Stopped into a church I passed along the way Well, I got down on my knees Got down on my knees And I pretend to pray I pretend to pray The preacher locked the door Preacher locked the door He knows I'm gonna stay Knows I'm gonna stay California dreamin California dreamin On such a winter's day Related material: Yesterday's "Happy birthday" for the late Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas Today's New York Times story on this morning's rededication of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine Posted 11/30/2008 at 6:30 PM |
Abstraction and Faith
A vulgarized version of LeWitt's remarks appears on a webpage of the National Gallery of Art.
For related remarks on abstraction perhaps less easily vulgarized than those of LeWitt, see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube. For the relation of this sort of geometry to faith, see All Hallows' Eve, 2006. Posted 11/30/2008 at 10:31 AM |
The Messier Brand Virginia Heffernan on the film version of A Wrinkle in Time: "... the film is also sad, and soaring. It recalls the hippie days when a perverse, hubristic originality was a quality to be cultivated, not medicated. Told not from an aloof remove-- through the eyes of a wise Yoda or Peter Jackson-- the movie glitters irregularly, woven through with the sparkling fibers of a righteous child's tormented imagination. Steven Spielberg also attempted, with the same ambiguous but moving results, this messier brand of science fiction in 'A.I.'" Posted 11/29/2008 at 1:06 PM |
An Astrophysicist Goes Missing, And His Children Search the Stars Related material:
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A Story for Madeleine Part One: Frame Tale Part Two: A Little Princess Part Three: Happy Birthday Posted 11/29/2008 at 2:06 AM |
Meanwhile... Recent abstracts of interest:Kuwait Foundation Lectures -- Jan. 29, 2008: J. P. Wintenberger, "On the Proof of Serre's Conjecture" Oct. 28, 2008: Chandrashekhar Khare, "Modular Forms and Galois Representations" Background: The Last Theorem, a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl published Aug. 5, 2008 "Going Beyond Fermat's Last Theorem," a news article in The Hindu published April 25, 2005 Wikipedia: Serre Conjecture (Number Theory) Henri Darmon, "Serre's Conjectures" Posted 11/26/2008 at 1:00 PM |
"Wow wow wow. Who the heck is this guy?" Posted 11/24/2008 at 8:16 PM |
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At the Still Point This morning's entry quoted Ezra Pound: "The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good."Dance critic Clive Barnes died Wednesday. Pound may have whispered his advice in St. Peter's ear when Barnes stood before the Janitor Coeli at heaven's gate. If so, another angel may have whispered in the other ear, "Vide Forever Fonteyn." Posted 11/23/2008 at 12:00 PM |
The Idea of Identity "The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good." -- Ezra Pound, How to Read Music critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996: The Juilliard'sExercise Part I: Apply Holland's Monday-to-Friday "idea of identity" to the lives and deaths during the week of Monday, Nov. 10 ("Frame Tales"), through Friday, Nov. 14, of a musician and a maker of music documentaries-- Mitch Mitchell (d. Nov. 12) and Baird Bryant (d. Nov. 13). Part II: Apply Holland's "idea of identity" to last week (Monday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 21), combining it with Wigner's remarks on invariance (discussed here on Monday) and with the "red dragon" (Log24, Nov. 15) concept of flight over "the Hump"-- the Himalayas-- and the 1991 documentary filmed by Bryant, "Heart of Tibet." Part III: Discuss Parts I and II in the context of Eliot's Four Quartets. (See Time Fold, The Field of Reason, and Balance.) Posted 11/23/2008 at 9:00 AM |
Gatsby Starts Over: Cleaning Up the St. Olaf Mess St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota -- From The MSCS Mess (Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science) November 14, 2008 Volume 37, Number 9-- Math Film Festival 2008Background: Log24 entries of Wednesday, November 19, the day "Good Will Hunting" was shown: Damnation Morning revisited and Mathematics and Narrative continued From a story in the November 21 Chronicle of Higher Education on a recent St. Olaf College reading of Paradise Lost:
Posted 11/21/2008 at 5:01 PM |
"Through the unknown, remembered gate...." -- Four Quartets (Epigraph to the introduction, Parallelisms of Complete Designs by Peter J. Cameron, Merton College, Oxford) "It's still the same old story...." -- Song lyric The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6: "An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through." There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily today: "John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too..." more» The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education. For related material on Paradise Lost and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative. Posted 11/19/2008 at 5:01 PM |
Sympathy for Baird Bryant "Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name But what's puzzling you Is the nature of my game" -- The Rolling Stones "'Don't you want to hear him call your name when you're standing at the pearly gates?' I told the Preacher 'Yes, I do, but I hope he don't call today.'" -- Kenny Chesney, song at the CMA Awards on Wednesday, November 12, quoted here at 9:00 AM on Thursday, Novermber 13 Related material: LA Times obituary for the experienced bohemian writer and filmmaker Baird Bryant, who died at 80 on Thursday, November 13. Bryant filmed parts of "Easy Rider" in 1968 and of the Altamont concert in 1969. He was apparently a member of the Harvard College Class of 1950. A more complete account of Bryant's life Thirty references to the Devil in a book by Bryant Solace With Interruptions (Log24 entries for November 12, 13, and 14 -- the day before Bryant's death, the day of his death, and the day after) Posted 11/19/2008 at 2:56 AM |
Limits From the previous entry: "If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist." -- Margaret Atwood, author of Cat's Eye Happy birthday to the late Eugene Wigner ... and a belated Merry Christmas to Paul Newman: "The laws of nature permit us to foresee events on the basis of the knowledge of other events; the principles of invariance should permit us to establish new correlations between events, on the basis of the knowledge of established correlations between events. This is exactly what they do." -- Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize Lecture, December 12, 1963 Posted 11/17/2008 at 9:00 AM |
Atwood on Art From the previous entry: "If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist." -- Margaret Atwood, author of Cat's Eye "The power of the dark is ascending. The light retreats to security, so that the dark cannot encroach upon it." -- Richard Wilhelm Related material: Darkness Visible Posted 11/16/2008 at 9:00 PM |
Art and Lies Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde-- "What is Art For?"-- in today's New York Times Magazine: Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art -- "Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives.... He... can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "... almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
For such a cube, see this illustration in (and the four entries preceding it -- Log24, May 9, 2003). Beware of Gardner's "clearly" and other lies. Posted 11/16/2008 at 8:00 PM |
From Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda: "It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch."Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton's nine was Koestler. From another book related to this exodus: "Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces-- an analysis which is geometrical in nature."-- Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam: "Riesz's example is well worth following today."Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews. For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also "geometrical in nature," see The Pope in Plato's Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education. Posted 11/16/2008 at 10:30 AM |
Middle Kingdom Space Machine Family From "The Chung," by W. C. McDonald, Jr.-- "CHUNG is a Chinese character which means 'in the middle of' or 'the center,' or, as applied to our CNAC aircraft, 'MIDDLE KINGDOM SPACE MACHINE FAMILY.'" (Here CNAC stands for "China National Aviation Corporation," an organization that in World War II, as part of the Army Air Transport Command, made high-altitude flights over the Himalayas.) Related material on poetry: Related material on space machines: Posted 11/15/2008 at 8:48 AM |
Ballistics and Faith From a review of José Saramago's new novel, Death With Interruptions: "The church has never been asked to explain anything," the cardinal assures the prime minister. "Our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith."Related material: Sept. 7, 2006- Birthday of Elizabeth I Sept. 7, 2007- Madeleine L'Engle is Dead Sept. 7, 2008- From the Finland Station For some mythology relevant to the first two of these three dates, see "Damnation Morning" and The Big Time. For some non-mythology related to ballistics, faith, and the third of these dates, see Rudy Ratzinger vs. Joseph Ratzinger. As for the main character of Saramago's novel...
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Riverrun (The first word in Finnegans Wake. See also the Log24 entries following the death of Pope John Paul II.) At Inside Higher Ed, Margaret Soltan ("UD") discusses... "moments of clarity [cf. related essay (pdf)] that seem, when you look at all of them together late in the day, to disclose our life’s otherwise hidden pattern, meaning, and flow.
Related material: Maclean's fellow author Kilgore Trout and the story he is said to be most proud of, about Bunker Bingo. See also yesterday's entry, Bob's Country Bunker, and On Linguistic Creation.Posted 11/14/2008 at 8:00 AM |
In Memory of a Different Drummer Drummer Mitch Mitchell, 61, of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was found dead at 3 AM yesterday in his hotel room. "Everybody wants to go to heaven" -- Kenny Chesney, song at last night's Country Music Awards Click to enlarge -- "Make me young" -- Kilgore Trout (Log24, 5/14/07) Related material -- the word "experienced" in yesterday's entry. Posted 11/13/2008 at 9:00 AM |
Quantum of Solace Lottery Numbers for November 11, 2008: PA midday 007, evening 628 NY midday 153, evening 069 Experienced readers of this journal will have little difficulty interpreting these results, except for 153. For that enigmatic number, see Object Lesson. Posted 11/12/2008 at 8:35 AM |
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Frame Tales From June 30 -- ("Will this be on the test?") Frame Tale One:
Frame Tale Two: Barry Sharples on his version of the Kaleidoscope Puzzle -- Background: "A possible origin of this puzzle is found in a dialogue between Socrates and Meno written by the Greek philosopher, Plato, where a square is drawn inside a square such that the blue square is twice the area of the yellow square. Colouring the triangles produces a starting pattern which is a one-diamond figure made up of four tiles and there are 24 different possible arrangements." "The king asked, in compensation for his toils during this strangest of all the nights he had ever known, that the twenty-four riddle tales told him by the specter, together with the story of the night itself, should be made known over the whole earth and remain eternally famous among men." Frame Tale Three: Finnegans Wake -- "The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne." Posted 11/10/2008 at 10:31 AM |
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"Beauty is a riddle." -- Dostoevsky "Seven is Heaven Eight is a Gate Nine is a Vine" -- Folk rhyme Posted 11/9/2008 at 9:00 AM |
Roman Religion Benedict XVI, before he became Pope: ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM ET PORTAE INFERI NON PRAEVALEBUNT ADVERSUS EAM "... a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough.... Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient." Tom O'Bedlam: "I know more than Apollo...." Wikipedia: "The lapis manalis (Latin: 'stone of the Manes') was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead.... One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld.... The... mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time." Posted 11/8/2008 at 10:30 AM |
From a Wikipedia:Cartoon Graveyard "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?" -- T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" "In the Roman Catholic tradition, the term 'Body of Christ' refers not only to the body of Christ in the spiritual realm, but also to two distinct though related things: the Church and the reality of the transubstantiated bread of the Eucharist.... According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 'the comparison of the Church with the body casts light on the intimate bond between Christ and his Church. Not only is she gathered around him; she is united in him, in his body....' ....To distinguish the Body of Christ in this sense from his physical body, the term 'Mystical Body of Christ' is often used. This term was used as the first words, and so as the title, of the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi of Pope Pius XII." Pope Pius XII: "83. The Sacrament of the Eucharist is itself a striking and wonderful figure of the unity of the Church, if we consider how in the bread to be consecrated many grains go to form one whole, and that in it the very Author of supernatural grace is given to us, so that through Him we may receive the spirit of charity in which we are bidden to live now no longer our own life but the life of Christ, and to love the Redeemer Himself in all the members of His social Body." Related material: Log24 on this date in 2002: Religious Symbolism at Princeton as well as King of Infinite Space -- and a "striking and wonderful figure" from this morning's newspaper-- Posted 11/8/2008 at 8:28 AM |
The Sincerest Form At a British puzzle website today I found this, titled "Tiles Puzzle by Steven H. Cullinane"--of Flattery The version there states that "there are 322,560 patterns made by swapping rows, swapping columns and swapping the four 2x2 quadrants!" Actually, only 840 patterns can be made in this version. These are formed by 322,560 permitted permutations of the 16 tiles. This is also true in my Kaleidoscope Puzzle. For a display of all 322,560 permutations as pairs of (orthogonal) patterns, see the Diamond 16 Puzzle. Update of Nov. 10, 2008: The error has been corrected. Posted 11/7/2008 at 2:22 PM |
Billy Graham is 90. Joni Mitchell is 65. Buen fin de semana a todos. -- Desconvencida Posted 11/7/2008 at 10:31 AM |
The Getaway Log24 on St. Luke's Day this year: "Damien Hirst's gory new seriesAn example of lifestyle coverage at The New York Times-- a 2006 story on visual art in Mexico that included a reference to... 'The Death of God-- Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools.'" For descriptions of such life, I prefer the literary art of Robert Stone-- in particular, Stone's novel A Flag for Sunrise.The review's conclusion: "A Flag for Sunrise isThe author of that review, John Leonard, died Wednesday, Nov. 5. This morning's Times has his obituary. Posted 11/7/2008 at 7:11 AM |
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Death of a Classmate Michael Crichton, Harvard College, 1964 Authors Michael Crichton and David Foster Wallace in today's New York Times obituaries The Times's remarks above on the prose styles of Crichton and Wallace-- "compelling formula" vs. "intricate complexity"-- suggest the following works of visual art in memory of Crichton. "Crystal"-- "Dragon" (from Crichton's Jurassic Park)-- For the mathematics (dyadic harmonic analysis) relating these two figures, see Crystal and Dragon. Some philosophical remarks related to the Harvard background that Crichton and I share-- Hitler's Still Point and The Crimson Passion. Posted 11/6/2008 at 10:07 AM |
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