Log24

Related material:

Frank J. Prial on the late singer Tony Martin—

— and, on Jan. 1, 2005, on beverage marketing:

Every picture tells a story.

Happy birthday to Hilary Swank.

"There is no question about what arithmetic is for
or why it is supported. Society cannot proceed
without it. Addition, subtraction, multiplication,
division, percentages: though not all citizens can
deal fluently with all of them, we make the
assumption that they can when necessary.
Those who cannot are sometimes at a disadvantage.

Algebra, though, is another matter."

— Underwood Dudley in the Notices of the
American Mathematical Society, May 2010:
"What Is Mathematics For?" 

A less nuanced remark from the American
Mathematical Society (AMS) today—

"The answer to the recent Op-Ed piece
in The New York Times  entitled
'Is Algebra Necessary?'
is resoundingly YES!"

— Eric Friedlander, AMS president

* A review of philosophical terminology—

"The distinction between necessary truth
and contingent truth is a version of Leibniz 's 
distinction between truths of reason and truths
of fact. A necessary truth must be true and
could not be false, whatever way the world is. 
It is true in itself. A contingent truth, on the other 
hand, depends upon the empirical world and might 
have been false had the world been different." 

— The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

On painter Karl Benjamin of Claremont, California,
who reportedly died on Thursday—

He played them music
and everything was concentrated and timeless
and all were artists 'til the bell rang.

Another remark from Claremont—

"'Once upon a time' used to be a gateway to
a land that was inviting precisely because
it was timeless, like the stories it introduced
and their ageless lessons about the human condition."

– Dorothea Israel Wolfson, 
   Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006

Benjamin was a professor emeritus at Pomona College.

The end of the beginning of the London Games 
suggests other games —

Shadows (July 14) —

A Game of Shadows — "You know my methods."

Related religious material —

The Feast of Saint  Jude,  2011.

(Continued from July 22)

Manhattan, July 22, 2012 — "Once upon a time, in a quiet corner
of the Middle East, there lived a shepherd named Gyges.  Despite
the hardships in his life Gyges was relatively satisfied with his meager
existence. Then, one day, he found a ring buried in a nearby cave."
Read more…

"I want you on the Swansea lathe today."
— Boss of the Christ figure in "The Machinist" (2004)

Related material in this journal—

Dylan Thomas and Modern Times—

IMDb trivia page on "The Machinist" (2004)—

"The time of 1:30 AM is significant throughout the movie.
Trevor often notices something out of the ordinary at this time.
During the 1 hour 30 minute mark in the movie,
the major plot twist is revealed."

As for the date  1/30… See Tolkien on telepathy.

(Backstory: The Gospel According to Father Hardon )

(Continued)

Part I:

Christian Bale as a Spanish Christ-parody in "The Machinist" (2004)

Part II:

"The expression 'the devil is in the details'
is turned on its head in the exhibit 'The Sacred Made Real'
at Washington's National Gallery of Art…." 
— Catholic News Service, 2010

Part III:

Tonight's New York Times  obituaries

Part IV:

"My goodness, there must be a hole in this glass."
— Maria in "The Machinist" (2004)

Wilson Pickett and the Holy…

L'Chaim

For those who like puzzles—

What film's page at IMDb recommends
the following "also liked" choices?

The Interpreter (2005), Identity (2003), The Game (1997),
The Ghost Writer (2010), The Machinist (2004), The Number 23 (2007)

A similar puzzle: Related Books

"Always with a little humor"
— Manchurian Candidate

"Sound of a Theorem"

In Memoriam

Ding

"One ring to bring them all…"
— J. R. R. Tolkien, Catholic author

Today in History, July 22, by The Associated Press—

"In 1934, bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death
by federal agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater,
where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie
'Manhattan Melodrama.'"

From a  Manhattan Melodrama—

"Follow the Ring" 

Piatigorsky died on Sunday, July 15. Notes in this  journal from that date—

• A July 15 update within a post of Sunday, July 8, and
• Converse.

Backstory—

• The Purloined Diamond,
• July 16 , and
• Lozengy Argent and Gules.

Colin Moynihan on the late Alexander Cockburn—

"His attachment to left-wing journalism— and controversy—
was forged very early on. His father, Claud Cockburn, while
covering the Spanish Civil War for The Daily Worker , joined
the Republican forces fighting the rebellion of Francisco
Franco. (Claud Cockburn, under a pseudonym, also wrote
novels, including Beat the Devil , which was made into a
film with Humphrey Bogart and which his son used as the
title of his column in The Nation .)"

A video linked to in this evening's earlier post suggests
an antidote to the film oeuvre  of Guillermo del Toro—
in particular, to Pan's Labyrinth.

For a leftist who wrote well—

Here's your ticket, pack your bags,
            time for jumpin' overboard 
Transportation is here 

—Talking Heads lyric

The New York Times  online front page
update of 10:11 this morning provides
a sort of antidote to Saturday morning
cartoons.

The update's time suggests a check
of this  journal's most recent post
with the date  10/11. It turns out
to be a meditation on art and
the speed of perception.

Related material:

A linked-to post, Twenty-Four.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/
la-pn-romney-colorado-shooting-is-
unspeakable-tragedy-20120720,0,1226295.story 

Romney: Colorado shooting is 'unspeakable tragedy'

By Seema Mehta 
July 20, 2012, 11:15 a.m.


BOW, N.H.—Hours after a shooter killed a dozen people
in a Colorado cinema, Mitt Romney scrubbed a scheduled
campaign rally Friday and instead offered his somber
condolences and prayers to the victims and their 
families.

“Our hearts break with the sadness of this unspeakable
tragedy. Ann and I join the president and first lady
and all Americans in offering our deepest condolences
to those whose lives were shattered in a few moments, 
a few moments of evil in Colorado,” Romney told a few
hundred people gathered at a lumber yard here.

“I stand before you today not as a man running for 
office but as a father and grandfather, a husband, an
American. This is a time for each of us to look into 
our hearts and remember how much we love one another 
and how much we love and how much we care for our great
country. There’s so much love and goodness in the heart
of America.”

Romney, wearing a navy blue suit and blue tie, spoke
for four minutes. The trademark campaign banners with
slogans such as “Believe in America” or “Obama’s Upside-
Down Economy” were gone, leaving a handful of American
flags as the backdrop. Before Romney spoke, Father 
Christian Tutor, an Anglican Catholic priest, led a 
prayer. ...

Caped Crusader

See also related juvenile humor, as well as Aurora in this  journal.

For those who prefer fiction:

"Many Dimensions  (1931) — An evil antiquarian illegally purchases
the fabled Stone of Suleiman (Williams uses this Muslim form
rather than the more familiar King Solomon) from its Islamic guardian
in Baghdad and returns to England to discover not only that the Stone
can multiply itself infinitely without diminishing the original, but that it
also allows its possessor to transcend the barriers of space and time."

— Wikipedia article on the author Charles Williams

A Passage to India… With Slides and Chanting

"Why art thou here, 
Come from the farthest Steppe of India?"

— Midsummer Night's Dream 

"After graduating, Mr. Franken headed for Harvard,
while Mr. Davis chose the University of the Pacific
in Stockton, Calif., because, he said, he had heard
that it had a foreign study program in India, where
he hoped to smoke opium. (They did, and he did.)"

— Obituary of Saturday Night Live  writer Tom Davis
by Douglas Martin in this evening's online New York Times

"Frances Alenikoff, a dancer, choreographer and visual artist
whose performances often interwove movement with slides,
film, speaking, tape recordings and chant, died on June 23
in Southampton, N.Y. She was 91."

— Margalit Fox, online NY Times of July 8, 2012

Click for up-to-date context from the Times.

Connoisseurs of hermeneutics will find that interpretations
of three of the above numbers are not hard to come by.

Consider, say, dates, post numbers in Log24, times, and so forth.

For the fourth number, 0131, try the following search:

http://www.m759.net/wordpress/?s=0131.

"History, Stephen said…."

For a black widow —

See history in today's Boston.com
and Waldorf in this journal.

I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard

— Paul Simon

See also the name Romanova
and the name Anastasia.

Éxito

Or: The Death of Ivan Illich

See For David Lavery and the prequel Art Isn't Easy. 

"Time for you to see the field."

— GitHub

— Got

(Continued.)

Jaws for Frank

Part I: October 8, 2010

Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate"

Part II: Noon Today

"The rest is the madness of art."

See also Patterns in the Carpets
and Saturday's Shadows.

The New York Times  online opinion today—

"Merit has been traditionally equated with intelligence, industriousness, educational attainment, creativity and competency. In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity, position is no longer ascribed by birth, and rewards flow to those who excel.

The rise of meritocratic competition as the preeminent means of social stratification in America has been hailed as a welcome advance because it replaced a society dominated by an upper class dependent on inherited wealth and status. The transition to meritocracy has, however, had unintended consequences. In the business sector, particularly, other less benign qualities emerge as essential to meritocratic success: aggressiveness, ruthlessness, dominance-seeking, victimizing behavior, acquisitiveness and the disciplined pursuit of self-interest." 

— Journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall discussing remarks last December by Mitt Romney

Note the subtle shift here from "merit" to "meritocracy." Romney used the former word, not the latter.

Note also this sentence, aimed particularly at meritocratic New York Times  readers—

"In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity… and rewards flow to those who excel."

Edsall lies. In a meritocracy, rewards flow to those who rubber-stamp "formal qualifications." See particularly Walter Kirn on meritocracy.

Edsall is pandering to Times  readers. Romney was pandering to a different group—

A tribute to Richard D. Zanuck in the style of Tim Burton—

Part I

Part II

Part III

The above Zanuck interview on Dark Shadows
was published on Midsummer Eve, June 23, 2012.

Also from June 23, 2012—

Related material— Russell on Hardy.

From this journal on June 19, 2012—

Walter Gropius on space—

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

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus  (1923)

A book published on the same date—
June 19, 2012:

"… what Chalmers called the convergence of coincidence—
a force majeure of unrelated events that shaped one's life,
that perhaps defined the concept of life itself.
He believed in the power of that force."

— The Cryptos Conundrum , by Chase Brandon

See also Chase Brandon in Sunday's Huffington Post .

"I wrote another book."
— Robert De Niro as Harlan Kane

A Story That Works “There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe; there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles — that minds should really touch, or that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing) that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy; and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.” – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“

Dichtung ist Stiftung.

For a White House daughter…

See Sweater and Light.

From this evening's Capitol Fourth—

She goes off with a great big bang
Boys I tell ya it's a beautiful thing

Related material— Big Bang  in this journal—

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

    See also Symbology, The Lost Cornerstone, and Now, Here's My Plan.

A story in two parts —

Part I (April 1986) and Part II (June 2012).

—Rhodes, I want you to get to know people like that.
 I'd like to sort of take you under my wing and educate you.

—Shucks, General, I'm just a country boy.

"And when I think about the values
that are important to me today,
I think first about meritocracy."

— Robert Diamond, Colby College '73, now
Chair of the Colby College Board of Trustees, in a
commencement address on Sunday, May 25, 2008

Other remarks on that Sunday —

• "Caught up in circles…"
• Wechsler Cubes
• Hall of Mirrors
• Sermon

Related material from Colby—

See also an MAA report on Gouvea from June 6, 2012.

Images from a Google search suggested by
last night's post Coming to Meet, by the recent
film "Archie's Final Project," and by a Thursday,
June 28, 2012, Times Higher Education  piece, 
"Raiders of the Lost Archives"—

    Log24, December 8, 2008 —

"Let the fingers do the research."
          — Archive Raiders

"High summer holds the earth." 

— James Agee, quoted in a post by University Diaries
linked to here on Thursday.

See also For Taylor and Country Strong.

* A phrase from the quoted Agee poem

Hexagram 44:
Coming to Meet

"This hexagram indicates a situation in which
the principle of darkness, after having been eliminated,
furtively and unexpectedly obtrudes again from within
and below. Of its own accord the female principle
comes to meet the male. It is an unfavourable and
dangerous situation, and we must understand and
promptly prevent the possible consequences.

The hexagram is linked with the fifth month
[June-July], because at the summer solstice
the principle of darkness gradually becomes
ascendant again."

— Richard Wilhelm 

To counteract the principle of darkness—

The Uploading (Friday— St. Peter's Day, 2012),

Thor's Light Bulb Joke, and …

 .

"… to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic"

— The aim of the artist, according to Thomas Wolfe 

Related entertainment—

High-minded— Many Dimensions .

Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube .

A non-Lyche* gate—

Part of the Andrew Amesbury series Archway to Highgate.

* See Lyche gate  in this journal.

Happy feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

Click image for some context. See also tonight's previous
post and Cliffs of Moher in this journal.

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

  Click word for details.

  See also a related poetic meditation
  from one for whom…

  The world is not enough. 

* Continued.

In memory of two figures from tonight's NY Times  obituaries index
(not  Nora Ephron and Anthony J. Wiener)—

Tower Envy

Erin Burnett and Jenga blocks yesterday

Related material—

The Bible Puzzle Book

and the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain

The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.

Remarks on Wallace Stevens's poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"
from Michael Bryson—

Or the woman-hero…

From a Log24 post on June 1, 2004—

“A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.’  Regular expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive. That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone as writing any other complex programming code.”

– David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

Happy birthday to the late Willard Van Orman Quine.

The New York Times  this morning reports the death
last Tuesday (June 19, 2012) in Boston
of Gerhard Kallman, a Brutalist architect
born in Berlin in 1915.

Some Log24 images from the date of his death—

The above view shows the south side of Kirkland Street (at Quincy).

A more appealing architectural image, from the other side
of Kirkland Street—

"The Double-Cross System, or XX System, was a World War II
anti-espionage and deception operation of the British military
intelligence arm, MI5. Nazi agents in Britain… were captured,
turned themselves in or simply announced themselves and were
then used by the British to broadcast mainly disinformation to
their Nazi controllers." —Wikipedia

The XX —

The Double Cross of Fritz Leiber—

Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

The New York Times  today—
 "Reality and our perception of it are incommensurate…."

The above New York Times Wire  item from 3:35 PM ET today
mentions two topics touched on in today's earlier Log24 post
Bowling in Diagon Alley— magic (implied by the title) and
incommensurability. The connection in that post
between the two topics is the diagonal  of a square.

The  wire item shows one detail from a Times  illustration
of the linked article— a blindfolded woman.

Another detail from the same illustration—

Hands-on Wand Work

See also remarks on Magic in this journal and on Harry Potter.

I dislike both topics.

In memory of art historian John Golding,
whose obituary appeared (finally) in
today’s online Telegraph—

“His most recent book, Paths to the Absolute  (based on
his 1997 series of AW Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts
delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC),
addressed seven abstract artists — Mondrian, Kazimir
Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Rothko
and Clyfford Still — and argued that abstract art was
not simply decorative but ‘heavily imbued with meaning
[and] with content’. The book won the Mitchell Prize for
the History of Art in 2002.”

Commentary on Golding’s obituary suggested by
this evening’s 4-digit New York Lottery number,
1051—

Post  1051 in this journal, together with a post from
April 1, 2012 found in a search for the digits  1051
in Log24. That search may serve as a review.

* A phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow

In memory of actor Richard Lynch, 76, who was found
dead at his California home on Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Lynch's last role was apparently as the Reverend John Hawthorne 
in the upcoming film The Lords of Salem .

(For a post on some related theological territory, see this journal
on the date Lynch's body was found.)

Wikipedia on the Salem film—

Lords of Salem  is the third film from Haunted Films,*
the first two being Paranormal Activity  and Insidious .

For other tales of paranormal activity, see the Bible.

For a post in this journal from the Insidious  release date,
see Mathematics Awareness Month (April 1, 2011).

See, too, related discussions of Finnegans Wake  by 
James S. Atherton in The Books at the Wake—

Pages 146-147 and 199-200.

* At IMDb, Haunted Movies. See also Blumhouse Productions.

For those who prefer a cinematic approach…

"I was alone, I took a ride…"

— Sound track of the 2010 film Steve Jobs on Flash

A quote from The Oxford Murders , 
a novel by Guillermo Martinez—

"Anyone can follow the path once it’s been marked out.
But there is of course an earlier moment of illumination, 
what you called the knight’s move. Only a few people, 
sometimes only one person in many centuries, 
manage to see the correct first step in the darkness.”

“A good try,” said Seldom.

In memory of Victor Spinetti, who died today—

"Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."

— Courtesy of Steve Jobs and Aldous Huxley—

The New York Times online front page last night—

"Microsoft introduced its own tablet computer,
called Surface, illustrating the pressure
Apple's success has put on it to marry
software and hardware more tightly."

Commentary—

Google Maps image

Related material—

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

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus  (1923)

Update of Feb. 3, 2013:
See also The Perception of Doors in this journal.

In memory of Paul Sussman, author of archaeological 
mystery novels about Egypt—

Sussman's last novel, not yet published, was

The Labyrinth of Osiris .

Sussman, 45, reportedly died suddenly on May 31, 2012.

A perhaps relevant thought—

"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical 
ultraomnipotence."

– e. e. cummings, 1944

The Fog of Law continues…

Egypt's highest court
declares parliament invalid

By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 11:36 AM EDT, Thu June 14, 2012

* See State of a Nation (Alicia Keys's birthday, 2012)

"What we need is… a third way
between the longstanding models
of war and peace. Movement in
this direction is already under way."

— Yale Law professor John Fabian Witt,
"The Legal Fog Between War and Peace"

Tolstoy he ain't.

Witt's remarks appeared yesterday
evening (between 8 and 9 PM EDT)
in the online New York Times .

For related "third way" material, see
yesterday's 7 PM EDT post in this  journal.

Lee Marvin in the 1983 film Gorky Park

For related material, see yesterday's post on Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy  and a May 27, 2010, post— Masks .

The link to the Masks  post was suggested by four things:

1. Tonight's Tony Awards
2. A speech dated May 27, 2010 (the Masks  date)—
   "Russia— Getting It Right the First Time"
3. The name of the organization on whose website
   the speech appears— Tertium Datur
4. Tertium Datur  in this journal—

   

* The title is in memory of business writer Mike Hammer.

A remark from the prepared text of Salman Khan,
who spoke at the MIT commencement today—

"I always tell people that MIT is the closest
thing to being Hogwarts— Harry Potter’s
wizarding school— in real life."

A detail from one computer's view of
the webcast of the commencement—

Time elapsed (from the start
of the browser's window, not  
from the start of the webcast) 

This suggests a look at the date  11/27—

Click on St. Patrick's for further details.

* See June 6, 2007.

The Khan calmed himself by degrees.

Click image for background.

In memory of Arthur P. Stern, a link to Feb. 23, 2010.

Related material— Not Quite Nothing.

… and Money Talks—

This morning's post Chinese Epiphany discussed interpretations of Chinese
stock market numbers.  A followup is shown above.

Here 12:12, the time of the New York Times  market quotes pictured,
may be interpreted as 12/12, Sinatra's birthday. The percentage
numbers +0.07 and +0.11 are, of course, lucky for gamblers.

The percentage number -0.01 is perhaps less lucky, but for whom?

"… Western academic philosophy will likely come to appear
utterly parochial in the coming years if it does not find a way
to approach non-Western traditions that is much more rigorous
and respectful than the tokenism that reigns at present."

— Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times  philosophy
    column "The Stone" yesterday

For example—

Selected Bibliography on Ancient Chinese Logic

Some background for this morning's post:
Margaret Masterman's Language, Cohesion and Form .
(See the morning post's footnote.)

Update of 12:25 PM EDT June 4, 2012—

See also "The Epiphany Philosophers" in the online
New York Times , a brief article dated September 19, 2008.

Jungians might enjoy a synchronistic note—

"Toward the Light," a brief post from this  journal
on that same date.

Yesterday's post Child's Play displayed a cube formed
by a Hasse diagram of the 8 subsets of a 3-set.*

This suggests a review of a post from last January—

* See a comment on yesterday's post relating it to earlier,
  very similar, remarks by Margaret Masterman.
  I was unaware yesterday that those remarks exist. 

In memory of Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, who died on May 30, 2012

C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge—

He played his games and indulged his eccentricities.
He was living in some of the best intellectual company
in the world— G. E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell,
Trevelyan, the high Trinity society  which was shortly to
find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury. (Hardy himself
had links with Bloomsbury, both of personal friendship
and of sympathy.)

See also "Max Black" + Trinity  in this journal.

"Like I said, it ain't me you gotta worry about."

— Riddick in Pitch Black

(Click Huntsman image below to enlarge.)