Log24

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Der Einsatz

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 AM

See the title phrase and Ice 9 in this journal.

Office Visit

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:03 AM

From the screenplay of "The Number 23"—

INT. NATHANIEL'S INSTITUTE, STAIRWELL – NIGHT

Agatha climbs a dark staircase. Layers of dust

testify to years of neglect.

INT. 3RD FLOOR CORRIDOR – CONTINUOUS

Agatha finds ROOM 318. A rusting door plaque reads,

"DR. SIRIUS LEARY, M.D. PSYCHIATRY."

For related material, see "Leary + Cuernavaca" and "Prime Cut."

Happy belated 2/3 birthday to Walter Sparrow.

Related material— Two other occurrences of "318" in this journal—
in another horror story, "The Sweet Smell of Avon,"
and in a quote from the Feast of St. Nicholas, 2010

"When Novelists Become Cubists," by Andre Furlani—

"A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that
it is the only way to get all the meaning in.
Genius always proceeds by faith" (312).

The unparaphrasable architectonic text
"differs from other narrative in that the meaning
shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line" (318).

[The references are to page numbers in
 Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination .]

Friday, February 3, 2012

Souvenir

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:35 PM

A phrase from today's noon post—

"Le souvenir de ce célèbre orateur"—

a souvenir

— and a song.

Unusual Suspects

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

"… 'Mes chers frères, n'oubliez jamais,
  quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières,
  que la plus belle des ruses du diable
  est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!'

     Le souvenir de ce célèbre orateur
nous conduisit naturellement vers le sujet des académies,
et mon étrange convive m'affirma qu'il ne dédaignait pas,
en beaucoup de cas, d'inspirer la plume, la parole et la conscience
des pédagogues, et qu'il assistait presque toujours en personne,
quoique invisible, à toutes les séances académiques." 

— Baudelaire, "Le Joueur Généreux"

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Rien de Rien*

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:45 PM

Click to enlarge:

In memory of the longtime co-editor of Series A  of the
Journal of Combinatorial Theory , who died on January 12th,
2012, here is a link to a Log24 post of that date.

* For the title, see January 19th.

Die Nichtung

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

"It seems that Hilbert had no taste for philosophers….
Hans Rademacher told this reviewer that, after Heidegger
once lectured in Göttingen, Hilbert gleefully repeated
to everyone the phrase "Das Nichts nichtet die Nichtung ."

— Gian-Carlo Rota, Discrete Thoughts , 2nd ed., p. 233

Die Lichtung

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 11:30 AM

See January 4th, 2012.

(This link resulted from an application of Heidegger's
philosophy of "the opening" and "the shining" (Die Lichtung ).)

See also The Shining of May 29.

Update of 12:19 AM Feb. 3, 2012—
The undated (but cached by Google on January 4th, 2012)
unsigned post from a deleted weblog linked to above as
"an application" is also available in a version that is signed
(but still undated).

The Opening

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 3:33 AM

From ShiftLock in this journal—

"Philosophy knows nothing of the opening."
— Heidegger

See also a post of September 25, 2009,
and a film whose opening was on that date.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Politics

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:16 PM

"Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?"

Wislawa Szymborska

See also the two previous posts,
Disturbing Archimedes and Tesseract.

Update—

IMAGE- Nobel-Prize-winning poet dies on St. Bridget's Day, 2012

Disturbing Archimedes

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:01 PM

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of
Mathematics and Narrative

"… brings together important thinkers in mathematics,
history, and philosophy to explore the relationship
between mathematics and narrative.
  The book's title recalls the last words of the great
Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was
slain by a Roman soldier— 'Don't disturb my circles' …."

Related material—

Archimedes's Vicious Circle

IMAGE- Archimedes's measurement of the area of a circle (by sharply pointed triangles)

IMAGE- The Mouth of Truth in 'Roman Holiday'

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Tesseract

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:21 PM
 

"… a finite set with  elements     
  is sometimes called an n-set …."

Tesseract formed from a 4-set—

IMAGE- Tesseract.

0000 0100 1100 1000
0001 0101 1101 1001
0011 0111 1111 1011
0010 0110 1110 1010

The same 16 subsets or points can
be arranged in a 4×4 array that has,
when the array's opposite edges are
joined together, the same adjacencies
as those of the above tesseract.

"There is  such a thing as a 4-set."
— Saying adapted from a novel   

Monday, January 30, 2012

Enda’s Game*

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:00 PM

The following passage by Tolkien was suggested by a copy of next Sunday's New York Times Book Review  that arrived in the mail today. (See Orson Scott Card's remarks on page 26— "Uncle Orson"— and the Review 's concluding essay "Grand Allusion.")

"Lastly, tengwesta  [system or code of signs] has also become an impediment. It is in Incarnates clearer and more precise than their direct reception of thought. By it also they can communicate easily with others, when no strength is added to their thought: as, for example, when strangers first meet. And, as we have seen, the use of 'language' soon becomes habitual, so that the practice of ósanwe  (interchange of thought) is neglected and becomes more difficult. Thus we see that the Incarnate tend more and more to use or to endeavour to use ósanwe  only in great need and urgency, and especially when lambe  is unavailing. As when the voice cannot be heard, which comes most often because of distance. For distance in itself offers no impediment whatever to ósanwe . But those who by affinity might well use ósanwe  will use lambe  when in proximity, by habit or preference. Yet we may mark also how the 'affine' may more quickly understand the lambe  that they use between them, and indeed all that they would say is not put into words. With fewer words they come swifter to a better understanding. There can be no doubt that here ósanwe  is also often taking place; for the will to converse in lambe  is a will to communicate thought, and lays the minds open. It may be, of course, that the two that converse know already part of the matter and the thought of the other upon it, so that only allusions dark to the stranger need be made; but this is not always so. The affine** will reach an understanding more swiftly than strangers upon matters that neither have before discussed, and they will more quickly perceive the import of words that, however numerous, well-chosen, and precise, must remain inadequate."

* "If a poem catches a student's interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary…."

   — Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in the essay "Grand Allusion" mentioned above. For a brief dictionary of most of the unfamiliar words in this post's title and in the above passage, see Vinyar Tengwar  39 (July 1998). This is copyrighted but freely available on the Web.

** The word "affine" has connotations not intended by Tolkien. See that word in this journal. See also page 5 of next Sunday's Times Book Review , which contains a full-page ad for the 50th anniversary edition of A Wrinkle in Time . "There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Declarations

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 6:00 PM

Weblog posts of two prominent mathematicians today discussed
what appears to be a revolution inspired by the business practices
of some commercial publishers of mathematics.

See Gowers and Cameron.

My own concern is more with the so-called "Non-Euclidean Revolution"
described by Richard Trudeau in a book of that title (Birkhäuser, 1987).

A 1976 document relevant to the concerns in the Trudeau book—

Though not as well known as another document discussing
"self-evident" truths, Cameron's remarks are also of some
philosophical interest.

They apply to finite  geometry, a topic unknown to Euclid,
but nevertheless of considerable significance for the foundations  
of mathematics.

"The hand of the creative artist, laid upon the major premise,
 rocks the foundations of the world." — Dorothy Sayers

Sunday School

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 AM

Beach with Palms

The following images were suggested by the
"other things" link in yesterday's "287501346" post.

From June 10, 2008

Two frames from the Jodie Foster film "Contact"—

See Storyline and Time Fold.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

The Sweet Smell of Avon

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:48 AM

IMAGE- NY Times on 'Narrowing the Definition of Autism'

The twin topics of autism and of narrowing definitions
suggested the following remarks.

The mystical number "318" in the pilot episode
of Kiefer Sutherland's new series about autism, "Touch,"
is so small that it can easily apply (as the pilot
illustrated) to many different things: a date, a
time, a bus number, an address, etc.

The last 3/18 Log24 post— Defining Configurations
led, after a false start and some further research,
to the writing of the webpage Configurations and Squares.

An image from that page—

IMAGE- Coxeter 3x3 array with rows labeled 287/501/346.

Interpreting this, in an autistic manner, as the number
287501346 lets us search for more specific items
than those labeled simply 318.

The search yields, among other things, an offer of
Night Magic Cologne  (unsold)—

IMAGE- Online offer of Avon Night Magic Cologne- 'The mystery and magic of the night is yours.'

For further mystery and magic, see, from the date
the Night Magic offer closed— May 8, 2010— "A Better Story."
See also the next day's followup, "The Ninth Gate."

Friday, January 27, 2012

Totentanz

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 6:00 PM

See also the links at the end of this morning's post.

Narrative

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:21 PM

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101113-Ono.gif

Notices of the American Mathematical Society

See also Rosetta Stone in this  journal.

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:44 AM

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

"Circles Disturbed  brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier— 'Don't disturb my circles'— words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds–stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities."

Timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Norway, March 1942

"The Red Skull finds the Tesseract, a cube of strange power,
said to be the jewel of Odin’s treasure room, in Tonsberg Norway.
 (Captain America: The First Avenger)"

Tesseracts Disturbed — (Click to enlarge)

Detail of Tesseracts Disturbed —

Narrative of the detail—

See Tesseract in this journal and Norway, May 2010

The Oslo Version and Annals of Conceptual Art.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave…"

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Change Illustrated

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:59 PM

"Something is happening to our town."

— Mayor of Pleasantville

Related material— Alicia Keys's birthday,
the ending of Midnight in Paris , and Rocket Billie.

See also a Sinatra song uploaded on this date
(Paul Newman's birthday) last year.

Found in Space

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 6:00 PM
 

"You have a clear and lively voice."
           — Midnight in Paris

Related material— Today's previous post.

Lamedvavnik

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:57 AM

NYT > Obituaries Dick Tufeld, Robot Voice in TV’s ‘Lost in Space,’ Dies at 85
    Wed Jan 25, 2012 23:42 from NYT Obituaries  By Bruce Weber

   "Mr. Tufeld possessed one of Hollywood’s most often-heard
   disembodied voices, especially from the 1950s through the 1970s."

In memoriam— A link from the date of Tufeld's death

After Midnight

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:16 AM

IMAGE- NYT obits shortly after midnight on Jan. 26, 2012

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

A Larger City

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:09 AM
ANY CHARACTER HERE
BOOKS OF THE TIMES

HOW IT ALL BEGAN
By Penelope Lively
229 pages. Viking. $26.95.

Review by Michiko Kakutani
in The New York Times ,
online Jan. 23, 2012

As a historian, Henry acknowledges that he has “a soft spot for what is known as the Cleopatra’s nose theory of history— the proposal that had the nose of Cleopatra been an inch longer, the fortunes of Rome would have been different.” It’s a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, he admits, but nonetheless “a reference to random causality that makes a lot of sense when we think about the erratic sequence of events that we call history.”

What Ms. Lively has done in this captivating volume is to use all her copious storytelling gifts to show how a similar kind of random causality rules individual lives, how one unlucky event can set off unexpected chain reactions, how the so-called butterfly effect— whereby the flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings can supposedly lead to a huge storm elsewhere in the world— ripples through the ebb and flow of daily life.

Rhetorical question—

"Why walk when you can fly?"
— Mary Chapin Carpenter

Rhetorical answer—

Two excerpts from a webpage on random walks

A drunk man will find his way home,
but a drunk bird may get lost forever.

— Shizuo Kakutani

Now we move to a larger city

IMAGE- 'Now we move to a larger city...' illustrated by 4x4 grid with dots signifying extension of the grid

State of a Nation

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:19 AM

Happy birthday to…

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Infinity Point

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:20 PM

From Labyrinth of the Line (March 2, 2011)—

"… construct the Golay code by taking the 24 points
to be the points of the projective line F23 ∪ {}…."

— Robert A. Wilson

A simpler projective line— a Galois geometry
model of the line F2 ∪ {}—

Image- The Three-Point Line: A Finite Projective Geometry

Here we may consider  to be modeled*
by the third square above— the Galois window .

* Update of about 1 AM Jan. 25, 2012—
  This infinity-modeling is of course a poetic conceit,
  not to be taken too seriously. For a serious 
  discussion of points at infinity and finite fields,
  see (for instance) Daniel Bump's "The Group GL(2)."

The Screwing

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:59 AM

"Debates about canonicity have been raging in my field
(literary studies) for as long as the field has been
around. Who's in? Who's out? How do we decide?"

— Stephen Ramsay, "The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around"

An example of canonicity in geometry—

"There are eight heptads of 7 mutually azygetic screws, each consisting of the screws having a fixed subscript (from 0 to 7) in common. The transformations of LF(4,2) correspond in a one-to-one manner with the even permutations on these heptads, and this establishes the isomorphism of LF(4,2) and A8. The 35 lines in S3 correspond uniquely to the separations of the eight heptads into two complementary sets of 4…."

 — J.S. Frame, 1955 review of a 1954 paper by W.L. Edge,
"The Geometry of the Linear Fractional Group LF(4,2)"

Thanks for the Ramsay link are due to Stanley Fish
(last evening's online New York Times ).

For further details, see The Galois Tesseract.

Monday, January 23, 2012

How It Works

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:59 PM

(Continued)

J. H. Conway in 1971 discussed the role of an elementary abelian group
of order 16 in the Mathieu group M24. His approach at that time was
purely algebraic, not geometric—

IMAGE- J. H. Conway in 1971 discussed the role of the elementary abelian group of order 16 in the Mathieu group M24. His approach then was purely algebraic, not geometric.

For earlier (and later) discussions of the geometry  (not the algebra )
of that order-16 group (i.e., the group of translations of the affine space
of 4 dimensions over the 2-element field), see The Galois Tesseract.

How Stuff Works

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 3:48 PM

"Design is how it works." —Steve Jobs

Website logo—

IMAGE- Website logo- 'How Stuff Works: We figure it out so you don't have to'

Screenshot from How Stuff Works—

IMAGE- Christ in the Last Judgment, from 'How Stuff Works'

IMAGE- 'Apple's Mind-Bogglingly Greedy and Evil License Agreement'

(Click image for details.)

From "A Device Worthy of a Gothic Novel,"
Chapter XVI of The Club Dumas,
by Arturo Perez-Reverte (1993),
Vintage International, April 1998….
the basis of the 1999 Roman Polanski film
The Ninth Gate

Aren't you going to give me a document to sign?"
"A document?"
"Yes. It used to be called a pact. Now it would be a contract
with lots of small print, wouldn't it? 'In the event of litigation,
the parties are to submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of…'
That's a funny thing. I wonder which court covers this."

Labyrinth

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 5:01 AM

"Yo sé de un laberinto griego que es una línea única, recta."
 —Borges, "La Muerte y la Brújula"

"I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line."
—Borges, "Death and the Compass"

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Souvenir*

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:09 PM

From life's box of chocolates

Happy birthday to Piper Laurie.

* Those who prefer their
souvenirs without sentiment
may consult the quaternions.

Year of the Dragon

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 3:33 PM

In China, the Year of the Dragon
has now begun. See Holy + Field
in this journal.

Pound Sign

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:00 PM

See Metamagical Themas

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120111-Hofstadter.gif

— as well as the pound sign, alias hash .

Egress

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120122-NYTobits.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120108-CardinalPreoccupied.jpg

"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."

The New Yorker , May 13, 2002

Card Trick

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 11:30 AM

An image suggested by a book at
Princeton University Press—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120122-Scoop-Tarot.jpg

Click image for details.

See also a somewhat deeper book from Princeton.

Sermon

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:00 AM

Kindergarten Theology

(Log24, St. Bridget's Day, 2008)

The Presbyterian Exorcist

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:26 AM

(Backstory— Presbyterian in this journal)

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed  brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier–"Don't disturb my circles"–words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds–stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities.

Exercise— Discuss the above paragraph's vulgarity.

Discuss also the more robust vulgarity of Marvel Entertainment

Context— "Marvel" in this journal, and The Cosmic Cube.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

The Oxford Murders

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:09 AM

 (Continued)

Blame It on Trajan

Wikipedia on the 2008 film The Oxford Murders

IMAGE- Tall column of images from Log24, headed by permutahedron pictures

Christmas Eve image search
suggested by Stevens's phrase
"diamond globe."

(Larger version: 2 MB)

Friday, January 20, 2012

Cock Tale

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:00 PM

(Continued from November 12, 2005 and June 7, 2011)

IMAGE- 1970 photo used in New Yorker of Jan. 23, 2012, with added photo credit information from a Philippe Sollers website

Related material— "Labyrinth," a fiction
by the late Roberto Bolaño
in the current New Yorker 

"There's no photo credit."

The Nothing That Is

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 PM

"The 'one' with whom the reader has identified himself
has now become 'the listener, who listens in the snow';
he has become the snow man, and he knows winter
with a mind of winter, knows it in its strictest reality,
stripped of all imagination and human feeling.
But at that point when he sees the winter scene
reduced to absolute fact, as the object not of the mind,
but of the perfect perceptual eye that sees
'nothing that is not there,' then the scene,
devoid of  its imaginative correspondences,
has become 'the nothing that is.'"

Robert Pack, Wallace Stevens:
An Approach to His Poetry and Thought
.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958.

 

IMAGE- The Ninefold Square at Ninevine.net

Chess

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:00 PM
 
Saturday, November 12, 2005

— m759 @ 8:00 PM

(continued)

A Singer 7-Cycle

“… problems are the poetry of chess.
   They demand from the composer
   the same virtues that characterize
   all worthwhile art:
   originality, invention, 
   harmony, conciseness,
   complexity, and
   splendid insincerity.”

   —Vladimir Nabokov

Soul Souvenirs

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:00 PM

"If the fault is with the soul, the sovereigns
Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first.
If the fault is with the souvenirs, yet these
Are the soul itself. And the whole of the soul, Swenson,
As every man in Sweden will concede,
Still hankers after lions, or, to shift,
Still hankers after sovereign images."

— Wallace Stevens

"Friday night and the lights are low"
— ABBA

See also American Music Award.

Brightness at Noon

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

(Continued)

See "harmonic analysis" in Mathematical Imagery and elsewhere in this journal.

Poetry and Thought*

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:30 AM

* Title courtesy of George Steiner.
   For the "thought" part, see Plato's diamond
   in last night's Mathematical Imagery.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Mathematical Imagery

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:28 PM

From the Crafoord Prize website

Related meta -mathematical image from Diamond Theory

Mathematical  image related to combinatorics—

See also permutahedron in this journal.

Hegel

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:08 PM

Those impressed by George Steiner's remark on Hegel in the previous post may consult…

(Click to enlarge.)

(The Christian Examiner.  Volume LXXX. New Series, Volume I.  January, March, May, 1866.
New York: James Miller, Publisher, 522, Broadway.  Boston: Walker, Fuller, & Co.

No. CCLIV, Art. IV.– THE SECRET OF HEGEL.
By C. C. Everett, pp. 196-207.

A review of…

The Secret of Hegel, being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter.
By James Hutchinson Sterling. In two volumes.
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green. 1865. 8vo, 2 vols.)

On Hegel, from the review—

"He starts not from the beginning, but from the heart, of the world.
There never was a time when this pure Being— which, in its
undivided absoluteness, is indistinguishable from nothing;
as pure, unbroken light is indistinguishable from darkness—

was by itself alone; but this absolute Being is yet the foundation
and the groundwork of whatever is."

For more on Hegel's logic, see Marxists.org.

See also Steiner on chess and Lenin in The New Yorker
(September 7, 1968, page 133).

’Ceptions

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:02 PM

Perception vs. Inception

Question—

"Where philosophy and literature mesh, where they are litigious toward one another in form or matter, these echoes of origin can be heard. The poetic genius of abstract thought is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology  better than Edith Piaf’s non de non , a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized?

This essay is an attempt to listen more closely."

— George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought 

Answer—

Edith Piaf's rien de rien . See also Is Nothing Sacred?

Square Triangles

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:26 PM

MathWorld.Wolfram.com has an article titled "Square-Triangle Theorem."

An article of my own, whose HTML title was previously "Triangles are Square," has been retitled accordingly.

What Rough Beast

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:28 AM

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120119-Uggie.jpg

"On the Internet, nobody knows…"

Related material— Story Theory and the Number of the Beast

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

For Esther

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:23 AM

http://log24.com/images/esther/nametag.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120118-GoogleNews-714AM.jpg

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Augenmusik

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:48 PM

In memory of Bach interpreter
Gustav Leonhardt

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120117-SolomonsCube.jpg

Augenmusik

Khora as Synchronicity

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 11:01 AM

A search for khora  + tao  yields a paper on Derrida—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120117-IanEdwards-OnKhora.gif

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120117-IanEdwards.jpg

A check of the above date— Nov. 18, 2010— yields…

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Frontiers of Speculation

 m759 @ 8:02 AM

Peter Woit has a post on Scientific American 's new Garrett Lisi article, "A Geometric Theory of Everything."

The Scientific American  subtitle is "Deep down, the particles and forces of the universe are a manifestation of exquisite geometry."

See also Rhetoric (Nov. 4, 2010) and Exquisite Geometries (May 19, 2009).

Related material on the temptation of physics
for a pure mathematician—

This morning's post on khora  and Cardinal Manning, and,
from Hawking's birthday this year, Big Apple.

Within this  post, by leading us to the apple,
Derrida as usual plays the role of Serpent.

Manning and Khora

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:26 AM

A weblog post from Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012—

"Today is the 120th anniversary of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning's death."

A Reluctant Sinner  (Thanks to Andrew Cusack for the link.)

If Manning is a saint, then Saturday was his feast day.

Some background— Manning in this journal.

See also Saturday's Derrida at Villanova. The link there to
previous posts on that topic leads to a post on Derrida's promotion
of his neologism différance as a version of Plato's khôra.

I prefer Manning's discussion of a closely related concept,
the scholastic philosophers' materia prima .

See Hugh R. King's 1956 paper sneering at the scholastics'
concept, and Heisenberg's much better-informed remarks
on the related concept of potentia

IMAGE- Excerpt from 'The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas' by John F. Wippel

For a related fictional account of a religious quest for "possibilities"
and "excluded middles" between "zeroes and ones," see
Ingraffia on The Crying of Lot 49 .

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Sermon

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 11:00 AM

IMAGE- Book cover symbolizing postmodern theory with a minus sign and biblical theology with a plus sign

"Accentuate the Positive."

— Clint Eastwood, soundtrack album for
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

Requiem Maas

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:30 AM

Headline from yesterday evening's New York Times  obituaries—

Frederica Sagor Maas, Silent-Era Scriptwriter, Dies at 111.

For Maas… Past Tense (Jan. 7, 2012) and its link to Dogma.

Related material—

Last night's SNL, this morning's Entertainment Break,
and — in the context of DogmaCatholics Believe.

From an LA Times  story about Maas on January 7

"Many of the screenplays she and her husband wrote between 1938 and 1950 were never produced. Hopeless, humiliated and having little money, the couple drove to a hilltop overlooking Hollywood with the intention of committing suicide in their Plymouth. Clutching each other, they started sobbing and realized that 'none of these things mattered. We had each other,' wrote Maas…."

Entertainment Break

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:00 AM

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120115-ViperRoom.jpg

Related material– Saturday night's Derrida at Villanova and Villanueva.

Sunday School

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 AM

Identity Crisis— Or, Tilting at Whirligigs 

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Derrida at Villanova

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:00 PM

"As Derrida said at Villanova,
"We wait for something we would not like to wait for.
That is another name for death."

— Brian D. Ingraffia, "Is the Postmodern Post-Secular?,"
p. 50 in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought ,
ed. by Merold Westphal, Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 44-68

See also Derrida at Villanova in this journal.

The link to Ingraffia's remarks was suggested by
this evening's New York Times  obituaries—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120114-NYTobits-642PM.jpg

Defining Form (continued)

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

Detail of Sylvie Donmoyer picture discussed
here on January 10

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120114-Donmoyer-Still-Life-CubeDetail.jpg

The "13" tile may refer to the 13 symmetry axes
in the 3x3x3 Galois cube, or the corresponding
13 planes through the center in that cube. (See
this morning's post and Cubist Geometries.)

Damnation Morning*

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 5:24 AM

(Continued)

The following is adapted from a 2011 post

IMAGE- Galois vs. Rubik

* The title, that of a Fritz Leiber story, is suggested by
   the above picture of the symmetry axes of the square.
   Click "Continued" above for further details. See also
   last Wednesday's Cuber.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Mysteries of Faith

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 6:00 PM

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120113-StCatherinesHeader.jpg

Wiener on Paley

… he was already recognised as the ablest of the group of young English mathematicians who have been inspired by the genius of G H Hardy and J E Littlewood. In a group notable for its brilliant technique, no one had developed this technique to a higher degree than Paley. Nevertheless he should not be though of primarily as a technician, for with this ability he combined creative power of the first order. As he himself was wont to say, technique without 'rugger tactics' will not get one far, and these rugger tactics he practised to a degree that was characteristic of his forthright and vigorous nature.

The Telegraph  today on British mystery author Reginald Hill—

"After National Service between 1955 and 1957,
he went up on a scholarship to St Catherine’s College, Oxford,
where he played rugby…."

Further details—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120113-DaggerAwards.jpg

"Unsheathe your dagger definitions." — James Joyce

Some context— St. Catherine in this journal and her feast day last year.

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