“None of the memories and identities of the people in the city are solid.”
— Grimstrup, Jesper Møller. SHELL BEACH:
The search for the final theory . Kindle Edition.
See also Peter Woit’s “Various Links” post today and Shell Beach in this journal.
For another approach to solidity (from pure mathematics, not physics), see
a Log24 search for Solid Symmetry.
From a post of January 8, 2021 —
“Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act .
The elements of a group do not have to just sit there,
abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can
‘produce changes.’ In particular, groups arise
naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure.”
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon’s Groups and Geometry
in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4
(April 1987), pp. 392-394.
Note:
The phrase “the subgroup V” here refers, confusingly, to the translation
subgroup derived from a vector space V.
“… I’m reverting to the foundational securities of childhood . . . .”
— University Diaries weblog this morning
Among my foundational securities is an image that might be titled . . .
The Truman Show —
Related literary remarks — Moss on the Wall.
” ‘The Maori named him Rog,’ Yael continued,
‘because those were the only I.D. letters that could
be made out on the wreck.’ ”
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers
From The Queen's Gambit , by Walter Tevis (1983) —
"She stopped and turned to Beth. 'There is no hint of a
Protestant ethic in Mexico. They are all Latin Catholics,
and they all live in the here and now.' Mrs. Wheatley
had been reading Alan Watts. 'I think I’ll have just one
margarita before I go out. Would you call for one, honey?'
Back in Lexington, Mrs. Wheatley’s voice would sometimes
have a distance to it, as though she were speaking from
some lonely reach of an interior childhood. Here in Mexico City
the voice was distant but the tone was theatrically gay, as though
Alma Wheatley were savoring an incommunicable private mirth.
It made Beth uneasy. For a moment she wanted to say something
about the expensiveness of room service, even measured in pesos,
but she didn’t. She picked up the phone and dialed six. The man
answered in English. She told him to send a margarita and a large
Coke to 713."
Mirror, Mirror
(Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition (1911), Crystallography .)
In honor of the Auckland opening of the opera
“The Cunning Little Vixen” on January 27, 2010 —
Fake —
Not-So-Fake —
A selected Hollywood artifact —
Dialogue from the recent Netflix series “Queen’s Gambit” —
Miss Jean Blake, interviewer from LIFE — “The board?”
Beth Harmon — “Yes. It’s an entire world
of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it.
I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt,
I only have myself to blame.”
This passage, and other psychological claptrap in the Netflix version,
does not occur in the original 1983 novel by Walter Tevis.
Related material — Sein Feld in this journal.
The location in the title is the opening scene of the new version
of "All Creatures Great and Small." The year in the title suggests
a look at (for instance) The Pentagram Papers.
A "support provided by" credit suggests some related images —
A Scotland-related post: The Blue Path and the Red Path
(Log24, Aug. 24, 2014).
Wendelboe's games included chess sets.
See as well a related purchase from further north on the same block.
Illustrations from posts now tagged Ved Mehta in this journal —
Epigraph to Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals ,
by Ved Mehta , remarks first published in The New Yorker in 1961 and 1962 —
See as well the Wallace Stevens phrase “The Ruler of Reality.”
“Kierkegaard is imagining a society where
people’s identities are robbed
under the disguise of modern liberation.”
“In a sense, we would see that change arises from
the structure of the object.”
— Nima Arkani-Hamed, quoted in
“A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics,”
by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine , Sept. 17, 2013.
For those who prefer less barbaric entertainment —
“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical. Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”
—Many Dimensions (1931), by Charles Williams
“Don’t give a damn ’cause I done that already.” — Zombie Jamboree
"Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act .
The elements of a group do not have to just sit there,
abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can
'produce changes.' In particular, groups arise
naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure."
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon's Groups and Geometry
in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4
(April 1987), pp. 392-394.
"The concept of group actions is very useful in the study of
isomorphisms of combinatorial structures."
— Olli Pottonen, "Classification of Steiner Quadruple Systems"
(Master's thesis, Helsinki, 2005, p. 48).
“In a sense, we would see that change arises from
the structure of the object.”
— Nima Arkani-Hamed, quoted in "A Jewel at the Heart of
Quantum Physics," by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine ,
Sept. 17, 2013.
See as well "Change Arises" in this journal.
The title refers to the Steiner quadruple systems in a 2005 thesis by
a Helsinki mathematician. See . . .
http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=helsinki-math.
See as well “a million diamonds” and . . .
.
Valentine reportedly died on December 29, 2020.
Related dialogue from "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996) —
– It's interesting how coupling appears in nature and mathematics.
– You were talking about pairs …
– Oh, the twin-prime conjecture. It explores pairs of prime numbers.
Those only divisible by themselves. Three-five. Five-seven.
Not seven-nine …
– Nine can be divided by three.
– That's right. And … and so on. It was discovered that pairs were
often separated by …
– One number in between.
– Exactly. Did you read my book?
– No, I'm sorry.
– That's okay. This is marvellous.
– A first date like a game show.
– I didn't mean to lecture.
– I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call it a date.
Twin-Prime Dates —
December 31 and December 29, 2020.
"Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still
which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn
of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the
stillness and the darkness before Time dawned…she would have known
that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed
in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start
working backwards."
– C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , as quoted at
https://apologyanalogy.com/death-working-backwards/ .
From a post of Tuesday, May 7, 2019 —
“Honored in the Breach:
Graham Bader on Absence as Memorial”
Artforum International , April 2012
| . . . .
“In the wake of a century marked by inconceivable atrocity, the use of emptiness as a commemorative trope has arguably become a standard tactic, a default style of public memory. The power of the voids at and around Ground Zero is generated by their origin in real historical circumstance rather than such purely commemorative intent: They are indices as well as icons of the losses they mark. Nowhere is the negotiation between these two possibilities–on the one hand, the co-optation of absence as tasteful mnemonic trope; on the other, absence’s disruptive potential as brute historical scar–more evident than in Berlin, a city whose history, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, can be seen as a ‘narrative of voids.’ Writing in 1997, Huyssen saw this tale culminating in Berlin’s post-wall development, defined equally by an obsessive covering-over of the city’s lacunae–above all in the elaborate commercial projects then proliferating in the miles-long stretch occupied until 1989 by the Berlin Wall–and a carefully orchestrated deployment of absence as memorial device, particularly in the ‘voids’ integrated by architect Daniel Libeskind into his addition to the Berlin Museum, now known as the Jewish Museum Berlin.” |
See also Breach in this journal, as well as Void.
* Literary background — The word “Purloined” in this journal.
Related background on Pearson —
Related background on Roberts —
Related material from a Log24 search for “Holy Cross” —
For Bird Day . . .
A tweet from Scott Edelman on November 12, 2020 —
This journal on the above tweet date —
Damonizing Your Opponent
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber’s “Damnation Morning,” 1959:
“Time traveling . . . is not quite the good clean boyish fun
it’s cracked up to be . . . ."
In memory of a mystery writer who reportedly died on Dec. 27, 2020 —
Posts tagged "Logo Animation" from around that date in this journal,
along with yesterday's post "Enchantments," suggest… a link.
The professor, Joshua Whatmough, in the previous post
taught, I later learned, something called epigraphy at Harvard.
An instance of the derived term "epigraph" —
George Steiner on chess —
"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."
— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.
In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .
At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —
… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and Newsweek :
he was running for President . . . .
. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…
She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do. The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had.
Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.
***
“Mr. Breuer’s audiences had to be willing to embrace,
or at least shrug off, some quantity of abstruseness
in his productions. Yet there was often a rapturous,
cacophonous beauty to them. At their best … they
worked on spectators like enchantments.
You can sense that effect in Margo Jefferson’s
New York Times review of “Red Beads” (2005) …
that she called ‘theater as sorcery; it is a crossroads
where artistic traditions meet to invent a marvelous
common language.’ “
— Laura Collins-Hughes, Jan. 4, 2021
I prefer . . .
"When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead . . . ."
See as well "Symmetric Generation" in this journal.
"Feed your head." — Grace Slick
Clay Risen memorializes an advertising executive —
“Ms. Young rose to prominence as an executive with Grey Advertising,
where she began in 1959, standing out as one of the few women and
one of the few Asian-Americans at the firm, which was then a power
in its field.”
Related art from Log24 on the date of Ms. Young’s death —
“A colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
George Clooney to Matt Damon —
“There’s a Michelangelo joke to be made.”
A search in this journal for Michelangelo suggests . . .
How about "Bach meets Bochner"?
A quote from the novel on which George Clooney's new Netflix film,
"The Midnight Sky," is based —
"Yet here he was, seventy-eight years old …
and, having come to the terminus of his life’s work,
all he could do was stare into the bleak face of
his own ignorance."
— Brooks-Dalton, Lily. Good Morning, Midnight (p. 5).
Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Related material —
For more ignorance, see part of the current New Yorker home page —
Click image for the magazine's animated gif .
— and other recent posts tagged "Sixteenth."
* The "Ice Stone" is in the New Year's Eve post tagged "Sixteenth."
Space fans may think of that tag as representing the empty space
(a sort of black hole ) in the classic "15 Puzzle."
St. Brendan’s Day is May 16. Three Log24 posts from
that date in 2020 are now tagged St. Brendan’s Seminar.
An older “Methodist hymnbook” apparently had 1026 hymns —
The Methodist Hymn Book,
Illustrated with Biography, History,
Incident, and Anecdote ,
by George John Stevenson.
Second edition, London, Charles H. Kelly, 1894 —
Hymn 834 — I seek Thy kingdom first
Hymn 625 — Out of the depth of self-despair
Hymn 910 — God of truth, and power, and grace
Hymn 842 — Father, I know that all my life
Hymn 366 — I soon shall hear thy quick’ning voice
The 1933 Methodist Hymn Book has the above-mentioned 984 hymns.
In that book, the above numbers refer to . . .
834 — Above the clear blue sky
625 — I to the hills will lift mine eyes
910 — These things shall be: a loftier race
842 — Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild
366 — Jesus! Redeemer, Saviour, Lord
I prefer the list from the older book.
Wikipedia on the late Hugh Hefner —
“Through his father’s line, Hefner was a descendant of
Plymouth governor William Bradford. He described
his family as ‘conservative, Midwestern, [and] Methodist’.
His mother had wanted him to become a missionary.”
A quote from Story Space —
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it . . . .” —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Annie_Fanny .
Hefner’s parents might prefer the region of Story Space
proper to Dreamboat Annie.
Yesterday’s flashback to the “Square Ice” post of
St. Francis’s Day, 2016 —
This suggests a review of the July 16, 2013, post “Child Buyers.”
Related images from “Tomorrowland” (2015) —
An ignorant, but hopeful, space fan —
The space fan knocks on one door-panel of a 3×3 array —
Related image from “Hereafter” (2010) —
Matt Damon with his 3×3 door-panel array.
New Yorker video today, at 14:00-14:25 —
"What's good about KenKen, and Sudoku, and crosswords,
all of those puzzles like that, is that they have grids to be filled in,
empty squares. I think there is something about human nature
that we want to fill up spaces. And if you're a puzzle person,
or almost anybody, and you see an empty grid, you want to
put something in those spaces. It gives a feeling of satisfaction
that you don't get often in life and that really feels good."
— Will Shortz, New York Times puzzle editor
"I can't get no… satisfaction…." — The Rolling Stones
The New Yorker recently restarted the Weiner story,
which includes —
"… the fall of 2017, when he began a twenty-one-month
prison sentence for sexting with a minor."
"You want to put something in those spaces."
— Will Shortz, New York Times puzzle editor
Yes, you do.
Weiner is now with a Brooklyn countertops company called IceStone.
Detail:
A story in numbers:
It is what it is.
See also the phrase “Beautiful Mathematics” in this journal.
A four-set has sixteen subsets. Fifteen of these symbolize the points
of “the smallest perfect universe,”* PG(3,2). The sixteenth is empty.
In memory of . . .
Polish this — “The Nothing That Is.”
* Phrase by Burkard Polster.
Variations on the title theme —
A Harvard student* attempts to summarize Nabokov’s aesthetics —
“Take ‘Pale Fire,’ his 1962 poem-as-novel
bursting with butterfly as theme:
‘I can do what only a true artist can do —
pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation …
see the web of the world,
and the warp and the weft of that web.’ “
“True artist” here refers to Kinbote, not Nabokov.
* Tessa K.J. Haining, Harvard Crimson Contributing Opinion Writer.
Tessa K.J. Haining ’23 lives in Adams House. Her column appears on
alternate Fridays. December 11, 2020.
The previous post suggests a look at The New Yorker today —
Another “core claim” —
“Change arises from the structure of the object.“
See also Wiener Kreis and Schlick.
Related material for innocents — Siobhan Roberts
on Conway’s Game of Life in today’s New York Times .
Those desiring greater literary depth may consult
this journal’s Gameplayers.
“Knight move” remark from The Eiger Sanction —
“I like to put people on myself by skipping logical steps
in the conversation until they’re dizzy.”
The following logical step — a check of the date Nov. 18, 2017 —
was omitted in the post Futon Dream on this year’s St. Stephen’s Day.
For further context, see James Propp in this journal.
From today’s post “Logo Animation” —
Related material from the art world —
Related entertainment —
“V. is whatever lights you to the end of the street: she is also the dark annihilation waiting at the end of the street.” (Tony Tanner, page 36, "V. and V-2," in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson. Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55). |
Midrash — Other posts tagged Annihilation.
Related material from Log24 yesterday —
Click the Aquarius symbol for a puzzle.
A related animation —
“… a revisionist account of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz…
portrays the Wicked Witch of the West ….”
Note the ambiguity of the initials “WW” in the above passage,
mirrored in the current film title “WW84.”
” There’s a line from the movie ‘The Paper Chase’, in which
the fearsome Professor Kingsfield tells a room of first-year
law-school students ‘You come in here with a skull full of mush …
and you leave thinking like a lawyer.’ “
— James Propp on December 14, 2020, in . . .
Related material — Japanese Bed.
| Mathematics
The Fano plane block design |
Magic
The Deathly Hallows symbol— |
Another name for the Fano plane design — The Ghostly Hallows.
From a search in this journal for Ghostly —
Related material — Digital Theology in a search for Dyson Bits.
“A quick note on terminology. Members of the Circle
were logical empiricists, sometimes called logical positivists.
Positivism is the view that our knowledge derives from
the natural world and includes the idea that we can have
positive knowledge of it. The Circle combined this position
with the use of modern logic; the aim was to build a new
philosophy.”
— Edmonds, David. The Murder of Professor Schlick (p. vii).
Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
For aficionados of associative logic —
See Triple Cross in this journal and the Fano-plane circle
in the illustration below.
From old posts tagged Change Arises —
|
From Christmas 2005:
For the eightfold cube
For an rather more
Click on image for details. |
The phrase "change arises" is from Arkani-Hamed in 2013, describing
calculations in physics related to properties of the positive Grassmannian —
A related recent illustration from Quanta Magazine —
The above illustration of seven cells is not unrelated to
the eightfold-cube model of the seven projective points in
the Fano plane.
The “Change Arises” part of the title refers to the previous post.
The 1905 “geometric object” there, a 4×4 square, appeared earlier,
in 1869, in a paper by Camille Jordan. For that paper, and the
“literary example” of the title, see “Ici vient M. Jordan .”
This post was suggested by the appearance of Jordan in today’s
memorial post for Peter M. Neumann by Peter J. Cameron.
Related remarks on Jordan and “geometrical objects” from 2016 —
These reflections are available from their author as a postprint.
See posts so tagged.
"Change arises from the structure of the object." — Arkani-Hamed
Related material from 1936 —
Related material from 1905, with the "object" a 4×4 array —
Related material from 1976, with the "object"
a 4×6 array — See Curtis.
Related material from 2018, with the "object"
a cuboctahedron — See Aitchison.
“The book by Hesse has many facets ….” (Link added.)
— V. V. Nalimov, In the Labyrinths of Language ,
Ch. 1, “What Language Is,” p. 22.
Related philosophical speculation —
See also remarks from Berlin on the 6×6 square and . . .
a Harvard illustration from Linden Street —
“The bureaucratic innovations of the New Deal
fed into the powerful associative logic
of commonsense reasoning,
leading a number of Americans to equate science
with the technocratic, managerial liberalism
of Roosevelt and his allies.”
— http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/
andrew-jewett-how-americans-came-distrust-science
From a Log24 search for “Notes Toward” —
| “Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word….” — Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction“ |
“… her art was rarely exhibited until the 1970s,
and then only sporadically and in small venues . . . .”
— New York Times obituary suggested by
today’s review,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/
arts/artists-who-died-2020.html
“No ordinary venue.” — Song lyric
Related material now linked to in the previous post —
“The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass,
vastly enlarging the things inside the block.
Strange things they were, too.”
“I Know Him So Well” — The Beckinsale Version —
datetime=”2020-12-21T01:08:17.000Z” title=”Dec 20, 2020″
See as well Simple Tune and Variation.
“… and the song of love’s recision is the music of the spheres.”
— E. L. Doctorow, City of God
Doctorow’s remark was quoted here earlier, on February 5, 2009 —
The central aim of Western religion–
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy– Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle: Limited Unlimited Odd Even Male Female Light Dark Straight Curved ... and so on .... “Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.” — Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) “In the garden of Adding — The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded: “Art inherited from the old religion — Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52 From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space: “We have now reached
“Space: what you — James Joyce, Ulysses |
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ,
Ch. 6 (italics are mine):
“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself.
A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance .”
An Internet search for the anonymous author Quack5quack yields . . .
In the altered headline above, " Q******* " may, if you like,
be interpreted as " Quellers ," an invented term for scholars
who investigate the origins of Christianity.
See the Log24 post "Q is for Quelle " (November 7, 2020).
Dan Brown, like the earlier novelist who wrote The Source ,
is such an investigator (of sorts), though not a scholar .
(For an example of actual scholarship , see the webpage
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/
middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED35525.
That page may be interpreted as putting the "hit" in "s***.")
* De Corpore had a negative effect on Hobbes’s scholarly reputation.
The inclusion of a claimed solution for squaring the circle, an apparent
afterthought rather than a systematic development, led to an extended
pamphlet war in the Hobbes-Wallis controversy. — Wikipedia
Another afterthought, in the style of Kinbote —
A search in this journal for Peter M. Neumann
yields a link to Transformations over a bridge (1983 Aug. 16).
In memory of Ralph Winter and Barbara Windsor.
See also . . .
Personally, I prefer To Catch a Thief —
“Breast or Thigh”?
(A sequel to the previous post, Square Space at Wikipedia)
Related remarks: A Dec. 16 Wikipedia revision by Quack5quack,
and posts in this journal tagged Helsinki Math.
The State of Square-Space Art at Wikipedia as of December 16, 2020,
after a revision by an anonymous user on that date:
See also Square Space at Squarespace.
Composer Harold Budd reportedly died at 84 on December 8
in Arcadia, California.
"The way I work is that
I focus entirely on a small thing
and try to milk that for all it's worth,
to find everything in it
that makes musical sense,"
Budd explained in a 1997 interview….
See related remarks in posts now tagged Quartet,
as well as posts now tagged Galois Window.
Continues. The Chanel mandorla in the previous post
suggests a review of a more complex figure — The Venn Lotus.
Politically correct leftists may be reminded of Intersectionality.
Hurt’s dies natalis (date of death, in the saints’ sense) was,
it now seems, 25 January 2017, not 27.
A connection, for fantasy fans, between the Philosopher’s Stone
(represented by the eightfold cube) and the Deathly Hallows
(represented by the usual Fano-plane figure) —
Images from a Log24 search for “Holocron.”
“Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms
the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature. . . .
They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories,
and follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out
for fairy-stories: ‘one thing must not be made fun of,
the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously,
neither laughed at nor explained away.’ “
— A leftist academic’s essay at aeon.co, “Empire of Fantasy,”
on St. Andrew’s Day, 2020.
"Leave a space." — Tom Stoppard, "Jumpers."
Obituary of a novelist in The Washington Post yesterday —
"He gave various explanations for how he chose his nom de plume —
le Carré means 'the square' in French —
before ultimately admitting he didn’t really know."
Related material for Dan Brown — Imperial Symbology and . . .
"Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms
the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature. . . .
They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories,
and follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out
for fairy-stories: ‘one thing must not be made fun of,
the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously,
neither laughed at nor explained away.’ "
— A leftist academic's essay at aeon.co, "Empire of Fantasy,"
on St. Andrew's Day, 2020.
A more respectable writer on literature and magic —
A speaker in Washington, D.C., yesterday —
“We are in a crucible moment in the history
of the United States of America,” he said at
the “Let the Church Roar” rally at the National Mall.
In other drama —
“It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe.”
— Peggy (Vanessa Redgrave) in a 1987 film.
The above Emma Watson date — Oct. 28, 2014 — suggests
some DC-related remarks in a Log24 search for “The Lost Symbol.”
“He said, ‘It’s no coincidence that I study narcissistic leaders,
because it takes one to know one’”
— Obituary for a CIA psychologist
“Opus esse uno, unum cognoscendi,” the arch-narcissist Veidt
haughtily declares before he does this, which he translates to mean,
“It takes one to know one.”
— https://www.salon.com/2019/12/16/
watchmen-finale-one-last-reveal-explains-all-those-eggs-
and-the-crushing-weight-of-legacy/
Dr. Post reportedly died on November 22.
From The New York Times on October 29 —
Zoe Lister-Jones on ‘The Craft’ and Women’s Power
by Melena Ryzik
See as well Ryzik in yesterday’s post “After Valentine’s” —
Related material —
“Perhaps only Shakespeare manages to create at the highest level
both images and people; and even Hamlet looks second-rate
compared with Lear .”
— Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” 1961
Byline from a 2019 post — ‘GLOBE STAFF AND NEW SERVICES’ —
 |
 |
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry,
demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
“block design” subtest.
— From a Log24 search for “Harrison Pope.”
Related drama — Other posts tagged Plastic Elements.
From a review of the new game Cyberpunk 2077 —
“Oh, you also find out the chip has meshed with
your nervous system, so you can’t take it out, and
that Silverhand’s consciousness will eventually
overtake yours, meaning your body will live on
but not your mind, soul or spirit.
Damn computers.”
— Daniel Van Boom at cnet.com,
Dec. 7, 2020 4:19 p.m. PT
(and under a different title later)
See also the similar plot of “Upgrade” (2018) , a film featured in the
Log24 post Popular Mechanics: Midnight Upgrade (Oct. 26, 2019).
STEM Education —
For an earlier form of the plot,
see “Go Chip” in this journal.
See a Log24 search that includes earlier posts on “Redactedentity.”
Recent activity by that entity at the Encyclopedia of Mathematics:
As the above “recent changes” list notes, Redactedentity added
a new favicon section to Talk:EoM on December 7, 2020. Details —
The new section as it appeared later, with “Redactedentity”
replaced by “Mihir Narayanan” —
Update at 5:35 PM ET on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020 —
User “Redactedentity” at Wikipedia is now user “Mihir Narayanan.”
From the Net on December 7, 2020 —
Some background for academics:
“The Self Regained”: Cyberpunk’s Retreat
to the Imperium by Sharon Stockton (1995)
A review dated December 7:
See the previous post and Butcher’s Clay (March 29, 2014).
* The title refers to a film starring Jessica Chastain.
See also Chastain in Annals of Subliminal Typography.
“Rosenbaum has a fluent style that can
pivot and change direction on a single word ….”
The above quotation results from a search
in this journal for golem.
That search resulted from today’s previous post,
Clay Risen.
Related conceptual art —
“You’ve got to be carefully taught . . . .” — Oscar Hammerstein II.
See as well the word undoing in a post of December 6.
The title, which suggests a combination of musings by James Joyce
and Gerard Manley Hopkins, is actually a person’s name. See below.
“Program or be programmed.” — Douglas Rushkoff
Detail —
The part of today’s online Crimson front page relevant to my own
identity work (see previous post) is the size, 4 columns by 6 rows,
of the pane arrays in the windows of Massachusetts Hall.
See the related array of 6 columns by 4 rows in the Log24 post
Dramarama from August 6 (Feast of the Transfiguration), 2020.
The title is a phrase I encountered today in a search for background
on the anonymous Wikipedia user whose first “user talk” page is as
follows —
See also CrazyMinecart88 at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CrazyMinecart88 .
“… the disclosure of knowledge as it is
intimately bound up with identity work”
— “Awarding the self in Wikipedia : Identity work
and the disclosure of knowledge,” by Daniel Ashton.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 1 – 3 January 2011.
Some mine cart “identity work” of my own —
The Importance of Being Ernst —
In the above Wikipedia revision today, the anonymous user “Redactedentity”
found that the article Kummer surface omitted Kummer’s first name
and so changed “authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Kummer” to
“authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Ernst Kummer.” This fixed the
omission but makes no sense as a statement of parameters.
“Redactedentity” was apparently unable to read the following page,
which explains that “last=” is for the author’s last name —
Of course, this revision may be merely an instance of trolling or of
the sort of humor sometimes found among people with the following
interests:
See also Pazouzou.
The New York Times online today —
Menu bar above a book review: “The Best of 2020.”
Alfred Bester —
Related search results —
Today’s earlier post “Binary Coordinates” discussed a Dec. 6
revision to the Wikipedia article on PG(3,2), the projective
geometry of 3 dimensions over the 2-element field GF(2).
The revision, which improved the article, was undone later today
by a clueless retired academic, one William “Bill” Cherowitzo,
a professor emeritus of mathematics at U. of Colorado at Denver.
(See his article “Adventures of a Mathematician in Wikipedia-land,”
MAA Focus , December 2014/January 2015.)
See my earlier remarks on this topic . . . specifically, on this passage —
“A 3-(16,4,1) block design has 140 blocks
of size 4 on 16 points, such that each triplet
of points is covered exactly once. Pick any
single point, take only the 35 blocks
containing that point, and delete that point.
The 35 blocks of size 3 that remain comprise
a PG(3,2) on the 15 remaining points.”
As I noted on November 17, this is bullshit. Apparently Cherowitzo
never bothered to find out that an arbitrary “3-(16,4,1) block design”
(an example of a Steiner quadruple system ) does not yield a PG(3,2).
PG(3,2) is derived from the classical 3-(16,4,1) block design formed by the affine
space of 4 dimensions over GF(2). That design has 322,560 automorphisms.
In contrast, see a 3-(16,4,1) block design that is automorphism-free.
From a cartoon graveyard —
See as well a father, a son, and a (sort of) ghost:
Richard K. Guy in “A Cross for von Sydow,”
his son, M. J. T. Guy, and Mirror Guy.
The title phrase is ambiguous and should be avoided.
It is used indiscriminately to denote any system of coordinates
written with 0 ‘s and 1 ‘s, whether these two symbols refer to
the Boolean-algebra truth values false and true , to the absence
or presence of elements in a subset , to the elements of the smallest
Galois field, GF(2) , or to the digits of a binary number .
Related material from the Web —
Some related remarks from “Geometry of the 4×4 Square:
Notes by Steven H. Cullinane” (webpage created March 18, 2004) —
A related anonymous change to Wikipedia today —
The deprecated “binary coordinates” phrase occurs in both
old and new versions of the “Square representation” section
on PG(3,2), but at least the misleading remark about Steiner
quadruple systems has been removed.
The photo of Lauren German from “Standing Still” (2005) in the
previous post suggests some related material for comedians:
The above character-creator name “Neil Gaiman” occurs here
in a post from June 2013 —
The above footnote refers to . . .
More merriment: Lauren German in a video of the related song
“Another One Bites the Dust.”
The recent posts "Bunker Bingo" and "Here's to Efficient Packing!"
suggest a review.
Alex Ross in The New Yorker on Dec. 2, 2020, on the German
word "Untergang " —
"The usual translation is 'downfall,' although
the various implications of the word—
literally, “going-under”—are difficult to capture
in English. In some contexts, Untergang simply
means descent: a sunset is a Sonnenuntergang .
Lauren German in a 2005 film —
See as well . . .
"Rock music from car . . ."
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