“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
Friday, May 29, 2020
Where It Used to Be
"Looking for what was, where it used to be"
— Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," I
"It Must Be Abstract," X
"X marks the spot" — Indiana Jones
Click the above image for a country song.
Comments Off on Where It Used to Be
The May Queens
In remembrance of Else Blangsted and Nancy Stark Smith,
who each reportedly died on May 1, 2020 —
Posts tagged Mayday 2020.
Comments Off on The May Queens
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Unity Game
“Old men ought to be explorers.” — T. S. Eliot
“Everybody’s lost but me!” — Young Indiana Jones, quoted
in a book review (“Knox Peden on Martin Hägglund”) in
Sydney Review of Books on May 26 . . .
” Here I am reminded of the words of
the young Indiana Jones alone in the desert,
decades before the Last Crusade:
‘Everybody’s lost but me.’ “
Related remarks — Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
Comments Off on Unity Game
Finite Geometry at GitHub
My website on finite geometry is now available
on GitHub at http://m759.github.io/ . The part
of greatest interest to coders is also at
https://repl.it/@m759/View-4x4x4#index.html .
Comments Off on Finite Geometry at GitHub
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
In Search of the Diamond Chariot*
From an obituary in The New York Times today —
“After graduating from Oberlin in 1974 with a degree in dance
and writing, she studied meditation and Buddhism at what is
now the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.”
— Gia Kourlas, May 27, 2020, 11:23 a.m. ET
* For the chariot, see other posts tagged September Samurai.
Comments Off on In Search of the Diamond Chariot*
Finite Jest
“No serious difficulty is encountered as long as one deals
with a domain consisting of a finite number of points only,
which can be ‘called up’ one after the other.” — Weyl
Background — The relativity problem in this journal.
Comments Off on Finite Jest
Continental Taste-Envy
The title is a phrase by Kyle Smith, who writes with
considerable taste and little envy.
Then there is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein . . .
See as well Heidegger at Davos.
Comments Off on Continental Taste-Envy
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Introduction to Cyberspace
Or approaching.
On the Threshold:
Click the search result above for the July 1982 Omni
story that introduced into fiction the term "cyberspace."
Part of a page from the original Omni version —
For some other kinds of space, see my notes from the 1980's.
Some related remarks on space (and illustrated clams) —
— George Steiner, "A Death of Kings," The New Yorker ,
September 7, 1968, pp. 130 ff. The above is from p. 133.
See also Steiner on space, algebra, and Galois.
Comments Off on Introduction to Cyberspace
Monday, May 25, 2020
Cyberface
(A sequel to D8ing the Joystick)
Adam Gopnik today in The New Yorker —
“In remote therapy sessions, with the loss of familiarly structured
therapeutic spaces, a kind of staring contest takes place.”
This journal on the above YouTube date — May 28, 2011 —
“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”
Canto IV of “It Must Change”
Update of 5:45 PM ET —
The above May 28, 2011, Stevens quotation is from a post
titled “Savage Detectives.” A related image starring Sean Young —
Comments Off on Cyberface
D8ing Continues.
Comments Off on D8ing Continues.
Mathematics and Narrative
Mathematics: This journal on September 1, 2011 —
Posts tagged September Morn.
Narrative: Also on September 1, 2011 —
See as well Nabokov’s Magic Carpet.
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative
The Shimada Documents
(For Harlan Kane)
From Shimada’s notes on computational data at
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shimada/
preprints/Edge/PaperEdge/compdataEdge.pdf —
“C24 is the list of codewords of the extended
binary Golay code C24. Each codeword is expressed
by a subset of the set M of the positions [1, . . . , 24]
of MOG.”
Comments Off on The Shimada Documents
Sunday, May 24, 2020
A Lexicon of Operators
“If we ended Part 1 proud of our accomplishment—
perhaps even a little smug—then we will get reacquainted
with our humility in this article.” — Robert Jacobson
Related to the grammar of operators —
Comments Off on A Lexicon of Operators
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Deep Dogma
“Far from making us revise our fundamentals and reform our thoughts,
major historical crises almost invariably reinforce our previous beliefs,
and make us entrench deeper into our dogma. ”
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , May 1, 2020
See also Geometric Theology.
Comments Off on Deep Dogma
Structure for Linguists
"MIT professor of linguistics Wayne O’Neil died on March 22
at his home in Somerville, Massachusetts."
— MIT Linguistics, May 1, 2020
The "deep structure" above is the plane cutting the cube in a hexagon
(as in my note Diamonds and Whirls of September 1984).
See also . . .
Comments Off on Structure for Linguists
Eightfold Geometry: A Surface Code “Unit Cell”
The resemblance to the eightfold cube is, of course,
completely coincidental.
Some background from the literature —
Comments Off on Eightfold Geometry: A Surface Code “Unit Cell”
Friday, May 22, 2020
Surface Code News
From a paper cited in the above story:
“Fig. 4 A lattice geometry for a surface code.” —
The above figure suggests a search for “surface code” cube :
Related poetic remarks — “Illumination of a surface.”
Comments Off on Surface Code News
Annals of Crystalline Beauty
The phrase “laborious cerebration” quoted in the previous post,
Sombre Figuration, suggests . . .
For an example of such cerebration, see Aitchison’s Octads.
Comments Off on Annals of Crystalline Beauty
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Sombre Figuration
Duke University Press states above that …
“You do not currently have access to this content.”
But see…
Some less difficult rigor —
For some less sombre figurations, see the category in which Google
has placed (as above) a book by the late Harold Bloom —
Click the box to perform the indicated search.
Comments Off on Sombre Figuration
The Dead and the Quick
Comments Off on The Dead and the Quick
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Cue the Violins
In memory of a music editor.
Blangsted reportedly died on May 1.
See also that date in this journal, among
other posts tagged The Next Level.
Comments Off on Cue the Violins
Scholarly History
On “emergence, institutionalization and (importantly) legitimation …
(with its resource allocation system and authority structure)” —
“It’s still the same old story.” — Song lyric
See as well other posts now tagged Raiding Minsky’s.
Comments Off on Scholarly History
Something to Look At
Stephen Ornes in Quanta Magazine today —
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
Symbolic Mathematics Finally Yields to Neural Networks
“Another possible direction for the neural net to explore
is the development of automated theorem generators.
Mathematicians are increasingly investigating ways to
use AI to generate new theorems and proofs, though
‘the state of the art has not made a lot of progress,’
Lample said. ‘It’s something we’re looking at.’ “
As is Stephanie Dick.
Comments Off on Something to Look At
A Queen of Fact*
The American Mathematical Society has noted the May 12 death
of Nancy D. Anderson. According to an unsigned May 14 obituary
in the Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, News-Gazette , Anderson was
“at the time of her retirement in 2000… one of the most respected
mathematics librarians of her generation.”
Related material (click to enlarge) —
* Phrase suggested by a Wallace Stevens poem. See May 12.
Comments Off on A Queen of Fact*
Monday, May 18, 2020
This about That…
Lifetime Achievement —
“Eugene Telemachus Rossides (his middle name was for the son of
Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey ) was born in Brooklyn on
Oct. 23, 1927.” —
Click the horse to search this journal for Trojan .
Comments Off on This about That…
Sunday, May 17, 2020
“The Ultimate Epistemological Fact”
"Let me say this about that." — Richard Nixon
Interpenetration in Weyl's epistemology —
Interpenetration in Mazzola's music theory —
Interpenetration in the eightfold cube — the three midplanes —
A deeper example of interpenetration:
Aitchison has shown that the Mathieu group M24 has a natural
action on the 24 center points of the subsquares on the eightfold
cube's six faces (four such points on each of the six faces). Thus
the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) interpenetrate
on the surface of the cube.
Comments Off on “The Ultimate Epistemological Fact”
Gran Torino
Source citation for an article quoted here last night —
“Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action” —
A check of that source yields the seal of the University of Torino —
Related material —
Comments Off on Gran Torino
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Bullshit Studies
From https://www.mathunion.org/outreach/logos/versions-all-logos —
Click the logo for some IMU history.
Related bullshit —
“Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action” —
Click the banner below for the background of the logo —
Comments Off on Bullshit Studies
Adventures on Prescott Street…
For a member of a 1960-1961 Harvard Freshman Seminar
at 8 Prescott Street —
Dusenbury’s study of color was published on June 9, 2015.
This journal on that date —
Comments Off on Adventures on Prescott Street…
Annals of Intellectual History*
The date — Nov. 20, 2011 — of a post cited here last night
was suggested as follows. It was the opening date of a
Broadway show, “Seminar,” that later starred Jeff Goldblum.
Jeff Goldblum in “Seminar“
* See Intellectual History in this journal.
Comments Off on Annals of Intellectual History*
SPACE COMMAND
Comments Off on SPACE COMMAND
Friday, May 15, 2020
Review
Charles Taylor,
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
See also Talking of Michelangelo.
Related material for comedians —
Literature ad absurdum —
Comments Off on Review
Thursday, May 14, 2020
For Mask Aficionados
|
Saturday, September 17, 2016
|
For those who prefer comedy —
Other toys: Archimedes at Hiroshima and related posts.
Comments Off on For Mask Aficionados
Tournamonde
In memory of Wallace Stevens, a not-so-gay tournamonde —
Beware, beware, her flashing eyes, her floating hair:
Comments Off on Tournamonde
Tony Award
"Tony Stark: That's how I wished it happened.
Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, or BARF.
God, I gotta work on that acronym.
An extremely costly method of hijacking the
hippocampus to . . . clear traumatic memories. Huh."
Another acronym — AIEEE !
Comments Off on Tony Award
Art Issue*
"… the beautiful object
that stood in
for something else.”
— Holland Cotter quoting an art historian
in The New York Times on May 13
From a post of April 27, 2020 —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside….”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
The beautiful object —
Something else —
* The title is a reference to other posts now also tagged Art Issue.
Comments Off on Art Issue*
Object
In memory of an art historian who reportedly died on May 6 —
What he loved about the art of the Baroque,
he told Ms. Soboleva, was that
“it was for a higher purpose.
It wasn’t just about the beautiful object;
it was the beautiful object that stood in
for something else."
— Holland Cotter in The New York Times
Related material:
The previous post and . . .
Comments Off on Object
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
The Follower: A Short Story for Stephen King
“Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain
how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.”
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016
What is the vashikaran? – QuoraMar 17, 2015 – Vashikaran is a well-known term in the field of Tantra and Mantra. It is an ancient legacy Tantra and Mantra used to control someone’s mind. It is a tantrik process … |
Comments Off on The Follower: A Short Story for Stephen King
Adventures in the Book Trade
Click the Springer “train of thought” advertisement below to enlarge.
A line for Stephen King:
“She gets the locomotive, I get the caboose.”
. . . . . . . 
Cover Design: Will Staehle / Unusual Co.
Comments Off on Adventures in the Book Trade
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Mehta Physics
Epigraph to Fly and the Fly-Bottle:
Encounters with British Intellectuals ,
by Ved Mehta , remarks first published
in The New Yorker in 1961 and 1962 —
See as well the Wallace Stevens phrase “The Ruler of Reality.”
Comments Off on Mehta Physics
Monday, May 11, 2020
Finite Geometry at Harvard
Now at https://dataverse.harvard.edu —
Archived copy of finitegeometry.org/sc .
For some related remarks in a more literary vein,
see posts now tagged Beadgame Space.
Comments Off on Finite Geometry at Harvard
Nietzsche for Comedians
See also Shangri-La and “At the Back of the North Wind .”
Update from the Times —
“Some things that happen for the first time….” — Song lyric
Comments Off on Nietzsche for Comedians
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Plato Again Thanks the Academy
Comments Off on Plato Again Thanks the Academy
Capilla
In memory of an architect who reportedly died yesterday at 88,
a search in this journal for capilla (Spanish for chapel).
Comments Off on Capilla
Deschooling* M.I.T.
New York Times opinion yesterday from a professor at M.I.T. —
* For some background on Deschooling, see (for instance) . . .
Comments Off on Deschooling* M.I.T.
Film Theory Love Call
From April 2, 2019 —
From this journal yesterday afternoon —
“The default sound for any new tweet is a whistle,
somewhere between a neighbourly ‘yoo-hoo’
and a dog-walker’s call to heel.” — The Economist
Comments Off on Film Theory Love Call
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Quicksilver* Meditation
Suggested by the previous post —
| Tom Lamont in The Economist , June/July 2020 —
Recently, I saw that a person called Celine in San Francisco had tweeted to her 2,500-odd followers about the difficulty of “trying to date SF guys in between their week-long meditation retreats, Tahoe weekends, month-long remote work sessions…” About 4,000 people tapped to endorse the sentiment, launching Celine onto an exponential number of strangers’ screens, including my own. The default sound for any new tweet is a whistle, somewhere between a neighbourly “yoo-hoo” and a dog-walker’s call to heel. |
“Everybody, here comes the life of the party
Everybody, here comes the life of the party, yeah, she is.”
Songwriters: Ben Hayslip / Rhett Akins / Jason Sellers
See as well Life of the Party in this journal.
Synchronologists may consult posts of March 2015.
* ” This was Language herself , as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding
out of the molten quicksilver of the first star called Mercury on Earth,
but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.” ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength .
Comments Off on Quicksilver* Meditation
Comedy Team: Tedious and Rigged
|
“Much of ‘Laurel Canyon’ proves tedious and rigged as it moves from Cambridge, where both Sam and Alex have graduated from Harvard Medical School, to California, where Sam will intern as Alex completes her doctoral thesis on the sex lives of fruit flies. — Malcolm Johnson in The Hartford Courant |
See as well this journal on the above Courant date — March 28, 2003 —
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like bananas.”
— Saying attributed to Harvard linguist Anthony Oettinger
Comments Off on Comedy Team: Tedious and Rigged
Shrikhande Continues.
See also earlier posts mentioning Shrikhande in this journal.
He reportedly died on April 21, 2020.
Synchronologists may consult posts now tagged with that date.
Comments Off on Shrikhande Continues.
Friday, May 8, 2020
Orthodox
In memory of a performer and historian of popular music
who reportedly died on April 19, 2020 —
Related material with an Easter theme —
See also posts in this journal related to March 11.
Comments Off on Orthodox
Production Values
From Log24 on August 30, 2013 —
| Portrait, in the 2013 film Oblivion , of a 2005 graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art —
London derrière. |
From a 2015 film viewed last night —
Comments Off on Production Values
Moon Song
"Even when some parts of the show don’t feel like they’re working,
the production is always top notch and eye-popping. The score, too,
is top notch here, but it’s the use of Pink Floyd’s 'The Dark Side of
the Moon' that resonates most."
— Kevin Lever on the Westworld May 3 Season 3 finale
Image from Log24 posts tagged Spectral Valhalla —
Comments Off on Moon Song
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Happy Vesak
“The holiday goes by dozens of names — but many countries unofficially
refer to it as Buddha’s Birthday or Buddha Day. It celebrates three
important events of Buddha’s life: birth, enlightenment, and death —
said to have occurred on the same calendar day, albeit many years apart.”
— CNN
Comments Off on Happy Vesak
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
“Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain
how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.”
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016
Illustrations, from the American Mathematical Society Spring
2020 book sale, of a book scheduled to be published May 28.
Comments Off on Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Kant as Diamond Cutter
"He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it.
That master diamond cutter."
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Part III.
Kant's "category theory" —
|
"In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant deduces the table of twelve categories, or pure concepts of the understanding….
The categories must be 'schematized' because their non-empirical origin in pure understanding prevents their having the sort of sensible content that would connect them immediately to the objects of experience; transcendental schemata are mediating representations that are meant to establish the connection between pure concepts and appearances in a rule-governed way. Mathematical concepts are discussed in this context since they are unique in being pure but also sensible concepts: they are pure because they are strictly a priori in origin, and yet they are sensible since they are constructed in concreto . " — Shabel, Lisa, "Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/kant-mathematics/>. |
See also The Diamond Theorem and Octad.us.
Comments Off on Kant as Diamond Cutter
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Identity Problem
The phrase “problem of identity” in the previous post suggests a search
for other instances of the phrase. That search yields a talk by Andrei Rodin:
A later book by Rodin echoes Vladimir Arnold‘s remark
that “mathematics is a part of physics.” (Rodin is a Russian
who apparently worships at the Church of Scientism.)
The Rodin talk is dated 19 November 2012.
For some very different philosophical remarks, by poet
Wallace Stevens, see the Log24 posts of 19 November 2012.
Comments Off on Identity Problem
“The Ship of Theseus”…
is a philosophical conundrum discussed this morning in the weblog of
David Justice.
A related statement of this “problem of identity,” from posts
in this weblog tagged “For Banff 2009” yesterday afternoon—
Remarks related to the ship of Theseus —
Comments Off on “The Ship of Theseus”…
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
In Memoriam: Jan Saxl, Mathematician
For the conference, see
https://www.birs.ca/events/2009/5-day-workshops/09w5030 .
For the Church of Synchronology:
“Time for you to see the field.” (Posts now tagged “For Banff 2009”)
Comments Off on In Memoriam: Jan Saxl, Mathematician
If Not Sublime
This is perhaps the same Robert Mezey, poet at Pomona College,
who reportedly died on April 25.
See a Pomona link, the Fano Hallows, from this journal on that date.
Comments Off on If Not Sublime
Monday, May 4, 2020
The Man Behind the Counter
The title is a phrase from the Suzanne Vega song in the previous post.
“Always busy counting . . . .” — Tagline at Peter J. Cameron’s weblog.
“This morning brought the news that Jan Saxl died on Saturday.”
A search for Saxl in this weblog yields a post related to a topic in
Wolfram Neutsch’s book Coordinates. See Saturday’s post
“Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level.”
Related narrative from the Saturday post —
Related narrative from Sunday’s Westworld finale —
Comments Off on The Man Behind the Counter
The Thing and I …
Update at 4 PM —
“It is always
Nice to see you”
Says the man
Behind the counter
Tom Stall’s diner in “A History of Violence” (30 September 2005).
This journal on 30 September 2005 —
“This place ain’t doing me any good.
I’m in the wrong town,
I should be in Hollywood.”
— Dylan, “Things Have Changed“
Comments Off on The Thing and I …
May the Fourth
“This is not the Hartshorne you’re looking for.”
“Reality as a Social Process (1953) developed the ideas
that becoming, or process, is fundamental throughout
reality, and that all the things that become are interrelated.”
— From American National Biography
Related material —
The New York Times obituary of Madeline Faith Kripke
and Nietzsche on “becoming, or process.”
Comments Off on May the Fourth
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Into the Westworld
He beomes aware of something else… some other presence.
“Anybody here?” he says.
I am here.
He almost jumps, it is so loud. Or it seems loud. Then he wonders if
he has heard anything at all.
“Did you speak?”
No.
How are we communicating? he wonders.
The way everything communicates with everything else.
Which way is that?
Why do you ask if you already know the answer?
— Sphere by Michael Crichton, Harvard ’64
Comments Off on Into the Westworld
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level*
From the obituary of a game inventor who reportedly died
on Monday, February 25, 2013 —
” ‘He was hired because of the game,’ Richard Turyn,
a mathematician who worked at Sylvania, told
the Washington Post in a 2004 feature on Diplomacy.”
* For the theorem, see Wolfram Neutsch, Coordinates .
(Published by de Gruyter, 1996. See pp. 761-766.)
Having defined (pp. 751-752) the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
as a 4×6 array to be used with Conway’s “hexacode,” Neutsch says . . .
“Apart from the three constructions of the Golay codes
discussed at length in this book (lexicographic and via
the MOG or the projective line), there are literally
dozens of alternatives. For lack of space, we have to
restrict our attention to a single example. It has been
discovered by Turyn and can be connected in a very
beautiful way with the Miracle Octad Generator….
To this end, we consider the natural splitting of the MOG into
three disjoint octads L, M, R (‘left’, ‘middle’, and ‘right’ octad)….”
— From page 761
“The theorem of Turyn” is on page 764 —
Comments Off on Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level*
Friday, May 1, 2020
The H-State
Related pure mathematics —
The Escape from Plato’s Cave to . . .
See also Numberland and Walpurgisnacht Geometry.
Comments Off on The H-State
Bullshit Studies
The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn (Bantam Books, 2014).
| “You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”
I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.” I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary. “If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.” That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing. |
My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (Cornell, 1970) —
“There is a point at which
‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’ “
The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”
Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:
See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.
Comments Off on Bullshit Studies
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Walpurgisnacht Geometry
A version more explicitly connected to finite geometry —
For the six synthematic totals , see The Joy of Six.
Comments Off on Walpurgisnacht Geometry
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Curtis at Pilsen, Thursday, July 5, 2018
For an account by R. T. Curtis of how he discovered the Miracle Octad Generator,
see slides by Curtis, “Graphs and Groups,” from his talk on July 5, 2018, at the
Pilsen conference on algebraic graph theory, “Symmetry vs. Regularity: The first
50 years since Weisfeiler-Leman stabilization” (WL2018).
See also “Notes to Robert Curtis’s presentation at WL2018,” by R. T. Curtis.
Meanwhile, here on July 5, 2018 —
| Simultaneous perspective does not look upon language as a path because it is not the search for meaning that orients it. Poetry does not attempt to discover what there is at the end of the road; it conceives of the text as a series of transparent strata within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic currents—produce momentary configurations as they intertwine or break apart, as they reflect each other or efface each other. Poetry contemplates itself, fuses with itself, and obliterates itself in the crystallizations of language. Apparitions, metamorphoses, volatilizations, precipitations of presences. These configurations are crystallized time: although they are perpetually in motion, they always point to the same hour—the hour of change. Each one of them contains all the others, each one is inside the others: change is only the oft-repeated and ever-different metaphor of identity.
— Paz, Octavio. The Monkey Grammarian |
The 2018 Log24 post containing the above Paz quote goes on to quote
remarks by Lévi-Strauss. Paz’s phrase “series of transparent strata”
suggests a review of other remarks by Lévi-Strauss in the 2016 post
“Key to All Mythologies.“
Comments Off on Curtis at Pilsen, Thursday, July 5, 2018
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
The Art Issue
“A sort of pointillist mosaic”
— Author David Mitchell on the film adaptation of
his novel Cloud Atlas .
See also the previous post, Cloud Atlas of Unknowing.
“Art isn’t easy.” — Sondheim.
Comments Off on The Art Issue
Monday, April 27, 2020
The Cracked Nut
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable
conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being –
the reward he seeks –the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life,
the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the
essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Comments Off on The Cracked Nut
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Crux
This post was suggested by a David Justice weblog post yesterday,
Coincidence and Cosmos. Some related remarks —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
See as well posts now tagged Crux.
Comments Off on Crux
The Triangle of Art
This post was suggested by yesterday morning's link to The Fano Hallows.
"Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain
how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016
A symbol related to The Fano Hallows —
Comments Off on The Triangle of Art
Saturday, April 25, 2020
The Grandfather Clock
“Well, I’ve helped to wind up the clock —
I might as well hear it strike!”
— Said to be a quotation from the grandfather
of a “pirate radio” founder who reportedly died
at 79 on April 20.
See as well this journal on the night of April 20 —
Wheel Turnin’ ’Round and ’Round —
and a search for “Wheel of Time.”
Comments Off on The Grandfather Clock
Form and Order
“Brahms maintained a classical sense of
form and order in his works….” — Wikipedia
For example —
The above Cologne sextet upload date suggests a review.
See posts now tagged The Fano Hallows.
Comments Off on Form and Order
Friday, April 24, 2020
Art at Cologne
This post was suggested by a New York Review of Books article
on Cologne artist Gerhard Richter in the May 14, 2020, issue —
“The Master of Unknowing,” by Susan Tallman.
Some less random art —
Comments Off on Art at Cologne
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Octads and Geometry
See the web pages octad.group and octad.us.
Related geometry (not the 759 octads, but closely related to them) —
#/media/File:150614-PG-3-2-schoolgirls-arrangement.png)
The 4×6 rectangle of R. T. Curtis
illustrates the geometry of octads —
Curtis splits the 4×6 rectangle into three 4×2 "bricks" —
.
"In fact the construction enables us to describe the octads
in a very revealing manner. It shows that each octad,
other than Λ1, Λ2, Λ3, intersects at least one of these ' bricks' —
the 'heavy brick' – in just four points." . . . .
— R. T. Curtis (1976). "A new combinatorial approach to M24,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
79, pp 25-42.
Comments Off on Octads and Geometry
Dead Poet Joke
From the subtitles of the recent Kristen Stewart film “Underwater” —
427
00:30:26,144 –> 00:30:27,476
He’d always say
he had a new joke,
428
00:30:27,478 –> 00:30:29,445
and then he’d tell
the same stupid joke.
429
00:30:29,447 –> 00:30:32,785
I was… laughing at that joke.
430
00:30:34,053 –> 00:30:35,685
Yeah, what was it?
431
00:30:35,687 –> 00:30:38,654
What did the fish say when
it bumped into the brick wall?
April 11 was the dies natalis , in the Catholic sense, of John Horton Conway.
Related material: Other posts containing the phrase “brick wall.”
Comments Off on Dead Poet Joke
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
One with Everything
The title is of course from an old joke about mystic philosophies.
Related remarks by John Archibald Wheeler —
“Remarkable issues connected with the puzzle of existence
confront us today in Hermann Weyl’s domain of thought.
Four among them I bring before you here as especially interesting:
(1) What is the machinery of existence?
(2) What is deeper foundation of the quantum principle?
(3) What is the proper position to take about the existence of
the “continuum” of the natural numbers? And
(4) What can we do to understand time as an entity, not precise and
supplied free of charge from outside physics, but approximate and
yet to be derived from within a new and deeper time-free physics?
In brief, how come time?
What about the continuum?
How come the quantum?
What is existence?”
— John A. Wheeler, “Hermann Weyl and the Unity of Knowledge,”
American Scientist 74, no. 4 (1986): 366–75. Reprinted in
John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe
(American Institute of Physics, December 1, 1995).
The above bibliographic data is from . . .
Schrank, Jeffrey. Inventing Reality: Stories We Create To Explain Everything .
Gatekeeper Press. Kindle Edition, March 14, 2020.
For further scholarly details, see a version at JSTOR:
“…the article is adapted from the concluding address given at
the Hermann Weyl Centenary Congress, University of Kiel, 3 July 1985.”
— https://www.jstor.org/stable/27854250.
I prefer Charles Williams on “the Unity of Knowledge.”
See the 15 instances of the phrase “the Unity” in his 1931 novel Many Dimensions .
Comments Off on One with Everything
Puzzle Pictures
|
A doodle from 2012’s Feast of the Epiphany—
A doodle based on a post for Twelfth Night, 2003—
|
Comments Off on Puzzle Pictures
Arts at Cambridge
Click here to enlarge. See also Hexagram 59, Feng Shui.
Comments Off on Arts at Cambridge
Deep Horizon
For some mathematical background, see Deep + Hardy.
Related entertainment —
Related non-entertainment —
Comments Off on Deep Horizon
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Living Water
The Tesseract Timeline:
Where The Cube Has Been In The …
www.cinemablend.com › news › the-tesseract-timeline-…
Mar 13, 2019 – With HYDRA. In 1942, Johann Schmidt, a.k.a.
the Red Skull, arrived in Tønsberg to procure the Tesseract
from an ancient church. While he …
Related material from posts tagged Aqua
(suggested by a name in the previous post) —
Comments Off on Living Water
Cold Comfort Continues
Comments Off on Cold Comfort Continues
Monday, April 20, 2020
The Date
Comments Off on The Date
Geometry for Poets
From Atomicity and Quanta by James Jeans,
Cambridge University Press, 1926, pp. 55-56 —
| “So far as we can at present conjecture, the investigation of the structure which produces this atomicity appears to be the big problem in the path of the quantum-theory. To conform to the principle of relativity, the new atomicity must admit of expression in terms of the space-time continuum, although we have seen that it cannot be an atomicity of the continuum itself. It may conceivably be an atomicity of its metric properties, such as determine its curvatures. We may perhaps form a very rude picture of it by imagining the curvature of the continuum in the neighbourhood of an atom not to be of the continuous nature imagined by Weyl, but to occur in finite chunks—a straight piece, then a sudden bend, then another straight bit, and so on. A small bit of the continuum viewed through a five-dimensional microscope might look rather like a cubist picture; and, conversely, perhaps a cubist picture looks rather more like a little fragment of the continuum than like anything else.” |
This is, of course, not the “atomicity” of the previous post.
For examples of that atomicity, a concept of pure geometry
rather than of physics, see …
Faure, C. A., and Frölicher, A., “Fundamental Notions of
Lattice Theory,” in Modern Projective Geometry (2000).
(Mathematics and Its Applications, vol 521. Springer, Dordrecht.)
Related art (a “cubist picture”) —
Juan Gris, Fruit Dish and Carafe , 1914
Comments Off on Geometry for Poets
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Easter Egg for Wittgenstein
Comments Off on Easter Egg for Wittgenstein
