Blitz by anonymous New Delhi user From Wikipedia on 31 May, 2007: All of the alterations involve removal of links placed by user Cullinane (myself). The 122.163... IP address is from an internet service provider in New Delhi, India. The New Delhi anonymous user was apparently inspired by an earlier
blitz by Wikipedia administrator Charles Matthews. (See User talk: Cullinane.) Related material: Ashay Dharwadker and Usenet Postings May 31, 2007, alterations by
The deletions should please Charles Matthews and fans of Ashay Dharwadker's work as a four-color theorem enthusiast and as editor of the Open Directory sections on combinatorics and on graph theory. There seems little point in protesting the deletions while Wikipedia still allows any anonymous user to change their articles. -- Cullinane 23:28, 31 May 2007 (UTC) Posted 5/31/2007 at 8:06 PM |
Posted 5/31/2007 at 3:57 PM |
Al Gore and the Absence of Truth "Evil is a negation, because it is the absence of truth." -- Mary Baker Eddy,
founder of Christian Science, in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, (Boston, 1906, page 186, line 11) M. Scott Peck on evil: "There are quite popular
systems of thought these days, such as Christian Science or the Course in Miracles, which define evil as unreality. It is a half-truth. The spirit of evil is one of unreality, but it itself is real. It really exists." "We must not fall back into Saint Augustine's now discarded doctrine of the 'privatio boni,' whereby evil was defined as the absence of good. Satan's personality cannot be characterized simply by an absence, a nothingness." -- People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, by Morgan Scott Peck, 1986. (Touchstone paperback, 2nd ed., 1998, page 208) Al Gore on M. Scott Peck:
-- Google search 5/30/07 He did? "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." -- Verbal Kint in "The Usual Suspects" Posted 5/30/2007 at 10:00 PM |
and a Finite Model Notes by Steven H. Cullinane May 28, 2007 Part I: A Model of Space-Time The following paper includes a figure illustrating
Penrose's model of "complexified, compactified Minkowski
space-time as the Klein quadric in complex projective 5-space."
Click on picture to enlarge. For some background on the Klein quadric and space-time, see Roger Penrose, "On the Origins of Twistor Theory," from Gravitation and Geometry: A Volume in Honor of Ivor Robinson, Bibliopolis, 1987.
Part II: A Corresponding Finite Model The Klein quadric also occurs in a finite model of projective 5-space. See a 1910 paper:
G. M. Conwell, The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group, Ann. of Math. 11, 60-76. Conwell discusses the quadric, and the related Klein correspondence, in detail. This is noted in a more recent paper by Philippe Cara: As Cara goes on to explain, the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell's discussion of eight heptads. These play an important role in another correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions of the large Mathieu group M24.
Related material: The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin. The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China's I Ching. There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube. This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2). This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams. "Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching
into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed. 'Go ahead
and try,' he exclaimed. 'You'll see how it turns out.
Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But
I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in
his bamboo grove.'" -- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, translated by Richard and Clara Winston Posted 5/28/2007 at 5:00 PM |
Random Number The previous entry links back to May 18's "Devil in the Details," an entry quoting Peter Woit. Yesterday afternoon Woit, who sometimes writes on pure mathematics as well as physics, posted an entry on a talk said to be related to something called "the ABC-conjecture," which has been called "the most important unsolved problem in diophantine analysis." (Dorian Goldfeld, "Beyond the Last Theorem," The Sciences, March/April 1996, 34-40) On the ABC-conjecture in number theory: "We hope to elucidate the beautiful connections between elliptic curves, modular forms and the ABC–conjecture." --Dorian Goldfeld (pdf) An Edinburgh postgraduate student on the conjecture: "... abc brings us full circle to Fermat's Last Theorem...." --Graeme Taylor at Everything2.com I regret I can add nothing to Taylor's admirable exposition and to Goldfeld's "beautiful connections" except the following observation of a rather ugly connection. The previous Log24 entry, from yesterday afternoon, related the May 18 "details" entry to Friday's PA evening lottery number, 005. A followup seems (if only to honor the madcap tradition of John Nash) to be called for. The PA evening number yesterday evening, Saturday, was 443. Nash, in his younger days, might have been pleased to note that this number is associated (if only by coincidence) with a topic Woit mentioned earlier yesterday-- Fermat's famed conjecture: -- Page 443 in The Annals of Mathematics, 2nd Ser., Vol. 141, No. 3 (May, 1995) This is the first page of a rather famous paper by Andrew Wiles. Such
coincidences are, of course, anathema to believers in the religion of
Scientism. But one such believer, Natalie Angier (yesterday morning's entry), at least acknowledges the charm of "the atheist's favorite Christmas movie, 'Coincidence on 34th Street.'" (pdf) Posted 5/27/2007 at 8:00 AM |
A Baffled Reader A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002): "To set one up (which I have not done because I don't want anyone to know what I think)," ... William Safire regarding "blogs". Here's one thing that I think-- today-- based on my "Hate Speech for Harvard," on "Devil in the Details" (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on
Revised version of the New Yorker cover of 5/21/07 Commentary on the cover by the PA lottery on 5/25/07 in the form of the evening number, 005. In the I Ching, this is the number of HSU: WAITING (NOURISHMENT) See also the previous entry and Natalie Angier's sneer at a politician's call for prayer, which, she said, involved the "assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub." Detail from the 5/21/07 New Yorker: THE IMAGE Clouds rise up to heaven: The image of WAITING. Thus the superior man eats and drinks, Is joyous and of good cheer. AMEN. Posted 5/26/2007 at 1:09 PM |
On the Religion of Scientism Recently, believers in the religion of Scientism have become increasingly militant. Christians, though seldom able, like Jesus, to love their enemy, might at least try, like Don Vito Corleone, to know their enemy. "Examples are the stained-glass Steven Pinker at The New York Times, Jesse Tisch at JBooks.com, Harvey Blume at The Boston Globe, Marcela Valdes at Publishers Weekly, Angier at The New York Times, Angier at The American Scholar, For other recent background, Posted 5/26/2007 at 9:13 AM |
Dance and the Soul From Log24 on this date last year: "May there be an ennui of the first idea? What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?" -- Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" The Associated Press, May 25, 2007-- Thought for Today: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson [Journals, on May 3, 1849] The First Idea: This "telling of what "Stevens
may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's
end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early
spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is
'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the
negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valery's
Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate
consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this
realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular,
in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives
life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As
Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:
Valery's
formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into
what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be
cured only by what Valery's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to
act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue
us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid
observer.'" --Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate * "la sorte... la plus mortelle": Other quotations (from March 28, Posted 5/25/2007 at 7:11 AM |
The hit was made famous by Patti LaBelle. Below is an online profile of LaBelle from AOL.com: This agrees with the birth date in a Log24 entry of 10/4/02, The Agony and the Ya-Ya. It now, however, appears that LaBelle was born on today's date, May 24. My apologies to Charlton Heston, the archangel Michael, and the city of New Orleans-- all featured in the Ya-Ya entry. Congratulations to Bob Dylan and Rosanne Cash on their new birthday-mate. Related material: 1. An entry from last year on this date, the pilgrimage day of St. Sarah 2. An entry from another religious holiday, the opening date of the real Moulin Rouge 3. The works of Robert Langdon, author of "the renowned collegiate textbook Religious Iconology" "Gitchi gitchi ya-ya, Dada...." Posted 5/24/2007 at 9:29 AM |
Posted 5/24/2007 at 4:00 AM |
The Beauty Test
"There is no royal road
to geometry" -- Attributed to Euclid There are, however, various non-royal roads. One of these is indicated by yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery numbers: The mid-day number 515 may be taken as a reference to 5/15. (See the previous entry, "Angel in the Details," and 5/15.)
The evening number 062, in the context of Monday's entry "No Royal Roads" and yesterday's "Jewel in the Crown,"
may be regarded as naming a non-royal road to geometry: either U. S. 62, a major route
from Mexico to Canada (home of the late geometer H.S.M. Coxeter), or a
road less traveled-- namely, page 62 in Coxeter's classic Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):
The illustration (and definition) is of regular tessellations of the plane. This topic Coxeter offers as an illustration of remarks by G. H. Hardy that he quotes on the preceding page:
One might argue that such beauty is strongly emergent
because of the "harmonious way" the parts fit
together: the
regularity (or fitting together) of the whole is not reducible to the
regularity of the parts. (Regular triangles, squares, and
hexagons fit together, but regular pentagons do not.)
The symmetries of these regular tessellations
of the
plane are less well suited as illustrations of emergence, since they
are tied rather closely to symmetries of the component parts.
But the symmetries of regular tessellations of the sphere-- i.e., of the five Platonic solids-- do emerge strongly, being apparently independent of symmetries of the component parts.
Another example of strong emergence: a group of 322,560 transformations acting naturally on the 4x4 square grid-- a much larger group than the group of 8 symmetries of each component (square) part. The lottery numbers above also supply an example of strong emergence-- one that nicely illustrates how it can be, in the words of Mark Bedau, "uncomfortably like magic." (Those more comfortable with magic may note the resemblance of the central part of Coxeter's illustration to a magical counterpart-- the Ojo de Dios of Mexico's Sierra Madre.) Posted 5/23/2007 at 7:00 AM |
Angel in the Details
See the Dickinson poem quoted here on May 15 (the date, as it happens, of Dickinson's death) in the entry "A Flag for Sunrise." See also Zen and Language Games and a discussion of a detail in a Robert Stone novel.
"I dwell in Possibility - A fairer House than Prose" -- Emily Dickinson Posted 5/23/2007 at 5:15 AM |
From the May 18 Harvard Crimson: "Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that 'the devil is in the details'...." Related material: "In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things." --Wikipedia "In the 1920's... the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are confident that there is no mysterious 'vital principle,' but that life is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world become quite pervasive." --Harvard mathematician George Mackey, "What Do Mathematicians Do?" Opposed to reductionism are "emergence" and "strong emergence"-- "Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic." --Mark A. Bedau Or comfortably. Posted 5/23/2007 at 4:29 AM |
Jewel in the Crown
The Crown of Geometry (according to Logothetti in a 1980 article) The crown jewels are the Platonic solids, with the icosahedron at the top. Related material: "[The applet] Syntheme illustrates ways of partitioning the 12 vertices of an icosahedron into 3 sets of 4, so that each set forms the corners of a rectangle in the Golden Ratio. Each such rectangle is known as a duad. The short sides of a duad are opposite edges of the icosahedron, and there are 30 edges, so there are 15 duads. Each partition of the vertices into duads is known as a syntheme.
There are 15 synthemes; 5 consist of duads that are mutually perpendicular, while
the other 10 consist of duads that share a common line of intersection." -- Greg Egan, Syntheme Duads and synthemes
(discovered by Sylvester) also appear in this note from May 26, 1986 (click to enlarge): The above note shows duads and synthemes related to the diamond theorem. See also John Baez's essay "Some Thoughts on the Number 6." That essay was written 15 years ago today-- which happens to be the birthday of Sir Laurence Olivier, who, were he alive today, would be 100 years old. "Is it safe?" Posted 5/22/2007 at 7:11 AM |
No Royal Roads A more recent royal reference: "'Yau wants to be the king of geometry,' Michael Anderson, a geometer at Stony Brook, said. 'He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn't like people encroaching on his territory.'" --Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber in The New Yorker, issue dated Aug. 28, 2006 Wikipedia, Cultural references to the Royal Road: "Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry.' Charles S. Peirce, in his 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878), says 'There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention.'" Related material: Day Without Logic (March 8, 2007) and The Geometry of Logic (March 10, 2007): There may be no royal roads to geometry or logic, but... "There is such a thing as a tesseract." -- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time Posted 5/21/2007 at 4:00 PM |
x Posted 5/21/2007 at 3:57 PM |
Down the Up Staircase Commentary on a Jonathan Borofsky painting in the May 21 New Yorker: Commentary -- "... Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal...." -- Rosalind Krauss Posted 5/21/2007 at 4:48 AM |
Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road: "Rufo's baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it. And opened it again. And kept on opening it...."
Related material: Posted 5/20/2007 at 7:00 PM |
Plato and Shakespeare:
Solid and Central "I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. 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 live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before." -- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):
"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." -- Hamlet From today's newspaper: Notes: For an illustration of the phrase "solid and central," see the previous entry. For further context, see the five Log24 entries ending on September 6, 2006. For background on the word "hollow," see the etymology of "hole in the wall" as well as "The God-Shaped Hole" and "Is Nothing Sacred?" For further ado, see Macbeth, V.v ("signifying nothing") and The New Yorker, issue dated tomorrow. Posted 5/20/2007 at 8:00 AM |
Point of View
"In a sense, too, Wallace Stevens has spent a lifetime writing a single poem. What gives his best work its astonishing power and vitality is the way in which a fixed point of view, maturing naturally, eventually takes in more than a constantly shifting point of view could get at. The point of view is romantic, 'almost the color of comedy'; but 'the strength at the center is
serious.' Behind Wallace Stevens stand Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as Rimbaud and
Mallarmé, and, surprisingly enough, La Fontaine and Pope. This poetic lineage is important only
in so far as it proves that a master can claim the world as ancestor. Knowing where he stands,
the poet can move as a free man in the company of free men."
-- Samuel French Morse, review
of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, in The New York Times (October 3, 1954) Related material: The point of view expressed in Log24 on today's date in 2004:
"the strength at the center is serious," see "Serious" (also on an October 3). Posted 5/19/2007 at 9:29 AM |
"Kids who may never get out of their town will be able to see the world through books. But I'm talking about my passion. What's yours?" No se puede vivir sin amar. Happy May 18, Reba. Posted 5/18/2007 at 3:00 PM |
Born on this date: Pope John Paul II, Comedian/writer Tina Fey "It’s just bad luck for me that in my first attempt at prime time I’m going up against the Click on picture for details. See also a serendipitously embedded cartoon: Posted 5/18/2007 at 8:00 AM |
Devil in the Details
Today's Harvard Crimson: "Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that 'the devil is in the details'...." From the weblog of Peter Woit: "The New Yorker keeps its physics theme going this week with cover art that includes a blackboard full of basic equations from quantum mechanics." May 21, 2007 New Yorker cover Detail The detail suggests the following religious images from Twelfth Night 2003:
"Mercilessly tasteful" -- Andrew Mueller, review of Suzanne Vega's "Songs in Red and Gray" Posted 5/18/2007 at 6:29 AM |
Selections from The Stephen King Hymnal Log24, April 21: Shine on... shine on... There is work to be done in the dark before dawn -- Daisy May Erlewine of Big Rapids, Michigan And from the granddaughter of Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Max Born: Posted 5/18/2007 at 5:18 AM |
Logos for Yolanda King, who died May 15, the birthday of L. Frank Baum: Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow Symbols of, left to right, Philip K. Dick (see 3/2/06), Robert Anton Wilson (see 6/11/03), and Kurt Vonnegut (see Palm Sunday, an Autobiographical Collage). See also An Unholy Trinity (5/6/07). The "sunrise" logo at top, along with the three-part motto "Educate, Empower, Entertain," is Yolanda King's own. Posted 5/17/2007 at 7:31 AM |
Entertainer of the Year Frank Rich on the United States: "... a country where entertainment is god" In another country: Question: "Que pasa, pendejo?" -- Question in a music video, "You Save Me," by last night's Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year Answer: Posted 5/16/2007 at 3:37 PM |
Second Billing
Today's online New York Times:
"Yolanda King founded and led Higher Ground Productions, billed as a 'gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation.'" --New York Times "Yolanda King’s Lecture Performances are tailored to suit your company’s immediate need for a critical and timely message delivered with a high-level of entertainment value." --Higher Ground Productions From the five log24 entries ending with "Dinner Theater?" (linked to in yesterday afternoon's Perspective on the News): "A 'moral values' crusade Posted 5/16/2007 at 11:22 AM |
Star Wars
From this morning's New York Times: "In April, Wiccans won an important victory when the Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit and agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans' headstones.... Many Wiccans practice some form of magic or witchcraft, which they say is a way of affecting one's destiny, but which many outsiders see as evil. The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, is often confused with symbols of Satanism." Posted 5/16/2007 at 4:01 AM |
Tony Nominations Announced
The Rev. Jerry Falwell Dies The Rev. Jerry Falwell speaks at a rally on the steps of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery in this Saturday, Aug. 16, 2003, file photo. (AP Photo/Dave Martin) The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2004: "The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University [at Lynchburg, Virginia] is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law." Religious perspective: See the five Log24 entries ending with "Dinner Theater?" (Nov. 26, 2004). Note Charles Williams's discussion of the Salem witchcraft trials. See also yesterday's "Seven Bridges." In light of that entry's picture of Nicole Kidman in "To Die For," and of Charles Williams's remarks, a discussion of Kidman's "Practical Magic" may also interest some. Posted 5/15/2007 at 2:11 PM |
The title of the Robert Stone Posted 5/15/2007 at 5:55 AM |
Seven Bridges "Make me young..." -- Kilgore Trout For the old at heart: The Mathematical Association of America in this Euler Tercentenary Year honors the seven bridges of Königsberg, Prussia (birthplace of David Hilbert). For Kilgore Trout: A song about the road to (and from) Hank Williams's memorial marker: "There are stars in the Southern sky and if ever you decide you should go there is a taste of time-sweetened honey down the Seven Bridges Road Now I have loved you like a baby like some lonesome child and I have loved you in a tame way and I have loved you wild" -- Steve Young Nicole Kidman dances "Sweet Home Alabama" Posted 5/14/2007 at 11:30 AM |
"Was there really a cherubim -- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door, "Oh, Euclid, I suppose."
-- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962, conclusion of Chapter Five, "The Tesseract"
From Log24's Xanga footprints, 3:00 AM today:
The link leads to a Jan. 23, 2006 entry on what one philosopher has claimed is "exactly that crossing point of constraint and freedom which is the very essence of man's nature." Posted 5/14/2007 at 3:09 AM |
"What is real?" -- Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday in Brazil "Dare to struggle, dare to win!" "Dare to guzzle Gordon's gin." -- dialogue from Masks of the Illuminati Posted 5/14/2007 at 2:22 AM |
Prime Blue "To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that... there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music." -- The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, 1993, page 14. Quoted in "A Mass for Lucero." Half the Answer: Commentary by spookytruth from Log24, 2/22/2005: "I mean, come on, Hunter, a stupid bullet through the head??? how creative, you brain-addled simpleton... if you take the assignment, if you are going to hook up your afterlife keyboard and transmit back and tell us about what it is REALLY like out there, if you decided to let your electric-shock fingers hot wire us the truth of the afterlife... if you really planned to tell us the answer to our ultimate, emotional question...... 'does God prefer beer, wine, or a shot of whiskey.' well, if that is what you decided to do well then, for God's sake, don't forget (oh, wait, yeah, you already DID FORGET, you half-baked, half brained, half witted, half-a-loaf, half pint pin head, you forgot, THE JOURNEY IS HALF THE ANSWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" On Dionysus: "For wine, he loves to view his altars stain, But prime blue ruin*-- goes against the grain." -- page 69, Jack Randall's Diary *name "given by the modern Greeks to gin" -- page 4, Jack Randall's Diary Posted 5/13/2007 at 12:31 PM |
Posted 5/13/2007 at 12:23 PM |
Posted 5/13/2007 at 5:01 AM |
In Memoriam
Dr. John K. Lattimer, who died Thursday:
Click on pictures for details. Posted 5/13/2007 at 1:00 AM |
Artistic Vision
Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers-- mid-day 384, evening 952. In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers. First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters-- "You can be replaced by some ping-pong balls and a dictionary." An example was given illustrating this saying. Here is another example: Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary-- Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition, 1960-- Page 384: "Defender of the Faith" Related Log24 entries: "To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006, and earlier Log24 entries from that year's Halloween season Page 952: "monolith" Related Log24 entries: "Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line" (with the four entries that preceded it). It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry-- "Lonesome No More!"-- was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis." See also April 7, 2003: April is Math Awareness Month.
"Art isn't easy." Posted 5/12/2007 at 11:07 AM |
In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today's Pennsylvania Lottery commentary. This afternoon's entry suggests an interpretation of today's numbers as comments on the new film "Georgia Rule." Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 384 Evening 952 Today's mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007). That novel suggests an interpretation of today's evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life. See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html. From that address: "The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death - If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival - If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth - If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied." Relevance to the film "Georgia Rule": lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord's name-- Georgia is a "lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho.... her framed motto is 'Count Your Blessings' and she's ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord's name." --David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007 There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord's name. Perhaps it includes the number 952. From The Gameplayers of Zan: "The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago-- first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone." From Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: "Nothing can be produced out of nothing." -- 10th edition, 1919, page 952 See also "Zen and Language Games" and "Is Nothing Sacred?" Posted 5/11/2007 at 11:30 PM |
Film Review "No offense to either of them, but 'Georgia Rule' suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie." --John Anderson at Variety.com, May 8, 2007 Sounds perfect to me. Posted 5/11/2007 at 5:11 PM |
Two-Part Invention
"O for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention" -- Henry V, Prologue "The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a
man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast." --G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX
Posted 5/11/2007 at 6:29 AM |
Riverdance The above scene from The Best of Riverdance furnishes an exercise in what Victor Turner has called "comparative symbology." The circular symbol at top may be seen as representing the solar deity Apollo, Leader of the Muses. The nine female dancers may be seen as the nine muses, with Jean Butler at the center as Terpsichore, Muse of Dance. Related Material -- ART WARS: To Apollo "This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason...." John Outram, architect For another look at Terpsichore in action, see Jean Butler at CRC Irish Dance Camp. For those who prefer a different sort of camp there is of course Xanadu. I prefer Butler. Posted 5/10/2007 at 10:00 PM |
Related material: All Hallows' Eve, 2005 -- -- as well as Balanchine's Birthday and the color worn by Jean Butler in Women of the Sidhe (Wednesday's entry). Posted 5/10/2007 at 10:31 AM |
Existential Dread in LA, Illustrated Click to enlarge. For background on photo-surrealist Charlie White, click here. The Times story is another excellent example of the New York Times's highly sophisticated-- some might say, degenerate-- approach to cultural and lifestyle coverage. The story is from the paper's Home and Garden section. Related material: The Garden of Allah. Posted 5/10/2007 at 2:45 AM |
1. Jean Butler at CRC Irish Dance Camp 2. Women of the Sidhe Posted 5/9/2007 at 3:09 AM |
News from Belfast "I was a child in the sixties Dreams could be held through TV With Disney and Cronkite and Martin Luther Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed" -- "It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go," by Nanci Griffith "Today we will witness not hype but history." -- Martin McGuinness, of the republican and mainly Catholic Sinn Fein party, on today's home rule ceremony in Belfast Posted 5/8/2007 at 6:29 PM |
The Public Square On the words "symbology" and "communitas" (the former used, notably, as the name of a fictional field at Harvard in the novel The Da Vinci Code)--
Symbology: "Also known as 'processual symbolic analysis,' this concept was developed by Victor Turner in the mid-1970s to refer to the use of symbols within cultural contexts, in particular ritual. In anthropology, symbology originated as part of Victor Turner's concept of 'comparative symbology.' Turner (1920-1983) was professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and finally he was Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia." --Wikipedia Symbology and Communitas:
Related material on Turner in Log24: Aug. 27, 2006 and Aug. 30, 2006. For further context, see archive of Aug. 19-31, 2006. Related material on Cuernavaca: Google search on Cuernavaca + Log24. Posted 5/8/2007 at 2:56 PM |
FIN et début New York Times, May 7, 2007 Related material: Social Change in the Twentieth Century, by Daniel Chirot (Harvard '64) Posted 5/7/2007 at 5:55 AM |
Posted 5/6/2007 at 4:04 PM |
Masters of Chaos "Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations." -- Julia Kristeva "Paris vaut bien une messe." -- Henri IV "Certain details might be considered and elucidated more fully." -- A Mass for Lucero "There is never any ending to Paris...." -- Ernest Hemingway Posted 5/6/2007 at 3:09 PM |
Three Souls From today's New York Times, Charles McGrath on Philip K. Dick: His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. "If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double," an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'" Now perhaps enjoying the afterlife together: Philip K. Dick Posted 5/6/2007 at 4:02 AM |
May '68 Revisited "At his final Paris campaign rally... Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.' 'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago. 'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.' Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy
accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the
ideology of 1968." -- Emma-Kate Symons, Paris, May 1, 2007, in The Australian Related material: From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi --
This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the
Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard. Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"-- "... the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such.... Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's translation of Dissemination, from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):
For a correction of Sollers's damned nonsense, click here. Posted 5/4/2007 at 5:01 PM |
A Web
"Some postmodern theorists
like to talk about the relationship between 'intertextuality' and
'hypertextuality'; intertextuality makes each text a 'mosaic of
quotations' [Kristeva, Desire in Language, Columbia U. Pr., 1980, 66] and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just
as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web." --Wikipedia of Links Related material Day Without Logic, Introduction to Logic, The Geometry of Logic, Structure and Logic, Spider-Man and Fan: "There is such a thing as a tesseract." -- A Wrinkle in Time Posted 5/3/2007 at 3:00 PM |
Today's Commentary
by the Pennsylvania Lottery: For the meaning of 714, see 7/14. For the meaning of 692, see Is Nothing Sacred? Related material: Law Day 2001: The Devil and Wallace Stevens Posted 5/1/2007 at 10:20 PM |
May 1, 2007
2:45 AM I could tell you a lot, but you gotta be true to your code. -- Sinatra At the still point... -- Eliot ...da ist der Tanz; Doch weder Stillstand noch Bewegung. Und nenne es nicht Beständigkeit, Wo Vergangenheit und Zukunft sich sammeln.
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number." -- Katherine Neville, The Magic Circle Happy Walpurgisnacht. Posted 5/1/2007 at 2:45 AM |