Ask a Stupid Question continued from last Wednesday... Log24 on August 26--
Wednesday, August 26, was the date of death for Hyman Bloom. Bloom, described in today's New York Times as "a painter of the mystical," died at 96. Bloom often painted portraits of imaginary rabbis; an article titled "American Mystic" describes "... the mesmerizing paradox at the heart of the rabbi portraits-- they remember keepers of a tradition in a method that tradition expressly forbids. As Bloom explains, age and illness endowing his voice with a hoarse, prophetic quality, 'Jewish culture has nothing to do with painting. That’s a rule, "Thou shalt not make an image of anything in the air or on the earth."'" -- Stephen Vider, Tablet Magazine, February 28. 2007 Related material: An entry in this journal linked to twice on the date of Bloom's death-- Art and Man at Yale-- and an illustrated entry from this journal on the date of the "Mystic" article-- Elements of Geometry. "So, there is one place where modernism triumphs. As in the cases of the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall, death always calls on the very best architects." -- J. G. Ballard, "A Handful of Dust" Posted 8/31/2009 at 5:24 PM |
A Crown for Varnedoe Oh, and while the King was looking down The Jester stole his thorny crown.... -- Don McLean Posted 8/31/2009 at 10:00 AM |
Coronation by Doctorow "And crown thy good with brotherhood...." Click image to enlarge. Brotherhood according to Doctorow: The Collyer Brothers Meet Flower Power Related material -- Blame It On Toby: Posted 8/30/2009 at 6:29 PM |
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"'Soul' of a Party Is Memorialized" -- NY Times online front page, 7:37 AM Personally, I prefer the life of the party: "Oh, children, catch me if you can!" -- Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia "We haven't had that spirit here since..." -- Hotel California Click to enlarge -- Posted 8/30/2009 at 8:07 AM |
Working Backward Continued from December 10, 2005: "Death itself would start working backward." -- Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia Posted 8/30/2009 at 7:00 AM |
Continued from Father's Day last year-- "For further details, click on the well." From the above link: James Hillman -- "The kind of movement Olson urges is an inward deepening of the image, an in-sighting of the superimposed levels of significance within it. This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams-- not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex." And from Feb. 29, 2008: and the following day: -- Heraclitus Posted 8/29/2009 at 8:00 PM |
Ba Gua = 8 Sections. Gua Ba = Section 8. Posted 8/29/2009 at 9:29 AM |
Part I: "Inside the church, the grief was real. Sen. Edward Kennedy's voice caught as he read his lovely eulogy, and when he was done, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg stood up and hugged him. She bravely read from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' ('Our revels now are ended. We are such stuff as dreams are made on'). Many of the 315 mourners, family and friends of the Kennedys and Bessettes, swallowed hard through a gospel choir's rendition of 'Amazing Grace,' and afterward, they sang lustily as Uncle Teddy led the old Irish songs at the wake." -- Newsweek magazine, issue dated August 2, 1999 Part II: The Ba gua (Chinese....) are eight diagrams used in Taoist cosmology to represent a range of interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each either 'broken' or 'unbroken,' representing a yin line or a yang line, respectively. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as 'trigrams' in English. --Wikipedia Posted 8/28/2009 at 3:09 AM |
The Shining of Lucero For John Cramer's daughter Kathryn (continued from September 24, 2002) "Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once." -- Broken Symmetries, 1983
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"Did you see more glass?" Background:
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"When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness. Last year [2000] History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred. Scully said the colony's founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a 'nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'" -- Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001 "Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven Before and after one arrives...." -- Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," XXVIII See also Art and Man at Yale. Posted 8/26/2009 at 9:00 AM |
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Sophists From David Lavery's weblog today-- Kierkegaard on Sophists: "If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates' day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract customers, and then would have had a sign painted saying: Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: that is how men who do not think behave)."To anyone familiar with Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the above remarks of Kierkegaard ring false. Actually, the sophists as described by Pirsig are not at all like scientists, but rather like relativist purveyors of postmodern literary "theory." According to Pirsig, the scientists are like Plato (and hence Socrates)-- defenders of objective truth. Pirsig on Sophists: I agree with Plato's (and Rebecca Goldstein's) contempt for relativists. Yet Pirsig makes a very important point. It is not the scientists but rather the storytellers (not, mind you, the literary theorists) who sometimes seem to embody Quality. As for hanging a sign outside the shop, I suggest (particularly to New Zealand's Cullinane College) that either or both of the following pictures would be more suggestive of Quality than a microscope: Posted 8/20/2009 at 4:00 PM |
Sophists From David Lavery's weblog today-- Kierkegaard on Sophists: "If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates' day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract customers, and then would have had a sign painted saying: Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: that is how men who do not think behave)." --Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, edited and translated by Alexander DruTo anyone familiar with Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the above remarks of Kierkegaard ring false. Actually, the sophists as described by Pirsig are not at all like scientists, but much more like relativist purveyors of postmodern literary "theory." According to Pirsig, the scientists are much more like Plato (and hence Socrates)-- defenders of objective truth. Pirsig on Sophists: I agree with Plato's (and Rebecca Goldstein's) contempt for relativists. Yet Pirsig makes a very important point. It is not the scientists but rather the storytellers (not, mind you, the literary theorists) who sometimes seem to embody Quality. As for hanging a sign outside the shop, I suggest (particularly to New Zealand's Cullinane College) that either or both of the following pictures would be more suggestive of Quality than a microscope: Posted 8/20/2009 at 3:36 PM |
From Visualizing GL(2,p) to Visualizing GL(2,Z) A note from 1985 leads, via today's earlier entry, to an article from 1993: See also Arnold's Cat Map. Posted 8/19/2009 at 7:00 PM |
Group Actions, 1984-2009 From a 1984 book review: "After three decades of intensive research by hundreds of group theorists, the century old problem of the classification of the finite simple groups has been solved and the whole field has been drastically changed. A few years ago the one focus of attention was the program for the classification; now there are many active areas including the study of the connections between groups and geometries, sporadic groups and, especially, the representation theory. A spate of books on finite groups, of different breadths and on a variety of topics, has appeared, and it is a good time for this to happen. Moreover, the classification means that the view of the subject is quite different; even the most elementary treatment of groups should be modified, as we now know that all finite groups are made up of groups which, for the most part, are imitations of Lie groups using finite fields instead of the reals and complexes. The typical example of a finite group is -- Jonathan L. Alperin, review of books on group theory, Bulletin (New Series) of the American Mathematical Society 10 (1984) 121, doi: 10.1090/S0273-0979-1984-15210-8 The same example at Wolfram.com: Caption from Wolfram.com: "The two-dimensional space Z3×Z3 contains nine points: (0,0), (0,1), (0,2), (1,0), (1,1), (1,2), (2,0), (2,1), and (2,2). The 48 invertible 2×2 matrices over Z3 form the general linear group known as Citation data from Wolfram.com: "GL(2,p) and GL(3,3) Acting on Points" from The Wolfram Demonstrations Project, http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/GL2PAndGL33ActingOnPoints/, Contributed by: Ed Pegg Jr" As well as displaying Cullinane's 48 pictures of group actions from 1985, the Pegg program displays many, many more actions of small finite general linear groups over finite fields. It illustrates Cullinane's 1985 statement: "Actions of GL(2,p) on a p×p coordinate-array have the same sorts of symmetries, where p is any odd prime."Pegg's program also illustrates actions on a cubical array-- a 3×3×3 array acted on by GL(3,3). For some other actions on cubical arrays, see Cullinane's Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube. Posted 8/19/2009 at 10:30 AM |
Prima Materia (Background: Art Humor: Sein Feld (March 11, 2009) and Ides of March Sermon, 2009) From Cardinal Manning's review of Kirkman's Philosophy Without Assumptions-- "And here I must confess... that between something and nothing I can find no intermediate except potentia, which does not mean force but possibility."Furthermore.... Cardinal Manning, Contemporary Review, Vol. 28, pages 1026-1027: The following will be, I believe, a correct statement of the Scholastic teaching:-- The Catholic physics expounded by Cardinal Manning above is the physics of Aristotle. For a more modern treatment of these topics, see Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. For instance: "The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater, however, meant... a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality."Compare to Cardinal Manning's statement above: "... between something and nothing I can find no intermediate except potentia..."To the mathematician, the cardinal's statement suggests the set of real numbers between 1 and 0, inclusive, by which probabilities are measured. Mappings of purely physical events to this set of numbers are perhaps better described by applied mathematicians and physicists than by philosophers, theologians, or storytellers. (Cf. Voltaire's mockery of possible-worlds philosophy and, more recently, The Onion's mockery of the fictional storyteller Fournier's quantum flux. See also Mathematics and Narrative.) Regarding events that are not purely physical-- those that have meaning for mankind, and perhaps for God-- events affecting conception, birth, life, and death-- the remarks of applied mathematicians and physicists are often ignorant and obnoxious, and very often do more harm than good. For such meaningful events, the philosophers, theologians, and storytellers are better guides. See, for instance, the works of Jung and those of his school. Meaningful events sometimes (perhaps, to God, always) exhibit striking correspondences. For the study of such correspondences, the compact topological space [0, 1] discussed above is perhaps less helpful than the finite Galois field GF(64)-- in its guise as the I Ching. Those who insist on dragging God into the picture may consult St. Augustine's Day, 2006, and Hitler's Still Point. Posted 8/18/2009 at 12:00 PM |
"... Kirkman has established an incontestable claim to be regarded as the founding father of the theory of designs." -- "T.P. Kirkman, Mathematician," by N.L. Biggs, Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, Volume 13, Number 2 (March 1981), 97-120. This paper is now available online for $12. For more about this subject, see Design Theory, by Beth, Jungnickel, and Lenz, Cambridge U. Press, Volume I (2nd ed., 1999, 1120 pages) and Volume II (2nd ed., 2000, 513 pages). For an apparently unrelated subject with the same name, see Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, by Helen Armstrong (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). For what the two subjects have in common, see Block Designs in Art and Mathematics. Posted 8/17/2009 at 9:48 PM |
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Return to Paradise (Title of a New Yorker essay dated June 2, 2008) Kenneth Bacon, an advocate for refugees, died yesterday at 64 on the Feast of the Assumption. In his honor, we may perhaps be justified in temporarily ignoring the wise saying "never assume." From a defense of the dogma of the Assumption: "On another level, the Assumption epitomizes the reconciliation of the material and spiritual world, as the human Mary enters 'body and soul to heavenly glory.' Carl Jung, the transpersonal psychologist, concluded that the doctrine of the Assumption reflected an acceptance of the physical world."For other such reconciliations, see
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Bacon was an advocate for refugees. "Even blue-blooded WASPs were refugees at one time; mine came over from England in 1630, fleeing debts for all I know," he said. Click cover to enlarge. Click for details. Bacon turned 64 last year on November 21. Log24 on that date: From a story in the November 21 Chronicle of Higher Education on a recent St. Olaf College reading of Paradise Lost:
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For St. Willard Van Orman Quine " ... to apprehend Quine receives Kyoto Prize The Timeless: Time (64 years, and more):
Macbeth: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor playerQuine: "I really have nothing to add." -- Quine, quoted on this date in 1998. Posted 8/15/2009 at 1:00 PM |
An Honest Question: "Did the Catholic Church just jump the shark by electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger? This is an honest question... not a slam." -- Anonymous user at an online forum on April 19, 2005 A Munificent Answer: No. That leap of faith was taken long before, on November 1, 1950. See the note below. Catholic Encyclopedia: "The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 15 August....Also on today's date (AP, Today in History)-- "In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh, Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility."On the same day in 1998, The New York Times published Sarah Boxer's century-end summary: Posted 8/15/2009 at 11:09 AM |
Week Seven – Imagine… Friday, August 14, 2009 @ 10:45 a.m. "Amphitheater – George Kembel – George Kembel is a co-founder and currently the executive director of the Stanford d.school, also known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University...."Background: "Plattner is said to be the 11th richest man in Germany with an estimated fortune of 5 billion USD, according to Forbes.... Plattner is a major owner of the San Jose Sharks hockey team...."Related material:
See also recent Log24 entries. Kessler died of a wasp sting on Monday, August 10, 2009. Some philosophical background for those who prefer Native American religions to the Abrahamic religions promoted at Chautauqua: On the Gleaming Way, by John Collier. Chapter One: "Native American Time." Posted 8/14/2009 at 10:31 AM |
Metaphor for Morphean morphosis, Posted 8/14/2009 at 10:10 AM |
Exegesis Text:
Exegesis:
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Online NY Times at 10:10 AM today: "Founder of Special Olympics was 88" Ask a Stupid Question... ______________________ Related material from this journal, July 30: "In the room the women come and go" -- Stephen King, The Shining: "The Wasps' Nest" NY Times today: Related material: Actual Being (Oct. 25, 2008) and The Shining (reissue, 1977 1st ed.), page 162: Posted 8/11/2009 at 11:07 AM |
For Maine Preacher Stephen King Union colonel Joshua Chamberlain, on the way to the battle at Gettysburg, remembers his boyhood. "Maine... is silent and cold. Maine in the winter: air is darker, the sky is a deeper dark. A darkness comes with winter that these Southern people don't know. Snow falls so much earlier and in the winter you can walk in a snowfield among bushes, and visitors don't know that the bushes are the tops of tall pines, and you're standing in thirty feet of snow. Visitors. Once long ago visitors in the dead of winter: a preacher preaching hell-fire. Scared the fool out of me. And I resented it and Pa said I was right. Pa. When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man, a noble man. Little humor but sometimes the door opened and you saw the warmth within a long way off, a certain sadness, a slow, remote, unfathomable quality as if the man wanted to be closer to the world but did not know how. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: 'What a piece of work is man... in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it." -- Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War Posted 8/10/2009 at 9:29 PM |
Pictures Within Pictures "The Chinese language is written in ideograms, pictures. Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram, a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram. It tells you what to do or not do, but not why. The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture. Such is the nature of the Chinese language. Simple yet complex. Pictures within pictures." -- Customer review at Amazon.com See also the pictures in this journal on today's date five years ago. Posted 8/10/2009 at 12:00 PM |
See also "Chautauqua" at Stormfront.org and the five entries ending with "Unfriendly Persuasion" this morning. Background: "Today's Sinner" Posted 8/9/2009 at 4:00 PM |
Unfriendly Persuasion "What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand...." -- Frank Rich in today's New York Times Author! Author! Posted 8/9/2009 at 9:11 AM |
On the Waterfront "On the Hoboken waterfront, people scattered as pieces of debris fell from the sky. A wheel from one of the aircraft lay on Hoboken's Sinatra Drive." --Associated Press, August 8, 2009 So set 'em up, Joe... Posted 8/9/2009 at 2:45 AM |
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Angel and Beast Screenwriter Frank Pierson spoke at Chautauqua Institution this morning. The gist of his remarks may be found in an undated graduation speech at WarnerSisters.com. His suggested motto for filmmakers: "To reach and touch the angel in the beast." The Chautauquan Daily, Friday, August 7, 2009 by Sara Toth, staff writer -- "Pierson listed his favorite movies as Posted 8/7/2009 at 9:29 PM |
A Fisher of Men Update: The above image was added at about 11 AM ET Aug. 8, 2009. From a webpage of the First United Methodist Church of Bloomington, Indiana-- Dr. Joe Emerson, April 24, 2005-- "The Ultimate Test" -- Text: I Peter 2:1-9Dr. Emerson falsely claims that the film "On the Waterfront" was based on a book by the late Budd Schulberg (who died yesterday). (Instead, the film's screenplay, written by Schulberg-- similar to an earlier screenplay by Arthur Miller, "The Hook"-- was based on a series of newspaper articles by Malcolm Johnson.) "The movie 'On the Waterfront' is once more in rerun. (That’s when Marlon Brando looked like Marlon Brando. That’s the scary part of growing old when you see what he looked like then and when he grew old.) It is based on a book by Budd Schulberg."Emerson goes on to discuss the book, Waterfront, that Schulberg wrote based on his screenplay-- "In it, you may remember a scene where Runty Nolan, a little guy, runs afoul of the mob and is brutally killed and tossed into the North River. A priest is called to give last rites after they drag him out." New York Times today Dr. Emerson flunks the test. Dr. Emerson's sermon is, as noted above (Text: I Peter 2:1-9), not mainly about waterfronts, but rather about the "living stones" metaphor of the Big Fisherman. My own remarks on the date of Dr. Emerson's sermon-- Those who like to mix mathematics with religion may regard the above 4x6 array as a context for the "living stones" metaphor. See, too, the five entries in this journal ending at 12:25 AM ET on November 12 (Grace Kelly's birthday), 2006, and today's previous entry. Posted 8/6/2009 at 1:44 PM |
The Running "Budd Schulberg, who wrote the award-winning screenplay for 'On the Waterfront' and created a classic American archetype of naked ambition, Sammy Glick, in his novel What Makes Sammy Run?, died on Wednesday. He was 95...." Posted 8/6/2009 at 6:00 AM |
Word and Image From Hall's obituary: "Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist who pioneered the study of nonverbal communication and interactions between members of different ethnic groups, died July 20 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95." NY Times piece quoted here on the date of Hall's death:
From Hall's obituary: "Mr. Hall first became interested in space and time as forms of cultural expression while working on Navajo and Hopi reservations in the 1930s." Log24, July 29:
"We are the key." -- Eye of Cat Update of about 4:45 PM 8/5: Paul Newall, "Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy"--The above photo of Juliette Binoche in Blue accompanying the quotations from Zelazny illustrates Kieślowski's concept, with graphic designs instead of musical notes. Some of the same designs are discussed in Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007). (See the Log24 entries of June 11, 2009.) Related material: "Jeffrey Overstreet, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, comments extensively on Blue. He says these stones 'are like strands of suspended crystalline tears, pieces of sharp-edged grief that Julie has not been able to express.'....For such a spirit, compare Binoche's blue mobile in Blue with Binoche's gathered shards in Bee Season. Posted 8/5/2009 at 11:30 AM |
Due Deference The New York Times today on architect Charles Gwathmey, who died Monday: "Mr. Gwathmey's Astor Place condominium tower drew criticism from those who said it was insufficiently deferential to its surroundings." Astor Place tower (click to enlarge): Surroundings: The above sculpture, popularly known as The Borg Cube, appeared here on Saturday: Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris The Borg Cube, with Cooper Union at left For deferential remarks, see Annals of Collective Consciousness. See also the link from noon today to Nobel Prize Day, 2006, and the link there to J. G. Ballard on modernism. "So, there is one place where modernism triumphs. As in the cases of the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall, death always calls on the very best architects." -- J. G. Ballard, "A Handful of Dust" Posted 8/4/2009 at 7:59 PM |
High Noon Images from Log24 on December 10, 2006 -- Nobel Prize Day, and the day after Kirk Douglas's birthday-- Kirk Douglas ad for the film "Diamonds" (2000) Images from Google News at noon today -- (Click for details.) "The serpent's eyes shine as he wraps around the vine..." -- Don Henley on a California hotel Posted 8/4/2009 at 12:25 PM |
Just What We Need Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vice comes out today. Title of a review in The New York Times: Another Doorway to theMore interesting doorways: An Aleph for Pynchon (July 9) Click on the doorway for details.
The Aleph (July 8) Click on the aleph for details. Posted 8/4/2009 at 8:00 AM |
For Your Consideration-- LA Times yesterday: Steven Miessner, keeper of the Academy's Oscars, died of a heart attack at 48 on Wednesday, July 29, 2009: Click the above to enlarge. Steve Miessner, the keeper of the Oscars, packages the statues for transport to Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles in preparation for the 81st Academy Awards ceremony held on Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009 (Chris Carlson/AP). From the date of Miessner's death: From the following day:
"Who knows where madness lies?" -- Quoted here July 29, 2009 (the day the keeper of the Oscars died) Possible clues: From Google News at about 7 AM ET Mon., Aug. 3, 2009:
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Spider Girl "The 'magico-religious' tarantella is a solo dance performed supposedly to cure... the delirium and contortions attributed to the bite of a spider at harvest (summer) time." -- Wikipedia Moral: Life's a dance (and Jersey girls are tough). For Mira Sorvino, star of "Tarantella," who was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey-- Bull on sacred cows: "Poor late nineteenth-century, poor early twentieth-century! Oh, brave new world that had such people in it: people like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel. Seven people who did more than all the machine-guns and canons of the Somme Valley or the Panzer divisions of Hitler to end the old world and to create-- if not the answers-- at least the questions that started off the new, each one of them killing one of the sacred cows on which Western consciousness had fed for so long...." -- Apostolos Doxiadis, "Writing Incompleteness-- the Play" (pdf). See also Mathematics and Narrative. Posted 8/2/2009 at 8:20 PM |
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And the Tony goes to... The New York Times today: "Tony Rosenthal, who created 'Alamo,' the eternally popular revolving black cube in Astor Place in the East Village, and many other public sculptures, died on Tuesday [July 28, 2009] in Southampton, N.Y. He was 94." The Astor Place sculpture, near Cooper Union, is also known as The Borg Cube:The Borg Cube, with Cooper Union at left Wikipedia on The Borg Queen: "The Borg Queen is the focal point within the Borg collective consciousness." Possible Borg-Queen candidates: Helen Mirren, who appeared in this journal on the date of Rosenthal's death (see Monumental Anniversary), and Julie Taymor, who recently directed Mirren as Prospera in a feminist version of "The Tempest." Both Mirren and Taymor would appreciate the work of Anita Borg, who pioneered the role of women in computer science. "Her colleagues mourned Borg's passing, even as they stressed how crucial she was in creating a kind of collective consciousness for women working in the heavily male-dominated field of computer technology." --Salon.com obituary Anita Borg Borg died on Sunday, April 6, 2003. See The New York Times Magazine for that date in Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art-- (Cover typography revised) I would award the Borg-Queen Tony to Taymor, who seems to have a firmer grasp of technology than Mirren. See Language Game, Wittgenstein's birthday, 2009. Posted 8/1/2009 at 9:26 AM |