Thursday, July 12, 2018
Kummerhenge Illustrated
“… the utterly real thing in writing is the only thing that counts…."
— Maxwell Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, Aug. 30, 1935
"Omega is as real as we need it to be."
— Burt Lancaster in "The Osterman Weekend"
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Titans
July 10, 2018
The private jets have begun clogging the jetways
in Sun Valley, Idaho, which can only mean one thing:
'Billionaire summer camp’' has begun.
The annual Allen & Company conference, the investment
firm’s invite-only gathering of some of the world’s most
powerful corporate titans, officially begins on Wednesday."
In other news —
Get ready to see the Titans in training camp."
See also another post now tagged "Clash of the Titans."
Clarity and Precision
"The whole meaning of the word is
looking into something with clarity and precision,
seeing each component as distinct,
and piercing all the way through
so as to perceive the most fundamental reality
of that thing."
For the word itself, try a Web search on
noteworthy phrases above.
“. . . the utterly real thing in writing is
the only thing that counts . . . ."
— Maxwell Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, Aug. 30, 1935
"168"
— Page number in a 2016 Scribner edition
of Stephen King's IT
Plato and Paradigms, Revisited
"Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things"
— W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children"
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
A Dark and Stormy May 29th
He had come a long way to this blue lawn,
and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity
beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
— Epigraph to Limitless: A Novel , by Alan Glynn
Glynn's novel was originally published in 2002 under the title
The Dark Fields .
Compare and contrast —
Stephen King's IT was first published by Viking in 1986.
See as well the May 29th date mentioned by King.
Monday, July 9, 2018
History for Hollywood
Beaty Confidential
From August 28, 2006
An article on banker Richard B. Fisher, and
the Log24 post "Today's Sinner."
Temple of Doom
Graeme McMillan in The Hollywood Reporter Saturday —
"The Quantum Realm is a place where time and space
work differently, and has all sorts of potential to help
keep the MCU fresh for its second decade of films. . . .
So where did it all come from?
What is known to movie audiences as the Quantum Realm
debuted in 1963’s Fantastic Four No. 16, in a story called
'The Micro-World of Doctor Doom!' "
Related art —
Annals of Ontology
The Thing and I continues.
"… the Quantum Realm wouldn’t really become a 'thing'
in Marvel’s comic book mythology until the end of that
decade [the 1970s], and the arrival of a toy license at
the publisher."
— Graeme McMillan in The Hollywood Reporter Saturday
Sunday, July 8, 2018
Fisher
The Fisher of the previous post was . . .
See also Fisher's connection to Bard College.
Related material from the date of Fisher's death —
See as well "Meet Joe Black."
Sixers*
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Use the Source
Update of 11:25 PM ET —
See also some other books suggested by Google during
a search on the Picard "active audible silence" phrase.
Easter Eggs for Rosalind
Three hidden keys open three secret gates
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits
And those with the skill to survive these straits
Will reach The End where the prize awaits
— Ready Player One , by Ernest Cline
Related text —
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram
aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi
dabo claves regni caelorum
Related imagery —
From Steven Spielberg's film "Ready Player One" (2018) —
From this journal on June 17, 2003 —
From The New York Times on Easter night, 2007 —
See as well Rosalind Krauss on LeWitt:
Friday, July 6, 2018
Blackboard Jungle — The Prequel
An image from the online New York Times today —
Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —
"Through the unknown, remembered gate . . . ."
Something
"… Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," 1936
"Read something that means something."
— Advertising slogan for The New Yorker
The previous post quoted some mystic meditations of Octavio Paz
from 1974. I prefer some less mystic remarks of Eddington from
1938 (the Tanner Lectures) published by Cambridge U. Press in 1939 —
"… we have sixteen elements with which to form a group-structure" —
See as well posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Paz:
Some context for what Heidegger called
das Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts
From Helen Lane's translation of El Mono Gramático ,
a book by Nobel winner Octavio Paz first published
in Barcelona by Seix Barral in 1974 —
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 |
A related 1960 meditation from Claude Lévi-Strauss taken from a
Log24 post of St. Andrew's Day 2017, "The Matrix for Quantum Mystics":
"In Vol. I of Structural Anthropology , p. 209, I have shown that
this analysis alone can account for the double aspect of time
representation in all mythical systems: the narrative is both
'in time' (it consists of a succession of events) and 'beyond'
(its value is permanent)." — Claude Lévi-Strauss
I prefer the earlier, better-known, remarks on time by T. S. Eliot
in Four Quartets , and the following four quartets
(from The Matrix Meets the Grid) —
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Raiders of the Lost Spell
From The New York Review of Books ,
issue dated July 19, 2018 —
"The only useful thing about The Seventh Function of Language
is the idea that one would need some magical means to persuade
through language, some secret spell. Useful, because perfectly
ridiculous. The spell, we know, exists . . . ."
— "Imagining the Real," by Wyatt Mason
Some nineteenth-century thoughts along these lines:
See also Declarations.
New from Oxford University Press —
From the Afterword to a 2017 novel titled Quantum Space —
Now from Oxford University Press,
a non-fiction approach to …
See also the previous post and other posts tagged Lost.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Propriation
The phrase "quantum space" in today's 10:45 AM post
was used earlier in a book title —
Amazon.com gives the Quantum Space publication date
for its Kindle edition as April 10, 2017.
I prefer my own remarks of April 10, 2017 —
From "Heidegger for Passover"
"Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying
— p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings ,
"Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" |
The Ant and the WASP
See also posts tagged "Lost" and a search for "Excellent Adventure."
Lost in Quantum Space
Combining concepts from earlier posts today, we have the above title.
A more concise alternative title …
Lost in the Matrix
For some related non -fiction, see posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
Fiction in a Cartoon Graveyard
Jonathan Franzen on fiction —
"Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of
the stories we tell about ourselves."
Or stories we are told by others …
For a Generation Lost in Space
So here's to you, Mrs. Robinson …
De Trinitate
This post on the Holy Trinity was suggested by the June 29
Boston Globe obituary of reporter Kathy Shaw.
A related film review from December 29, 2016 —
"Trinity (2016): Surreal and Haunting Imagery" —
See also this journal on December 29, 2016, featuring
a ghost spokesman for White Owl cigars:
Monday, July 2, 2018
In Memoriam
This post is in memory of dancer-choreographer Gillian Lynne,
who reportedly died at 92 on Sunday, July 1, 2018.
For a scene from her younger days, click on Errol Flynn above.
The cube contemplated by Flynn is from Log24 on Sunday.
"This is how we enter heaven, enter dancing."
— Paraphrase of Lorrie Moore (See Oct. 18, 2003.)
Mean Girls
The previous post, together with remarks in this journal
on April 3-5, 2013 — the dates of a CUNY philosophy
conference — suggests a look at today's New York Times
philosophy column "The Stone."
The challenges of this enterprise go beyond merely finding the rhetorical and material resources to brush deception aside. To be a participant in a good-enough democratic polis is a perpetual project that requires taking seriously one’s abiding and evolving tastes and interests and working without surcease to create an ever-expanding social and linguistic space for every individual who arrives on our shores, or at our borders, to pursue happiness. The authors are philosophy professors: Nancy Bauer at Tufts University; Alice Crary at the University of Oxford; and Sandra Laugier at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. |
Related material about the film referenced in today's previous post —
Happy birthday, LiLo.
A Mykonos* Narrative …
For Cady Heron
"Why you gotta be so mean?" — Taylor Swift
* See references to that Greek island in this journal.
Another Letterman Intro
Recognitions, Corrections; Corrections, Recognitions.
"It is the dawning of the second gestalt
in relation to the first
that is the experience of meaning."
— Jan Zwicky in "The Experience of Meaning"
(at 27:36 of 44:36 in the video of her talk)
Related remarks by the author of The Corrections —
" Even friends of The Recognitions have found it a daunting
text. Jonathan Franzen, the best known of the book's current
day champions, has offered both praise and words of warning
to potential readers. 'I loved it,' he proclaimed in the pages
of The New Yorker back in 2002, where he held up Gaddis's
novel as the preeminent example of what Franzen calls 'the
Status model' of literature. Authors who subscribe to the
'Status model' embrace fiction as the springboard for
'a discourse of genius and art-historical importance' freed
from the demands of the marketplace or the requirements of
mass consumption. Yet even Franzen acknowledges the toll
exacted by this particular masterpiece. He declares that The
Recognitions is 'the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read
in its entirety,' adding that he completed the task 'as a kind
of penance.' "
Now try Euclid.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
The Trinity Pretzel
The previous post suggests a review of a post from July 26, 2008 —
Jung's birthday — that mentions "The Trinity Pretzel."
For the pretzel itself, see the previous post and the posts of May 6, 2005.
Deutsche Ordnung
The title is from a phrase spoken, notably, by Yul Brynner
to Christopher Plummer in the 1966 film “Triple Cross.”
Related structures —
Greg Egan’s animated image of the Klein quartic —
For a smaller tetrahedral arrangement, within the Steiner quadruple
system of order 8 modeled by the eightfold cube, see a book chapter
by Michael Huber of Tübingen —
For further details, see the June 29 post Triangles in the Eightfold Cube.
See also, from an April 2013 philosophical conference:
Abstract for a talk at the City University of New York:
The Experience of Meaning Once the question of truth is settled, and often prior to it, what we value in a mathematical proof or conjecture is what we value in a work of lyric art: potency of meaning. An absence of clutter is a feature of such artifacts: they possess a resonant clarity that allows their meaning to break on our inner eye like light. But this absence of clutter is not tantamount to ‘being simple’: consider Eliot’s Four Quartets or Mozart’s late symphonies. Some truths are complex, and they are simplified at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be truths. Nonetheless, it’s often possible to express a complex truth in a way that precipitates a powerful experience of meaning. It is that experience we seek — not simplicity per se , but the flash of insight, the sense we’ve seen into the heart of things. I’ll first try to say something about what is involved in such recognitions; and then something about why an absence of clutter matters to them. |
For the talk itself, see a YouTube video.
The conference talks also appear in a book.
The book begins with an epigraph by Hilbert —
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Commandment 9 from Outer Space
A recent New York Times piece on novelist Jonathan Franzen concludes
with a reference to the Rodney Crowell song "I Don’t Care Anymore.”
Two lines near the end of that song —
"If indeed I do get lonesome in my mansion on the hill
There's this neighbor's wife I covet for her beauty and her skill"
Related material —
From Catechism of the Catholic Church The Ninth Commandment … IN BRIEF
2528 "Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already
2529 The ninth commandment warns against lust or carnal |
Publicity still for "Lost in Space" —
More recently …
Log24 on the release date of "Sin City" — April First, 2005 —
Friday, June 29, 2018
Triangles in the Eightfold Cube
From a post of July 25, 2008, “56 Triangles,” on the Klein quartic
and the eightfold cube —
“Baez’s discussion says that the Klein quartic’s 56 triangles
can be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle Egan ‘cubes’ that
correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way
that automorphisms of the Klein quartic correspond to
automorphisms of the Fano plane. Show that the
56 triangles within the eightfold cube can also be partitioned
into 7 eight-triangle sets that correspond to the 7 points of the
Fano plane in such a way that (affine) transformations of the
eightfold cube induce (projective) automorphisms of the Fano plane.”
Related material from 1975 —
More recently …
For St. Stanley
The phrase "Blue Dream" in the previous post
suggests a Web search for Traumnovelle .
That search yields an interesting weblog post
from 2014 commemorating the 1999 dies natalis
(birth into heaven) of St. Stanley Kubrick.
Related material from March 7, 2014,
in this journal —
That 2014 post was titled "Kummer Varieties." It is now tagged
"Kummerhenge." For some backstory, see other posts so tagged.
Analogies Between Analogies:
Literary Meditation for the Feast of SS Peter and Paul
Background: McLuhan on analogy.
See a publication offering facsimiles of the original 4×6 cards
of John Shade's "Pale Fire," as Nabokov described them.
Regarding these card proportions, note that 4/6 = 333/500, approximately —
the proportions of the text box in a post from yesterday.
"Continue a search for thirty-three and three" — Katherine Neville.
These rather pointless, but vaguely poetic, analogies were suggested by …
-
Yesterday morning's "The Corrections," a post
featuring spider ballooning and a dead poet, and
- "Blue Dream," a post of Feb. 11, 2006.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
All in Plato
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
The Letterman Intro
"Summerfield, Kummerhenge. Kummerhenge, Summerfield."
Taken In
A passage that may or may not have influenced Madeleine L'Engle's
writings about the tesseract :
From Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis (1952) —
"Book IV – Beyond Personality: I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully. You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares. Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels. Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already. You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time —tonight, if you like. . . . . |
But beware of being drawn into the personal life of the Happy Family .
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966339 —
"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
And ends with …
"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a 'personality disorder.' His anger was
paranoid and unremitting."
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Flores
Rock Notes
"Vinnie Paul of the band Hellyeah performs in concert
during Day 2 of the Rock Allegiance Festival at
Talen Energy Stadium on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016, in
Chester, Pa. (Photo by Owen Sweeney/Invision/AP)"
"Former SKID ROW singer Sebastian Bach played
a cover version of the PANTERA classic
"Cemetery Gates" as a tribute to Vinnie Paul Abbott
during his June 24 concert at The Pyramid Cabaret in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada."
Monday, June 25, 2018
The Gateway Device
<title data-rh="true">Frank Heart, Who Linked Computers Before the Internet, Dies at 89 – The New York Times</title> |
See also yesterday's "For 6/24" and …
The Trials of Device
"A blank underlies the trials of device."
"Designing with just a blank piece of paper is very quiet."
Related material —
An image posted at 12 AM ET December 25, 2014:
The image stands for the
phrase "five by five,"
meaning "loud and clear."
Other posts featuring the above 5×5 square with some added structure:
Sunday, June 24, 2018
For 6/24
A clue to the relationship between the Kummer (16, 6)
configuration and the large Mathieu group M24 —
Related material —
See too the diamond-theorem correlation.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
Meanwhile …
Backstory for fiction fans, from Log24 on June 11 —
Related non -fiction —
See as well the structure discussed in today's previous post.
Plan 9 from Inner Space
From Nanavira Thera, "Early Letters," in Seeking the Path —
"nine possibilities arising quite naturally" —
Compare and contrast with Hudson's parametrization of the
4×4 square by means of 0 and the 15 2-subsets of a 6-set —
An Argentine Abstraction*
See Borges + Aleph in this journal.
* Phrase from a poem by Wallace Stevens
Friday, June 22, 2018
Seize the Dia …
For the Late Charles Krauthammer
"… lo lidchok et haketz …."
— Acceptance speech, Guardian of Zion award, 2002
Also on February 20, 2012 —
Thursday, June 21, 2018
Models of Being
A Buddhist view —
“Just fancy a scale model of Being
made out of string and cardboard.”
— Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer’s Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington
A Christian view —
A formal view —
From a Log24 search for High Concept:
See also Galois Tesseract.
Dirac and Geometry (continued)
"Just fancy a scale model of Being
made out of string and cardboard."
— Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer's Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington
"… a treatise on Kummer's quartic surface."
The "super-mathematician" Eddington did not see fit to mention
the title or the author of the treatise he discussed.
See Hudson + Kummer in this journal.
See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
Cavell’s Matrix
From an obituary for Stanley Cavell, Harvard philosopher
who reportedly died at 91 on Tuesday, June 19:
The London Review of Books weblog yesterday —
"Michael Wood reviewed [Cavell’s]
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow in 2005:
'The ordinary slips away from us. If we ignore it, we lose it.
If we look at it closely, it becomes extraordinary, the way
words or names become strange if we keep staring at them.
The very notion turns into a baffling riddle.' "
See also, in this journal, Tuesday morning's Ici vient M. Jordan and
this morning's previous post.
Update of 3:24 AM from my RSS feed —
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Feature
"… what we’re witnessing is not a glitch. It’s a feature…."
— A Boston Globe columnist on June 19.
An image from this journal at the beginning of Bloomsday 2018 —
An encountered feature , from the midnight beginning of June 16 —
Literary Symbolism
"… what we’re witnessing is not a glitch. It’s a feature…."
The glitch encountered on Bloomsday by Agent Smith (who represents
the academic world) is the author of the above page, John P. Anderson.
The feature is the book that Anderson quotes, James Joyce
by Richard Ellmann (first published in 1959, revised in 1982).
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Death on Father’s Day
From the University of Notre Dame in an obituary dated June 17 —
Timothy O’Meara, provost emeritus, Kenna Professor of Mathematics Emeritus and Trustee Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, died June 17. He was 90.
A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1962, O’Meara twice served as chairman of the University’s mathematics department and served as its first lay provost from 1978 to 1996.
He was graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1947 and earned a master’s degree in mathematics there the following year. Earning his doctoral degree from Princeton University in 1953, he taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1954 to 1956 before returning to Princeton where he served on the mathematics faculty and as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study for the next six years.
In addition to his mathematical teaching and scholarship, he published magisterial works, including “Introduction to Quadratic Forms,” “Lectures on Linear Groups,” “Symplectic Groups” and “The Classical Groups and K-Theory,” co-authored with Alexander J. Hahn, professor of mathematics emeritus at Notre Dame and a former O’Meara doctoral student. |
Related material (update of 9:20 PM ET on June 19) —
Ici vient M. Jordan
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Bead Game Introduction
From The Abacus Conundrum —
Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it.… …what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.” — Das Glasperlenspiel (Hermann Hesse, 1943) |
See also Web Audio Resources at GitHub.
Saturday, June 16, 2018
Kummer’s (16, 6) (on 6/16)
"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
See too "The Ruler of Reality" in this journal.
Related material —
A more esoteric artifact: The Kummer 166 Configuration . . .
An array of Göpel tetrads appears in the background below.
"As you can see, we've had our eye on you
for some time now, Mr. Anderson."
For June 16
"But perhaps the desire for story
is what gets us into trouble to begin with."
— Sarah Marshall on June 5, 2018
"Beckett wrote that Joyce believed fervently in
the significance of chance events and of
random connections. ‘To Joyce reality was a paradigm,
an illustration of a possibly unstateable rule…
According to this rule, reality, no matter how much
we try to manipulate it, can only shift about
in continual movement, yet movement
limited in its possibilities…’ giving rise to
‘the notion of the world where unexpected simultaneities
are the rule.’ In other words, a coincidence … is actually
just part of a continually moving pattern, like a kaleidoscope.
Or Joyce likes to put it, a ‘collideorscape’."
— Gabrielle Carey, "Breaking Up with James Joyce,"
Sydney Review of Books , 15 June 2018
Carey's carelessness with quotations suggests a look at another
author's quoting of Ellmann on Joyce —
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Myth
Wylie’s Bull
"There is a structure theory for bull-free graphs
modulo the structure of triangle-free graphs
and their complements, which again is not easy.
(The bull has a triangular face, with horns or
pendant edges at two of its three vertices.)"
— Peter J. Cameron today
For example —
The bull graph in a book by Clarence R. Wylie, Jr.
(author of the poem "Paradox" (1948)). See no. 6 below —
See also Wikipedia.
Related material —
J. Paul Getty and Minotaur, according to Hollywood —
How to Arrange Things
Link, Not Wand.
"How frail the wand, but how profound the spell !"
— Clarence R. Wylie, Jr., "Paradox" (1948)
The above fanciful PlayStation symbols suggest an etymology —
See also Kipnis.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Not So New
"I just found me a brand new box of matches …"
— Soundtrack of the trailer for "Ocean's 8"
"… matchwood, immortal diamond …." —
Click the above definitions for further information.
See as well Blue Diamond in this journal.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Like Decorations in a Cartoon Graveyard
Two visions of happy neurons:
This post was suggested by a link in today's New York Times —
"Simon Denny, the New Zealand artist whose work incorporates
board games, intervenes by introducing his own pieces into an attic of
the late-18th-century Haus zum Kirschgarten, already filled with
'old historical dollhouses, board games, chess games' and the like …."
Dark Laughter
See John Ganz and Das Finstere Lachen .
“There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies.
But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies.
And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication,
there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Too Clever By Half
"Particularly if a person thinks of himself as clever,
he will often have a hard time admitting his own ignorance."
— John Ganz in the online New York Times today.
"One model for what I’m trying to accomplish is the writings of
Martin Gardner. Some other models are … well, actually, I’m not
going [to] tell you; I’d much rather imitate these writers in hope that
you’ll notice the resemblance and figure it out. That’s a game
I’ll be playing with you over the next few years."
— James Propp, Mathematical Enchantments, June 17, 2015.
A check of my own ignorance of synchronology . . .
http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=50955,
a post of June 17, 2015.
Monday, June 11, 2018
Arty Fact
The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.
The Eye of ARTI —
See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —
— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" —
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8
An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —
This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.
See as well . . .
Glitter
A Scientific American headline today —
Glittering Diamond Dust in Space
Might Solve a 20-Year-Old Mystery
Related art —
"Never underestimate the power of glitter."
Background: "Diamond Dust" + Glitter in this journal.
Finite Fields in 1956
The "more complicated" material mentioned by James Propp
in the previous post was notably described by A. A. Albert in 1956:
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Number Concept
The previous post was suggested by some April 17, 2016, remarks
by James Propp on the eightfold cube.
Propp's remarks included the following:
"Here’s a caveat about my glib earlier remark that
'There are only finitely many numbers ' in a finite field.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call the elements of finite fields
'numbers'. Elements of GF(q ) can be thought of as
the integers mod q when q is prime, and they can be
represented by 0, 1, 2, …, q–1; but when q is a prime
raised to the 2nd power or higher, describing the
elements of GF(q ) is more complicated, and the word
'number' isn’t apt."
Related material —
See also this journal on the date of Propp's remarks — April 17, 2016.
Pieces of April
This journal on April 16, 2018 —
Happy birthday to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
Related material from another weblog in a post also dated April 16, 2018 —
"As I write this, it’s April 5, midway through the eight-day
festival of Passover. During this holiday, we Jews air our
grievances against the ancient Pharaoh who enslaved
and oppressed us, and celebrate the feats of strength
with which the Almighty delivered us from bondage —
wait a minute, I think I’m mixing up Passover with Festivus."
. . . .
"Next month: Time and Tesseracts."
From that next post, dated May 16, 2018 —
"The tesseract entered popular culture through
Madeleine L’Engle’s 'A Wrinkle in Time' . . . ."
The post's author, James Propp, notes that
" L’Engle caused some of her readers confusion
when one of the characters … the prodigy
Charles Wallace Murray [sic ] , declared 'Well, the fifth
dimension’s a tesseract.' "
Propp is not unfamiliar with prodigies:
"When I was a kid living in the Long Island suburbs,
I sometimes got called a math genius. I didn’t think
the label was apt, but I didn’t mind it; being put in
the genius box came with some pretty good perks."
— "The Genius Box," a post dated March 16, 2018
To me, Propp seems less like Charles Wallace
and more like the Prime Coordinator —
For further details, see the following synchronicity checks:
Saturday, June 9, 2018
SASTRA paper
Through Marvel Comics, Darkly
Click the above for "Cloak and Dagger" in this journal.
Friday, June 8, 2018
Commedia
“There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies.
But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies.
And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication,
there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
For Anthony Bourdain
Flashback —
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Nox
|
Thursday, June 7, 2018
ART WARS for Hanna and Her Sisters
In memory of David Douglas Duncan
"Marissa, we picked up an unencrypted signal
below the Arctic Circle." — Hanna (2011)
Paved with Good Intentions
See also David Brooks on logic in today’s online New York Times —
“…the necessary skill of public life, the ability to
see two contradictory truths at the same time.”
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Geometry for Goyim
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8 —
A mystery box that I prefer —
Click image for some background.
See also Nicht Spielerei .
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
Mystery Box*
From The Force Awakens —
See also other posts now tagged Mystery Box.
* A phrase of filmmaker J.J. Abrams, director
of The Force Awakens (2015). See Abrams
and a different mystery box in The New York
Times on June 2, 2011.
The Signal
Monday, June 4, 2018
The Trinity Stone Defined
“Unsheathe your dagger definitions.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
The “triple cross” link in the previous post referenced the eightfold cube
as a structure that might be called the trinity stone .
Sunday, June 3, 2018
Trinity Stone
Or: "What Dreams May Come"
(For the foxtail girl)
"Most religious beliefs are not true. But here’s the crux.
The emotional brain doesn’t care. It doesn’t operate on
the grounds of true and false. Emotions are not true or false.
Even a terrible fear inside a dream is still a terrible fear."
— Stephen T. Asma in the New York Times philosophy
column "The Stone" today
See also Triple Cross.
In greater depth:
Posts tagged on131004, a tag derived from a date in
a Google search today …
For enthusiasts of symbology, a webpage illustrated here this morning —
This morning's review of this Ajna webpage was suggested by posts from
the Oct. 4, 2013, date in the Google crux search above.
“Use the Source, Luke”
6/3
<meta name="description"
content="Identidade generativa para o Diamonds Studio
Desenvolvido em conjunto com
http://quadradao.com.br/
http://diamondsstudio.com.br/
Baseado na Diamond Theory by Steven H Cullinane, 1977">
Saturday, June 2, 2018
Friday, June 1, 2018
The Agent
From a 2003 obituary of author Neil Postman —
"In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business (Viking, 1985; Penguin, 1986),
he indicted the television industry on the charge of making
entertainment out of the world's most serious problems.
The book was translated into eight languages and sold
200,000 copies worldwide, according to N.Y.U."
Postman reportedly died on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2003.
Log24 on that date —
Art Theory for Yom Kippur and Ado.
See also today's obituary reporting the May 21 death of Postman's
erstwhile agent Elaine Markson.
This journal on May 21, in a post titled "Crux" —
"Chance became tied to the liberties
of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication
or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny."
— Google Books description of No Accident, Comrade:
Chance and Design in Cold War American Narrative,
by Steven Belletto, Oxford U. Press (first published
in hardcover on Dec. 28, 2011)
Midrash —
Click the image for related posts.
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Eightfold Suffering:
A New, Improved Version of Quantum Suffering !
Background for group actions on the eightfold cube —
See also other posts now tagged Quantum Suffering
as well as — related to the image above of the Great Wall —
Quantum Suffering
Hart the Knife*
For Spaceballs fans . . .
A web page from the father of Vi Hart, co-author of the
2014 quaternion-model article cited in the previous post:
* The title was suggested by the following video —
Quaternion Group Models
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Professional Style
For an example of the admirable Schwartz style, see a recent letter.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Her Fair Lady
The Schwartz Meme
Aficionados of the preposterous joke
(see yesterday's post Epstein on Art)
may consult a Google Image Search for
Schwartz Meme.
I prefer Schwartz même —
The Seventh Function . . .
Monday, May 28, 2018
Figaro (by Cartier)
Epstein on Art
Joseph Epstein in the online Weekly Standard
on May 24, 2018, at 3:03 PM —
Hilton Kramer, in a powerful essay called “Revenge of the Philistines,” praised Wolfe’s account of the sociology of the visual art of the time. On the comedy inherent in the subject, he noted, Wolfe “is illuminating and often hilarious.” Yet, when it came to the analysis of ideas, Kramer felt, “when it comes down to actual works of art and the thinking they both embody and inspire, Wolfe is hopelessly out of his depth . . . and, no doubt, beyond his true interests.” He faulted Wolfe for his inability to understand the historical context of the contemporary situation in art or how we have come to where we are in a way that carries us well beyond “the drawing-room comedy of The Painted Word .” Kramer concluded: “It is this fundamental incomprehension of the role of criticism in the life of art—this enmity to the function of theory in the creation of culture—that identifies The Painted Word , despite its knowingness and its fun, as a philistine utterance, an act of revenge against a quality of mind it cannot begin to encompass and must therefore treat as a preposterous joke.” |
For Kramer in greater depth, see an online biography.
Skewers
A piece co-written by Ivanov, the author noted in the previous post, was cited
in my "Geometry of the 4×4 Square."
Also cited there — A paper by Pasini and Van Maldeghem that mentions
the Klein quadric.
Those sources suggested a search —
The link is to some geometry recently described by Tabachnikov
that seems rather elegant:
For another, more direct, connection to the geometry of the 4×4 square,
see Richard Evan Schwartz in this journal.
This same Schwartz appears also in the above Tabachnikov paper:
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Heptagons, Quilts, Mathieu Groups
The phrase "ghostly heptagons" appears in A Piece of Justice , a 1995 novel
by Jill Paton Walsh that features some fictional politically correct mathematics.
(See the previous post.)
Related material from a Google search today —
The Ivanov book is new:
“What Interests Me”
See also a Log24 search for A Piece of Justice .