Log24

In honor of a famed architecture critic,
here is a link to Bruno's Atria.

See also Giordano Bruno  in this journal.

"Not only was he world class, highly regarded and effective,
but he also offered a story, a lesson, or a playful insight
that was there if you were paying attention."

— Tribute to the late Tingye Li, past president of the
Optical Society of America, who died on Dec. 27

See also Object Lesson.

"When you study the basics very thoroughly,
you never know where it may end."

— Ulrich Schneider, U. of Munich physicist,
     in a science story by Charles Choi today

  Midnight in Paris

   See also Mariani  in this journal.

"What possessed a generation of young European artists,
and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery
in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy
became practically compulsory in the next." 

— Peter Schjeldahl in the current New Yorker

The following remarks may or may not be relevant.

Paul Valéry, "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,"
La Nouvelle Revue , Paris, Vol. 95 (1895)—

"Regarded thus, the ornamental conception is to the individual arts
what mathematics is to the other sciences. …the objects chosen
and arranged with a view to a particular effect seem as if disengaged
from most of their properties and only reassume them in the effect,
in, that is to say, the mind of the detached spectator. It is thus
by means of an abstraction that the work of art can be constructed,
and is more or less easy to define according as the elements borrowed
from reality for it are more or less complex. Inversely it is by a sort of
induction, by the production of mental images, that all works of art are
appreciated, and this production must equally be more or less active,
more or less tiring, according as it is set in motion by a simple
interlacing on a vase or a broken phrase by Pascal."

— Translated by Thomas McGreevy (Valéry's Selected Writings,
     New Directions, 1950)

Paul Valéry, "Introduction a la Méthode de Léonard de Vinci,"
La Nouvelle Revue , Paris, Tome 95 (1895), p. 762—

"De ce point de vue, la conception ornementale est aux arts
particuliers ce que la mathématique est aux autres sciences. De
même que les notions physiques de temps, longueur, densité,
masse, etc., ne sont dans les calculs que des quantités homo-
gènes et ne retrouvent leur individualité que dans l'interprétation
des résultats, de même les objets choisis et ordonnés en vue d'un
effet sont comme détachés de la plupart de leurs propriétés et
ne les reprennent que dans cet effet, dans l'esprit non prévenu
du spectateur. C'est donc par une abstraction que l'œuvre d'art
peut se construire, et cette abstraction est plus ou moins éner-
gique, plus ou moins facile à y découvrir, que les éléments em-
pruntés à la réalité en sont des portions plus ou moins com-
plexes. Inversement, c'est par une sorte d'induction, par la
production d'images mentales que toute œuvre d'art s'apprécie;
et cette production doit être également plus ou moins énergique,
plus ou moins fatigante  selon qu'un simple entrelacs sur un
vase ou une phrase brisée de Pascal la sollicite." 

"I never had any hesitation or regrets…."

— Rita Levi-Montalcini, who died today at 103

See also today's previous post and…

Turning the Page:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in Looper :

Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys :

See also Big Time  in this journal.

A meditation on the performance of the late Charles Durning
in the film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas .

• This journal on December 7th, 2012
• This journal on December 22, 2012
• Kristofferson and Huppert in Heaven's Gate
• Walken in Heaven's Gate
• Punchline at Heaven's gate: "Spell chrysanthemum."

Where Kirkland meets Quincy—

Click image for some context.

The Kernel of the Concept of the Object…

according to the New York Lottery yesterday—

From 4/27

From 11/24

A page numbered 176

A page numbered 187

… In gratitude for his book Real Presences—

Will and Idea:

A related shell game:

Ad for a talk at Harvard by Nick Bostrom in April 2010—

Click ad for background on the April 10 , 2010, symposium.

See also Bostrom on the The Simulation Argument
and the Log24 April 12, 2010, Shell Game post above.

Note the black diamond logo of Bostrom's Oxford institute.

* See Google Doodle for today, the
   200th anniversary of the Grimms'
   Kinder- und Hausmärchen .

   See also Ay Que Bonito Es Volar
    and The Broom Factory.

Today's New York Times  on a collector of Japanese art who died on December 8th—

In 1954, she made her first trip to Japan. The visit had been suggested by the architect Walter Gropius, whose disciple Benjamin Thompson was designing a modernist house for her in Oyster Bay, on Long Island.

Gropius, a titan of the Bauhaus school, was deeply influenced by the Japanese aesthetic and wanted her to experience its clean, spare lines firsthand.

See Dec. 8th in this  journal for the following clean, spare lines:

Japanese character
        for "field"

Related material: Looking Deeply and Field.

Image adapted from a 1960 Grove Press
(Evergreen paperback E-219) cover
illustration, apparently by Roy Kuhlman,
for The Spirit of Zen , by Alan Watts

Or: Being There

(A sequel to last night's Lyric Intelligence )

William Deresiewicz reviews Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano :

The novel’s prescience is chilling. Six years before the left-wing English
sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy ,
a dystopian satire that coined that now-ubiquitous final word,
Vonnegut was already there.

Related material:

Intelligence Test , Gombrich,  and, more generally, Stupidity.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however
measured or far away." — Thoreau

"I got a line on you." — Spirit

See also today's previous post and Eve's Menorah.

The following passage is suggested by last night's "Eve's Menorah"
and by today's "Review of Leonardo  Article" —

Click image to enlarge.

In today's New York Times :

The late film executive Steven Bach on
the late literary agent Robert Lescher —

Mr. Bach’s 1985 book about film, “Final Cut:
Dreams and Disaster in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate’ ”—
a crow’s-nest view of the cultural and personal tensions
on the set— became a best seller and a Hollywood-insider
classic. In his acknowledgments, Mr. Bach said Mr. Lescher
“was the spiritual father to the book and to its author as well.”

See also "The rest is the madness of art" and Eight Gate.

The last name of the author Camelia Elias matches
the first name of the father of Robert "Slowly" Lescher.

Related material: December Days and  All Saints.

Ado.

"Fail better." — Samuel Beckett, "Worstward Ho"

"West. And slowly." — Stage direction for a Christmas carol

This post was suggested by the December 4th death
of modernist composer Jonathan Harvey, 73,
and by Harvey's reflections on his 2007 opera
Wagner Dream .

For related reflections, see the Oct. 10 post on
the Dürer magic square in Mann's Doctor Faustus .

See also a December 2nd post on the Nov. 18 death of
chess grandmaster Elena Akhmilovskaya Donaldson.

Related material: The Revisiting (December 3rd, 2012)

Part I

Embedding the Stone (March 23, 2012) —

The Meno Embedding

Part II

ReverbNation.com — Lawrence Class —

A review of a post from December 6, 2002,
suggests a review of more recent remarks.

See June 26, 2012: Looking Deeply.

A later post supplies some mathematical
background. See Counterexample (Nov. 27, 2012).

Happy Feast of Saint Nicholas.

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died today at 104.

His "Crown of Thorns" cathedral
appeared here in
some posts of August 2003.

(Continued)

Living Legend Takes Five.

(Midnight in the Garden, continued)

E is for Ending …

Cullinane = Cullinan + E

And for Everlast.

(The Cullinan link above is to a woman
who apparently is the wife of writer
Alan Cowell. See The Revisiting, Dec. 3rd.)

(Continued from Grim Joke )

Happy Birthday to The Master.

Image from this journal on November 11th,
darkened in honor of a Harvard professor
who died on that date—

Related material: Lincoln and Darwin at Harvard.

Evening numbers for the New York lottery
yesterday were 182 and 8691.

One interpretation of the latter number is
8/6/91, birth date of the WWW—

For one interpretation of the former number,
see Random Reference.

The title of yesterday's 11:22 PM post was "The Place of the Lion."

This is also the title of a novel by Charles Williams.

See, too, Midsummer Eve's Dream and Midsummer Night 2007.

For C. S. Lewis, who was born on this date in 1898,
and Natalie Wood, who died on this date in 1981

"He was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers…."
— C. P. Snow on mathematician G. H. Hardy

"Whoever you are— I have always depended on
the kindness of strangers." — A Streetcar Named Desire

From this journal on September 24, 2012—

Today's midday New York Lottery: 444 and 5222.

See Deuteronomy  4:44 and 5:2-22.

The New York Lottery:

CATCH OUR LIVE DRAWINGS:
NUMBERS and WIN 4
Draw Day: Twice Daily
Draw Time: Midday: 12:20 p.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Evening: 7:30 p.m. – 7:40 p.m. 

NY Lottery this evening: 674 and 1252 —

.

Contrapuntal themes:

Related Log24 posts today—
at 11:30 AM ET  (see post 674 ) and
at 7 PM ET (see post 1252).

The Devil at Midday:

Interpreting the midday numbers,
172 and 7817, is more difficult. Perhaps 172
refers to a Zen page number in a post from 
the Feast of Saint Louis in 2003, and perhaps,
in a less saintly manner, 7817 refers to
two posts in which these four digits appear
in product numbers within links— namely,
the Garden Party  "Background" link and 
the Seven Bridges  "wild" link.

Then again, perhaps not.

Today's sermon is for Martha B. Helfer, author of
the treatise on Darstellung  in today's previous post
and of the following—

(Click for clearer image.)

Helfer's The Word Unheard  was published by Northwestern University Press
on St. Andrew's Day, 2011. Log24 posts on that day—

Lines, Grids, and Fatuity for St. Andrew's Day.

The last of these warned of an upcoming Jewish Book Week event
on February 22, 2012.

That date turned out to be Ash Wednesday. See a Log24 post on that topic
that quotes a poet, T.S. Eliot, with anti-Semitic proclivities—

"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

This is perhaps not entirely irrelevant to Helfer's title, The Word Unheard .

* A concept of Schopenhauer and Hitler, and the first name of
   a fictional Boston mathematician.

The title of yesterday's post Will and Representation is of course
a reference to Schopenhauer's philosophical work of that name.

As the post itself indicates, the title is also a punning reference to
mathematical representation theory . 

To avoid confusion, it should be noted that Schopenhauer's
representation , in the original German, was Vorstellung .

The German for mathematical  representation theory is,
on the other hand, Darstellungstheorie . (The mathematical
use of Vorstellung  is non-technical, referring to concepts
of pedagogy. (A group presentation  is a Präsentation .))

For a discussion of the Vorstellung-Darstellung  distinction
in philosophy, not mathematics, see… 

The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of  Darstellung
in German Critical Discourse , by Martha B. Helfer,
State University of New York Press, 1996, esp. pp. 24-26.

New today…
John Markoff in this morning's New York Times—

"…what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy
of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks
or just 'neural nets' for their resemblance to the neural connections
in the brain."

Not so new…
From the early days of Mike Lynch's Autonomy Inc.—

"Autonomy 's intelligent agents use neural networking
to search for patterns of information, rather than
specific words or phrases, thereby distinguishing relevant
from irrelevant information." (Business Wire , October 8, 1996)

And from 1999—

For the answer, click here.

Connoisseurs of synchronicity may note two posts
from the date the above photo was taken:

First Draft of History and The Swedish Solution.

(The late Larry Hagman was, according to NBC News, "a longtime member 
of the Peace and Freedom Party, a minor leftist organization in California.")

Arthur C. Clarke—

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"The HP/Autonomy  Debacle," by John C. Dvorak at pcmag.com on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012—

"The whole Autonomy  thing was weird since the company seemed to be performing magic. On co-founder Michael Richard Lynch's Wikipedia page, the company is described as 'a leader in the area of computer understanding of unstructured information, an area which is becoming known as meaning-based computing .'

I do not know how gullible HP's board of directors is, but when I see the sudden emergence of something called 'meaning-based computing,' the alarms sound and the bullcrap meter begins to tag the red line."

A story by Terence K. Huwe in Online  magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2011, defines meaning-based computing (MBC), discusses Autonomy , and llnks to…

John Markoff in The New York Times , March 4, 2011— 

"Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people— who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing 'digital anomalies' that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds 'call me' moments— those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter."

For example…

Jonathan Weil at Bloomberg.com yesterday
on the HP-Autonomy  story—

"The goodwill figure is especially telling."

From remarks by Wallace Stevens featured in recent Log24 posts:

"The poet finds that as between these two sources: the imagination and reality, the imagination is false, whatever else may be said of it, and reality is true; and being concerned that poetry should be a thing of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to reality, which then becomes his inescapable and ever-present difficulty and innamorata. In any event, he has lost nothing; for the imagination, while it might have led him to purities beyond definition, never yet progressed except by particulars. Having gained the world, the imaginative remains available to him in respect to all the particulars of the world. Instead of having lost anything, he has gained a sense of direction and a certainty of understanding. He has strengthened himself to resist the bogus."

— Bard College speech of 1951

Related material:

With Autonomy , H-P Bought An Old-Fashioned
Accounting Scandal. Here's How It Worked.
(Forbes , Nov. 20, 2012)

Hewlett-Packard is losing a star in Mike Lynch
(The Guardian , May 25, 2012)

The Quest for Meaning: The world's smartest search engine
took 250 years to build. Autonomy  is here. 
(Wired , Feb. 2000)

(Continued)

Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012—

"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'

The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"

The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."

These same words in a different tongue—  "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)

"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."

— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization , Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142 

Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.

Last evening's NY Lottery numbers
985 and 3274, interpreted as the
numbers of Log24 posts, suggest
a look at Joyce's nightmare— history.

* The title refers both to a film and to
   a Log24 post, Random Access Memory.

The Telegraph  this evening has an obituary for
Theresa Brown, a Texas madam who reportedly 
died on September 18, 2012.

In her honor, an update has been made to a Log24 post
of that date. I hope she finds the update relevant.

* "Love Stage" — See yesterday's post.