From the May Day 2016 link above, in "Sunday Appetizer from 1984" —
The 2015 German edition of Beautiful Mathematics , a 2011 Mathematical Association of America (MAA) book, was retitled Mathematische Appetithäppchen — Mathematical Appetizers . The German edition mentions the author's source, omitted in the original American edition, for his section 5.17, "A Group of Operations" (in German, 5.17, "Eine Gruppe von Operationen")—
That source was a document that has been on the Web since 2002. The document was submitted to the MAA in 1984 but was rejected. The German edition omits the document's title, and describes it as merely a source for "further information on this subject area."
“The dialectic is the play that the last instance opens up
between itself and other ‘instances’, but this dialectic is
materialist: it is not played out up in the air, it is played out
in the play opened up by the last instance, which is material.”
That Ereignis post is dated July 3, 2007.
Related material for the Church of Synchronology —
"The deepest strain in a religion is the particular
and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart,
in the company of such pronouncements as ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’
Take the deepest strain of religion away…
and what remains are the surface pieties —
abstractions without substantive bite —
to which everyone will assent
because they are empty, insipid, and safe."
From a New York Times obituary today recounting
the life of a psychoanalyst who reportedly died at 94 on
January 16 —
"Dr. Shengold began treating Dr. Sacks in 1966 for
an amphetamine addiction. He continued to see him for
nearly a half-century.
'Above all, Shengold has taught me attention,' Dr. Sacks said in an interview in 2012 for the website
Web of Stories, an archive of stories told by prominent
scientists and other people. 'And what is sometimes
called listening with a third ear — listening to what is
behind the babble.' "
The New Yorker, issue dated July 23, 2007, page 42:
“While out-of-body experiences have the character of
a perceptual illusion (albeit a complex and singular one),
near-death experiences have all the hallmarks of mystical
experience, as William James defines it….”
From Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) ,
Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly,
Indiana University Press, 1999 (first published in German
in 1989 as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) but written in 1936-1938—
"The 'between' [das Zwischen ] is the simple 'bursting open'
that enowns be-ing to a being, which up until then is held back
from what is ownmost to it and is not yet to be named a being.
This 'bursting open' is the clearing for the sheltered. But the
'bursting open' does not disperse. and the clearing is not a mere
emptiness.
The 'between' [das Zwischen ] which bursts open gathers
what it removes into the open of its strifing and refusing
belongingness, moves unto the ab-ground , out of which everything
(god, man, world, earth) recoils in swaying into itself and thus leaves
to be-ing the unique decidedness of en-ownment."
— 270, "The Essential Sway of Be-ing" (p. 341)
"Enownment and enstrifing, historical grounding and decision,
uniqueness and the onefold, what has the character of
the between [Zwischenhafte ] and the cleavage [Geklüft ] —
they never name the essential sway of be-ing as properties
but rather in each case the whole essential swaying* of its essential
sway."
— 270, "The Essential Sway of Be-ing" (p. 342)
* For "swaying" as "unfolding," see (for instance) the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
also George Kovacs, Thinking and Be-ing in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) ,
Zeta Books, 2015.
Ereignis in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy —
Further aspects of the essential unfolding of Being are revealed by what is perhaps the key move in the Contributions—a rethinking of Being in terms of the notion of Ereignis, a term translated variously as ‘event’ (most closely reflecting its ordinary German usage), ‘appropriation’, ‘appropriating event’, ‘event of appropriation’ or ‘enowning’. (For an analysis which tracks Heidegger's use of the term Ereignis at various stages of his thought, see Vallega-Neu 2010). The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift.
Related theology — See "The Meaning of Perichoresis."
Background — The New Yorker , "On Religion:
Richard Rohr Reorders the Universe," by Eliza Griswold
on February 2, 2020, and a different reordering in posts
tagged Eightfold Metaphysics.
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Farewell mein Lieber herr
Goodbye mein Lieber herr
It was a fine affair but now it's over
And though we made you Chair
You're not allowed to share
We're better off without you mein herr
Your talent was a Thousand Talents wide mein herr
Your chemistry with China mesmerized mein herr
It's really no surprise to find you lied mein herr
But that's why
FBI
Watched you spy...
Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to …
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University
Department of Social Relations
Center for Research in Personality
Morton Prince House
5 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts
July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz
c/o Upstate Medical School
Irving Avenue
Syracuse 10, New York
Dear Dr. Szasz:
Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun.
The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry.
I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century.
It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty.
. . . .
The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.
Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."
Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's "jewel box" post …
A 4-dimensional hypercubeH (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces. In its incarnation as a Galois tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of 2,304 affine transformations.
Similar remarks apply to the I Ching In its incarnation as
a Galois hexaract, for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.
"The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call
'surveillance capitalism.' Its success depends upon one-way-mirror
operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of
misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. . . ."
"It’s not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling
White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland
where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion."
"Dr. Daubechies is best known for her work on mathematical structures
called wavelets; her discoveries have been so influential, in fact, that
these are referred to in the field as Daubechies wavelets. She describes
them as 'mathematical building blocks' that can be used to extract the
essential elements of images or signals without losing their quality—
in effect, a new universal language for scientists and researchers."
"QI has traced the core of the quotation
to the work of an early researcher in
artificial intelligence, Anthony Oettinger,
who was trying to get a computer to
manipulate the English language."
"In this state of free-association, each new thought
resembles or overlaps or somehow connects-to
the previous thought. As our alertness continues to fall —
as we continue to grow more tired — we lose contact with
external reality.
'The sweetness/ of the gentle world you had made for him
dissolving beneath/ his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of
sleep — .' (Rilke, transl. Stephen Mitchell.) Eventually we
sleep and dream."
"With Mr. Lehrer reporting from Washington and Mr. MacNeil
from New York, the program sought to represent all sides of
a controversy by eliciting comments from rivals for public
attention. But the anchors deliberately drew no sweeping
conclusions of their own about disputed matters, allowing
viewers to decide for themselves what to believe.
The approach had its drawbacks. An extended presentation
of authoritative voices offering conflicting viewpoints left
some viewers dissatisfied, if not confused. Many found the
technique elitist and dull, and even some critics called it
boring — or, worse, a willful refusal by Mr. Lehrer and Mr.
MacNeil to make hard judgments about adversarial issues
affecting the public interest."
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made . . . .
"it remains only to choose a pleasing arrangement of {1, 2, … 7} to label the eye-in-the-pyramid points.
there are, as it’ll turn out, 168 of ’em that’ll work."
"Freshman Seminar Program Department Administrator Corinna S. Rohse
described the program’s courses, which allow students to study subjects
that vary from Sanskrit to the mathematical basis for chess, as
'jewel-like: small and incredibly well-cut.' "
Compare and contrast these remarks of Pereyra with the following
remarks, apparently by the same Corinna S. Rohse quoted above.
* Location of the Harvard Freshman Seminar program in the 2008
article above. The building at 6 Prescott was moved there from 5 Divinity Avenue in 1978. When the seminar program was started
in the fall of 1959, it was located in a house at 8 Prescott St. (In
1958-1959 this was a freshman dorm, the home of Ted Kaczynski.)
"Freshman Seminar Program Department Administrator Corinna S. Rohse
described the program’s courses, which allow students to study subjects
that vary from Sanskrit to the mathematical basis for chess, as
'jewel-like: small and incredibly well-cut.' "
This suggests a review of Log24 posts now tagged Four Gates.
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See as well, in yesterday's Cornfield post, Plato on
tolerating "the presence of untruth." That not one
of the 29 (as of today) comments on Gowers's post
mentions the above presence of untruth is itself a
comment on the culture of the Academy.
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.
"Philip Roth has got a new book out called Exit Ghost ,
which I find touching. He’s ageing and pursuing the
question of what ageing does to a writer’s skills. I’m
dealing with that myself so that book speaks for me
a great deal."
Related material from October 2, 2007 —
See as well this journal on the days before and after
the Kakutani review above:
"Step by step, Kepes follows the liberation of the plastic elements:
lines, planes, and colors, and the creation of a world of forms of our own.
The spatial conception interconnects the meaning fragments and
binds them together just as in another period perspective did when it used
a single station point for naturalistic representation."
“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.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55).
She’s a mystery
She’s everything
a woman should be
Woman in black
got a hold on me
Science fiction author Mike Resnick "died very early today,
January 10, 2020, a little after midnight," his daughter wrote,
according to a Heavy.com article dated "Jan 9, 2020 at 11:07 am."
That date of death accordingly should be "January 9, 2020."
But perhaps the saying "print the legend" is relevant here.
For related fiction, see Resnick's The Dark Ladyin this journal
and …
"There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way And returned on the previous night."
[Link added.]
— According to quoteinvestigator.com, this is from the
December 19, 1923, Punch, or The London Charivari ,
Volume 165, "Relativity" (Limerick), page 591, column 1.
"One of the more fortuitous encounters of late-20th-century popular culture —
almost up there with Lennon meets McCartney and Taylor meets Burton —
took place on Labor Day 1965, at Jane Fonda’s Malibu beach house. The
actress was hosting a daylong bash at which her father, Henry’s,
generation mingled uneasily with her Hollywood hippie friends. The Byrds
played in the backyard. A young comedian-turned-film director named Mike
Nichols was approached by an improv comic-turned-itinerant writer named
Buck Henry, who asked how he was doing. Nichols dourly looked around
at all the proto-Summer of Love vibes and said, 'Here, under the shadow of the great tree, I have found peace.'
Henry immediately recognized a sardonic East Coast kindred spirit trapped
in Lotusland . . . ."
— Ty Burr, Boston Globe staff, January 9, 2020, 10:34 AM
DECODING MATHEMATICS AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
"Dissecting a passage of text in a language other than one's
native language is a daunting task and requires a strategy.
When dissecting mathematical language, readers are faced
with the same challenges, whether the mathematics is in
the form of an equation or in the form of a word problem."
See as well a post from this journal on the above date —
June 12, 2014. (That post revisits a post from today's date —
January 7 — eight years ago, in 2012.)
The above reference to "Tuesday" is explained by the fine print
at the bottom of the Science Times article — "A version of this article
appears in print on [Tuesday] , Section D, Page 6 of the
New York edition with the headline: In Battle of Giant Telescopes,
Outlook for the U.S. Dims."
"Now, as the wheels of the academic and government bureaucracy begin to turn, many American astronomers worry that they are following in the footsteps of their physicist colleagues. In 1993, Congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, and the United States ceded the exploration of inner space to Europe and CERN, which built the Large Hadron Collider, 27 miles in diameter, where the long-sought Higgs boson was eventually discovered.
The United States no longer builds particle accelerators. There could come a day, soon, when Americans no longer build giant telescopes. That would be a crushing disappointment to a handful of curious humans stuck on Earth, thirsting for cosmic grandeur. In outer space, nobody can hear you cry."
" When the Center for Fiction honored Mehta in 2018 with a
lifetime achievement award, tributes were written by Joan Didion,
Haruki Murakami and Anne Tyler, who praised 'his precision' and
'deft assurance' and called him the 'Fred Astaire of editing.' "
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