Thursday, January 5, 2012
From a review of Truth and Other Enigmas , a book by the late Michael Dummett—
"… two issues stand out as central, recurring as they do in many of the
essays. One issue is the set of debates about realism, that is, those debates that ask
whether or not one or another aspect of the world is independent of the way we
represent that aspect to ourselves. For example, is there a realm of mathematical
entities that exists fully formed independently of our mathematical activity? Are
there facts about the past that our use of the past tense aims to capture? The other
issue is the view— which Dummett learns primarily from the later Wittgenstein—
that the meaning of an expression is fully determined by its use, by the way it
is employed by speakers. Much of his work consists in attempts to argue for this
thesis, to clarify its content and to work out its consequences. For Dummett one
of the most important consequences of the thesis concerns the realism debate and
for many other philosophers the prime importance of his work precisely consists
in this perception of a link between these two issues."
— Bernhard Weiss, pp. 104-125 in Central Works of Philosophy , Vol. 5,
ed. by John Shand, McGill-Queen's University Press, June 12, 2006
The above publication date (June 12, 2006) suggests a review of other
philosophical remarks related to that date. See …
For some more-personal remarks on Dummett, see yesterday afternoon's
"The Stone" weblog in The New York Times.
I caught the sudden look of some dead master….
— Four Quartets
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Wednesday, January 4, 2012
I revised the cubes image and added a new link to
an explanatory image in posts of Dec. 30 and Jan. 3
(and at finitegeometry.org). (The cubes now have
quaternion "i , j , k " labels and the cubes now
labeled "k " and "-k " were switched.)
I found some relevant remarks here and here.
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Tuesday, January 3, 2012
"He had come a long way to this blue lawn,
and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city,
where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."
— The Great Gatsby
See also St. Andrew's Day, 2011, in this journal.
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In memory of artist Ronald Searle—
Searle reportedly died at 91 on December 30th.
From Log24 on that date—
Click the above image for some context.
Update of 9:29 PM EST Jan. 3, 2012—
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Theorum
From RationalWiki
Theorum (rhymes with decorum, apparently) is a neologism proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Greatest Show on Earth to distinguish the scientific meaning of theory from the colloquial meaning. In most of the opening introduction to the show, he substitutes "theorum" for "theory" when referring to the major scientific theories such as evolution.
Problems with "theory"
Dawkins notes two general meanings for theory; the scientific one and the general sense that means a wild conjecture made up by someone as an explanation. The point of Dawkins inventing a new word is to get around the fact that the lay audience may not thoroughly understand what scientists mean when they say "theory of evolution". As many people see the phrase "I have a theory" as practically synonymous with "I have a wild guess I pulled out of my backside", there is often confusion about how thoroughly understood certain scientific ideas are. Hence the well known creationist argument that evolution is "just a theory" – and the often cited response of "but gravity is also just a theory".
To convey the special sense of thoroughness implied by the word theory in science, Dawkins borrowed the mathematical word "theorem". This is used to describe a well understood mathematical concept, for instance Pythagoras' Theorem regarding right angled triangles. However, Dawkins also wanted to avoid the absolute meaning of proof associated with that word, as used and understood by mathematicians. So he came up with something that looks like a spelling error. This would remove any person's emotional attachment or preconceptions of what the word "theory" means if it cropped up in the text of The Greatest Show on Earth , and so people would (in "theory ") have no other choice but to associate it with only the definition Dawkins gives.
This phrase has completely failed to catch on, that is, if Dawkins intended it to catch on rather than just be a device for use in The Greatest Show on Earth . When googled, Google will automatically correct the spelling to theorem instead, depriving this very page its rightful spot at the top of the results.
See also
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Some backgound— In this journal, "Diamond Theory of Truth."
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Monday, January 2, 2012
An adaptation for the late Barbara Lea—
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best,
But úncúmberèd: meadow-dówn is nót distréssed
For a ráinbow fóoting it nor shé for her bónes rísen.
— After Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
* "And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it."
— Alice Sebold
Comments Off on The Lovely Bones*
Sunday, January 1, 2012
"… myths are stories, and like all narratives
they unravel through time, whereas grids
are not only spatial to start with,
they are visual structures that explicitly reject
a narrative or sequential reading of any kind."
— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids,"
October (Summer 1979), 9: 50-64.
Counterexample—
The Ninefold Square
See Coxeter and the Aleph and Ayn Sof—
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(Continued)
Both Ears…
And the Tale…
For another version of the tale, click
the "Continued" link from last year's final post.
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Saturday, December 31, 2011
(Continued)
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
From a commercial test-prep firm in New York City—
From the date of the above uploading—
From a New Year's Day, 2012, weblog post in New Zealand—
From Arthur C. Clarke, an early version of his 2001 monolith—
"So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered
throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the
promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been
patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.
Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set…."
The numerical (not crystal) pyramid above is related to a sort of
mathematical block design known as a Steiner system.
For its relationship to the graphic block design shown above,
see the webpages Block Designs and The Diamond Theorem
as well as The Galois Tesseract and R. T. Curtis's classic paper
"A New Combinatorial Approach to M24," which contains the following
version of the above numerical pyramid—
For graphic block designs, I prefer the blocks (and the parents)
of Grand Rapids to those of New York City.
For the barbed tail of Clarke's "Angel" story, see the New Zealand post
of New Year's Day mentioned above.
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Friday, December 30, 2011
The following picture provides a new visual approach to
the order-8 quaternion group's automorphisms.
Click the above image for some context.
Here the cube is called "eightfold" because the eight vertices,
like the eight subcubes of a 2×2×2 cube,* are thought of as
independently movable. See The Eightfold Cube.
See also…
Related material: Robin Chapman and Karen E. Smith
on the quaternion group's automorphisms.
* See Margaret Wertheim's Christmas Eve remarks on mathematics
and the following eightfold cube from an institute she co-founded—
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
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Thursday, December 29, 2011
From Margaret Wertheim's "Outsider Physicists and the Oh-My-God Particle," New Scientist , Dec. 24, 2011—
For the past 18 years I have been collecting the works of what I have come to call "outsider physicists". I now have more than 100 such theories on my shelves. Most of them are single papers, but a number are fully fledged books, often filled with equations and technical diagrams (though I do have one that is couched as a series of poems and another that is written as a fairy tale)….
The mainstream science world has a way of dealing with people like this— dismiss them as cranks and dump their letters in the bin. While I do not believe any outsider I have encountered has done any work that challenges mainstream physics, I have come to believe that they should not be so summarily ignored.
Consider the sheer numbers. Outsider physicists have their own organisation, the Natural Philosophy Alliance, whose database lists more than 2100 theorists, 5800 papers and over 1300 books worldwide. They have annual conferences, with this year's proceedings running to 735 pages. In the time I have been observing the organisation, the NPA has grown from a tiny seed whose founder photocopied his newsletter onto pastel-coloured paper to a thriving international association with video-streamed events.
The NPA's website tells us that the group is devoted "to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels, of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas".
Very little unites this disparate group of amateurs— there are as many theories as members— except for a common belief that "something is drastically wrong in contemporary physics and cosmology, and that a new spirit of open-mindedness is desperately needed". They are unanimous in the view that mainstream physics has been hijacked by a kind of priestly caste who speak a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible to most human beings. They claim that the natural world speaks a language which all of us can, or should be able to, understand.
"…a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible…."
For instance, the "secret language" of Dr. Garret Sobczyk?
See a brief paper by Sobczyk in the NPA Proceedings described above.
See also Sobczyk in the February 2012 Notices of the American Mathematical Society —
"Conformal Mappings in Geometric Algebra"—
This AMS article, together with Sobczyk's list of previous publications,
indicates that, despite his appearance in the NPA Proceedings , he is definitely not a crank.
Unfortunately, publication in the Notices does not by itself guarantee respectability.
For an example, see the Mathematics and Narrative post of Dec. 13, 2011.
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Continued from All Souls Day, 2011 —
Professor Sir Michael Dummett,
born June 27 1925, died December 27 2011
See also this journal on the day of Dummett's death.
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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
- Helen Frankenthaler's obituary in yesterday's online New York Times
- A 1975 review of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word
- In memory of the reviewer, a post from the date of her death
See also yesterday morning's Getting with the Program.
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Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Stanley Fish in The New York Times yesterday evening—
From the MLA program Fish discussed—
Above: An MLA session, “Defining Form,” led
by Colleen Rosenfeld of Pomona College
An example from Pomona College in 1968—
The same underlying geometries (i.e., “form”) may be modeled with
a square figure and a cubical figure rather than with the triangular
figures of 1968 shown above.
See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
Those who prefer a literary approach to form may enjoy the recent post As Is.
(For some context, see Game of Shadows.)
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Monday, December 26, 2011
Click images for context.
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Esquire on Julie Taymor—
Taymor, it must be said, is a beautiful woman. Her face at fifty-eight has sharp, expressive features— she actually frowns when she's unhappy, and her eyes seem to light up when she laughs— and she still has the long black hair she had when she was a young actress, "a very pretty eighteen-year-old," as she puts it, who "didn't want to play Cinderella or Snow White. I wanted to be the Wicked Witch of the West."
— Richard Dorment, article dated November 14, 2011
Ay que bonito es volar …
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Sunday, December 25, 2011
"Woher dieser Sprung von Endlichen zum Unendlichen? "
— Wittgenstein, Zettel , § 273
Antwort— Accomplished in Steps and For 34th Street.
See also Boundary Method.
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Yesterday's "diamond globe" post linked to a picture by Prof. Mike Zabrocki
of York University in Toronto. Here is the picture itself—
Some related material from 2004—
2003-2004 Events:
Prof Talk: Thursday, April 1st, from 2:30pm to 3:30pm in North Ross 638.
Speaker: Prof. Mike Zabrocki
Title: "Gems of Algebra: The Secret Life of the Symmetric Group"
Prof. Zabrocki's talk was enjoyable and accessible. One of the notable aspects of the talk was that Prof. Zabrocki presented some open problems related to the topics he was speaking about. Unfortunately, there were some technical problems that resulted in some images not appearing in Prof. Zabrocki's PowerPoint presentation, but Prof. Zabrocki easily made up for the problem by some work at the chalk board. Please feel free to take a look at Prof. Zabrocki's PowerPoint presentation, as well as the pictures of the permutahedron for n=4 and the permutahedron for n=5.
Some slides from the talk—
Detail from the slides—
A less academic ornament, from this journal on the date
of the Zabrocki talk—
Click image for context.
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Saturday, December 24, 2011
A search for Wallace Stevens ebooks
today at Alibris yielded 24 results.
I selected one to order—
Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes .
From that book—
(Click to enlarge)
Stevens's phrase "diamond globe" in this context suggests an image search
on permutahedron + stone + log24 .
For the results of that search (2 MB), click here.
Some background for the phrase used in the search—
See a photo by Mike Zabrocki from June 4, 2011.
See also a Log24 image and a generalization of the underlying structure.
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Friday, December 23, 2011
(Continued from April 5, 2009)
"Thought can as it were fly , it doesn't have to walk."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel , fragment 273
See also a related song.
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From Margaret Soltan, a brief Xmas story.
I, too, like Perkins.
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The reference in yesterday morning's post "The Speed of Thought"
to an art critic's webpage on what she calls "psychic art"
suggests an illustration of another sort of psychic art, from
the oeuvre of the late film director Don Sharp—
See also a Log24 post, "Go Ask Alice," from the above video's uploading date.
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Thursday, December 22, 2011
"As if an apparently meaningless frame of reference,
traveling at the speed of thought, suddenly became relevant…."
— Stephen Rachman, "Lost in Translation"
Unclean Frame—
Detail from the film "Sunshine Cleaning"
Clean Frame—
See also Psychic Art and "The Speed of Thought."
For another form of psychic art, see Game of Shadows.
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Stephen Rachman on "The Purloined Letter"
"Poe’s tale established the modern paradigm (which, as it happens, Dashiell Hammett and John Huston followed) of the hermetically sealed fiction of cross and double-cross in which spirited antagonists pursue a prized artifact of dubious or uncertain value."
For one such artifact, the diamond rhombus formed by two equilateral triangles, see Osserman in this journal.
Some background on the artifact is given by John T. Irwin's essay "Mysteries We Reread…" reprinted in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism .
Related material—
Mathematics vulgarizer Robert Osserman died on St. Andrew's Day, 2011.
A Rhetorical Question
Osserman in 2004—
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
A Rhetorical Answer
Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"
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Tuesday, December 20, 2011
For Emil Artin—
“And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline.”
— Johnny Mercer, “Midnight Sun”
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Monday, December 19, 2011
(Where Entertainment is God, continued)
Related material— The Nexus (Jan. 8, 2010).
That post contains the following—
"A Nexus is a place equidistant from the five elements as explained in the TV series Charmed . Using this as a point of reference, it is quite possible that there could be several Nexus points of power scattered throughout the world, though rare."
— Nexus (Charmed) in Wikipedia
Happy birthday, Alyssa Milano.
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Related material— Hitchens on Heaven—
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Sunday, December 18, 2011
For those who prefer their news straight—
Happy birthday, Steven Spielberg.
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"Vaclav Havel oversaw a bumpy transition…." —New York Times today
"Is it over— or is it just beginning?" —"All About Eve"
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Continued from August 16—
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Christopher Hitchens on J. K. Rowling—
“We must not let in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot remarked in another connection, and the wish to have everything clarified is eventually self-defeating in its own terms. In her correct determination to bring down the curtain decisively, Rowling has gone further than she should, and given us not so much a happy ending as an ending which suggests that evil has actually been defeated (you should forgive the expression) for good.
Greater authors— Arthur Conan Doyle most notably— have been in the same dilemma when seeking closure. And, like Conan Doyle, Rowling has won imperishable renown for giving us an identifiable hero and a fine caricature of a villain, and for making a fictional bit of King’s Cross station as luminous as a certain address on nearby Baker Street. It is given to few authors to create a world apart, and to populate it as well as illustrate it in the mind.
"A fictional bit of King's Cross Station"—
Throughout the series, Harry has traveled to King's Cross Station, either to depart for Hogwarts or return to London on the Hogwarts Express. The station has always symbolized the crossroad between the Muggle world and the Wizarding realm and Harry's constant shuffling between, and his conflict with, the two extremes. As Harry now finds himself at a transition point between life and death, it is purely to be expected that he would see it within his own mind as a simulacrum of that station. And though Dumbledore assures Harry that he (Harry) is not actually dead, it seems Harry can choose that option if he so wishes. Harry has literally and figuratively been stripped bare, and must decide either to board a train that will transport him to the "other side", or return to the living world…. — Wikibooks.org
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
See also Thursday morning's "As Is."
Comments Off on Lining the Train
Friday, December 16, 2011
Two recent quotes in this journal—
December 14—
"Hoban once ruefully observed that death would be a good career move:
'People will say, "Yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let’s look at him again."'"
December 15—
"This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level."
— "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" in Shadow Train
Michael Kinsley in The New York Times on Sunday, May 13, 2007—
Kinsley on the career of Christopher Hitchens—
Interesting! …. Interesting!! …. Interesting!!! …. Interesting!!!!
Where was this train heading?
Kinsley on a book in which Hitchens …
… pronounces the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” “engaging but abysmal” (a typical Hitchens aside: cleverly paradoxical? witlessly oxymoronic? take your pick)….
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The Sherlock Holmes film "A Game of Shadows"
is apparently showing around midnight
(12:00 AM PST, 3:00 AM EST) tonight in LA
at the ArcLight Hollywood.
This passage was quoted here on Sunday, November 27, this year.
For other words related to that date, see tonight's 11:02 post.
The serpent's eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine
In the Garden of Allah
— Don Henley
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"Just the facts." — Attributed to Joe Friday
A search in this journal in honor of the late
Christopher Hitchens yields links to two of his reviews—
a review of the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and
a review of a work by a rather different author—
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows .
Comments Off on Friday
Thursday, December 15, 2011
New York Daily News , 2:55 PM EST today—
Joe Simon, who dreamed up the star-spangled super hero Captain America while riding on a Manhattan bus during the early days of World War II, died Thursday [Dec. 15] after an undisclosed illness. He was 98.
New York Times , about 10 PM EST today—
Joe Simon, a writer, editor and illustrator of comic books who was a co-creator of the superhero Captain America, conceived out of a patriotic impulse as war was roiling Europe, died on Wednesday [Dec. 14] at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
The discrepancy is perhaps due to initial reports that quoted Simon's family as saying he died "Wednesday night."
Simon was a co-creator of Captain America. For some background on Simon and a photo with his fellow comic artist Jerry Robinson, co-creator of The Joker, see a Washington Post article from this afternoon. Robinson died on either Wednesday, Dec. 7, or Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011.
Los Angeles Times—
Jerry Robinson, a pioneer in the early days of Batman comics and a key force in the creation of Robin the Boy Wonder; the Joker; Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred; and Two-Face, died Wednesday afternoon [Dec. 7] in New York City. He was 89.
CNN—
Cartoonist Jerry Robinson, who worked on the earliest Batman comics and claimed credit for creating the super-villain The Joker, died Thursday [Dec. 8] at the age of 89, his family confirmed.
A picture by Robinson—
The Joker in January 1943
with a Nov. 27 calendar page
A non-joke from a more recent November 27—
Simplex Sigillum Veri
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave…"
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What "As" Is —
"This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level."
— Shadow Train
"You got to ride it like you find it."
— Song lyric
Related entertainment —
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Wednesday, December 14, 2011
For novelist Russell Hoban, who died yesterday—
"Hoban once ruefully observed that death would be a good career move:
'People will say, "Yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let’s look at him again."'"
Comments Off on As Was Foretold
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Mathematics —
(Some background for the Galois tesseract )
(Click to enlarge)
Narrative —
An essay on science and philosophy in the January 2012
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .
Note particularly the narrative explanation of the double-slit experiment—
"The assertion that elementary particles have
free will and follow Quality very closely leads to
some startling consequences. For instance, the
wave-particle duality paradox, in particular the baffling
results of the famous double slit experiment,
may now be reconsidered. In that experiment, first
conducted by Thomas Young at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, a point light source
illuminated a thin plate with two adjacent parallel
slits in it. The light passing through the slits
was projected on a screen behind the plate, and a
pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen was
observed. It was precisely the interference pattern
caused by the diffraction patterns of waves passing
through adjacent holes in an obstruction. However,
when the same experiment was carried out much
later, only this time with photons being shot at
the screen one at a time—the same interference
pattern resulted! But the Metaphysics of Quality
can offer an explanation: the photons each follow
Quality in their actions, and so either individually
or en masse (i.e., from a light source) will do the
same thing, that is, create the same interference
pattern on the screen."
This is from "a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Calgary."
His essay is titled "A Perspective on Wigner’s 'Unreasonable Effectiveness
of Mathematics.'" It might better be titled "Ineffective Metaphysics."
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative, continued
Requiem for a Hollywood market researcher—
See also a more detailed obituary.
For a tune related to Leonardo in memory of Farrell, see Hudson Hawk.
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Monday, December 12, 2011
From a review of the film "Wild Palms" in The New Yorker by James Wolcott
(issue dated May 17, 1993, pages 104-106)—
"The MacGuffin that will determine the outcome is a piece of
software [sic ] called the Go chip, its name taken from the
strategy board game. (There's a nod in the script to the Japanese
novelist Yasunari Kawabata, author of 'The Master of Go.')
Whoever possesses the Go chip possesses the
'techno-shamanistic key to eternity'…."
"In tomorrow's techno-pop tyranny, reruns are the basis of order."
"As Kreutzer's mistress, Kim Cattrall has excellent posture."
From Saturday Night Live on December 10, 2011, a portrayal of Kim Cattrall—
See also "Sex and the City" fans in The Crimson Passion.
For other keys (perhaps related to the Wild Palms "image sickness"),
see "Claves Regni Caelorum (Escher)" — Images, 1.9 MB.
Comments Off on Techno-Shamanistic Keys
Comments Off on Chip on his Shoulder
Religion for stoners,♦ in memory of Horselover Fat
Amazon.com gives the publication date of a condensed
version* of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis as Nov. 7, 2011.
The publisher gives the publication date as Nov. 8, 2011.
Here, in memory of the author, Philip K. Dick (who sometimes
called himself, in a two-part pun, "Horselover Fat"), is related
material from the above two dates in this journal—
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Stoned
m759 @ 12:00 PM
…. Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011—
From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
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Sunday, January 2, 2011
A Universal Form
m759 @ 6:40 PM
Simon Critchley today in the New York Times series "The Stone"—
Philosophy, among other things, is that living activity of critical reflection in a specific context, by which human beings strive to analyze the world in which they find themselves, and to question what passes for common sense or public opinion— what Socrates called doxa— in the particular society in which they live. Philosophy cuts a diagonal through doxa. It does this by raising the most questions of a universal form: “What is X?”
Actually, that's two diagonals. See Kulturkampf at the Times and Geometry of the I Ching .
[Here the "Stoned" found by the search
was the title of Critchley's piece, found in its URL—
"http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/stoned/ ."]
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See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
 .
Monday, November 7, 2011
The X Box
m759 @ 10:30 AM
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
The New York Times Magazine on St. Andrew's Day, 2003
.
For some background on this enigmatic equation,
see Geometry of the I Ching.
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Merry Xmas.
♦ See also last night's post and the last words of Steve Jobs.
* Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher, has, deliberately or not, sown confusion
about whether this is only the first of two volumes.
Comments Off on X o’ Jesus
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Comments Off on Nine is a Vine
From today's New York Times —
"We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones[*] among us. And for all of us."
— Eric Weiner , the author, most recently, of Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine .
[* A term for the religiously unaffiliated. See also the 3 PM hour of prayer.]
For highly interactive flirtations, I prefer Rebecca Larue. ("Skyrockets in flight…")
Comments Off on Flirtations
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Comments Off on A Word of Greek
For Hillary Rodham Clinton
Announcer: Red Flag Parfum, by Chanel.
The only perfume that warns men:
[ she turns to leave the party ]
Woman: I'm fucking crazy!
[ she runs from the party ]
Announcer: Red Flag.
Another version of Running from the Party —
"Words are events." — Walter J. Ong, Society of Jesus
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Who is the Red Pawn?
One answer, from the author of a book pictured here yesterday—
"Breaking Dawn 's cover is a metaphor for Bella's progression
throughout the entire saga. She began as the weakest
(at least physically, when compared to vampires and werewolves)
player on the board: the pawn. She ended as the strongest: the queen."
An answer I personally prefer— the Saturday Night Live version.
See also, in this journal, The Eight .
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Friday, December 9, 2011
Today's showtimes at ArcLight Hollywood—
Meanwhile…
Related (?) material—
A quote from the 2007 Anthony Hopkins film "Slipstream"—
"We've lost the plot!"—
as it has appeared in this journal.
See also the Dec. 7th note on Don Sebastian de Villanueva and…
Happy birthday, Kirk Douglas.
Comments Off on Showtime!
Some background for last night's post on Diego Rivera—
See "Octavio Paz" + "Solar Country" in this journal.
"Mexico is a solar country— but it is also a black country, a dark country.
This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child."
— Octavio Paz
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Diego Rivera on Google yesterday…
… and in this journal.
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Thursday, December 8, 2011
Comments Off on For Saint Les
Comments Off on En un lugar de la Mancha…
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
This evening's previous post honored a Jewish saint whose feast day is September 22nd.
Non-Jews may prefer to honor on that date St. Thomas of Villanueva.
* The late author of
"five novels featuring the vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva, a cynical, amoral and misanthropic Spanish nobleman whose predatory appetites pale into insignificance compared with the historical catastrophes which he witnesses in his periodic reincarnations." — Wikipedia
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For Saint Irving
* For one interpretation of this phrase, see
Sicilian Reflections (from this year's Feast
of St. Irving Berlin on his dies natalis ).
Comments Off on Eight is a Gate*
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
… in memory of Broadway photographer Leo Friedman, who died Friday.
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A Tale for St. Nicholas
Yesterday's midday New York Lottery numbers
were 629 and 2262.
The former suggests St. Peter's Day, 6/29, while
the latter suggests post 2262 in this journal—
On Muriel Spark.
Related material… As a memento mori, the three
Log24 posts from the date of Spark's death—
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Monday, December 5, 2011
From an obituary in this evening's online Wall Street Journal—
"Ms. Dunn spent her childhood in Las Vegas, where her father was a casino entertainment director and her mother was a retired showgirl. She earned a journalism degree from University of California at Berkeley….
She eventually advanced to become chief executive of Barclays Global Investors. As head of the large institutional money manager, she succeeded in the orderly world of index funds, which aim to control risk and take the guesswork out of investing."
As does Las Vegas.
Happy birthday to Joan Didion.
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A check tonight of Norwegian artist Josefine Lyche's recent activities
shows she has added a video to her web page that has for some time
contained a wall piece based on the 2×2 case of the diamond theorem —
The video (top left in screenshot above) is a tasteless New-Age discourse
that sounds frighteningly like the teachings of the late Heaven's Gate cult.
Investigating the source of the video on vimeo.com, I found the account of one "Jo Lyxe,"
who joined vimeo in September 2011. This is apparently a variant of Josefine Lyche's name.
The account has three videos—
- "High on RAM (OverLoad)"– Fluid running through a computer's innards
- "Death 2 Everyone"– A mystic vision of the afterlife
- "Realization of the Ultimate Reality (Beyond Form)"– The Blue Star video above
Lyche has elsewhere discussed her New-Age interests, so the contents of the videos
were not too surprising… except for one thing. Vimeo.com states that all three videos
were uploaded "2 months ago"— apparently when "Lyxe" first set up an account.*
I do not know, or particularly care, where she got the Blue Star video, but the other
videos interested me considerably when I found them tonight… since they are
drawn from films I discussed in this journal much more recently than "2 months ago."
"High on RAM (OverLoad)" is taken from the 1984 film "Electric Dreams" that I came across
and discussed here yesterday afternoon, well before re-encountering it again tonight.
And "Death 2 Everyone" (whose title** is perhaps a philosophical statement about inevitable mortality
rather than a mad terrorist curse) is taken from the 1983 Natalie Wood film "Brainstorm."
"Brainstorm" was also discussed here recently… on November 18th, in a post suggested by the
reopening of the investigation into Wood's death.
I had no inkling that these "Jo Lyxe" videos existed until tonight.
The overlapping content of Lyche's mental ramblings and my own seems rather surprising.
Perhaps it is a Norwegian mind-meld, perhaps just a coincidence of interests.
* Update: Google searches by the titles on Dec. 5 show that all three "Lyxe" videos
were uploaded on September 20 and 21, 2011.
** Update: A search shows a track with this title on a Glasgow band's 1994 album.
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
Steve Buscemi last night on Saturday Night Live
describing Christmas tree ornaments with his mate Sheila—
"This one's a little computer."
"Beep Boop Beep"
"This one's a little pinecone. … Beep Boop Beep"
Meanwhile…
In related news…
"Her name drives me insane."
— Rosetta Stone, 1978 cover of "Sheila," Tommy Roe's 1962 classic
Click image for sketch.
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Season's Greetings
from Down Under
(Click image for source. Background here.)
(B is for Bullock)
When Black Dog meets Red Hat,
the result is… Red Dog clip.
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(Continued from earlier posts.)
See the online New York Times on November 27—
With Blocks, Educators Go Back to Basics
— and related letters, online today—
The Building Blocks of Education
Another back-to-basics illustration—
"Design is how it works."
— Steve Jobs
See also the designer of the above Big apple—
“I’m fascinated with how past designers
had to come up with ideas
and solve problems using limited resources.”
— Mikey Burton
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From David Weinberger's book
Small Pieces Loosely Joined —
As Weinbergers go, I prefer Eliot.
Then there is my own theory of "small pieces loosely joined."
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Friday, December 2, 2011
(Continued from Mardi Gras 2011)
"People throw rocks at things that shine." — Taylor Swift, "Ours"
"Timing is everything." — Song lyric in "Country Strong"
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Heaven or Hell?
Morningstar (the weapon, not the girl)
Have You No Shame?
In like Flynn
Oh, and a belated happy birthday to Sarah Silverman.
* See November 25th.
Comments Off on Des Pudels Kern*–
See 11/07 in 2009.
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The Gift Horse
See also this journal on November 25th.
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"When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf,
and takes his dog to see the sport,
he should take care to avoid mistakes.
The dog has certain relationships to the wolf
the shepherd may have forgotten."
— Robert M. Pirsig
* An embroidered tale. See Paranoia, Dog Tale, and Kristallnacht 2006.
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Thursday, December 1, 2011
"I love gazing into things. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is, for example, to see into a dog, in passing— into him… to ease oneself into the dog exactly at his center, the place out of which he exists as a dog, that place in him where God would, so to speak, have sat down for a moment when the dog was complete, in order to watch him at his first predicaments and notions and let him know with a nod that he was good, that he lacked nothing, that no better dog could be made. For a while one can endure being in the middle of the dog, but one has to be sure to jump out in time, before the world closes in around him completely, otherwise one would remain the dog within the dog and be lost to everything else."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in The New York Times in 1988
Omitting unneeded narrative details,
a madman's knight move —
A novel search in memory of the late
uncrowned crown prince of Albania—
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Related narratives—
Prose Tale and The Meadow.
Oh, and happy birthday to Woody Allen (76 today)—
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." —Groucho Marx
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Tens of Millions of Smartphones Come With Spyware
Preinstalled, Security Analyst Says
Published December 01, 2011 – FoxNews.com
For details, see comments at YouTube.
Related entertainment—
1. Tara Fitzgerald in "New World Disorder" (1999)—
We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more
2. Tara Fitzgerald in "Broken Glass" (2011)—
And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
— Procol Harum song at beginning and end of "The Net" (1995)
“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,
quoted here on Kristallnacht 2011
See also, from "The Net"—
Decompiling Wolfenstein
"In Wolfenstein 3D , the player assumes the role of an American soldier
of Polish descent… attempting to escape from the Nazi stronghold of
Castle Wolfenstein." — Wikipedia
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For a Daughter of Hollywood
See also New Day Nina and Bridget and Nina.
Comments Off on A Glass Slipper…
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
From the release date of the film of Alan Glynn’s
novel The Dark Fields (now retitled “Limitless“)—
“The time is now.”
Related material—
“Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because the dog is smarter than the tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.”
Above: Amy Adams in “Sunshine Cleaning”
“Now, I’ll open up a line of credit for you.
You’ll be wantin’ a few toys.”
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For those who think "right-brain" means something—
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Thanks for the warning, kingsplace.co.uk.
See also yesterday's Flight from Ennui.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Post 2310 in yesterday evening’s Short Story links to two posts
from 2006 inspired by Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy—
|
Ennui
May there be an ennui
of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar,
should there be?
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
Related material: The Line.
7:13 PM |
|
Order and Ennui
Meanwhile, back at the Institute
for Advanced Study:
May 25, 4:40 PM —
Research Seminar
(Simonyi Hall Seminar Room) —
Pirita Paajanen,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem:
Zeta functions of
finitely generated infinite groups
Some background cited by Paajanen:
M.P.F. du Sautoy,
“Zeta functions of groups:
The quest for order
versus the flight from ennui,”
Groups St Andrews 2001 in Oxford ,
Volume 1, CUP 2003.
Those who prefer the showbiz
approach to mathematics
(the flight from ennui?) may
enjoy a website giving
further background from du Sautoy.
4:40 PM |
|
The first paragraph of
“Zeta Functions of Groups: The Quest for Order
Versus the Flight from Ennui,” by Marcus du Sautoy,
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford—
“Mathematics is about the search for patterns,
to see order where others see chaos. We are very lucky
to find ourselves studying a subject which is neither so rigid
that the patterns are easy, yet not too complicated
lest our brains fail to master its complexities.
John Cawelti sums up this interplay perfectly in a book*
not about mathematics but about mystery and romance:
‘if we seek order and security, the result is likely to be
boredom and sameness. But rejecting order for the sake
of change and novelty brings danger and uncertainty…
the history of culture can be interpreted as a dynamic
tension between these two basic impulses…
between the quest for order and the flight from ennui.”’
* John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance:
Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture ,
University of Chicago Press, 1976.
[Cawelti cites as his souce on interpreting “the history
of culture” Harry Berger, Jr., “Naive Consciousness and
Culture Change: An Essay in Historical Structuralism,”
Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association ,
Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 1973): page 35.]
Here du Sautoy paints mathematicians as seekers of order,
apparently not realizing that the author he approvingly quotes
states that seekers of order face the danger of boredom.
Another danger to seekers
of order is, of course, seeing
order where there is none.
“Are you the butterfly?“
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Monday, November 28, 2011
New York Lottery on Cyber Monday,
November 28, 2011—
Related material: Hannibal Pictures—
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A search in memory of Ken Russell, who died Sunday.
Russell directed, among many other films, "Savage Messiah"—
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Sunday, November 27, 2011
The new executive editor of The New York Times , Jill Abramson, flatly declared:
“‘In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion.'” —The Daily Beast
Detail —
“Words are events.” — Walter J. Ong, S.J.
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Narrative
"What he ultimately lacks is a convincing narrative.
This also ties Habermas once again to the Occupy movement.
But without a narrative there is no concept of change."
Discuss.
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Saturday, November 26, 2011
A search on the word "innermost" in a PDF copy of a book
by Suzanne Gieser on Jung and Pauli yields no definite meaning
for the book's title, The Innermost Kernel (Springer, 2005).
The author does, however, devote a section (pp. 36-41) to the
influence of Schopenhauer on Jung and Pauli, and that section at least
suggests that the historical origin of her title is in Schopenhauer's
reformulation of Kant's "Ding an sich."
The Innermost Kernel , p. 37—
"… an expression of an underlying invisible world,
the one that forms the innermost essence of reality,
the thing-in-itself. This is the will, a blind existence
that forms an omnipresent entity beyond time, space
and individuality." *
* Arthur Schopenhauer, "Über die Vierfache Wurzel
des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde" (1813),
Kleinere Schriften, SämtlicheWerke III
(Stuttgart, 1962), 805–806.
* See also Mann on Schopenhauer and an "innermost kernel."
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* See previous uses of that book title in this journal.
Comments Off on Eden Express (continued*)
This year's Black Friday Prize for Literature went to…
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Friday, November 25, 2011
Hamlet Fire†
The "knight's move" of the title is the supplying of the above link.
For details, click on the link (a search on the link's two words).
* For the meaning of "knight's move," see To Make a Short Story Long.
† For the meaning of the phrase (as opposed to the search ),
see the birthplace of Tom Wicker, who died today.
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This afternoon's post Window Actions suggests the following.
Synchronistic Reviewing
From a review at bibliphage.blogspot.com on March 24, 2009—
The weblog containing the review is named "Outside of a Dog." Its motto—
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." —Groucho Marx
See also the dog in the update of today's noon entry.
For a synchronistic review, see this weblog on March 24, 2009.
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"Letzen Endes wird also der Materiebegriff in beiden Fällen auf Mathematik zurückgefürt. Der innerste Kern alles Stofflichen ist für uns wie für Plato eine Form, nicht irgendein materieller Inhalt."
"In the final analysis, in both cases [Plato and modern physics] the notion of matter is essentially a mathematical concept. The most fundamental kernel of all that is material is for us, as well as for Plato, a [mathematical] form, and not some material content."
— W. Heisenberg, "Platons Vorstellungen von den kleinsten Bausteinen der Materie und die Elementarteilchen der modernen Physik," Im Umkreis der Kunst. Eine Festschrift für Emil Preetorius , Wiesbaden 1953, pp. 137-140, as cited by Luc Brisson and F. Walter Meyerstein in Inventing the Universe , SUNY Press, 1995.
See also remarks by Pauli in For All Hallows Day.
Update of 1 PM
Related material —
"Zweiteilung und Symmetrieverminderung, das ist des Pudels Kern. Zweiteilung ist ein sehr altes Attribut des Teufels."
—Pauli to Heisenberg
Here "the poodle's kernel" is a reference to Faust , where the devil appears as a poodle.
On Schopenhauer's later years—
"In Frankfurt he spent the remaining years of his life, living quietly in two rooms with his pipe and his flute but with no friends or companions except a small poodle, the only creature to which Schopenhauer ever seems to have felt any real attachment. He named the dog Atman, a term taken from the pessimistic religion of India, in which Schopenhauer had become more and more interested in his later years."
— Robert F. Davidson, "Pessimism: Arthur Schopenhauer" in Philosophies Men Live By , New York, The Dryden Press, 1952
Comments Off on The Innermost Kernel and Physics
Thomas Mann on an innermost kernel—
"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)
See also previous quotations here of the phrase "innermost kernel."
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Thursday, November 24, 2011
… And the New York Lottery, with a wry smile,
signs its Thanksgiving story J. D. Salinger .
(See 863 and 4034.)
Comments Off on Transparent Things
"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard." — Rhymin' Simon
Camp Necon 2001
See also Uncertainty and More Uncertainty.
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"They should have sent a poet." — "Contact"
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
See Chapter 11, "Meter and Rhythm," of…
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Grace and Abstraction
Paul Motian, Drummer, Composer and Bandleader, Dies at 80
Tue Nov 22, 2011 20:54 from NYT > Obituaries by By BEN RATLIFF
Mr. Motian, a drummer, bandleader, and composer of grace and abstraction,
was one of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 50 years.
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Today's New York Lottery numbers:
231, 4403, 550, 0764.
Continuing the Serious Hardy Apology sequence,
here is a reference to volume number 231 in the
Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics series—
For some less serious work, see posts on 4403 (4/4/03)
as well as posts numbered 550 and 764.
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Pebbles found on the cyberspace beach this morning
From Oxford University Press—
From a less scholarly work at Scribd.com —
"The clocks were striking thirteen."
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Monday, November 21, 2011
A search for images related to Joseph T. Clark, Society of Jesus,
(author* of a quote in today's noon entry) yields—
The Jewel in Venn's Lotus
(Click to enlarge.)
"Heaven, I'm in heaven" — First words of "Purple Rose of Cairo"
* Very likely the same Joseph T. Clark, S. J. (1911-1989) who taught at Canisius College.
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Joseph T. Clark, S. J., Conventional Logic and Modern Logic:
A Prelude to Transition (Philosophical Studies of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association, III) Woodstock, Maryland:
Woodstock College Press, 1952—
| Alonzo Church, "Logic: formal, symbolic, traditional," Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942), pp. 170-182. |
The contents of this ambitious Dictionary are most uneven. Random reference to its pages is dangerous. But this contribution is among its best. It is condensed. But not dense. A patient and attentive study will pay big dividends in comprehension. Church knows the field and knows how to depict it. A most valuable reference. |
Another book to which random reference is dangerous—
For greater depth, see "Cassirer and Eddington on Structures,
Symmetry and Subjectivity" in Steven French's draft of
"Symmetry, Structure and the Constitution of Objects"
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Sunday, November 20, 2011
PBS 9 PM Eastern—
See also this journal on November Seventh.
Comments Off on The Master
A chess set previously mentioned in this journal—
These chessmen appeared in the weblog Minimalissimo
on Sept. 20, 2010. In Log24 on that date, the issue was
not so much the chessmen as the underlying board.
See "The Unfolding." See also the following from
the Occupy Space gallery in Limerick today—
C A V E S – Anthony Murphy Solo Exhibition
Opening 7 pm Thursday 1st Dec
Exhibition 2nd – 22nd Dec 2011
Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners, inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile, facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and these shadows of the activity being played out behind the prisoner become the only version of reality that the prisoner knows.
C A V E S is an exhibition of three large scale works, each designed to immerse the viewer, and then to confront the audience with a question regarding how far they, as privileged viewers of the shadows and reflections being played out upon the walls, are willing to allow themselves to believe what they know to be a false reality.
The works are based on explorations of simple 2D shapes; regular polygons are exploded to create fractured pattern, or layered upon one another until intricate forms emerge, upon which the projections can begin to draw out a third dimension. |
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Saturday, November 19, 2011
From Thursday's post All Things Fashion—
From today's online New York Times—
The nuclear symbol beneath the op-ed headline
is the most interesting part of this afternoon's front page—
Jung on projections—
It is possible to project certain characteristics onto another person who does not possess them at all, but the one being projected upon may unconsciously encourage it.
"It frequently happens that the object offers a hook to the projection, and even lures it out. This is generally the case when the object himself (or herself) is not conscious of the quality in question: in that way it works directly upon the unconscious of the projicient. For all projections provoke counter-projections when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject." ["General Aspects of Dream Psychology," CW 8, par. 519.]
For an object that "offers a hook to the projection," see yesterday's Hypercube Rotations—
Central projection
of the hypercube
See also Stallion Gate in this journal.
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Friday, November 18, 2011
Brilliant researchers Lillian Reynolds and Michael Brace have developed a system of recording and playing back actual experiences of people. Once the capability of tapping into "higher brain functions" is added in, and you can literally jump into someone else's head and play back recordings of what he or she was thinking, feeling, seeing, etc., at the time of the recording, the applications for the project quickly spiral out of control. While Michael Brace uses the system to become close again to Karen Brace, his estranged wife who also works on the project, others start abusing it for intense sexual experiences and other logical but morally questionable purposes. The government tries to kick Michael and Lillian off the project once the vast military potential of the technology is discovered. It soon becomes obvious that the government is interested in more than just missile guidance systems. The lab starts producing mind torture recordings and other psychosis inducing material. When one of the researchers dies and tapes the experience of death, Michael is convinced that he must playback this tape to honor the memory of the researcher and to become enlightened. When another researcher dies during playback the tape is locked away and Michael has to fight against his former colleagues and the government lackeys that now run his lab in order to play back and confront the "scariest thing any of us will ever face"— death itself. Written by Eric van Bezooijen.
See also researcher John Gregory Dunne and "Lucero Puro" in this journal.
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The hypercube has 192 rotational symmetries.
Its full symmetry group, including reflections,
is of order 384.
See (for instance) Coxeter—
Related material—
The rotational symmetry groups of the Platonic solids
(from April 25, 2011)—
— and the figure in yesterday evening's post on the hypercube—
(Animation source: MIQEL.com)
Clearly hypercube rotations of this sort carry any
of the eight 3D subcubes to the central subcube
of a central projection of the hypercube—
The 24 rotational symmeties of that subcube induce
24 rigid rotations of the entire hypercube. Hence,
as in the logic of the Platonic symmetry groups
illustrated above, the hypercube has 8 × 24 = 192
rotational symmetries.
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Thursday, November 17, 2011
See notes related to the discussion of the torus within the hypercube
in Thomas F. Banchoff 's 1996 text Beyond the Third Dimension .
The hypercube torus is more intelligible in the light of an
animation at the weblog post "Gleaming the Hypercube"—
(Animation source: MIQEL.com)
Comments Off on The Rolling Donut
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From "Elegy to the Void," by Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books , issue dated Nov. 24, 2011—
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote in The White Album . Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale. The book has, instead, an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No.
Blue Nights is a sequel of sorts to The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion's story of the year following the death on December 30th, 2003, of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.
Related material:
For some context, see
- Cosmic Banditos in this journal,
- the Fall 1997 newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Study,
- and Oppenheimer's Aria.
For a different link to that aria, see a journal entry dated December 28, 2003.
(Click link, scroll down.)
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011
"Put me on a highway, show me a sign…" — Eagles
"It is tempting to blame any confusion here
on Wallace's famously complex style of presentation."
— Darren Abrecht: "When You Get to the End, Keep Going,"
a review of David Foster Wallace's nonfiction book
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
See also today's previous post Apple Meets Pumpkin.
Happy Birthday, Lisa Bonet.
Comments Off on To the Limit
From The Guardian
On All Hallows' Eve —
The reported last words of
Apple founder Steve Jobs were
"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."
In the spirit of these words, a
Google search from today—
See also…
- Lemniscate in this journal as well as
- Stone Junction and
- Infinite Jest .
Comments Off on Apple Meets Pumpkin
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
"The case took an eerie twist, Ben Bradlee later wrote…."
— A story by obituaries editor Adam Bernstein
in this morning's Washington Post .
Related material—
The Night Clerk
Jason Robards as Erie Smith in "Hughie"
and as Washington Post executive editor
Ben Bradlee in "All the President's Men"
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From this morning's online New York Times—
|
Les Daniels, Historian of Comic Books, Dies at 68
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: November 14, 2011
Les Daniels, one of the earliest historians of comic books— from the launching (off the doomed planet Krypton) of Superman in 1938 through the countercultural comix movement of the ’60s— and an author of horror novels, died on Nov. 5 at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 68.
The cause was a heart attack, said Diane Manning, his sister and only immediate survivor. …
|
The version at The Comics Reporter may or may not be more accurate—
|
Leslie Noel Daniels III, 1943-2011
Posted 7:00 AM PST Nov. 14, 2011 —
(Unsigned, apparently by Tom Spurgeon.)
The writer Les Daniels died at an unknown moment before November 4 in his Providence apartment, local media sources have reported. Daniels' body was identified by his friend, the illustrator Steve Gervais, on that day, who told the Providence Journal that it looked like Daniels had been dead a couple of days by the time he saw the body. The police had been called after other acquaintances worried that the they had not been in contact with the writer for an extended period of time. Daniels was a diabetic waiting to receive surgery for a heart-valve replacement. No autopsy was requested. Daniels was 68 years old. …
|
* The title refers to yesterday's post Uncertainty.
Comments Off on More Uncertainty*
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Catholic Encyclopedia on Mind—
"If we are told that the explanation of a page of a newspaper is to be found in the contact of the paper with a plate of set types, we are still compelled to ask how the particular arrangement of the types came about, and we are certain that the sufficient explanation ultimately rests in the action of mind or intelligent being."
Or not so certain—
"These capacities for conscious deliberation, rational thinking and self-control are not magical abilities. They need not belong to immaterial souls outside the realm of scientific understanding (indeed, since we don’t know how souls are supposed to work, souls would not help to explain these capacities). Rather, these are the sorts of cognitive capacities that psychologists and neuroscientists are well positioned to study."
— "The Stone" column in yesterday's online New York Times
See also the Catholic Encyclopedia on Soul.
Comments Off on Uncertainty
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Where Entertainment is God (continued)
On the re-editing of a news story by The New York Times—
"…in the original versions of a Times report by Jeremy W. Peters, [the new executive editor, Jill Abramson] flatly declared: 'In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion.'" —The Daily Beast
The Times this afternoon—
See also a follow-up from last June
to this morning's "lost in space" quote—
NYT quote removal sparks web buzz
"It's obvious that an editorial decision was made to 'rectify' a quote that made the Times look foolish."
Not so, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told POLITICO. “Space was clearly a consideration.”
Comments Off on Brinksmanship…
The Space Case
"A generation lost in space"
— Don McLean, "American Pie"
Last night's post discussed Jim Dodge's fictional vision of a "spherical diamond" related to physics.
For some background, see Poetry and Physics (April 25, 2011).
That post quotes a July 2008 New Yorker article —
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, contributing editor at Rolling Stone
and sometime writer on space—
“There’s a dream that underlying the physical universe is some beautiful mathematical structure, and that the job of physics is to discover that,” Smolin told me later. “The dream is in bad shape,” he added. “And it’s a dream that most of us are like recovering alcoholics from.” Lisi’s talk, he said, “was like being offered a drink.”
Or a toke.
"Now John at the bar is a friend of mine
He gets me my drinks for free
And he's quick with a joke or to light up your smoke
But there's someplace that he'd rather be"
— Billy Joel, "Piano Man"
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Saturday, November 12, 2011
From today's previous post, a fragmentary thought—
"Professor Dodge and the underground artists
whose work he helped save are the subjects of a book…"
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Jim Dodge, Stone Junction
(a novel first published in 1989)
From pages 206-208, Kindle Edition—
`Have you seen it?'
Volta hesitated. `Well, I've dreamed it.'
Daniel shook his head. `I'm getting lost. You want me to vanish into your dreams?'
`Good Lord, no,' Volta blanched. `That's exactly what I don't want you to do.'
`So, what is it exactly you do want me to do?'
`Steal the diamond.'
`So, it's a diamond?'
`Yes, though it's a bit like saying the ocean is water. The diamond is perfectly spherical,* perfectly clear— though it seems to glow— and it's about two-thirds the size of a bowling ball. I think of it as the Diamond. Capital D.'
`Who owns it?'
`No one. The United States government has it at the moment. We want it. And to be honest with you, Daniel, I particularly want it, want it dearly. I want to look at it, into it, hold it in my hands. I had a vision involving a spherical diamond, a vision that changed my life, and I want to confirm that it was a vision of something real, the spirit embodied, the circuit complete.'
Daniel was smiling. `You're going to love this. That dream I wanted to talk to you about, my first since the explosion? It just happened to feature a raven with a spherical diamond in its beak. Obviously, it wasn't as big as a bowling ball, and there was a thin spiral flame running edge to edge through its center, which made it seem more coldly brilliant than warmly glowing, but it sounds like the same basic diamond to me.'
`And what do you think it is?'
`I think it's beautiful.'
Volta gave him a thin smile. `If I were more perverse than I already lamentably am, I would say it is the Eye of the Beholder. In fact, I don't know what it is.'
`It might be a dream,' Daniel said.
`Very possibly,' Volta agreed, `but I don't think so. I think— feel , to be exact— that the Diamond is an interior force given exterior density, the transfigured metaphor of the prima materia , the primordial mass, the Spiritus Mundi . I'm assuming you're familiar with the widely held supposition that the entire universe was created from a tiny ball of dense matter which exploded, sending pieces hurtling into space, expanding from the center. The spherical diamond is the memory, the echo, the ghost of that generative cataclysm; the emblematic point of origin. Or if, as some astrophysicists believe, the universe will reach some entropic point in its expansion and begin to collapse back into itself, in that case the Diamond may be a homing point, the seed crystal, to which it will all come hurtling back together— and perhaps through itself, into another dimension entirely. Or it might be the literal Philosopher's Stone we alchemists speak of so fondly. Or I might be completely wrong. That's why I want to see it. If I could actually stand in its presence, I'm convinced I'd know what it is. I would even venture to say, at the risk of rabid projection, that it wants to be seen and known.'
`But you're not even sure it exists,' Daniel said. `Right? And hey, it's tough to steal something that doesn't exist, even if you can be invisible. The more I think about this the less sense it makes.'
* Here Dodge's mystical vision seems akin to that of Anthony Judge in "Embodying the Sphere of Change" (St. Stephen's Day, 2001). Actually, the cube, not the sphere, is the best embodiment of Judge's vision.
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See also Tuesday's "Stoned" and the 47 references
to the term "bowling" in the Kindle Stone Junction .
Furthermore… Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!
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From this journal on Guy Fawkes Day, 2011—
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m759 @ 7:59 AM
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
— T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
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This year's Lamont Cranston award goes to…
Norton Dodge, who died at 84 on Guy Fawkes Day.
"Professor Dodge and the underground artists
whose work he helped save are the subjects of
a book, The Ransom of Russian Art (1994),
by John McPhee."
— Margalit Fox in today's New York Times
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(Continued from September 7th, 2002)
Happy Birthday, Wallace Shawn!
Shawn in "The Speed of Thought,"
a 2011 film by Evan Oppenheimer.
Uruguay is featured in that film.
See also Lichtung!.
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Perhaps the best obituary for the late Morris Philipson
(see Nov. 10) is this text, by writer W.P. Norton
(not to be confused with the publishing firm W.W. Norton).
For the text in context, see a screenshot of the Norton
weblog (which was very slow to load this morning).
The Blogspot loading logo that did appear at Norton's
weblog suggests the following image—
LOGOS
The logo on the right is that of
The New York Times 's
philosophy weblog "The Stone."
Philipson, incidentally, reportedly died on the morning of November 3.
See the remarks of Tom Wolfe quoted here on that date.
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Friday, November 11, 2011
"And suddenly all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomine, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women. Then vertigo and terror seized me and, clutching at my Teacher, I said, 'Is that the truth?….' "
— C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce , final chapter
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