Log24

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

In Memory of an Author* Who Died on Wednesday, Jan. 18

"He played with history and narrative techniques." — Obituary headline

* See his New York Times  obituary, online today —

More Sucker Bait at the Palace

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:02 pm

Toys ‘R’ Us —The Focus of Interest

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:03 am

"… the focus of interest for most of the American military attachés
in Europe became tanks and antitank/antiaircraft weapons."

https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/
content/issues/2020/Fall/4Candill20.pdf

See also "A Meadow for Trevanian" (Sept. 27, 2021).

Victor’s Spoils:  Space, Space, Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:51 am

A check of the phrase "memory-alpha" in the above URL
reveals that it comes from a 1969 Star Trek episode 
written by Shari Lewis and her husband Jeremy Tarcher.

Tarcher reportedly died on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015.
From this journal on that date

On the editor of the anthology Space, Space, Space :

"Sloane’s writing is drum-tight, but his approach
is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins
turning up the heat. He understood that before
a pot can boil, it must simmer." — Stephen King

Of related literary interest to fans of the late Russell Banks,
whose novel title Cloudsplitter  refers to Mt. Marcy, the 
highest mountain in New York State —

Marcy was a New York State politician who is said to have
coined the above phrase 

"to the victor go the spoils."

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Nuance

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:07 pm

"Her attention to the nuances of language
is both intuitive and painstaking." 

— Testimonials page at 
https://www.lesliekendalldye.net/testimonials.html

The birth name of Leslie Kendall Dye was Leslie Engelberg.

Related remarks —

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word  (1975):

“It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene.”

Report from Angel Mountain —

"Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four."

The Importance of Being Droll

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:42 pm

The Engelberg Variations —

"… the arrangement of one's books …."

. . . or of one's house committees . . . .

Monday, January 23, 2023

“You’re so vain…” — Song lyric

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:22 pm

A remark by Esther Dyson on Jan. 19:

See as well the above group-theory author here  on Jan. 19.

Related material:  "Same Staircase, DIfferent Day."

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Preform

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:33 pm

Sometimes  the word "preform"  is not  a misspelling.

"there are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious
but nonetheless active — living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense,
that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions."

The Source:  Jung on a facultas praeformandi  . . .

Illustration —

"A primordial image . . . .
the axial system of a crystal"

For those who prefer a  Jewish  approach to these matters —

(Post last updated at about 2:10 PM ET on Jan. 23, 2023.)

“Preform an affine transformation”

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:42 pm

"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Transformers  (2007)

Related literature:

The Approach

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:48 pm

The Stillwell Dichotomies

Number Space
Arithmetic  Geometry
Discrete  Continuous

Related literature —

IMAGE- History of Mathematics in a Nutshell

Bourbaki on arithmetic and geometry

From a "Finite Fields in 1956" post —

The Nutshell:

    Related Narrative:

Saturday, January 21, 2023

One-Liner

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:11 pm

Pythagorean theorem proof by overlapping similar figures

Dead-Poet Witcraft

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:40 pm

"Death is the mother of beauty." — Wallace Stevens

From the 2020 Feast of St. Wallace Stevens,
who reportedly died in 1955 on August 2 —

Related material —

Durer magic square as an affine transformation

Exercise Can each  order-4 magic square be obtained by some
transformation like the one above (i.e., preserving affine hyperplanes)?
If not, why not?

Update of 31 Jan. 2023 — Spoiler Remarks by Tilman Piesk.

Handcraft

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:58 am

"The reader can construct her own cube . . . ."

Cube labels for S4 multiplication by Ovidiu Cristinel Stoica

Friday, January 20, 2023

Signature Piece

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:57 pm

From a search in this journal for Hancock

The late David Crosby on Heaven, Wednesday, January 18 —

"I heard the place is overrated . . . cloudy."

Wilford Brimley versus Music-Theory Thing

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:27 pm

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2020/08/02/bill-sniffin-
wilford-brimley-represented-wyoming-well/ :

Photo: "Brimley at a screening of The Thing  on October 22, 2012"

Simple English Wikipedia, crediting "Marc Majcher – Flickr: IMG_6768"

“A Sort of Metaphysical State” — John O’Hara

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:57 am

     For some, perhaps Vermont . . . For others, perhaps Wyoming.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Making the Cut

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:25 pm

See also this  journal on Monday, January 16.

Of London Bondage . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:48 pm

Continues.

In 2007, April 30 — Walpurgisnacht — was the
release date of the "Back to Black" single . . .

A related music venue —

A related map —

This post was suggested by . . .

Two Approaches to Local-Global Symmetry

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:34 am

Last revised: January 20, 2023 @ 11:39:05

The First Approach — Via Substructure Isomorphisms —

From "Symmetry in Mathematics and Mathematics of Symmetry"
by Peter J. Cameron, a Jan. 16, 2007, talk at the International
Symmetry Conference, Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007

Local or global?

"Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?  A structure M  is homogeneous * if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M  can be extended to an automorphism of ; in other words, 'any local symmetry is global.' "

A related discussion of the same approach — 

"The aim of this thesis is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain point of view,
as homogeneous as possible, that is
which have as many symmetries as possible.
the basic idea is the following: a structure S  is
said to be homogeneous  if, whenever two (finite)
substructures Sand S2 of S  are isomorphic,
there is an automorphism of S  mapping S1 onto S2.”

— Alice Devillers,
Classification of Some Homogeneous
and Ultrahomogeneous Structures
,”
Ph.D. thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles,
academic year 2001-2002

The Wikipedia article Homogeneous graph discusses the local-global approach
used by Cameron and by Devillers.

For some historical background on this approach
via substructure isomorphisms, see a former student of Cameron:

Dugald Macpherson, "A survey of homogeneous structures,"
Discrete Mathematics , Volume 311, Issue 15, 2011,
Pages 1599-1634.

Related material:

Cherlin, G. (2000). "Sporadic Homogeneous Structures."
In: Gelfand, I.M., Retakh, V.S. (eds)
The Gelfand Mathematical Seminars, 1996–1999.
Gelfand Mathematical Seminars. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1340-6_2

and, more recently, 

Gill et al., "Cherlin's conjecture on finite primitive binary
permutation groups," https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05154v2
(Submitted on 9 Jun 2021, last revised 9 Jul 2021)

This approach seems to be a rather deep rabbit hole.

The Second Approach — Via Induced Group Actions —

My own interest in local-global symmetry is of a quite different sort.

See properties of the two patterns illustrated in a note of 24 December 1981 —

Pattern A above actually has as few  symmetries as possible
(under the actions described in the diamond theorem ), but it
does  enjoy, as does patttern B, the local-global property that
a group acting in the same way locally on each part  induces
a global group action on the whole .

* For some historical background on the term "homogeneous,"
    see the Wikipedia article Homogeneous space.

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

“Wine and Chocolate”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:37 pm

The title describes one approach to longevity
from an obituary for a woman who reportedly
died yesterday at the age of 118.

These dietary supplements are related, if only
metaphorically, to posts now tagged Juneteenth 2007.

Symmetries from Walpurgisnacht 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 am

In 2007, April 30 — Walpurgisnacht — was also the
release date of the "Back to Black" single . . .

A related music venue —

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Alexandria Quartets

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:55 pm

"Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves,
deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all
the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?"

Annals of Scientific Theology

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:11 pm

"Think of it as a cybernetic version of prayer…."

— Dennis Overbye in today's online New York Times ,

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/science/
cosmology-universe-programming.html
.

Related remarks:  The Log24 tag Geheimnis der Einheit, and . . .

Related art — "The Difference," a Log24 post of Epiphany 2010.

Cold Mountain

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

See the above title in this journal.

Monday, January 16, 2023

“Working Backwards” … Continues

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:59 pm

See earlier instances of "working backwards" in this journal.

Alan Rickman as Metatron in "Dogma" —

Alan Rickman as Severus Snape at Hogwarts —

Defense Against the Dark Arts

Page three hundred and ninety-four —

See also today's previous post.

A Magic Mountain for McCarthy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:58 pm

From my RSS feeds last night —

This  journal  on Wednesday, December 28, 2022

For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —

Ready When You Are, C. B.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:23 pm

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Fire and Ice

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:40 pm

Organic Symmetry

"Benzene is a natural constituent of petroleum 
and is one of the elementary petrochemicals.
Due to the cyclic continuous pi bonds between
the carbon atoms, benzene is classed as an 
aromatic hydrocarbon. Benzene is a colorless
and highly flammable liquid with a sweet smell,
and is partially responsible for the aroma of gasoline."

Wikipedia

Anti-Organic Symmetry —

Thomas Mann on snowflakes

Needful Things*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:50 pm

Thomas Mann on the deathly precision of snowflakes

* The title is that of a Stephen King book . . .

Snowflake Kindling

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:17 pm

Some background . . .

A letter in The Mathematical Intelligencer,  January 1988  

http://www.log24.com/noindex-pdf/
Cullinane-letter-Artes_Liberales-Intelligencer.pdf
 —

Nested Polyhedra

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:39 pm

The three nested icosahedra on the cover of 
a recent vulgarized-mathematics book suggest . . .

This is, of course, a highly  special case of the much more
general, and much more difficult,  n-body problem .

Types of Ambiguity

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:59 am

From this journal on Wednesday, July 13, 2022

A Date for Thing

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:11 am

This  journal on the above date — March 16, 2022 —

Cover design by Will Staehle.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Châtelet on Weil — A “Space of Gestures”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:21 pm
 

From Gilles Châtelet, Introduction to Figuring Space
(Springer, 1999) —

Metaphysics does have a catalytic effect, which has been described in a very beautiful text by the mathematician André Weil:

Nothing is more fertile, all mathematicians know, than these obscure analogies, these murky reflections of one theory in another, these furtive caresses, these inexplicable tiffs; also nothing gives as much pleasure to the researcher. A day comes when the illusion vanishes: presentiment turns into certainty … Luckily for researchers, as the fogs clear at one point, they form again at another.4

André Weil cuts to the quick here: he conjures these 'murky reflections', these 'furtive caresses', the 'theory of Galois that Lagrange touches … with his finger through a screen that he does not manage to pierce.' He is a connoisseur of these metaphysical 'fogs' whose dissipation at one point heralds their reforming at another. It would be better to talk here of a horizon that tilts thereby revealing a new space of gestures which has not as yet been elucidated and cut out as structure.

4 A. Weil, 'De la métaphysique aux mathématiques', (Oeuvres, vol. II, p. 408.)

For gestures as fogs, see the oeuvre of  Guerino Mazzola.

For some clearer remarks, see . . .


Illustrations of object and gestures
from finitegeometry.org/sc/ —

 

Object

 

Gestures

An earlier presentation
of the above seven partitions
of the eightfold cube:

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

Related material: Galois.space .

Friday, January 13, 2023

The Not-So-Hidden Figure

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:58 pm

See Cormac McCarthy on "The Kekulé Problem" and . . .

LMS Gresham

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:08 pm
 

Mathematical Structures

Posted on 13/01/2023 by Peter Cameron

My last major job at Queen Mary University of London more than ten years ago was designing and presenting a new first-semester first-year module to be taken by all students on mathematics programmes or joint programmes involving mathematics. I discussed it in my LMS-Gresham lecture.

 

LMS


 

 Gresham

"… seeds having fallen on barren rock, as it were" . . .

See today's previous Log24 post.

Darkness at Noon: Game of Stones*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:13 pm

* From some related posts

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100826-Causeway.jpg

The “Diamond Space” of Mazzola

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:30 am

The Source —

Some similar notions from my own work . . .

The "Digraph" of Mazzola might correspond to a directed graph
indicating the structure of a permutation, as at right below —

Mazzola's "Formula" might correpond to a matrix and translation that
transform the above "Space" of eight coordinates, and his "Gesture"
to a different way of generating affine transformations of that space . . . 
as in my webpage "Cube Space, 1984-2003."

Dürer, Music, and Doktor Faustus

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:49 am

The previous post and Mann's Doktor Faustus in this journal
suggest a look at . . .

Thursday, January 12, 2023

Mazzola’s Music-Theory “Diamond Space”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm

See also earlier references to Mazzola in this journal.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

A Subtle Knife for Pullman

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 pm

Raiders of the Lost Dark

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:19 pm

A sequel to the previous post, "How the Darkness Gets In" —

'Raiders of the Lost Dark'

How the Darkness Gets In

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:20 pm
 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUDOLF CARNAP 

EDITED BY PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP
Open Court Publishing Co.
Copyright © 1963 by The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc. 

. . . .
In Princeton I had some interesting talks with Einstein….
. . . .
Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now
worried him seriously. He explained that the
experience of the Now means something special
for man, something essentially different from
the past and the future, but that this important
difference does not and cannot occur within physics.
That this experience cannot be grasped by science
seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable
resignation. I remarked that all that occurs objectively
can be described in science; on the one hand the
temporal sequence of events is described in physics;
and, on the other hand, the peculiarities of man's
experiences with respect to time, including his different
attitude towards past, present, and future, can be
described and (in principle) explained in psychology.
But Einstein thought that these
scientific descriptions 
cannot possibly
satisfy our human needs; that there is
something essential about the Now
which is just outside 
of the realm of science.
We both agreed that this was not a question of a defect
for which science could be blamed, as Bergson thought.
I did not wish to press the point, because I wanted
primarily to understand his personal attitude to the
problem rather than to clarify the theoretical situation.
But I definitely had the impression that Einstein's
thinking on this point involved a lack of distinction
between experience and knowledge. Since science
in principle can say all that can be said, there is no
unanswerable question left. But though there is no
theoretical question left, there is still the common human
emotional experience, which is sometimes disturbing
for special psychological reasons. 

See also . . .

The extraordinary consequences of Einstein’s universe:
Relativity shatters our experience of time

9th January 2023

By Michael David Silberstein 

"Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College
and co-athor [sic] of Emergence in Context:
A treatise of twentry
[sic] first-century natural philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 2022)."

"… the experience that there is something special about
the character of the present moment. This is what presumably
lead [sic] Einstein to say that

'there is something essential about the Now
which is just outside the realm of science.' "

Silberstein does not give any source for his quotation.
But see the passage from Carnap above.

I do not recommend taking Carnap's — or Silberstein's —
word for anything.

The source of Silberstein's remarks is a publication of an 
organization called "Institute of Art and Ideas," or IAI.

Wikipedia on that organization:

"The IAI is responsible for organising the bi-annual festival 
HowTheLightGetsIn, the biggest philosophy and music
festival in the world* aimed at 'tackling the dearth of philosophy
in daily life,' in addition to monthly IAI Live events."

* Maya Oppenheim (7 September 2021):
"HowTheLightGetsIn: The world's largest philosophy
and music festival to ask life's big questions
."
The Independent.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Social Number Mysticism

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:47 pm

(A sequel to Social Geometry)

Number mysticism I prefer, from a post of Nov. 15 last year —

Social Geometry . . . Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:19 pm

Other social notes from that May weekend —

Some related reading for Cormac McCarthy

The Topos of Unconsciousness .

Monday, January 9, 2023

Not So Dark

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:56 pm

“Worstward Ho!” Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:24 pm

The title refers to a post discussing a date, 
that of last year's Feast of St. Thomas Becket. 

Related material —

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/movies/ruggero-deodato-dead.html .

Snakes on a Plane

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:39 pm

Evolution of an image . . .

 

 

 

( Not to be confused with The Tin Man’s Hat. )

Borromean Snakes from slide by René Guitart

Theology and Narrative

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:16 pm

The tortoise of the previous post suggests . . .

"Is it the good turtle soup
 or merely the mock?" 

Related material from the above
Toronto premiere date —

Solomon and the Ring.

This Day’s Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:09 pm

From a link target in this  journal on April 4, 2004 —

"Puzzle begun  I write in the day's space . . . ."

Today's link targets —

Valéry and Rilke, Stevens and Borges . . . and Zeno.

Passage related to Merrill, Valery, Stevens, Rilke, Borges, palm and phoenix

Sunday, January 8, 2023

Oil City Snow

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:38 pm

From AP News in The Derrick , Oil City, PA, today —

"Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time
had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man
of the North, with an old Puritan’s sense of consequences.
Snow fell often in his fiction . . . ." — Hillel Italie

Update of 3:33 PM ET —

From a link target in this  journal on April 4, 2004

"Puzzle begun  I write in the day's space . . . ."

Princess Charming

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am

Thandiwe Newton in "Reminiscence" (2021) —

The above film is from August 20, 2021.

From that same date —

Saturday, January 7, 2023

Iconic

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:59 pm

Related material — Icon Parking and . . .

Important Product

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:15 pm

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/07/
it-altered-my-entire-worldview-leading-authors-pick-
eight-nonfiction-books-to-change-your-mind
 —

"… just one aspect of a historical process
that we can legitimately call 'progress' –
not a romantic or utopian or naive ideal,
but an empirical fact that we can see
in graphs and numbers."

and sometimes elsewhere . . .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101021-CelebrationOf.jpg

Saturday Reviews

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:26 am

"Might be a nice 20 page essay, but a bomb of a book"
— Herbert Gintis on Taleb's Black Swan , review dated April 10, 2012.

This remark might also be applied to Crumey's Mobius Dick :

A physicist and Doktor Faustus

Related material for Jungians who enjoy synchronicity —

The Log24 posts from the date of the Gintis review — April 10, 2012.

Friday, January 6, 2023

Death of a Sandal Maker

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:36 pm

Tuesday, November 8, 2016, was also the publication date
at Princeton University Press for a book by one Herbert Gintis:

Gintis reportedly died yesterday, Jan. 5, 2023.

"He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania
and then attended Harvard University for post-graduate
work in mathematics. After receiving his master's degree,
he grew disillusioned with the field, and while at Harvard,
became a sandal maker with a shop in Harvard Square." 

In later years, Gintis was associated with the Santa Fe Institute.

Thursday, January 5, 2023

Logic and Geometry at Harvard

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:56 pm

'If Triangles Are Square' book


See also "Triangles Are Square" in 1984 —

Harvard  Square:

Harvard Square, 1964

The Square-Triangle Problem

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:50 am

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Brightness at Noon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:57 am

Spaceballs

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:02 am

A memorial by Richard Goldstein

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

The Deal

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:22 pm

The Source: https://txxx.com/videos/446436/corinne-wahl-bobbi-burns-missy-o-shea-unknown-cynthia-s-lee-in-new-york-nights-1984/?kt_lang=en

Monday, January 2, 2023

The Gate

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:12 pm

The Memorial Urn

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:55 pm

Sunday, January 1, 2023

The Missing Links

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:20 am

Pullman links in this journal —

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=wsu.edu .

Specifically . . .

<a href="http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Edee/GLOSSARY/SHUCHUNG.HTM"
target="_new" rel="noopener noreferrer">
<strong><em>Shu</em>: Reciprocity</strong></a>

and 

<a href="http://www.wsu.edu/%7Edee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM"
target="_new"><font size="6"><b>Logos</b></font></a>

Those links no longer work.  See instead . . .

https://web.archive.org/web/20011224032243/
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GLOSSARY/SHUCHUNG.HTM

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20011129072406/
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM
 .

Logo from these  links:

Alpha

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:18 am

Wallace Stevens —

"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."

— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Matrix Rotator

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

This post was suggested by a "matrix rotator" photo dated 1953-03-02.

Some context — Kracauer's notion of "mass ornament."

Dies Natalis: The Frame

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:49 am

From this journal on Candlemas 2018

Also on Candlemas 2018 —

Friday, December 30, 2022

Bullshit Studies: The View from East Lansing

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:40 pm

Detail of the above screen (click to enlarge) —

See also this  journal on the above date  — June 10, 2021.

From this journal on May 6, 2009

A related picture of images that "reappear metamorphosed
in the coordinate system of the high region" —

(For the backstory, see Geometry of the I Ching
and the history of Chinese philosophy.)

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

“The ‘Dim Void’: Beckett’s Worstward Ho!

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:53 am

The title is from . . .

https://booksonthewall.com/blog/samuel-beckett-quote-fail-better/ .

This post was suggested by yesterday's Feast of St. Thomas Becket

A Beckett-related flashback linked to here yesterday

Rosalind Krauss in 1978 —

"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity." 

Thursday, December 29, 2022

In memory of . . .

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:35 pm

Vivienne Westwood

See also this  journal on December 11.

Bullshit Studies: “Foundations of Modern Consciousness”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:57 am

The first Romantics

"How a close group of brilliant friends,
in a tiny German university town, laid
the foundations of modern consciousness"

Headline for the article whose URL is . . .

https://aeon.co/essays/
english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania

The article was published by Aeon  on December 20, 2022,
and is featured in today's Arts & Letters Daily . On the author:

"Andrea Wulf is a historian and the award-winning author
of several books, including the bestselling 
The Invention of Nature  (2015) and, most recently, 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and
the Invention of the Self
  (2022). She is a Miller Scholar

at the Santa Fe Institute

and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature."

Related material — "The Eight" According to Coleridge.

Art Theory: What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:57 am

Literary Metadata: A Canterbary Tale

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:58 am

Two items from the same date in 2014 —

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Santa Fe Institute as Magisterium Wannabe

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:23 am

"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship

Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —

"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."

A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
 

COIN
 

https://www.armstrong.edu/history-journal/history-journal-myth-ritual-and-the-labyrinth-of-king-minos
 

RING


"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an 
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
 

KEY


"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in 
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference 
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
 

For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Rave Review . . .

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:27 pm

The Forms of Being

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:25 pm

"If the window is this matrix of ambi- or multivalence,
and the bars of the windows-the grid-are what help us
to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are themselves 
the symbol of the symbolist work of art. They function as
the multilevel representation through which the work of art
can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."

Page 59, Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," MIT Press,
October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64

Related material —

Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.

A related literary remark —

"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark  set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."

— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book review, not  of Dark Materials.

Monday, December 26, 2022

The Halo

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Super-8 Box

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

For the title, see other posts tagged Super-8.

Box containing Froebel's Third Gift-- The Eightfold Cube

Click image for some background.

Related material —

Sunday, December 25, 2022

Happy Holidays to Christopher Nolan.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:15 am

Merry Xmas, Enola.

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:48 am

Published on Sept. 15, 2022.  See as well this journal on that date.

The WTF Detective

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:59 am

Saturday, December 24, 2022

Window as Matrix

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:57 am

Grids

Author: Rosalind Krauss
Source: October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778321

From page 59:

"Flowing and freezing; glace  in French means glass, mirror, and ice;
transparency, opacity, and water. In the associative system
of symbolist thought this liquidity points in two directions.
First, towards the flow of birth-the amniotic fluid, the 'source'-
but then, towards the freezing into stasis or death-
the unfecund immobility of the mirror. For Mallarmé, particularly,
the window functioned as this complex, polysemic sign by which
he could also project the 'crystallization  of reality into art.' 5
Mallarmé's Les Fenêtres  dates from 1863;
Redon's most evocative window, Le Jour , appeared in 1891
in the volume Songes . If the window is this matrix of
ambi- or multivalence, and the bars of the windows-the grid-
are what help us to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are
themselves the symbol of the symbolist work of art.
They function as the multilevel representation through which
the work of art can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."

5 Robert G. Cohn, "Mallarmé's Windows," Yale French Studies ,
no. 54 (1977), 23-31.

Another evocative example — See Galois Window in this  journal.

Xmas with Moriarty:  Big Little Ideas

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 am

For the Harvard Psychedelics Club

Friday, December 23, 2022

Scope and Depth

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:28 pm

"The book I came back to
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I couldn’t cope with it
as a student; it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married,
and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised
its majestic scope and depth." — Philip Pullman in
The GuardianFri 23 Dec 2022 05.00 EST

Another instance of scope  and depth  — 
"The Amber Spyglass" Log24 post of Wednesday.

See also other references here  to Middlemarch.

Was ist Raum?” — Bauhaus Founder Walter Gropius

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:43 am

"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
 erfassen und gestalten?"

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus
  (1923)

A relevant illustration:

At math.stackexchange.com on March 1-12, 2013:

Is there a geometric realization of the Quaternion group?” —

The above illustration, though neatly drawn, appeared under the
cloak of anonymity.  No source was given for the illustrated group actions.
Possibly they stem from my Log24 posts or notes such as the Jan. 4, 2012,
note on quaternion actions at finitegeometry.org/sc (hence ultimately
from my note “GL(2,3) actions on a cube” of April 5, 1985).

These references will not appeal to those who enjoy modernism as a religion.
(For such a view, see Rosalind Krauss on grids and another writer's remarks
on the religion's 100th anniversary this year.)

Some related nihilist philosophy from Cormac McCarthy —

"Forms turning in a nameless void."

Thursday, December 22, 2022

GSD is “Graduate School of Design.”

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:52 pm

The 'harvard gsd' in the link button below is the Graduate School of Design.

'square harvard model' Google search result

Related material — "News of the World" in this journal.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:58 am

IMAGE- Aug. 5, 2005- Galois tesseract, Shakespeherian Rag, Sir Alec Guinness

For Harlan Kane: The Canetti Maxim

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:14 am

"Most important for Canetti are certain events
that he calls 'illuminations,' such as his witnessing
of striking workers being mowed down by Viennese
police on July 15, 1927, which was the germ of both
Auto-da-Fé and Crowds and Power. For Canetti,
these epiphanies are moments of metamorphosis,
which he prizes above all in art as well as in life.
Canetti aspired to be a 20th-century Ovid, but
precisely because he was modern, this ambition
landed him, again and again, in paradox, such as
the one expressed in the aphorism that gives this
compilation its title, or in this characteristic maxim:
'It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves .'"

— Hal Foster in The Chronicle of Higher Education ,
"The Best Scholarly Books of 2022," Dec. 21, 2022.

See also this  journal on Nov, 25, 2022 —

“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

For “Dark Materials” Fans: The Monkey Trial

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:35 am

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

The Unmagic Square

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:45 pm

Last year on this date:

A Riddler Wannabe —

Related material — The Krauss passage quoted as above
by Shechtman in The New Yorker  in December 2021 appears
also in a Log24 post of October 18, 2017:  "Three Small Grids."

Digitally Assisted Fiction . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:16 am


The Amber Spyglass :


Click for a related story.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

The Puzzle

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:25 pm

Today's previous post "The Urn" suggests a look at . . .

How to Solve The New York Times Crossword

By Deb Amlen. Illustrations by Elena Xausa.
Animations by Lorenzo Fonda.

That web page is undated, but its HTML source contains
43 instances of the date 2017-10-18.

See as well "Three Small Grids," a post from this  journal on 2017-10-18.

Related material — Today's 3:05 PM ET New York Times  obituary
for the above crossword guide illustrator, Elena Xausa —

The Urn

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:18 pm

Chris Ware, visual crossword puzzle clue, New Yorker issue dated Dec. 26, 2022.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/26/the-cover-crossword

"The two cover characters, who I’ve been thinking of as and . . ."

— Chris Ware on his New Yorker  cover for the issue dated Dec. 26, 2022.

For Fans of “The Story Theory of Truth” . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:28 am

(See earlier posts referring to that theory.)

Catching up to Pullman's Oct. 3 remark . . .

See Log24 posts now tagged October 1-2-3.

Monday, December 19, 2022

Mathematics and Narrative, Continued . . .
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 3:50 am

   Midrash from Philip Pullman . . .

"The 1929 Einstein-Carmichael Expedition"

    I prefer the 1929 Emch-Carmichael expedition —

This is from . . .

“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”

— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
(Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics,
Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham,
Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))

Sunday, December 18, 2022

“Square Round” — Ulysses, end of Ch. 17

Circle and Square at the Court of King Minos —

Harmonic analysis based on the circle involves the
circular  functions.  Dyadic  harmonic analysis involves …

Cullinane Square Model

For some related history, see (for instance) . . .

'Dyadic Walsh Analysis from 1924 Onwards'

Harry Potter and the Crown of Fire . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:24 am

Continues.

Saturday, December 17, 2022

The Presence of a Cello

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Friday, December 16, 2022

“Can’t Remember Where or When” — Song Lyric

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:28 pm
 

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round 
Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg
in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs
of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

Black disc from end of Ch. 17 in Ulysses

— Ulysses , conclusion of Chapter 17.

Thursday, December 15, 2022

The Puzzle in General Terms

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

Artification

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:58 pm

(Continued)

IMAGE- Valéry on ornament in 'Method of Leonardo,' with Valéry's serpent-and-key emblem

Click image to enlarge.

Related material —

Update —

Remediation at Princeton

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:01 pm

Christmas Knot

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 am

For seekers of a "crazy Christmas knot" —

The commercial logo below may be viewed as
three in-folded Y-shaped orange forked tongues.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Miles to Go

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:38 pm

Jay Goldberg, Miles Davis, Cicely Tyson

See also a Log24 post from Dec. 5, the lawyer's dies natalis.

“Modern Meets Historic”

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:07 am

The above title phrase is from the Windows lockscreen
I encountered at 7:59 AM ET today:

Click to enlarge. See also Cologne in this journal.

Plan 9 From Moriarty

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 am

Some related mathematical windmills —

IMAGE- The eight Galois quaternions

For the eight-limbed star at the top of the quaternion array
above, see "Damnation Morning" in this journal —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming 
implement that looked by quick turns to me like 
a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a delicate 
branding iron—especially when its tip sprouted 
an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in 
the fourth dimension or only die in it.”

— Fritz Leiber, short story, 1959

See as well . . .

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/12/13/
harvard-psychedelics-club-signet-society-art-show-2022/
.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

In Memory of a Mississippi Coach

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:10 pm

Remarks in memory of football coach Mike Leach of Mississippi State University

The "Boolean exclusive or" is the same as addition 
in the two-element Galois field GF(2).

Monday, December 12, 2022

Blue Velvet Farewell

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm

A koan for the real  Lumberton . . .

"What was your original face before you were born?"

Bullshit Studies

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:37 pm

From Peter Woit's weblog today —

The New Yorker and the Publicity Stunt

Posted on December 12, 2022 by woit

The wormhole publicity stunt story just keeps going.
Today an article about the Google Santa Barbara lab
and quantum computer used in the publicity stunt
appeared in the New Yorker

From The New Yorker  itself —

See also a very different take from another New Yorker  author —

The King in the Window

(Cf.  Log24, Plan 9 at Yale, Nov. 13, 2017).

“Cottage Industry” Continues: Marketing 101

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:37 pm

The "Cottage Industry" of the title is the "Modernism" racket
of today's 1 AM post — a subsidiary of Academia that
uses some of the same marketing techniques as Hollywood . . .

See also "Plato's Ghost" in this journal.

Trying Yet Another Social Network

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:34 pm

An existential question . . .

If at first you don't succeed . . .

The word "counterarts" in the Medium  URL above suggests 
a review of Log24 on Defense Against the Dark Arts.

A Cottage Industry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am

The above tag "Academy Century" is a nod to an earlier tag,
"Academy Year," that refers to Dec. 7, 2021-Dec. 7, 2022 . . .
the dates of a Deerfield Academy publication and of a Log24 post.

Some remarks from a more advanced academy —

"This year marks the centenary of modernism's annus mirabilis ."
Johanna Winant in Boston Review, December 7th, 2022.

Some will prefer a different annus mirabilis .

Sunday, December 11, 2022

One Hand Clapping

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:12 pm

("Efficient Packing," continued)

Pawner versus Pawnee

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:18 pm

A music producer pawns his current drum device 
and acquires a demonic 1970s machine.

Related material —

This  post was suggested by a remark made during the filming
of "Edge of Tomorrow," by a Log24 post on the new Nolan film
about Oppenheimer, and by the work of a different  Edge:

"… a reality that only my notes can provide."
    — Kinbote in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire

Saturday, December 10, 2022

Elementary, My Dear

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:55 pm

De Colores

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:05 pm

"What's up with you,  Herbert?"

Poe Tale

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm

       Meanwhile . . .

    "Article electronically published on December 21, 2011"—

Artification* Illustrated

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:05 pm

* The word "artification" is from yesterday's Letter of the Law.

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