginning of the thirties... Stankowski began to work as a typographer and graphic designer in a Zurich advertising agency. Together with a group of friends-- they were later to be known as the 'Zurich Concretists'-- he explored the possibilities of symmetry and mirroring in the graphic arts. Stankowski experimented with squares and diagonals, making them the hallmarks of his art. Of his now world-famous logo for the Deutsche Bank-- the soaring diagonal in the stable square-- he proudly said in 1974: 'The company logo is a trade-mark that sends out a signal.'" -- Deutsche Bank Collection New York firefighters killed at Deutsche Bank From RTE News, Ireland: RTE News, Ireland
Sunday, 19 August 2007 09:21-- "Two New York fire fighters were killed while trying to douse a blaze in the former Deutsche Bank building in the city. The fire broke out on 14th and 15th floors yesterday afternoon and
spread to several floors before it was brought under control about five
hours later. The building, which was damaged by falling debris of the twin towers
that had collapsed in 2001 when terrorists flew hijacked planes into
them, was being 'deconstructed' to make way for construction of a new
Freedom Tower." Related material
When you care enough to send the very best... See also "Cheap Epiphany, continued," from Aug. 3, as well as A Writer's Reflections (Aug. 14): "Summer Reading," by Joost Swarte Posted 8/19/2007 at 8:19 AM |
A Concrete Universal
"What on earth is a 'concrete universal'?" -- Said to be an annotation (undated) by Robert M. Pirsig of A History of Philosophy, by Frederick Copleston, Society of Jesus. "No matter how it's done, you won't like it." -- Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila "In chapters 19 and 20 of LILA there is a discussion about the possibility of making Zen and the Art into a movie. It opens with a scene where Robert Redford, who 'really would like to have the film rights,' comes to meet and negotiate with Phaedrus in his New York City hotel room. Phaedrus tells the famous actor that he can have the rights to the book, but maybe that's just because he's star-struck and doesn't like to haggle. Under his excitement, Phaedrus has a bad feeling about it. He tells us that he's been warned by several different people not to allow such a film to be made. Even Redford warned him not to do it. So what's the problem? As it's put at the end of that discussion, 'Films are social media; his book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the problem.'" -- David Buchanan at robertpirsig.org "The insight is constituted precisely by 'seeing' the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete." -- Fr. Brian Cronin's Foundations of Philosophy, Ch. 2, "Identifying Direct Insights," quoted in Ideas and Art See also Smiles of a Summer Evening, the current issue of TIME, the time of this entry (7:20:11 PM ET), and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star. Posted 8/18/2007 at 7:20 PM |
x Posted 8/18/2007 at 8:00 AM |
x Posted 8/18/2007 at 7:59 AM |
Philip K. Dick, 1928 - 1982 on the cover of a 1987 edition of his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint: Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted from an earlier (1984) edition Philip K. Dick as a window wraith (see below) The above illustration was suggested by yesterday's quoted New Yorker characterization by Adam Gopnik of Philip K. Dick-- "... the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe." -- as well as by the illustrations of Gopnik's characterization in Kernel of Eternity, and by the following passage from Gopnik's 2005 novel The King in the Window: "What's a window wraith?" Related material: As noted, Kernel of Eternity, and also John Tierney's piece on simulated reality in last night's online New York Times.
Whether our everyday reality is merely a simulation has long been a
theme (as in Dick's novel above) of speculative fiction. Interest in
this theme is widespread, perhaps partly because we do exist as
simulations-- in the minds of other people. These simulations may be
accurate or may be-- as is perhaps Gopnik's characterization of
Philip K. Dick-- inaccurate. The accuracy of the simulations is seldom
of interest to the simulator, but often of considerable interest to the
simulatee. The cover of the Aug. 20 New Yorker in which the Adam Gopnik essay appears may also be of interest, in view of the material on diagonals in the Log24 entries of Aug. 1 linked to in yesterday's entry: "Summer Reading," Posted 8/14/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Adam Gopnik in "...
the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six,
and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said
and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to
do with Christopher Marlowe." Modernity: A Film by "...
the most thoroughgoing modernist design element in Hitchcock's films
arises out of geometry, as Francois Regnault has argued, identifying 'a
global movement for each one, or a "principal geometric or dynamic
form," which can appear in the pure state in the credits....'" --Peter
J. Hutchings (my italics) Epilogue: Adam Gopnik is also the author For more on Epiphany, see For more on quantum computing, See also Posted 8/13/2007 at 11:07 AM |
In the context of quantum information theory, the following structure seems to be of interest-- "... the full two-by-two matrix ring with entries in GF(2), M2(GF(2))-- the unique simple non-commutative ring of order 16 featuring six units (invertible elements) and ten zero-divisors." -- "Geometry of Two-Qubits," by Metod Saniga (pdf, 17 pp.), Jan. 25, 2007 This ring is another way of looking at the 16 elements of the affine space A4(GF(2)) over the 2-element field. (Arrange the four coordinates of each element-- 1's and 0's-- into a square instead of a straight line, and regard the resulting squares as matrices.) (For more on A4(GF(2)), see Finite Relativity and related notes at Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.) Using the above ring, Saniga constructs a system of 35 objects (not unlike the 35 lines of the finite geometry PG(3,2)) that he calls a "projective line" over the ring. This system of 35 objects has a subconfiguration isomorphic to the (2,2) generalized quadrangle W2 (which occurs naturally as a subconfiguration of PG(3,2)-- see Inscapes.) Saniga concludes: "We have demonstrated that the basic properties of a system of two interacting spin-1/2 particles are uniquely embodied in the (sub)geometry of a particular projective line, found to be equivalent to the generalized quadrangle of order two. As such systems are the simplest ones exhibiting phenomena like quantum entanglement and quantum non-locality and play, therefore, a crucial role in numerous applications like quantum cryptography, quantum coding, quantum cloning/teleportation and/or quantum computing to mention the most salient ones, our discovery thus It would seem that my own
study of pure mathematics-- for instance, of the following "diamond ring"-- is not without relevance to the physics of quantum theory. Posted 8/12/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Four Colours
The previous entry dealt with Plato's myth of the ring of Gyges that
conferred invisibility. Another legendary ring, from Hermann
Hesse, with some background from Carl Jung:From C. G. Jung, Collected Works (Princeton U. Press), Volume 12-- Psychology and Alchemy (1944)-- Part II-- "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy"-- Chapter 3, "The Symbolism of the Mandala"-- as quoted in Jung, Dreams, published by Routledge, 2001-- Page 265-- "... the dreamer is wandering about in a dark cave, where a battle is going on between good and evil. But there is also a prince who knows everything. He gives the dreamer a ring set with a diamond.... Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East (1932): "'... Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice, and understanding and to fulfil their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. Defendant H. is no longer a child and is not yet fully awakened. He is still in the midst of despair. He will overcome it and thereby go through his second novitiate. We welcome him anew into the League, the meaning of which he no longer claims to understand. We give back to him his lost ring, which the servant Leo has kept for him.' Posted 8/11/2007 at 10:00 PM |
The Ring of Gyges
10:31:32 AM ET Commentary by Richard Wilhelm on I Ching Hexagram 32: "Duration is... not a state of rest, for mere
standstill is
regression. Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore
self-renewing movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking
place in accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every
ending."
Related material Jung and the Imago Dei
"Not Being There," by Christopher Caldwell, from next Sunday's New York Times Magazine:
"The Boy Who Lived," by Christopher Hitchens, from next Sunday's New York Times Book Review:
I, on the other hand, recommend Tolkien... or, for those who are already familiar with Tolkien, Plato-- to whom "The Ring of Gyges" may serve as an introduction. "It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!" -- C. S. Lewis Posted 8/10/2007 at 10:31 AM |
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 31, Number 1, July 1994, Pages 1-14 Selberg's Conjectures and Artin L-Functions (pdf) M. Ram Murty Introduction In its comprehensive form, an identity between an automorphic L-function and a "motivic" L-function is called a reciprocity law. The celebrated Artin reciprocity law is perhaps the fundamental example. The conjecture of Shimura-Taniyama that every elliptic curve over Q is "modular" is certainly the most intriguing reciprocity conjecture of our time. The "Himalayan peaks" that hold the secrets of these nonabelian reciprocity laws challenge humanity, and, with the visionary Langlands program, we have mapped out before us one means of ascent to those lofty peaks. The recent work of Wiles suggests that an important case (the semistable case) of the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture is on the horizon and perhaps this is another means of ascent. In either case, a long journey is predicted.... At the 1989 Amalfi meeting, Selberg [S] announced a series of conjectures which looks like another approach to the summit. Alas, neither path seems the easier climb.... [S] A. Selberg, Old and new conjectures and results about a class of Dirichlet series, Collected Papers, Volume II, Springer-Verlag, 1991, pp. 47-63. Zentralblatt MATH Database on the above Selberg paper: "These are notes of lectures presented at the Amalfi Conference on Number Theory, 1989.... There are various stimulating conjectures (which are related to several other conjectures like the Sato-Tate conjecture, Langlands conjectures, Riemann conjecture...).... Concluding remark of the author: 'A more complete account with proofs is under preparation and will in time appear elsewhere.'" Related material: Previous entry. Posted 8/9/2007 at 12:00 PM |
In memory of Atle Selberg, mathematician, dead at 90 on August 6, 2007 According to the American Mathematical Society, Selberg died, like André Weil, on the Feast of the Metamorphosis. Endgame Metaphor for Morphean morphosis, -- Steven H. Cullinane, Nov. 7, 1986 Read more.For further views of the Amalfi coast, site of the above Escher scene, see the film "A Good Woman" (made in 2004, released in 2006) starring Scarlett Johansson-- Scene from "A Good Woman" -- and the following from Collegiate Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Atrani, Amalfi Coast, Italy: "An interior made exterior" -- Wallace Stevens Posted 8/7/2007 at 6:25 PM |
The Horse Whisperer Scarlett Johansson and friend in "The Horse Whisperer" (1998) Thanks to University Diaries (Aug. 6) for the following:
"'The University of Sydney has ordered an independent review into allegations that the dean of the Conservatorium of Music hired a horse whisperer to conduct management workshops.' [Are you, like UD, a bit vague on exactly what a horse whisperer is? And are you having trouble figuring out what a horse whisperer would have to offer a management workshop? But then, what exactly is a management workshop? Read on.]" For some background on horse whispering and management workshops, see IABC Steal Sheet, March 2004. Related material: The recent Log24 entries
Posted 8/7/2007 at 8:00 AM |
The Divine Universals "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." -- William Blake, Proverbs of Hell From Shining Forth:
Symmetry axes (See Damnation Morning.) From the cover of the "That old Jew -- Dialogue from the Related material: -- and this morning's online The above image contains summary obituaries for Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, 1981-2005, and for Sal Mosca, jazz pianist and teacher. In memory of the former, see all of the remarks preceding the image above. In memory of the latter, the remarks of a character in Martin Cruz Smith's Stallion Gate on jazz piano may have some relevance: "I
hate arguments. I'm a coward. Arguments are full of words, and each
person is sure he's the only one who knows what the words mean. Each
word is a basket of eels, as far as I'm concerned. Everybody gets to
grab just one eel and that's his interpretation and he'll fight to the
death for it.... Which is why I love music. You hit a C and it's a C
and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like
being intelligent. Like understanding. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at
the piano and picks out the undeniable truth." Posted 8/6/2007 at 8:00 AM |
x Posted 8/6/2007 at 7:59 AM |
Lucero
To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973:
From Holt Spanish and English Dictionary, 1955:
Posted 8/5/2007 at 7:00 PM |
Venus "Take us the foxes, the little foxes..." WARNING: Objects in rear view mirror may be older than they appear. Posted 8/5/2007 at 9:00 AM |
x Posted 8/4/2007 at 4:01 PM |
x Posted 8/4/2007 at 3:00 PM |
Law and Poetry
Robert Duvall and John Travolta outside a courtroom in "A Civil Action" (1998) This entry is in memory of Robert E. Keeton, a "judge's judge" who is the subject of an obituary in today's New York Times. Judge Keeton died, according to the Times, on July 1. According to Harvard Law School, the University of Texas Law School, and The Boston Globe, he died on July 2. Such details can sometimes be important. In view of last night's entry on the evening star, the following two links seem appropriate. A Tune for Michaelmas and Posted 8/4/2007 at 8:00 AM |
From August 1 --
The following image represents an epiphany of sorts: It contains the "double cross" symbol of Fritz Leiber's Changewar stories; the "double cross" is also the traditional eight-ray symbol of the evening star-- the planet Venus. Epiphanies due to Venus are indeed sometimes cheap... but not always. For further details, see and Posted 8/3/2007 at 10:09 PM |
The Toronto Star on Matt Damon's new film-- "At least partly, the Bourne movies are a 21st-century Frankenstein story." On Prof. Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT, found dead on April 19, 1999-- "He made it a priority to start any sort of meeting with a long drawn-out hello...." 1997: 2007: Posted 8/3/2007 at 2:02 PM |
"Tommy Makem was an Irish soul singer, and souls don't die." Cullen's statement E is for Everlast Scene from "Million Dollar Baby" Posted 8/3/2007 at 8:09 AM |
"Let's give 'em somethin' to talk about, A little mystery to figure out" (Scarlett Johansson singing on Saturday Night Live, April 21, 2007) A Midrash for Sid Scene from "Scoop" (2006) Clues: Today's previous entries, Show Business according to Fritz Leiber: "Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts," April 22, 2007, 11:09 AM: Teaching a Brick to Sing, April 22, 2007, 8:31 PM: Welcome to the Cave, and, in conclusion... Shadows in the Cave-- Today's Pennsylvania lottery and a midrash on today's lottery: 527 -- 5/27, 2005: Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux and 168 -- December 25, 2005: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group (of order 168). Posted 8/1/2007 at 9:29 PM |
Diagon Alley From this morning: This symbol from the box-style I Ching is echoed by a French ad for the 2006 film "Scoop"-- This film may be taken as foreshadowing the afterlife of the late Fleet Street figure Richard Stott. Stott, along with film directors Ingmar Berman and Michelangelo Antonioni, died on Monday (July 30). He is, we may suppose, the mysterious third man in Tuesday's remark by the mayor of Rome: "With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity." Dogs and Lampposts, by Richard Stott The title of Stott's book is from H. L. Mencken, who is said to have felt that the proper relationship of a journalist to a politician is that of a dog to a lamppost. Posted 8/1/2007 at 6:19 PM |
x Posted 8/1/2007 at 1:09 PM |
August First, 8:00:14 AM: Cheap Epiphany
Restoring the Booze: A Look at the 50's- Another Epiphany: Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989 (Click on image for background.) Detail: Related material: Logos and Logic and Diagon Alley. "What a swell party this is." -- adapted from Cole Porter Posted 8/1/2007 at 8:00 AM |