Saturday, November 12, 2011
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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Thursday, November 10, 2011
A puzzle of sorts—
To which book are these six books,
found in a Google book search today, related?
(Click image to enlarge.)
Update of 12:06 AM on November 11th—
Comments Off on Related Books
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
The Big Lukasiewicz
“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
See also Łukasiewicz in Wikipedia and Lukasiewicz in this journal.
The latter's Christian references seem preferable to yesterday's
link to a scene from the Coen brothers' film "The Big Lebowski."
For those who prefer a Christ-for-Jews there is
also Harvard's version. See The Crimson Passion.
Comments Off on Polish Logic–
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
From "The Stone" in Sunday's online New York Times—
Cosmic Imagination
By William Egginton
Do the humanities need to be defended from hard science?
Illustration of hard science —
Illustration of the humanities —
(The above illustrations from Sunday's "The Stone" are by Leif Parsons.)
Midrash by the Coen brothers— "The Dude Abides."
See also 10/10/10— The Day of the Tetractys—
* Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011—
From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
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/ ."]
|
See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
.
Comments Off on Stoned*
Monday, November 7, 2011
"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.
Comments Off on The X Box
Sunday, November 6, 2011
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,''
says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer—
that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!'
That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like.
Design is how it works.''
— "The Guts of a New Machine," by Rob Walker,
New York Times Magazine , Sunday, Nov. 30, 2003
See also, from the day of the above Anything Box review—
St. Peter's Day, 2011— two Log24 posts—
The Shattered Mind and Rome After Dark.
Related boxes… Cosmic Cube and Design Cube.
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Saturday, November 5, 2011
Related material—
Crank Power!
Click images for further details.
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Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
— T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
A passage quoted here on this date in 2005—
Douglas Hofstadter on his magnum opus:
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions
by some central solid essence."
This refers to Hofstadter's cover image:
Also from this date in 2005:
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Friday, November 4, 2011
Continued from All Hallows Eve…
The Belgian Lottery logo—
The Belgian Lottery was a sponsor of
last month's 25th Solvay Conference —
"The Theory of the Quantum World,"
Brussels, October 19-22, 2011.
See also this journal in October and Change Logos—
(Physicists will recognize the kinship
with the coat of arms of Niels Bohr.)
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Thursday, November 3, 2011
"Buckle up!" — Harlan Kane, in the spirit of strategic stupidity.
Comments Off on The China Conundrum
This journal on April 8—
See also a quote from William Peter Blatty in this journal yesterday.
The green cell in the array may be viewed as representing
Blatty's The Ninth Configuration … or perhaps Plan 9.
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Mathematics and Narrative, continued
"… a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls"
— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word , 1975, quoted here on October 30th
"… our laughable abstractions, our wryly ironic po-mo angels dancing on the heads of so many mis-imagined quantum pins."
— Dan Conover on September 1st, 2011
"Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: 'When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other.'
I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God."
— Tom Wolfe, "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Forbes , 1996
"… Ockham's idea implies that we probably have the ability to do something now such that if we were to do it, then the past would have been different…"
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Today is February 28, 2008, and we are privileged to begin a conversation with Mr. Tom Wolfe."
— Interviewer for the National Association of Scholars
From that conversation—
Wolfe : "People in academia should start insisting on objective scholarship, insisting on it, relentlessly, driving the point home, ramming it down the gullets of the politically correct, making noise! naming names! citing egregious examples! showing contempt to the brink of brutality!"
As for "mis-imagined quantum pins"…
This journal on the date of the above interview— February 28, 2008—
Illustration from a Perimeter Institute talk given on July 20, 2005
The date of Conover's "quantum pins" remark above (together with Ockham's remark above and the above image) suggests a story by Conover, "The Last Epiphany," and four posts from September 1st, 2011—
Boundary, How It Works, For Thor's Day, and The Galois Tesseract.
Those four posts may be viewed as either an exploration or a parody of the boundary between mathematics and narrative.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." —A Wrinkle in Time
Comments Off on Ockham’s Bubbles–
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
A search today, All Souls Day, for relevant learning
at All Souls College, Oxford, yields the person of
Sir Michael Dummett and the following scholarly page—
(Click to enlarge.)
My own background is in mathematics rather than philosophy.
From a mathematical point of view, the cells discussed above
seem related to some "universals" in an example of Quine.
In Quine's example,* universals are certain equivalence classes
(those with the "same shape") of a family of figures
(33 convex regions) selected from the 28 = 256 subsets
of an eight-element set of plane regions.
A smaller structure, closer to Wright's concerns above,
is a universe of 24 = 16 subsets of a 4-element set.
The number of elements in this universe of Concepts coincides,
as it happens, with the number obtained by multiplying out
the title of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets .
For a discussion of functions that map "cells" of the sort Wright
discusses— in the quartets example, four equivalence classes,
each with four elements, that partition the 16-element universe—
onto a four-element set, see Poetry's Bones.
For some philosophical background to the Wright passage
above, see "The Concept Horse," by Harold W. Noonan—
Chapter 9, pages 155-176, in Universals, Concepts, and Qualities ,
edited by P. F. Strawson and Arindam Chakrabarti,
Ashgate Publishing, 2006.
For a different approach to that concept, see Devil's Night, 2011.
* Admittedly artificial. See From a Logical Point of View , IV, 3
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"I do keep wishing— oh, ever so wistfully and— let’s face it, hopelessly— that 'The Exorcist' be remembered at this time of the year for being not about shivers but rather about souls, for then it would indeed be in the real and true spirit of Halloween, which is short for the eve of All Hallows or All Saints Day."
— William Peter Blatty in an article dated October 28, 2011.
See also The Soul's Code, a Log24 post of October 28.
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"It's still the same old story…"
See Glory in this journal.
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master— that's all.'
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest— adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs— however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'
'Would you tell me please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'
'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'
'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'
See also Interpenetration in this journal… and in Northrop Frye.
Comments Off on For All Souls Day
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The following was suggested by the Sermon
of October 30 (the day preceding Devil's Night)
and by yesterday's Beauty, Truth, Halloween.
"The German language has itself been influenced by Goethe's Faust , particularly by the first part. One example of this is the phrase 'des Pudels Kern ,' which means the real nature or deeper meaning of something (that was not evident before). The literal translation of 'des Pudels Kern ' is 'the core of the poodle,' and it originates from Faust's exclamation upon seeing the poodle (which followed him home) turn into Mephistopheles." —Wikipedia
See also the following readings (click to enlarge)—
Note particularly…
"The main enigma of any description of a patternless
unus mundus is to find appropriate partitions which
create relevant patterns." —Hans Primas, above
"In general, the partition of G into right cosets
can differ from its partition into left cosets. Galois
was the first to recognize the importance of when
these partitions agree. This happens when the
subgroup H is normal." — David A. Cox,
Galois Theory , Wiley, 2004, p. 510
Comments Off on For All Hallows Day
Monday, October 31, 2011
On Halloween…
"Remember that for Ockham there is nothing in the universe that is
in any way universal except a concept or word: there are no real
natures shared by many things. However, things do resemble one
another, some things more closely than others. So the various
degrees of resemblance give a foundation in reality for our conceptual
structures, such as Porphyry's tree.
Now resemblance (or similitude or likeness) is a relation.
If such relations are realities, then we can say that there are realities
out there that correspond to our conceptual structures."
— R.J. Kilcullen at Macquarie University, course labeled Phil360
"The kernel of a homomorphism is always a congruence.
Indeed, every congruence arises as a kernel."
— Congruence Relation, section on Universal Algebra, in Wikipedia
"Beauty then is a relation."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
"An Attempt to Understand the Problem of Universals"
is the title of a talk by Fabian Geier, University of Bamberg—
"The talk was held at Gdańsk University on May 26th 2008."
Related material— Stevie Nicks turns 60.
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From Sean D. Kelly, chairman of Harvard's philosophy department, on Oct. 13, 2011—
"What I’m looking for at the moment is a good reference from Plato to make it clear how he understands the term. I remember that in the Thaeatetus there is discussion of knowledge as true belief with logos, and a natural account here might count logos as something like rational justification or explanation. And perhaps Glaukon’s request in the Republic for an explanation or account (logos) of the claim that Justice is a good in itself is a clue. But there must be other places where the term appears in Plato. Does anyone have them?"
See instances of logos under "Pl." (Plato) and "Id." (Idem ) in Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon —
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=lo/gos .
(See also Liddell and Scott's "General List of Abbreviations"—
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Asection%3D5 .)
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Sunday, October 30, 2011
For the late philosopher Peter Goldie, who died on October 22nd—
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word — "And there, at last, it was!"—
See also Whiteness and Horseness.
Comments Off on The Idea Idea
Part I: Timothy Gowers on equivalence relations
Part II: Martin Gardner on normal subgroups
Part III: Evariste Galois on normal subgroups
"In all the history of science there is no completer example
of the triumph of crass stupidity over untamable genius…."
— Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics
See also an interesting definition and Weyl on Galois.
Update of 6:29 PM EDT Oct. 30, 2011—
For further details, see Herstein's phrase
"a tribute to the genius of Galois."
Comments Off on Sermon
See also "James Hillman" in this journal.
(After clicking, scroll down.)
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Friday, October 28, 2011
From The Telegraph today—
Professor Peter Goldie,
born November 5 1946, died October 22 2011.
With co-author Elisabeth Schellekens, Goldie wrote
Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art?
In memoriam—
Two posts from the day, Nov. 14, 2009,
that that book was published in paperback—
For St. Lawrence O'Toole's Day and
Mathematics and Narrative, continued—
and a post from the day of Goldie's death… Araby.
See also an excerpt from Who's Afraid? .
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James Hillman reportedly died on Thursday, October 27, 2011.
For some commentary, see Wednesday's link to 779—
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Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Peter J. Cameron yesterday on Galois—
"He was killed in a duel at the age of 20…. His work languished for another 14 years until Liouville published it in his Journal; soon it was recognised as the foundation stone of modern algebra, a position it has never lost."
Here Cameron is discussing Galois theory, a part of algebra. Galois is known also as the founder* of group theory, a more general subject.
Group theory is an essential part of modern geometry as well as of modern algebra—
"In der Galois'schen Theorie, wie hier, concentrirt sich das Interesse auf Gruppen von Änderungen. Die Objecte, auf welche sich die Änderungen beziehen, sind allerdings verschieden; man hat es dort mit einer endlichen Zahl discreter Elemente, hier mit der unendlichen Zahl von Elementen einer stetigen Mannigfaltigkeit zu thun."
— Felix Christian Klein, Erlanger Programm , 1872
("In the Galois theory, as in ours, the interest centres on groups of transformations. The objects to which the transformations are applied are indeed different; there we have to do with a finite number of discrete elements, here with the infinite number of elements in a continuous manifoldness." (Translated by M.W. Haskell, published in Bull. New York Math. Soc. 2, (1892-1893), 215-249))
Related material from Hermann Weyl, Symmetry , Princeton University Press, 1952 (paperback reprint of 1982, pp. 143-144)—
"A field is perhaps the simplest algebraic structure we can invent. Its elements are numbers…. Space is another example of an entity endowed with a structure. Here the elements are points…. What we learn from our whole discussion and what has indeed become a guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity Σ try to determine is group of automorphisms , the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed. You can expect to gain a deep insight into the constitution of Σ in this way."
For a simple example of a group acting on a field (of 8 elements) that is also a space (of 8 points), see Generating the Octad Generator and Knight Moves.
* Joseph J. Rotman, An Introduction to the Theory of Groups , 4th ed., Springer, 1994, page 2
Comments Off on Erlanger and Galois
The New York Times this evening—
Europe Agrees on Plan to Inject New Capital Into Banks
By STEVEN ERLANGER and RACHEL DONADIO
Published: October 26, 2011
…“The world is looking at Germany, whether we are strong enough
to accept responsibility for the biggest crisis since World War II,”
Mrs. Merkel said in an address to the Parliament in Berlin….
The same quotation in the original German—
«Die Welt schaut auf Deutschland und Europa. Sie schaut darauf,
ob wir bereit und fähig sind, in der Stunde der schwersten Krise Europas
seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Verantwortung zu übernehmen.»
("The world is looking at Germany and Europe— looking at
whether we are ready and able, in the hour of the
deepest crisis of Europe since the end of World War II,
to accept responsibility." (I.e. , for resolving the crisis))
Comments Off on Annals of Translation
Tue Oct 25, 2011 08:26 AM [London time]
from the weblog of Peter Cameron—
Today is Évariste Galois’ 200th birthday.
The event will be celebrated with the publication of a new transcription
and translation of Galois’ works (edited by Peter M. Neumann)
by the European Mathematical Society. The announcement is here.
Cameron's further remarks are also of interest.
Comments Off on For Galois
Peter Woit, phrase from a weblog post on October 25th, 2011—
"In possibly related news…."
For 779, see post 779 in this weblog.
For 8974, see Hollywood Endings.
For 082, see page 82 of Culture and Value , ed. G.H. von Wright, tr. Peter Winch (Oxford 1980) (as quoted by M. Jamie Ferreira in "The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion," Religious Studies , Vol. 30, March 1994, pp. 29-44, reprinted in Wittgenstein Studies (1997))—
Wittgenstein: “God’s essence is supposed to guarantee his existence— but what this really means is that what is here at issue is not the existence of something.”
For 0372, see page 372 in Essays of Three Decades , by Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947 ("Schopenhauer," 1938, pp. 372-410)—
THE PLEASURE we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the high and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life's manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.
Truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other. Each by itself, without the support given by the other, remains a very fluctuating value. Beauty that has not truth on its side and cannot have reference to it, does not live in it and through it, would be an empty chimera— and "What is truth?"
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Monday, October 24, 2011
“Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
till it’s gone”
— Joni Mitchell, quoted here
in post 2967.
Today's midday New York Lottery—
2967 and 002.
Comments Off on Going, Going…
Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.
The 123 suggests page 123 of DeLillo's Underworld .
(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)
The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.
These two topics—
- the afterlife (in the Latin-American rhythms context of yesterday's Shine On, Edmundo)
- and Kenneth Burke
are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—
Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”
Modern rendition
of “Bab-ilu“
|
Kenneth
Burke
|
The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…
The New York Times Book Review for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.
From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…
Making Sense of It
David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.
BY ADAM THIRLWELL
The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment— condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.
See also Saturday's Edenville.
Comments Off on The Lottery of Babalu
Wikipedia today—
Paranormal Activity 3 is a 2011 American supernatural horror film. It is the third film of the Paranormal Activity series and serves as a prequel, set 18 years prior to the events of the first two films. It was released in theaters on October 21, 2011. The film broke financial records upon release, setting a new record for a midnight opening for a horror film ($8M), the best opening day for a horror film in the United States ($26.2M), the highest opening for any film in October, highest opening for a film in the fall (Sep-Oct), and setting a record opening for the franchise ($54M).
So much for Celebration of Mind.
(Background: Last year's Paranormal post of October 23.)
Comments Off on The Hunt for Profitable October
Sunday, October 23, 2011
"… if you will, a cha-cha on the floor of the Grand Hotel Abyss."
— Harvard student's essay on Jack Nicholson in the ballroom of "The Shining"
"At the still point, there the dance is."
— Four Quartets
Related material on the transition from "Do" to "Be" on Friday, October 21st—
Comments Off on Shine On, Edmundo
A Date with Erin
Related material suggested by today's
midday New York Lottery— 032 and 7537—
Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:
Duration
“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill
is regression. Duration is rather the self-contained
and therefore self-renewing movement of
an organized, firmly integrated whole
[click on link for an example], taking place
in accordance with immutable laws
and beginning anew at every ending.”
and the date 7/5/37—
Comments Off on Accentuate the Positive–
(This post's title was appropriated from a novel by Brian Morton.)
Yesterday's evening New York Lottery— 229 and 9294.
Alex Ross in the online New Yorker quotes a bad essay he wrote in college titled…
“The Grand Hotel Abyss: History and Violence in ‘The Shining,’”
which purports to analyze the famous scene in which Jack Nicholson
types the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”:
Nicholson has become a chomping-machine of language,
recycling stock phrases, appropriating whatever
drifts into his path. His words are nothing but echoes….
The lottery's 229 may be interpreted as "2/29." See a post from that date in 2008
involving echoes and the abyss.
The lottery's 9294 may be interpreted as "9/2/94." A search for that date yields
an article from Pacific Stars and Stripes—
That article is echoed by a later Doonesbury caricature
of a professor discussing echoes in black rhetoric. That
caricature is from the 2/29 post—
Comments Off on Starting Out in the Evening (continued)
Saturday, October 22, 2011
"Put me on to Edenville." — James Joyce, quoted in today's noon post.
The New Yorker 's Book Bench quotes a college essay on "The Shining"—
"In the Gold Room, the fatally disconnected under-zone of play,
he finds a fin-de-siècle soirée in progress; after a drink of
Jack Daniels, he dances about for a bit—if you will,
a cha-cha on the floor of the Grand Hotel Abyss."
If you will! You probably won’t.
Then again…
Comments Off on Edenville
Or: Starting Out in the Evening, continued from noon yesterday
Yesterday evening's New York Lottery numbers were 510 and 5256.
For the former, see post 510, Music for Patricias.
For the latter, see Richard Feynman at the Caltech YMCA Lunch Forum on 5/2/56—
"The Relation of Science and Religion."
Some background….
The Aleph
"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental.
For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph ,
the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes
the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth…."
— Borges, "The Aleph," quoted in Ayn Sof (January 7th, 2011)
The Y
See "Pythagorean Letter" in this journal.
Edenville
"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
"A very short space of time through very short times of space…. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
— James Joyce, Ulysses , Proteus chapter
Comments Off on Lunch at the Y
Suggested by this morning's previous post (Araby) as well as
by Thursday's posts Jack and Jill and The Thing Itself …
an item from Google News—
Note the beauty of the headline's meter.
A midrash for Bloomberg—
"Let us return to the insertions." —André Topia, "The Matrix and the Echo."
Comments Off on The Meter is Running
An excerpt from "Araby," a short story by James Joyce—
At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey in the hall door. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.
'The people are in bed and after their first sleep now,' he said.
I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically:
'Can't you give him the money and let him go? You've kept him late enough as it is.'
My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old saying: 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' He asked me where I was going and, when I told him a second time, he asked me did I know The Arab's Farewell to his Steed . When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt.
For a rather viciously anti-Catholic commentary, see Wallace Gray's Notes.
Update of 9:26 AM Oct. 22—
This is the same Wallace Gray who was an authority on Joyce at Columbia University and died on December 21, 2001. I prefer a different Columbia University Joyce scholar— William York Tindall (scroll down after clicking), who died on Sept. 8, 1981.
See also, from midnight a year after the date of Gray's death, Nightmare Alley.
Comments Off on Araby
Friday, October 21, 2011
Book title. For some commentary, see the title in this journal.
As for the phrase it has often been paired with in this journal— "Finishing Up at Noon"—
American Mathematical Society today—
John G. Hocking (1920-2011)
Friday October 21st 2011
Hocking, a member of the faculty at Michigan State University from 1951 to 1987, died March 23 at the age of 90. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1953 under the direction of Gail S. Young. Hocking and Young wrote a text, Topology , that was widely used. Hocking was an AMS member since 1951. Read more about Hocking in a blog posted by John Golden, a former student.
For a gloss on the meaning of "Up" above, see a Log24 post from the date of Hocking's death—
* See also yesterday evening.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
Click the image below for some background.
The above image illustrates an equivalence* between sequential and simultaneous points of view.
The sequential point of view says "Do," the simultaneous point of view says "Be."
And then there is the Sinatra point of view—
"The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
"It turned out so right… for strangers in the night."
* Based on a boustrophedonic folding.
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Thursday, October 20, 2011
This evening's New York Lottery numbers are 770 and 9703.
This suggests a look at post 770 (Hesse and Bach) and at 9/7/03 (Hesse and knights).
See also Hessian.
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The New Yorker 's online Book Bench has an entertaining
approach to Jack's "All work and no play…" in "The Shining."
For some background, see this morning's previous Log24
post, The Thing Itself.
That post gives some background for the
Midnight in the Garden post of September 6th.
Also on September 6th… See Jill.
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Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker magazine—
Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—
"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"
A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…
Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…
Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.
The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .
The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—
The Diamond Star
See Configurations and Squares.
That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.
Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero from March 28, 2003.
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Stephanie Hlywak on author Mary Gaitskill (March 22, 2010)—
"In her most recent collection of short stories, Don’t Cry ,
now out in paperback, memory converges with present,
fantasy collides with reality, and sparse prose reveals deep craft."
Mary Gaitskill
See also Gaitskill in the Log24 post Plain Hunt Maximus,
Gaitskill on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , and yesterday's
New York Times on the bells of Notre-Dame.
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'Hardball with Chris Matthews'
for Monday, October 17th, 2011—
FINEMAN: Right. The way to do that, Chris,
is the way that the people who ran against
Mitt Romney on behalf of Senator Ted Kennedy
did it years ago, when Romney was challenging
Ted Kennedy for that Senate seat.
They went out to Indiana — the Teddy people
went out to Indiana, found a plant that
had been shuttered by Bain Capital…
MATTHEWS: Right.
FINEMAN: … as part of a takeover and makeover…
MATTHEWS: A chop shop.
FINEMAN: … and they launched a caravan —
a caravan of unemployed people that went
all the way from Indiana to Boston.
Lights out for Mitt Romney. You have to do it that way.
You can`t do it like resenting the guy who
looks like the guy on the Monopoly card.
(LAUGHTER)
New York Lottery, evening of Oct. 19, 2011— 985 and 8739.
For 985, see Log24 post 985, "Resurrection" (Aug. 4, 2003).
For 8739, see the 8/7/39 TIME cover—
"TURFMAN WILLIAM WOODWARD
Before racing comes raising. (Sport)"
— TIME magazine cover, August 7, 1939
See also… The rest of the story.
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Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Midday NY lottery on Oct. 19, 2011— 043 and 7531.
The latter is the birth date (7/5/31) of Jerry Slocum,
Hughes Aircraft designer and puzzle enthusiast.
For the former, see Hexagram 43 in Geometry of the I Ching.
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Little Flags:
See also Sicilian Reflections.
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- Peter learned to read and spell,
- And then he loved her very well.
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"There is work to be done
in the dark before dawn."
— Song lyric
Log24 posts suggested by the New York Lottery
yesterday (the Feast of Saint Luke) —
684, 2047, 710, 7900.
Comments Off on Shine On
Monday, October 17, 2011
In contrast to Harvard's 375th Anniversary pandemonium—
Tommy Lee Jones, Harvard '69
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Pandemonium
Comments Off on Friday Night Lights…
A follow-up to yesterday's Sunday School—
(Click on images for some background.)
Backstory— "Plan 9 is an operating system kernel …."
Meditation— "How can you tell the craftsman from the craft?"
(Apologies to William Butler Yeats.)
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Sunday, October 16, 2011
See Iconography and Amy Adams.
Perhaps the "word from our sponsa " in the former is "clay."
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(Continued from 24 hours ago)
Saturday evening NY lottery: 302 and 0181.
For 302, see OCODE. For 0181, see the bridge
between page 180 and page 181 in
Disjunctive Poetics by Peter Quartermain
(Cambridge University Press, 1992).
* For some narrative related to the title,
see The Deceivers by Alfred Bester.
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A song for Bridget and Nina (see midnight's post).
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Saturday, October 15, 2011
"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." —Nabokov
Suggested by yesterday's evening NY lottery—
Post 4248: The Hunt for Exemplary October, and
Post 942: Links for St. Benedict
Related material—
three-point landing n
1. (Engineering / Aeronautics) an aircraft landing
in which the two main wheels and the nose or tail wheel
all touch the ground simultaneously
— Collins English Dictionary
See also…
Tiffany Case and…
The Diamond
in the Mandorla
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
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Friday, October 14, 2011
"All this he knew, but what he didn’t know was that he resonated to the Anima Mundi which produced his extraordinary synergic pattern sense… what I call a 'Phane Sense,' from the Greek phainein meaning to show . It was this phane sense that enabled him to be shown things from apparently unrelated facts and events and synergize them into a whole."
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers
Click to enlarge—
The Tiffany Epiphany — from Elizabeth Osborne's
Vocabulary from Latin and Greek Roots IV
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The above photo was taken on May 19, 2011.
See a Log24 post from that date, "Bedrock."
Those to whom this suggests a Flintstones joke
may consult Denis Dutton in this journal.
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Thursday, October 13, 2011
"Plan 9 is an operating system kernel but also a collection of accompanying software."
— Webpage pointed out by the late Dennis Ritchie,
father of the programming language C
and co-developer of Unix, who reportedly died on October 8.
From Ritchie's own home page—
"A brief biography, in first person instead of obituary style."
From that biography—
"Today, as a manager of a small group of researchers, I promote exploration of distributed operating systems, languages, and routing/switching hardware. The recent accomplishments of this group include the Plan 9 operating system…."
Another operating system is that of Alfred Bester.
My laptop now includes his classic The Stars My Destination ,
downloaded this morning…
(Click to enlarge.)
Not much compared to Widener Library (see this morning's Lost Cornerstone),
but sufficient for present purposes…
"Simple jaunt." — "The Comedian as the Letter C"
See also Plan 9 from Outer Space in this journal.
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This post was suggested by this morning's New York Times story on the missing cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral and by the recent design for an official T-shirt celebrating Harvard's 375th anniversary—
In Harvard's case, the missing piece beneath the cathedral-like spire* is the VERITAS on the college shield.
Possible sources for a shield image representing VERITAS—
1. "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal, which might be combined with
2. Reflections on Kurt Gödel ** by Hao Wang, Chapter 9, "To Fit All the Parts Together"—
"The metaphor of fitting parts together readily suggests
the concrete image of solving a picture puzzle…." (p. 243)
Or the image of a Wang tiles puzzle.
A graphic image, colorful but garish, that summarizes these two sources—
Shield with matching Wang tiles
* The Lowell House bell tower
** MIT Press, first published in 1987
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"I've got a little story you oughta know…."
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative, continued
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
In memory of the man who
"looked after all the college and cathedral bells in Oxford."
Frank White
Wed Oct 12, 2011 12:55 PM EDT
Head of England's oldest continuously trading
bellhanging company who tended the bells of Oxford
|
Comments Off on For Whom the Bell (continued)
Grid from a post linked to in yesterday's 24 Hour DeLillo—
A Study in Art Education
For an example of this grid as slow art , consider the following—
"One can show that the binary tetrahedral group
is isomorphic to the special linear group SL(2,3)—
the group of all 2×2 matrices over the finite field F3
with unit determinant." —Wikipedia
As John Baez has noted, these two groups have the same structure as the geometric 24-cell.
For the connection of the grid to the groups and the 24-cell, see Visualizing GL(2,p).
Related material—
The 3×3 grid has been called a symbol of Apollo (Greek god of reason and of the sun).
"This is where we sat through his hushed hour,
a torchlit sky, the closeness of hills barely visible
at high white noon." — Don DeLillo, Point Omega
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Review of DeLillo's novel Point Omega—
"One difference between art and entertainment has to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so that you’re challenged to re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so that you don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all except, perhaps, the adrenalin rush before dazzling spectacle. Although, of course, there can be myriad gradations between the former and latter, in their starkest articulation we’re talking about the distance between, say, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol…."
— Lance Olsen, March 1, 2010, in The Quarterly Conversation
Robert Hughes on fast and slow art—
"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game."
– Speech of June 1, 2004
Log24 on art speeds—
A Study in Art Education (June 15, 2007)
Twenty-four (March 13, 2011)
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Monday, October 10, 2011
(Continued)
From Winning—
"In the desert you can remember your name,
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."
— America
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From University Diaries yesterday—
"…unscripted moments when, prompted or provoked
by a brilliant lecture or an intense verbal exchange,
you perceive something you never perceived before…"
For University Diaries , a screenshot of part of today's online New York Times—
What Fresh Hell Is This?
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See last year's Day of the Tetraktys.
Those who prefer Hebrew to Greek may consult Coxeter and the Aleph.
See also last midnight's The Aleph as well as Saturday morning's
An Ordinary Evening in Hartford and Saturday evening's
For Whom the Bell (with material from March 20, 2011).
For connoisseurs of synchronicity, there is …
THE LAST CONCERT
Cached from http://mrpianotoday.com/tourdates.htm —
The last concert of Roger Williams — March 20, 2011 —
March 20
|
"Roger Williams" In Concert,
The Legendary Piano Man!!
Roger Williams & his Band
(Sierra Ballroom)
7:30-9:00pm
|
Palm Desert, CA
|
Background music… Theme from "Somewhere in Time"
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COLLEGE OF THE DESERT
Minutes — Organization Meeting
11:00 a.m., Saturday, July 1, 1961—
15. Preparation of College Seal:
By unanimous consent preparation of a College
Seal to contain the following features was
authorized: A likeness of the Library building
set in a matrix of date palms, backed by
a mountain skyline and rising sun; before
the Library an open book, the Greek symbol
Alpha on one page and Omega on the other;
the Latin Lux et Veritas, College of the
Desert, and 1958 to be imprinted within or
around the periphery of the seal.
From the website http://geofhagopian.net/ of
Geoff Hagopian, Professor of Mathematics,
College of the Desert—
Note that this version of the seal contains
an Aleph and Omega instead of Alpha and Omega.
From another Hagopian website, another seal.
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Sunday, October 9, 2011
"Design is how it works." — Steven Jobs
A comment on the life of Jobs —
Paola Antonelli
Photo Credit: Andrea Ciotti
Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—
“NeXT was a risk and a beautiful failure."
Related material—
What’s NeXT?
and 2008 posts of
May 8, May 9, and May 10.
"Math class is tough, Barbie."
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Saturday, October 8, 2011
In memory of "Mr. Piano" Roger Williams, who died today—
Flashback:
Related material— 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.
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From Rebecca Goldstein's Talks and Appearances page—
• "36 (Bad) Arguments for the Existence of God,"
Annual Meeting of the Freedom from Religion Foundation,
Marriot, Hartford, CT, Oct 7 [2011], 7 PM
From Wallace Stevens—
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
For those who prefer greater depth on Yom Kippur, yesterday's cinematic link suggests…
"Yo sé de un laberinto griego que es una línea única, recta."
—Borges, "La Muerte y la Brújula " ("Death and the Compass")
See also Alpha and Omega (Sept. 18, 2011) and some context from 1931.
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For the morning of Yom Kippur
"Amanecer— ¿Tienes una Bandera para mí?"
— Emily Dickinson
The link above leads to an anonymous photo taken on July 18, 2006.
See also a large image search (1.9 MB) from yesterday
and a Log24 post from July 18, 2006, Sacred Order.
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Friday, October 7, 2011
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Comments Off on And the Peace Prize Goes To…
Thursday, October 6, 2011
From the novel Starting Out in the Evening quoted in today's noon post—
"He… never took off his sunglasses, not even in the darkest bars."
You can't make this stuff up.
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From post 4017 in this journal (do not click links)—
"Thanks to University Diaries for an entry on Clancy Martin,
a philosophy professor in the 'show me' state, and his experiences with AA."
Neither link in this quote works anymore.
See instead Martin in the London Review of Books .
Lottery hermeneutics, however, still seems usable.
Today's midday NY lottery "163" may be taken as a sequel
to both the page number "162" in today's noon post—
— Humboldt's Gift , page 163 (Penguin Classics, 1996)
— and a sequel to University Diaries ' meditation today on the Nobel literature prize,
which includes a quote from the winner:
"At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel.
Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows…. It is I! It is I!"
— Tomas Tranströmer, "The Name"
As for the evening NY numbers 014 and 5785, see Hexagram 14,
Not Even Wrong , and 5/7/85.
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(Click logo for details.)
NeXT in action:
This morning's post Opening Act suggests the following scholium—
To Purgatory fire you'll come at last;
And Christ receive your soul.
If ever you gave meat or drink,
Every night and all,
The fire will never make you shrink;
And Christ receive your soul.
See also The Wall Street Journal 's Ice Water in Hell story.
Followup scholium — "Vague but exciting …" —
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Wednesday, October 5, 2011
University Diaries today—
"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."
This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .
Today's New York Lottery—
A quote suggested by the UD post—
"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."
— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut
Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—
(Click images to enlarge.)
Cool Mystery:
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
As for the midday numbers—
For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).
For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.
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A Log24 post yesterday morning referred to a Neil Young song.
That song could, it turns out, be regarded as an opening act for a musician who died in London early this morning—
AP story— … Spokesman Mick Houghton said Wednesday that [Bert] Jansch died early Wednesday morning….
Jansch was a founding member of the British folk group Pentangle and had inspired a generation of rock and folk guitarists with his acoustic mastery….
Houghton says his final solo performances were opening for Canadian rocker Neil Young earlier this year.
In memoriam… "Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming…"
Background… The Pentangle in Sir Gawain and The Lyke-Wake Dirge performed by Pentangle.
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Tuesday, October 4, 2011
(Click the above AZ address for lyrics.)
"All in a dream…"
See also Music for Zenna (March 28, 2011).
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— M. A. Foster, The Book of the Ler
"The Hulens themselves are closemouthed, secretive."
Above: Esther Dyson, pictures from Google's
2011 Zeitgeist conference at Paradise Valley, AZ.
See also "Everything's a story" (Feb. 19, 2004).
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Everett Ellin, pioneer of art museum technology, died on September 16th.
"Few bastions of the humanities have withstood the march of technology more tenaciously than the art museum,” Mr. Ellin wrote in a journal article in 1969. "But now, at long last, the computer has entered the house of the Muse and— like the man who came to dinner— the guest is here to stay. It would behoove the host to know something about his visitor’s care and feeding."
— Margalit Fox in tonight's online New York Times
From this journal on the date of Ellin's death—
Click image for some context.
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Monday, October 3, 2011
In memory of the late combinatorialist-philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota…
Excerpts from the introduction to Allan Casebier's
Film and Phenomenology: Towards a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation
(Cambridge Studies in Film, Cambridge University Press, 1991) —
Pages 1-2, pages 3-4, pages 5-6.
Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer
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The following may help show why R.T. Curtis calls his approach
to sporadic groups symmetric generation—
(Click to enlarge.)
Related material— Yesterday's Symmetric Generation Illustrated.
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Sunday, October 2, 2011
From "The Poet" (1844)—
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy.
The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world or nest of worlds; for the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition….
… Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false…. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one…. And the mystic must be steadily told,— All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,— universal signs, instead of these village symbols,— and we shall both be gainers.
See also Weyl on the use of symbols (in coordinate systems) and today's previous posts Birth of a Poet and Symmetric Generation Illustrated.
Comments Off on Emerson on Mathematics
R.T. Curtis in a 1990 paper* discussed his method of "symmetric generation" of groups as applied to the Mathieu groups M 12 and M 24.
See Finite Relativity and the Log24 posts Relativity Problem Revisited (Sept. 20) and Symmetric Generation (Sept. 21).
Here is some exposition of how this works with M 12 .
* "Geometric Interpretations of the ‘Natural’ Generators of the Mathieu groups," Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1990), Vol. 107, Issue 01, pp. 19-26.
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"All that we call sacred history
attests that the birth of a poet
is the principal event in chronology."
— Emerson
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Saturday, October 1, 2011
It turns out that Fabrizio Palombi, author and editor of books on the late combinatorialist-philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota, is also an expert on the French charlatan Lacan. (For recent remarks related to Rota, see yesterday's Primordiality and the link "6.7 (June 7)" in today's The Crowe Sphere.)
"We all have our little mythologies."
— "Lacan’s Mathematics," by Amadou Guissé, Alexandre Leupin, and Steven D. Wallace (a preprint from the website of Steven D. Wallace, assistant professor of mathematics at Macon State College, Macon, GA.) A more extensive quote from "Lacan's Mathematics"—
Epistemological Cuts* or Births?
An epistemological cut can be described as the production of homonyms. For example, the word orb in Ptolemaic cosmology and the same word in the Kepler’s system, albeit similar, designate two entities that have nothing in common: the first one, in the Ancients’ cosmology, is a crystal sphere to which stars are attached; orb, for Kepler, is an ellipsis whose sole material existence is the algorithm describing its path. A cut becomes major when all word of different eras change meaning. A case in point is the cut between polytheism and monotheism (Judaism): the word god or god takes an entirely different meaning, and this change affects all areas of a vision of the world. From the non created world of the Ancients, inhabited by eternal Gods, we pass on to a world created by a unique God, who is outside of his creation. This cut affects all areas of thinking. However, mythology, albeit separated from the new vision by the cut, survives as an enduring residue. Our sexual thinking, for example, is essential mythological, as proven by the endurance of the Oedipus complex or our cult of this ancient deity called Eros. Love is inherently tied to what Freud called the omnipotence of thought or magical thinking.
Of course, the quintessential major epistemological cut for us is the break effectuated by modern science in the 17th century. All the names are affected by it: however, who can claim he or she has been entirely purged of pre-scientific reasoning? Despite us living in a scientific universe, we all have our little mythologies, residues of an era before the major epistemological cut.
Any modeling of major epistemological cuts, or paradigm changes as Thomas Kuhn would have it, has therefore to account at the same time for a complete break with past names (that is, new visions of the world) as well as the survival of old names and mythologies.
* For some background on this Marxist jargon, see Epistemological Break (La Coupure Épistémologique ) at the website Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’Analyse and Contemporary French Thought.
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From Wallace Stevens's "A Primitive Like an Orb"—
But the virtuoso never leaves his shape,
Still on the horizon elongates his cuts,
And still angelic and still plenteous,
Imposes power by the power of his form.
See also the film Virtuosity and The Crowe Sphere
(a Log24 search that includes, by accident, a post
with the phrase "he crowed exultantly.").
Such a crowing: Cagney's classic "Top of the world!"
Those who seek significance in the name of Crowe's
character in Virtuosity , "SID 6.7," may consult yesterday's
Primordiality and a related post of 6.7 (June 7), 2010.
(For the "SID" part, see Caesar in this journal and Gladiator.)
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Friday, September 30, 2011
"A Phenomenological Perspective,"
Ch. 2 in The Star and the Whole:
Gian-Carlo Rota on Mathematics and Phenomenology ,
by Fabrizio Palombi, A K Peters/CRC Press, 2011—
"Rota is convinced that one of the fundamental tasks of phenomenology is that of highlighting the primordiality of sense. In his words, if 'many disputes among philosophers are disputes about primordiality' then 'phenomenology is yet another dispute about what is most primordial' (Rota, 1991a,* p. 54). In this way he evidently does not intend to deny the existence of matter, of objects, or of that objective dimension proper to science, in favor of a spiritualist option, but rather to posit as primordial another dimension of the world connected with contexts and with roles, which is considered primordial because each one of us is confronted with it primordially."
* The End of Objectivity: The Legacy of Phenomenology ,
Lectures by Rota at MIT 1974-1991, 457 pages,
MIT Mathematics Department, Cambridge, MA
"The Ultimate, Apocalyptic Laptop"
by George Johnson
Published: September 5, 2000, by The New York Times—
"In a paper in the current issue of Nature , Dr. Lloyd describes the ultimate laptop— a computer as powerful as the laws of physics will allow. So energetic is this imaginary machine that using it would be like harnessing a thermonuclear reaction. In the most extreme version of this computer supreme, so much computational circuitry would be packed into so small a space that the whole thing would collapse and form a tiny black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravity."
Related material: Rota and "Black Hole" in this journal, as well as the Sator Square.
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Thursday, September 29, 2011
Lottery hermeneutics for Michaelmas—
New York Lottery the evening of Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011—
499 and 6985.
For 499, see post 499 in this journal ("Angel Night," Sept. 29, 2002).
For 6985, see a Sunday, 6/9/85, review of Amy's Eyes , a children's book by Richard Kennedy.
"Especially for the adult reader, the narrator's musings comprise many of the book's great pleasures. He discusses the seductiveness of numerology, the 'Wayward Daughter of Mathematics'….''
— Edwin J. Kenney Jr.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The properties of the Mathieu group M 24 have recently interested some physicists—
(Click to enlarge.)
For some related papers, see Mendeley.com.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Daredevil work—
For Dan Brown, author of The Lost Symbol—
Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate
(Syfy channel, 9 PM tonight)
"Klaatu barada nikto."
Comments Off on The Lost Plot
Monday, September 26, 2011
For T.S. Eliot's Birthday
Last night's post "Transformation" was suggested in part
by the title of a Sunday New York Times article on
George Harrison, "Within Him, Without Him," and by
the song title "Within You Without You" in the post
Death and the Apple Tree.
Related material— "Hamlet's Transformation"—
Hamlet, 2.2:
Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was….”
A transformation:
Click on picture for details.
See also, from this year's Feast of the Transfiguration,
Correspondences and Happy Web Day.
For those who prefer the paganism of Yeats to
the Christianity of Eliot, there is the sequel to
"Death and the Apple Tree," "Dancers and the Dance."
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Sunday, September 25, 2011
Random thoughts from A Story (September 13th)—
A September 24th story from The Washington Post —
"James R. Adams was author or co-author of seven books,
beginning in 1971 with 'The Sting of Death.'"
Adams, an Episcopal priest, died on September 13th.
The September 13th Log24 post from which the above numbered links were
taken was in memory of film producer John Calley, who also died on that day.
A quote from Adams on the resurrected body of Christ:
"This new body had peculiar powers."
A quote from Calley:
"Let me put you in this unit."
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Saturday, September 24, 2011
For instance…
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For the Pope in Germany—
"We wish to see Jesus. For somehow we know, we suspect, we intuit, that if we see Jesus we will see what Meister Eckhart might call “The Divine Kernel of Being”— that Divine Spark of God’s essence, God’s imago Dei, the image in which we are created. We seem to know that in seeing Jesus we just might find something essential about ourselves."
—The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, St. Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland, weblog post of Saturday, March 28, 2009, on a sermon for Sunday, March 29, 2009
See also this journal in March 2009.
Related non-theology—
Weyl on coordinate systems, Cassirer on the kernel of being, and A Study in Art Education.
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The title describes two philosophical events (one major, one minor) from the same day— Thursday, July 5, 2007. Some background from 2001:
"Are the finite simple groups, like the prime numbers, jewels strung on an as-yet invisible thread? And will this thread lead us out of the current labyrinthine proof to a radically new proof of the Classification Theorem?" (p. 345)
— Ronald Solomon, "A Brief History of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , Vol. 38 No. 3 (July 2001), pp. 315-352
The major event— On July 5, 2007, Cambridge University Press published Robert T. Curtis's Symmetric Generation of Groups.*
Curtis's book does not purport to lead us out of Solomon's labyrinth, but its publication date may furnish a Jungian synchronistic clue to help in exiting another nightmare labyrinth— that of postmodernist nominalism.
The minor event— The posting of Their Name is Legion in this journal on July 5, 2007.
* This is the date given by Amazon.co.uk and by BookDepository.com. Other sources give a later July date, perhaps applicable to the book's publication in the U.S. rather than Britain.
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Friday, September 23, 2011
NY Lottery this evening—
Continued from Themes of Sept. 17—
"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."
Lottery hermeneutics for this evening—
747 — Source of the sound effect in a post of April 28, 2009:
"And Kali, ‘The Dark One,’ addressed him with the voice of a cloud of thunder…"
— The King and the Corpse , by Heinrich Zimmer
3695 — Number of a post on Steps Toward Salvation (Dec. 14, 2008)
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NY Lottery this afternoon—
See also post 1115.
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For those who prefer Nick Stahl (star of "The Speed of Thought"— see previous post)
to Keanu Reeves as a savior figure, here is a still from another film with Stahl as savior—
Backstory —
See also a Log24 post from the day of Blank's death, The Uploading.
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Thursday, September 22, 2011
And the Irving Thalberg Award goes to…
Robert De Niro as Irving Thalberg in "The Last Tycoon"
Text and Context—
Text:
Jerky Treats for dogs
Context:
"Mad Dog and Glory" (March 5, 1993)
"Point of No Return" (March 19, 1993) —
Note Jerky Treats in background.
A possible acceptance speech for the Thalberg Award—
"Let me put you in this unit." — John Calley, via Buck Henry
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Related material—
See also yesterday's Symmetric Generation.
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In memoriam …
Bridget Fonda in "Point of No Return." This is a 1993 remake of 1990's "La Femme Nikita ,"
virtually the same scene-by-scene, but with two nice new touches: the young assassin's code name
is Nina, after Nina Simone, and she happily shops as Simone sings "new day" in the soundtrack.
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." — Yogi Berra
This evening's NY Lottery numbers were 375 and 3141.
Subjective interpretations—
There seems to be only one relevant result of a Google search for "375 Log24"—
There are, however, two relevant interpretations of the number 3141—
1. The Saturday Evening Post 3/1/41 article by Jack Alexander on AA—
"The members of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle
a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic
as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling."
2. Post number 3141 in this journal— Aesthetics for Jesuits.
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Suggested by yesterday's Relativity Problem Revisited and by Cassirer on Objectivity—
From Symmetric Generation of Groups , by R.T. Curtis (Cambridge U. Press, 2007)—
"… we are saying much more than that G ≅ M 24 is generated by
some set of seven involutions, which would be a very weak
requirement. We are asserting that M 24 is generated by a set
of seven involutions which possesses all the symmetries of L3(2)
acting on the points of the 7-point projective plane…."
— Symmetric Generation , p. 41
"It turns out that this approach is particularly revealing and that
many simple groups, both sporadic and classical, have surprisingly
simple definitions of this type."
— Symmetric Generation , p. 42
See also (click to enlarge)—
Cassirer's remarks connect the concept of objectivity with that of object .
The above quotations perhaps indicate how the Mathieu group M 24 may be viewed as an object.
"This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."
— James Joyce, Stephen Hero
For a simpler object "which possesses all the symmetries of L3(2) acting on the points of the 7-point projective plane…." see The Eightfold Cube.
For symmetric generation of L3(2) on that cube, see A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.
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Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Hermann Weyl's 1949 remarks in this morning's post
were made at an event on March 19 in honor of Einstein's
70th birthday five days earlier.
Somehow the conclusion of Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel
Cat's Eye seems appropriate:
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A footnote was added to Finite Relativity—
Background:
Weyl on what he calls the relativity problem—
“The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time.”
– Hermann Weyl, 1949, “Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research“
“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them.”
– Hermann Weyl, 1946, The Classical Groups , Princeton University Press, p. 16
…. A note of Feb. 20, 1986, supplied an example of such coordinatizations in finite geometry. In that note, the group of mediating transformations acted directly on coordinates within a 4×4 array. When the 4×4 array is embedded in a 4×6 array, a larger and more interesting group, M 24 (containing the original group), acts on the larger array. There is no obvious solution to Weyl’s relativity problem for M 24. That is, there is no obvious way* to apply exactly 24 distinct transformable coordinate-sets (or symbol-strings ) to the 24 array elements in such a way that the natural group of mediating transformations of the 24 symbol-strings is M 24. ….
Footnote of Sept. 20, 2011:
* R.T. Curtis has, it seems, a non-obvious way that involves strings of seven symbols. His abstract for a 1990 paper says that in his construction “The generators of M 24 are defined… as permutations of twenty-four 7-cycles in the action of PSL2(7) on seven letters….”
See “Geometric Interpretations of the ‘Natural’ Generators of the Mathieu groups,” by R.T. Curtis, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1990), Vol. 107, Issue 01, pp. 19-26. (Rec. Jan. 3, 1989, revised Feb. 3, 1989.) This paper was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.
Some related articles by Curtis:
R.T. Curtis, “Natural Constructions of the Mathieu groups,” Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. (1989), Vol. 106, pp. 423-429
R.T. Curtis. “Symmetric Presentations I: Introduction, with Particular Reference to the Mathieu groups M 12 and M 24” In Proceedings of 1990 LMS Durham Conference ‘Groups, Combinatorics and Geometry’ (eds. M. W. Liebeck and J. Saxl), London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Series 165, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 380–396
R.T. Curtis, “A Survey of Symmetric Generation of Sporadic Simple Groups,” in The Atlas of Finite Groups: Ten Years On , (eds. R.T. Curtis and R.A. Wilson), London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Series 249, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 39–57
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Monday, September 19, 2011
742
as indicated by Gravity's Rainbow— the end of page 742—
by the New York Lottery on the evening of June 17, 2010—
and by this journal on the afternoon of that day—
Detail from New Yorker cover (fiction issue of June 2010)
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Sunday, September 18, 2011
Lurching Toward Decision
"Suskind… nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for 'the perfect technical answer' to the myriad of complex issues coming at him."
— Frank Rich on Ron Suskind's new book about the White House, Confidence Men
Very distantly related material—
From "Confidence Game," an Oct. 12, 2008, post in this journal, a quasi-European perspective—
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
– Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
|
See also …
Gravity’s Rainbow , Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
"… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….
Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of
742"
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R.D. Carmichael's seminal 1931 paper on tactical configurations suggests
a search for later material relating such configurations to block designs.
Such a search yields the following—
"… it seems that the relationship between
BIB [balanced incomplete block ] designs
and tactical configurations, and in particular,
the Steiner system, has been overlooked."
— D. A. Sprott, U. of Toronto, 1955
The figure by Cullinane included above shows a way to visualize Sprott's remarks.
For the group actions described by Cullinane, see "The Eightfold Cube" and
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168."
Update of 7:42 PM Sept. 18, 2011—
From a Summer 2011 course on discrete structures at a Berlin website—
A different illustration of the eightfold cube as the Steiner system S(3, 4, 8)—
Note that only the static structure is described by Felsner, not the
168 group actions discussed (as above) by Cullinane. For remarks on
such group actions in the literature, see "Cube Space, 1984-2003."
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A transcription—
"Now suppose that α is an element of order 23 in M 24 ; we number the points of Ω
as the projective line ∞, 0, 1, 2, … , 22 so that α : i → i + 1 (modulo 23) and fixes ∞. In
fact there is a full L 2 (23) acting on this line and preserving the octads…."
— R. T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M 24 ,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1976), 79: 25-42
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"But Thou knewest not, it seems, that no sooner would man reject
miracle than he would reject God likewise, for he seeketh less
God than 'a sign' from Him." —The Grand Inquisitor
Update of 1:44 AM—
Seek and Ye Shall Find …
(Click images for larger context)
The Holy Office —
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Saturday, September 17, 2011
Historic plane crashes at West Virginia air show
"The T-28 aircraft crashed at about 2:40 p.m.
during an acrobatic demonstration at the 2011
Thunder Over the Blue Ridge Open House & Air Show…."
See also Themes—
"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."
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The previous two posts, Baggage and The Uploading, suggest
a review of Wroclaw's native son Ernst Cassirer.
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