Thursday July 31, 2008
Symmetry in Review

"Put bluntly, who is kidding whom?"

-- Anthony Judge, draft of
"Potential Psychosocial Significance
of Monstrous Moonshine:
An Exceptional Form of Symmetry
as a Rosetta Stone for
Cognitive Frameworks,"
dated September 6, 2007.

Good question.

Also from
September 6, 2007 --
the date of
Madeleine L'Engle's death --


 
Pavarotti takes a bow

Related material:

1. The performance of a work by
Richard Strauss,
"Death and Transfiguration,"
(Tod und Verklärung, Opus 24)
by the Chautauqua Symphony
at Chautauqua Institution on
July 24, 2008


2. Headline of a music review
in today's New York Times:

Welcoming a Fresh Season of
Transformation and Death


3. The picture of the R. T. Curtis
Miracle Octad Generator
on the cover of the book
Twelve Sporadic Groups:

Cover of 'Twelve Sporadic Groups'

4. Freeman Dyson's hope, quoted by
Gorenstein in 1986, Ronan in 2006,
and Judge in 2007, that the Monster
group is "built in some way into
the structure of the universe."

5. Symmetry from Plato to
the Four-Color Conjecture


6. Geometry of the 4x4 Square

7. Yesterday's entry,
"Theories of Everything"

Coda:

"There is such a thing

Tesseract
     as a tesseract."

-- Madeleine L'Engle

Cover of The New Yorker, April 12, 2004-- Roz Chast, Easter Eggs

For a profile of
L'Engle, click on
the Easter eggs.

Posted 7/31/2008 at 12:00 PM

Wednesday July 30, 2008
Theories of Everything

Ashay Dharwadker now has a Theory of Everything.

Like Garrett Lisi's, it is based on an unusual and highly symmetric mathematical structure. Lisi's approach is related to the exceptional simple Lie group E8.* Dharwadker uses a structure long associated with the sporadic simple Mathieu group M24.

GRAND UNIFICATION

OF THE STANDARD MODEL WITH QUANTUM GRAVITY

by Ashay Dharwadker
Abstract
"We show that the mathematical proof of the four colour theorem [1] directly implies the existence of the standard model, together with quantum gravity, in its physical interpretation. Conversely, the experimentally observable standard model and quantum gravity show that nature applies the mathematical proof of the four colour theorem, at the most fundamental level. We preserve all the established working theories of physics: Quantum Mechanics, Special and General Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the Electroweak model and Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We build upon these theories, unifying all of them with Einstein's law of gravity. Quantum gravity is a direct and unavoidable consequence of the theory. The main construction of the Steiner system in the proof of the four colour theorem already defines the gravitational fields of all the particles of the standard model. Our first goal is to construct all the particles constituting the classic standard model, in exact agreement with t'Hooft's table [8]. We are able to predict the exact mass of the Higgs particle and the CP violation and mixing angle of weak interactions. Our second goal is to construct the gauge groups and explicitly calculate the gauge coupling constants of the force fields. We show how the gauge groups are embedded in a sequence along the cosmological timeline in the grand unification. Finally, we calculate the mass ratios of the particles of the standard model. Thus, the mathematical proof of the four colour theorem shows that the grand unification of the standard model with quantum gravity is complete, and rules out the possibility of finding any other kinds of particles."


* See, for instance, "The Scientific Promise of Perfect Symmetry" in The New York Times of March 20, 2007.

Posted 7/30/2008 at 11:48 AM

Tuesday July 29, 2008
To Die For: 

Scenes from 
The Human Stain --

Menin, the word
in Greek on the
professor's
blackboard,
   means "wrath"...

Menin... First line, in Greek, of the Iliad

Scenes from the film 'The Human Stain'

"Objects in rear view mirror
may be older than they appear.
"

Posted 7/29/2008 at 10:31 AM

Monday July 28, 2008
Continued

"There is a body on
the cross in my church."
-- Mary Karr, quoted 
here on July 10, 2007

From Jan. 20, 2004,
opening day of the first
Tennessee lottery--

Song of the Father

"Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po' Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall."

-- Jimmie Rodgers, known as
"the father of country music."

Posted 7/28/2008 at 12:00 PM

Sunday July 27, 2008
For Brother Taylor:

Bobbie Gentry is 64 today.

"It was the third of June,
another sleepy, dusty Delta day...."

Third of June, 2007

Third of June, 2008


Posted 7/27/2008 at 10:04 AM

Saturday July 26, 2008
For Jung's Birthday:

The Revelation Game
Revisited


Lotteries
on Jung's
birthday,
July 26,
2008
Pennsylvania
(No revelation)
New York
(Revelation)
Mid-day
(No belief)
No belief,
no revelation

625


6/25 --
Quine's
birthday


Revelation
without belief

003


The
Trinity
Pretzel


Evening
(Belief)
Belief without
revelation

087

1987 --
Quine
publishes
Quiddities
Belief and
revelation

829


8/29 --
Hurricane
Katrina,
McCain's
birthday



From Josephine Klein, Jacob's Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy, London, Karnac Books, 2003--

Page 14 --
Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Quiddity and haeccity were contentious topics in medieval discussions about the nature of reality, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have encountered these concepts during his Jesuit training. W. H. Gardner, who edited much of Hopkins's work, writes that
in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy... Hopkins came across the writing of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker's Principles of Individuation and Theory of Knowledge he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. [Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Penguin, 1953, p. xxiii]
In this useful introduction to his selection of Hopkins's work, Gardner writes that Hopkins was always looking for the law or principle that gave an object 'its delicate and surprising uniqueness.' This was for Hopkins 'a fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight.' Clive Bell called it 'significant form'; Hopkins called it 'inscape'-- 'the rich and revealing oneness of the natural object' (pp. xx-xxiv). In this chapter, I call it quiddity."

Posted 7/26/2008 at 10:22 PM

Saturday July 26, 2008
Tinker Shuffle

Cover of book 'Irish Travellers'

Peter  O'Toole

Peter Seamus O'Toole,
born Connemara, 1932


"O body swayed to music,
O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer
from the dance?"

-- William Butler Yeats

"My little baby sister
can do it with ease.
It's easier to learn
  than those ABC's."

-- Kylie Minogue 


Happy birthday,
Kate Beckinsale

Posted 7/26/2008 at 3:09 PM

Friday July 25, 2008
56 Triangles

Greg Egan's drawing of the 56 triangles on the Klein quartic 3-hole torus

John Baez on
  Klein's quartic:


"This wonderful picture was drawn by Greg Egan with the help of ideas from Mike Stay and Gerard Westendorp. It's probably the best way for a nonmathematician to appreciate the symmetry of Klein's quartic. It's a 3-holed torus, but drawn in a way that emphasizes the tetrahedral symmetry lurking in this surface! You can see there are 56 triangles: 2 for each of the tetrahedron's 4 corners, and 8 for each of its 6 edges."

Exercise:

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

Click on image for further details.


Note that if eight points are arranged
in a cube (like the centers of the
eight subcubes in the figure above),
there are 56 triangles formed by
the 8 points taken 3 at a time.


Baez's discussion says that the Klein quartic's 56 triangles can be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle Egan "cubes" that correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way that automorphisms of the Klein quartic correspond to automorphisms of the Fano plane. Show that the 56 triangles within the eightfold cube can also be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle sets that correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way that (affine) transformations of the eightfold cube induce (projective) automorphisms of the Fano plane.

Posted 7/25/2008 at 6:01 PM

Thursday July 24, 2008
Tried out the new knol.google.com site
with a copy of The Diamond Theorem.

Posted 7/24/2008 at 8:24 AM

Monday July 21, 2008
Knight Moves:
The Relativity Theory
of Kindergarten Blocks


(Continued from
January 16, 2008)

"Hmm, next paper... maybe
 'An Unusually Complicated
Theory of Something.'"

-- Garrett Lisi at
Physics Forums, July 16

Something:

From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:

Froebel's Third Gift: A cube made up of eight subcubes

Click on image for details.


An Unusually
Complicated Theory:


From Christmas 2005:

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

Click on image for details.


For the eightfold cube
as it relates to Klein's
simple group, see
"A Reflection Group
of Order 168
."

For an even more
complicated theory of
Klein's simple group, see

Cover of 'The Eightfold Way: The Beauty of Klein's Quartic Curve'

Click on image for details.

Posted 7/21/2008 at 12:00 PM

Saturday July 19, 2008
Hard Core

(continued from yesterday)

Bertram Kostant, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at MIT, on an object discussed in this week's New Yorker:

"A word about E(8). In my opinion, and shared by others, E(8) is the most magnificent 'object' in all of mathematics. It is like a diamond with thousands of facets. Each facet offering a different view of its unbelievable intricate internal structure."

Hermann Weyl on the hard core of objectivity:

"Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity behind-- as Eddington puts it-- the colorful tale of the subjective storyteller mind." (Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, Princeton, 1949, p. 237)

Steven H. Cullinane on the symmetries of a 4x4 array of points:

A Structure-Endowed Entity

"A guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity S, try to determine its group of automorphisms, the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed.  You can expect to gain a deep insight into the constitution of S in this way."

-- Hermann Weyl in Symmetry

Let us apply Weyl's lesson to the following "structure-endowed entity."

4x4 array of dots

What is the order of the resulting group of automorphisms?


The above group of
automorphisms plays
a role in what Weyl,
following Eddington,
  called a "colorful tale"--

The Diamond 16 Puzzle

The Diamond 16 Puzzle


This puzzle shows
that the 4x4 array can
also be viewed in
thousands of ways.

"You can make 322,560
pairs of patterns. Each
 pair pictures a different
symmetry of the underlying
16-point space."

-- Steven H. Cullinane,
July 17, 2008

For other parts of the tale,
see Ashay Dharwadker,
the Four-Color Theorem,
and Usenet Postings
.

Posted 7/19/2008 at 2:00 PM

Friday July 18, 2008
Hard Core

David Corfield quotes Weyl in a weblog entry, "Hierarchy and Emergence," at the n-Category Cafe this morning:

"Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity behind-- as Eddington puts it-- the colorful tale of the subjective storyteller mind." (Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science [Princeton, 1949], p. 237)

For the same quotation in a combinatorial context, see the foreword by A. W. Tucker, "Combinatorial Problems," to a special issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, November 1960 (1-page pdf).

See also yesterday's Log24 entry.

Posted 7/18/2008 at 12:00 PM

Thursday July 17, 2008
CHANGE
 FEW CAN BELIEVE IN

Continued from June 18.

Jungian Symbols
of the Self --


User icons (identicons) from Secret Blogging Seminar
Compare and contrast:

Jung's four-diamond figure from
Aion -- a symbol of the self --

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

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...."

For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.

Posted 7/17/2008 at 4:28 PM

Tuesday July 15, 2008
My comment on a discussion of elliptic curves and modular forms at Secret Blogging Seminar, about 10 PM tonight:

How does this affect popularized discussions of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture-- for instance, Ivars Peterson's, in "Curving Beyond Fermat," November 1999-- which claim, for instance, that "Elliptic curves and modular forms are mathematically so different that mathematicians initially [in the 1950's, the early days of the conjecture] couldn't believe that the two are related."?

Update of about 10:45 PM tonight:

A reply by the author of the discussion, Scott Carnahan:

I don’t think anyone doubted that there is a connection between elliptic curves and modular forms on the level I described above. However, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture refers to a more advanced idea about a deeper connection.

Carnahan then gives a one-paragraph summary, definitely not popularized, of the deeper connection.

Posted 7/15/2008 at 10:10 PM

Sunday July 13, 2008
The Drunkard's Walk
is the title of a recent
book by Leonard Mlodinow:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080713-DrunkardsWalk.jpg
 
Cover of British edition

"Leonard Mlodinow has had, to speak informally, a pretty random career....

A far more sober instance of randomness, however, underpins his new book, The Drunkard's Walk. And it's not hard to see it as a sort of Rosebud, explaining why the author finds unpredictability so compelling."

Another sort of Rosebud--
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy:
"... A Mathematician's Apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again."
Perhaps in the afterlife Hardy, an expert on the theory of numbers, does again enjoy such powers. If so, his comments on the following would be of interest:

New York Lottery today:
Mid-day 006
(the first perfect number)
Evening 568
(an apparently random number)

Hardy, when taken to church as a child, passed the time by factorizing hymn numbers. This suggests we note that 568 equals 8 times 71. A check of Wikipedia on the prime number 71 reveals that it is related to 568 in another way: 568 is is the sum of the primes less than 71--
2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 +
13 + 17 + 19 + 23 +
29 + 31 + 37 + 41 +
43 + 47 + 53 + 59 +
61 + 67 = 568
Clearly it is false that the sum of the primes less than a prime p is, in general, a multiple of p, since (2 + 3 + 5) is not a multiple of 7. The sum of primes less than an integer x is, however, of some interest.

See The On-Line Encyclopedia
of Integer Sequences,

A046731, Sum of primes < 10^n, as well as
A006880, Number of primes < 10^n.

According to an amateur* mathematician named Cino Hilliard, "a very important relationship exists" between the sum of primes less than x and the prime counting function Pi(x) which is the number of primes less than x--

(Sum of primes less than x) ~ Pi(x^2).

Whether this apparent relationship is, in fact, "very important," or merely a straightforward consequence of other number-theoretical facts, is not obvious (to those of us not expert in number theory) from Google searches. Perhaps Hardy can clear this question up for those who will, by luck or grace, meet him in the next world.

* For some background, see a profile and user group messages here and here and here.

Posted 7/13/2008 at 10:23 PM

Sunday July 13, 2008
Indefinable?

C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy:

"This was 1931, and the phrase was not yet in English use, but in later days they would have said that in some indefinable way he had star quality."

From the Feast of the
Transfiguration, 2007
:

 Symmetry axes
of the square:

Symmetry axes of the square

See Damnation Morning.

See also today's
previous three entries
.

Happy birthday,
Harrison Ford.

Posted 7/13/2008 at 8:00 PM

Sunday July 13, 2008
Christ's High Table

C. P. Snow in A Mathematician's Apology:

FOREWORD

"It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ's high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest. He had just returned to Cambridge as Sadleirian professor, and I had heard something of him from young Cambridge mathematicians. They were delighted to have him back: he was a real mathematician, they said, not like those Diracs and Bohrs the physicists were always talking about: he was the purest of the pure. He was also unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything. This was 1931, and the phrase was not yet in English use, but in later days they would have said that in some indefinable way he had star quality."

Perhaps now also at Christ's high table-- Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister, Evelyn Keyes, who died on July 4, 2008:

"... the memory of Evelyn Keyes looking at herself on the screen, exclaiming: 'There's star quality! Look at those tits!'"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/Evelyn_Keyes_in_99_River_Street.jpg

Evelyn Keyes in 99 River Street


See also "Supper at Eight" and
Irreconcilable Differences.

Posted 7/13/2008 at 12:24 PM

Sunday July 13, 2008
Footprint

Sweden
608410039/philosophy-w...
7/13/2008 11:55 AM
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Posted 7/13/2008 at 12:06 PM

Sunday July 13, 2008
On the beach: 'Once again the castle's architect is taken to task for using sand instead of stone.' --Sally Forth 7/13/08
 
See also
St. Peter's Day, 2005,
and Michiko Kakutani
on tribal delusions.

Posted 7/13/2008 at 11:00 AM

Saturday July 12, 2008
Advertisement

"God is like Me,
only more so."

-- Norman Mailer,
Advertisements for Myself

NY Times online front page July 12, 2008-- detail from review of 'Hellboy 2'-- 'jokey, sometimes touching and a lot of fun'

Context:

NY Times online front page July 12. 2008, 10:02 AM-- Tony Snow, former White House press secretary, dies

See also
Context-Sensitive Theology.

Posted 7/12/2008 at 10:31 AM

Saturday July 12, 2008
Keyes
Posted 7/12/2008 at 12:00 AM

Friday July 11, 2008
Ready When
You Are, C. B.


New  York Lottery July 11, 2008: Mid-day 908, Evening 623

For related material, see
"Goodbye and Hello"
from 9/08, 2003 and
"Requiem for a Storyteller"
from 9/08, 2007,
as well as
"Raiders of the Lost Stone"
from 6/23, 2007 and
"George Carlin Dies"
from 6/23, 2008.

See also
today's previous entries.

Posted 7/11/2008 at 9:11 PM

Friday July 11, 2008
De Haut en Bas
continued from July 3

"I say high, you say low,
you say why,
and I say I don't know.
Oh, no.
You say goodbye
and I say hello."

-- Hello Goodbye *

Thanks to NBC Nightly News tonight for a story on the following:

Manhattanhenge
is an evening when "the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street...."

Full Sun on grid:
Friday, July 11--
8:24 PM EDT

Related material from the late
Tom Disch on St. Sarah's Day:

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

9:15 pm

What I Can See from Here

I face east toward the western wall
Of a tall many-windowed building
Some distance off. I don't see the sunset
Directly, only as it is reflected
From the facade of that building.
Those familiar with Manhattan know
How the evening sun appears to slide
Into the slot of any east/west street,
And so its beams are channeled
Along those canyon streets to strike
Large objects like that wall
And scrawl their anti-shadows there,
A Tau of twilight luminescence
At close of day. I've seen this
For some forty years and only tonight
Did I realize what I had been looking at:
The way god tries to say good-bye.

-- Tom Disch

* Stanley Cavell, in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, has a note on the song "Hello Goodbye"--

"189. The extra-long coda... was referred to as the 'Maori finale' from the start...."

Posted 7/11/2008 at 7:11 PM

Friday July 11, 2008
AND MORE LOGOS:

"Serious numbers will
always be heard."
-- Paul Simon  

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-DowLg.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-NYSE.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-HSBClogo.jpg

The HSBC Logo Designer --

Henry Steiner

He is an internationally recognized corporate identity consultant. Based in Hong Kong, his work for clients such as HongkongBank, IBM and Unilever is a major influence in Pacific Rim design.

Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club.

His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995).

-- Yaneff.com


Related material
from the past --


Wittgenstein and Fly from Fly-Bottle

Fly from Fly Bottle:

Graphic structures from Diamond Theory and from Kyocera logo

Charles Taylor,
"Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
  (Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) --

"... the object sets up
 a kind of frame or space or field
   within which there can be epiphany."


Related material
from today --

Escape from a
  cartoon graveyard:


http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-BabyBlues.jpg

Posted 7/11/2008 at 1:00 PM

Friday July 11, 2008
LOGOS

"Religions are hardy."
-- TIME magazine,
issue dated July 14

"I confess I do not
believe in time."
-- Vladimir Nabokov  

"I can hardly do better than
go back to the Greeks."
-- G. H. Hardy

'The Greeks and the Irrational,' by E.R. Dodds

Figure 1:
The Greeks

Diagonal of the Square

Figure 2:
The Irrational

'You cannot find the limits of the soul even by travelling all roads-- so deep is its logos'-- Heraclitus

Posted 7/11/2008 at 9:00 AM

Thursday July 10, 2008
Something

From the current
issue of TIME:

Mark Twain on cover of  TIME, issue dated July 14, 2008

"Religions are hardy. 'Many a time
we have gotten all ready for the
funeral' of one faith or another,
'and found it postponed again,
on account of
the weather or something.'"

-- Mark Twain

Twain was raised
as a Presbyterian
(the Calvinist tradition).

This year's Twain award
for humor went to
George Carlin,
raised in
the Catholic tradition.

On learning he had won
the Twain award,
Carlin said,
"Thank you, Mr. Twain.
Have your people
call my people."

Today's Birthdays:

Born July 10, 1509 --

John Calvin portrait

John Calvin

His people: see

The Authority of Narrative.

Born July 10, 1984 --

Maria Julia Mantilla website screenshot

Maria Julia Mantilla


Her people: see 

Catholic Tastes.

Posted 7/10/2008 at 12:00 PM

Wednesday July 9, 2008
Ah! Bright Wings

A poem by the late Thomas Disch:

Sundays at the Colosseum

I think you always had to be a little juiced
to enjoy the show. Or Jewish!
    I never attended
without a flask of red, and would salute
the dying singers--
    martyrs they called themselves--
when the lions drew first blood.
    The songs
went on until either terror or death
had silenced the last of them. I doubt
we would have gone so religiously
if it weren't for the singing.
Sometimes we'd even sing along.
Circuses aren't the same these days.
    Pity.

-- From Disch's weblog on Friday,
   May 23, 2008, at 8:26 AM

Related material on a novel by Disch:

"On Wings of Song, published in 1979, tells the story of a repressive Amesville, Iowa, in the 21st century. The main character, Daniel Weinreb, tries to master the art of song and flight, 'driven by the knowledge that some have attained flight, their spirits separated from their physical bodies and propelled on the waves of their own singing voices-- literally born on wings of song.'"

-- Jocelyn Y. Stewart in a Los Angeles Times obituary of July 8, 2008

See also the Log24 entries for
 the date of Disch's poem--
 St. Sarah's Eve-- and for
 the evening of July 8.

Posted 7/9/2008 at 8:00 PM

Wednesday July 9, 2008
x
Posted 7/9/2008 at 12:15 PM

Wednesday July 9, 2008
God, Time, Epiphany

8:28:32 AM

Anthony Hopkins, from
All Hallows' Eve
last year
:

"For me time is God,
God is time. It's an equation,
like an Einstein equation."

James Joyce, from
June 26 (the day after
Anti-Christmas) this year:

"... he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
-- It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."

Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):


"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have just
as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
as in painting portraits...."

From Epiphany 2008:

An arrangement of planes:


http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080709-Epiphany.gif

From May 10, 2008:

A pattern of figures:

Seven partitions of the 2x2x2 cube in a book from 1906

See also Richard Wilhelm on
Hexagram 32 of the I Ching:

"Duration is a state whose movement is not worn down by hindrances. It 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. The end is reached by an inward movement, by inhalation, systole, contraction, and this movement turns into 
a new beginning, in which the movement is directed outward, in exhalation, diastole, expansion."
'The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell,' by Hulme, 1907, page 64, line 672: 'with this he gaf the gaste'

-- The Middle-English
    Harrowing of Hell...
    by Hulme, 1907, page 64


Posted 7/9/2008 at 9:07 AM

Wednesday July 9, 2008
God, Time, Epiphany

8:28:32 AM

Anthony Hopkins, from
All Hallows' Eve
last year
:

"For me time is God,
God is time. It's an equation,
like an Einstein equation."

James Joyce, from
June 26 (the day after
Anti-Christmas) this year:

"... he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
-- It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."

Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):


"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have just
as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
as in painting portraits...."

From Epiphany 2008:

An arrangement of planes:


http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080709-Epiphany.gif

From May 10, 2008:

A pattern of figures:

Seven partitions of the 2x2x2 cube in a book from 1906

See also Richard Wilhelm on
Hexagram 32 of the I Ching:

"Duration is a state whose movement is not worn down by hindrances. It 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. The end is reached by an inward movement, by inhalation, systole, contraction, and this movement turns into a new beginning, in which the movement is directed outward, in exhalation, diastole, expansion."

'The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell,' by Hulme, 1907, page 64, line 672: 'with this he gaf the gaste'

-- The Middle-English
    Harrowing of Hell...


    by Hulme, 1907, page 64

Posted 7/9/2008 at 9:06 AM

Wednesday July 9, 2008
God, Time, Epiphany

8:28:32 AM

Anthony Hopkins, from
All Hallows' Eve
last year
:

"For me time is God,
God is time. It's an equation,
like an Einstein equation."

James Joyce, from
June 26 (the day after
Anti-Christmas) this year
:

"... he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
-- It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."

Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):


"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have
just as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
  as in painting portraits...."

From Epiphany 2008:

An arrangement of planes:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080709-Epiphany.gif

From May 10, 2008:

A pattern of figures:

Seven partitions of the 2x2x2 cube in a book from 1906

See also Richard Wilhelm on
Hexagram 32 of the I Ching:

"Duration is a state whose movement is not worn down by hindrances. It 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. The end is reached by an inward movement, by inhalation, systole, contraction, and this movement turns into a new beginning, in which the movement is directed outward, in exhalation, diastole, expansion."

'The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell,' by Hulme, 1907, page 64, line 672: 'with this he gaf the gaste'

-- The Middle-English
    Harrowing of Hell...


    by Hulme, 1907, page 64

Posted 7/9/2008 at 8:28 AM

Tuesday July 8, 2008
Translation
to a Higher Plane


New York State Lottery
this evening: 737.

Boeing 737 in flight

"Don't know when 
  I'll be back again."

-- Peter, Paul, and Mary --
the final hit

Posted 7/8/2008 at 9:34 PM

Tuesday July 8, 2008
And the Templeton Prize
  goes to...


Sir John M. Templeton and Thomas Disch in the New York Times obituaries on Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Click on image for further details.

Posted 7/8/2008 at 3:17 PM

Tuesday July 8, 2008
New York Lottery mid-day today: 672

'The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell,' by Hulme, 1907, page 64, line 672: 'with this he gaf the gaste'

-- The Middle-English
    Harrowing of Hell...
    by Hulme, 1907, page 64

Posted 7/8/2008 at 1:14 PM

Tuesday July 8, 2008
Translation

Yesterday's entry discussed T.E. Hulme-- a co-founder, with Ezra Pound, of the Imagist school of poetry. Recent entries on randomness, using the New York Lottery as a source of examples, together with Hulme's approach to poetry discussed yesterday, suggest the following meditation-- what Charles Cameron might call a "bead game."

Part I:

Ezra Pound on Imagism (from Gaudier-Brzeska,* 1916):
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. [....]

The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --

"The apparition of these
    faces in the crowd:
 Petals, on a
    wet, black bough."

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

Part II:

Eleanor Goodman on translation (in a July 7, 2008, weblog entry, "Pound and Process: An Introduction"):

"... all translations exist on an axis. Indeed, they exist in a manifold of many axes intersecting. One axis is that of foreignness and familiarity. One axis is that of structural mimicry, another of melodic mimicry. And one axis is that of semantic fidelity."
Goodman's use of the word "manifold" here is of course poetic, not mathematical.

Part III:

New York Lottery, mid-day on July 7, 2008: 771.

Part IV:

A Google search on manifold 771 reveals that 771 is, according to Google's scanners, an alternate form (a "translation," via structural mimicry) of a script version of the letter M. (See Part V below.)

Part V:

Long version of a 
one-image poem --

"Random apparition:
  manifold translated."

This poem summarizes the
relationship (See Part IV above) of
the (apparently) random number 771
to the rather non-random concept of
a linear manifold:

Paul R. Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, Princeton, 1948-- Definition of linear manifold (denoted by script M)

[Such lines and planes have not
been, in mathematical language,
"translated."]

-- Paul R. Halmos,
Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces,
Princeton University Press, 1948

Short version of the   
above one-image poem
--

 771:
Script M

* Gaudier-Brzeska created the artifact shown on the cover of Solid Objects, a work of literary theory by Douglas Mao. For more on that artifact and on the New York Lottery, see Sermon for St. Peter's Day. "It is not in the premise that reality/ Is a solid...." --Wallace Stevens

"I was like, Oh My God." --Poet Billy Collins at Chautauqua Institution, morning of July 7, 2008

Posted 7/8/2008 at 3:33 AM

Monday July 7, 2008
Classicism

Last evening's entry referred to a 1961 essay by Iris Murdoch titled "Against Dryness."  Murdoch's use of "dryness" as a literary term is taken from a 1911 essay by T. E. Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism." Hulme says that
"There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say: 'But how can you have verse without sentiment?' You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them."
Related philosophy from Hollywood:
Bentley: ... What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
Lawrence:  It's clean.
Bentley:  Well, now, that's a very illuminating answer.
Posted 7/7/2008 at 7:00 AM

Sunday July 6, 2008
"Hancock" Powers to the Top
of July Fourth Box Office

--
This evening's online
  New York Times

New York Lottery
Sunday, July 6,
2008:

Mid-day 307
Evening  921

Log24  3/07:

Symbols:

Three 3x3 symbols of a language game:  the field, the game, checkmate

Log24  9/21:

"The consolations of form,
the clean crystalline work"

-- Iris Murdoch, 
"Against Dryness"

Will Smith
on Chess


Will Smith with chessboard

Will Smith

The Independent, 9 July 2004:

"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.

'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'

He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street-- that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.

'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves-- like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'

Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"

Related material:

"Philosophers' Stone"
and other entries
of June 25, 2008


Posted 7/6/2008 at 9:00 PM

Sunday July 6, 2008
The Pursuit of Happyness

"Remember that we deal with
Mary Chapin Carpenter --
cunning, baffling, and powerful."

-- Saying adapted
from the Big Book of
Alcoholics Anonymous

Mary Chapin Carpenter sings 'I Am a Town'

"I'm Pabst Blue Ribbon, American."

Barack Obama hoists a Pabst at the Raleigh Times Bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, on May 6, 2008

-- The Telegraph, May 7, 2008

Former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms

was city editor at the Raleigh Times.

See the Fourth of July
.

SHOE cartoon, Sunday, July 6, 2008: At a bar, a patron to the editor: 'Each day is a gift.' Editor: 'Oh? Then where do I go to return last Thursday?'

See also last Thursday.

Posted 7/6/2008 at 9:00 AM

Saturday July 5, 2008
The Bacchae
by Euripides

New York Lottery
on the Fourth of July:
 
Mid-day 678
Evening 506

These numbers may be
interpreted as references to a
current Lincoln Center play --
The Bacchae, by Euripides.

Line 678 of The Bacchae --

From a Brandeis class's translation (2006):

Messenger:

[677] Our feeding herds of cattle were just climbing
[678] above the treeline when the sun
[679] sent forth its rays to warm the earth.

Related cartoon by Ed Arno
(See yesterday morning's Log24
and entries of June 27):

Van Gogh portrait by Ed Arno: the artist in sunlight, having written 'DEAR THEO' on his canvas

Related review by Charles Isherwood in today's New York Times:
"A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a spectacular one...."
Line 506 of The Bacchae --

From a 1988 translation (pdf) by Matthew A. Neuburg--

Dionysus:

[506] You don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re doing, who you are.

Translator's note:

506 The state of this line in the MSS has driven editors to despair; in particular, the first of the things Pentheus is said not to know is, in Greek, “what you are living,” which seems doubtful Greek. Many emendations have been proposed; I accept here DODDS’s emendation, but I have a feeling we’re missing something.

AMEN.

Posted 7/5/2008 at 8:00 AM

Friday July 4, 2008
In memory of
Senator Jesse Helms, R-NC:

"I'm a church beside the highway
       where the ditches never drain,
I'm a Baptist like my daddy,
       and Jesus knows my name."

-- Mary Chapin Carpenter

Posted 7/4/2008 at 11:30 AM

Friday July 4, 2008
REDEMPTION

"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard."
-- Paul Simon


From Log24 on June 27, 2008,
the day that comic-book artist
Michael Turner died at 37 --

Van Gogh (by Ed Arno) in
The Paradise of Childhood
(by Edward Wiebé):


'Dear Theo' cartoon of van Gogh by Ed Arno, adapted to illustrate the eightfold cube


Two tomb raiders: Lara Croft and H.S.M. Coxeter

For Turner's photo-opportunity,
click on Lara.

Posted 7/4/2008 at 8:00 AM

Thursday July 3, 2008
De Haut en Bas

"... this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
     fully found"

-- Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer"

Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro in 'The Score'

Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro
in "The Score"

The Prize:

Billie Holiday, 'On the Sentimental Side' 3-CD set

Posted 7/3/2008 at 7:11 PM

Thursday July 3, 2008
Highs and Lows

From today's New York Times:

This week, we the people of North America are staging two celebrations. The Fourth of July is the 232nd birthday of the United States....

In Canada, today, another ceremony will mark the 400th anniversary of Quebec City, the first permanent settlement in New France.

Paul Simon on religion:

"I need a photo opportunity,      
I want a shot at redemption...."

Log24 on August 8, 2002
--

The cast of "Some Girls,"
a film set in Quebec City:

The cast of 'Some Girls'

"Don't want to end up a cartoon
in a cartoon graveyard."

Sally Forth on the Bicentennial and the Starland Vocal Band: 'Well, the mid-70s were a period of highs and lows.'
Amen, sister.

Posted 7/3/2008 at 11:00 AM

Thursday July 3, 2008
Blasphemous Thoughts
about Thor

Commonweal on Gopnik on Chesterton
:

"Gopnik thinks Chesterton’s aphorisms are better than any but Oscar Wilde’s, and he describes some of them as 'genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound.' For example: 'Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.'"

Pregnant and Profound:
Douglas Adams on Thor

Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have approved of on a first date.

"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?" she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"

"We will go to Asgard... now," he said.

At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world.

-- The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
See also
The Turning:


"A theorem proposed betwen the two--"

-- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

The Turning: An Approach to the Theorem of Pythagoras

From The History of Mathematics,
by Roger Cooke


"... point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B...."

-- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

Posted 7/3/2008 at 7:59 AM

Thursday July 3, 2008
x
Posted 7/3/2008 at 7:57 AM

Wednesday July 2, 2008
Let Noon Be Fair

"The serpent's eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine"


Scene from 'A Good Year'

A Good Year

-- Last summer's journal

Related material:

'The Power Of The Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts,' by Rudolf Arnheim

Cover illustration:


'Spies returning from the land of Canaan with a cluster of grapes,' Biblia Sacra Germanica

Spies returning from the land of
Canaan with a cluster of grapes.


 Colored woodcut from
Biblia Sacra Germanica,
Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1483.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Posted 7/2/2008 at 12:00 PM

Wednesday July 2, 2008
Bull's-Eye

On this date in 1961,
Ernest Hemingway shot
himself.

The Talented Patricia Highsmith

The Talented Patricia Highsmith

"Yes, oh, God, Robin was beautiful. [....] A sort of first position in attention, a face that will age only under the blows of perpetual childhood. The temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire."

-- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Related material:

The Languages of Addiction,
Ch. 13: The Barnes Complex

See also
The Garden of Eden.

Posted 7/2/2008 at 8:28 AM

Wednesday July 2, 2008
Sacerdotal Jargon

Wallace Stevens, from
"Credences of Summer" in
Transport to Summer (1947):

"Three times the concentred
     self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
     having possessed
The object, grips it
     in savage scrutiny...."

In memory of the former
first lady of Brazil,
who died on June 24 --

Emily Dickinson
:

Till Summer folds her miracle --
As Women -- do -- their Gown --
Or Priests -- adjust the Symbols --
When Sacrament -- is done --

Symbols of the
thrice concentred self:


Symbols of the Thrice Concentred Self

The circular symbol is from July 1.
The square symbol is from June 24,
the date of death for the former
first lady of Brazil.

Wallace Stevens quotes Paul Klee:

"'... what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space-- which he calls the mind or heart of creation-- determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow...."

-- "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951)

Posted 7/2/2008 at 3:33 AM

Tuesday July 1, 2008
x
Posted 7/1/2008 at 7:20 PM

Tuesday July 1, 2008
THE USUAL SUSPECT
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/090701-Macke-Emily-sm.jpg

Click image to enlarge.

Related material:


Log24 entries from the
date of Macke's death


Posted 7/1/2008 at 4:20 AM

Tuesday July 1, 2008
THE USUAL SUSPECT
 
Emily Dickinson and the Mighty Merchant

Click image to enlarge.

Related material:


The three Log24 entries from
the date of Macke's death

Posted 7/1/2008 at 3:33 AM