See also Plan 9.
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Homily
Art Space Paradigm Shift
This post’s title is from the tags of the previous post —
The title’s “shift” is in the combined concepts of …
Space and Number
From Finite Jest (May 27, 2012):
The books pictured above are From Discrete to Continuous ,
by Katherine Neal, and Geometrical Landscapes , by Amir Alexander.
For some details of the shift, see a Log24 search for Boole vs. Galois.
From a post found in that search —
“Benedict Cumberbatch Says
a Journey From Fact to Faith
Is at the Heart of Doctor Strange“
— io9 , July 29, 2016
” ‘This man comes from a binary universe
where it’s all about logic,’ the actor told us
at San Diego Comic-Con . . . .
‘And there’s a lot of humor in the collision
between Easter [ sic ] mysticism and
Western scientific, sort of logical binary.’ “
[Typo now corrected, except in a comment.]
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Quanta Dating
For the Church of Synchronology —
See also this journal on July 17, 2014, and March 28, 2017.
Pip
The title is from a poem in The New Yorker last December —
. . . pip trapped inside, god’s
knucklebone . . . .
The conclusion of yesterday's Google Image Search for Göpel Inscape —
See also "Pray to Apollo" in this journal.
A Cinematographer Departs
In memory of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who reportedly
died at 81 in Berlin on Tuesday evening, April 11, the first full day
of Passover, 2017.
From a New York Times description of his work —
"The sinuous shot, which shows people parting …
like the Red Sea. . . ." — Margalit Fox tonight
From Log24 on the reported date of Ballhaus's death:
Friday, April 14, 2017
For the Sunshine Girls*
High Concept
Hudson and Finite Geometry
The above four-element sets of black subsquares of a 4×4 square array
are 15 of the 60 Göpel tetrads , and 20 of the 80 Rosenhain tetrads , defined
by R. W. H. T. Hudson in his 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface .
Hudson did not view these 35 tetrads as planes through the origin in a finite
affine 4-space (or, equivalently, as lines in the corresponding finite projective
3-space).
In order to view them in this way, one can view the tetrads as derived,
via the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set, from the 16 elements
of the binary Galois affine space pictured above at top left.
This space is formed by taking symmetric-difference (Galois binary)
sums of the 15 two-element subsets, and identifying any resulting four-
element (or, summing three disjoint two-element subsets, six-element)
subsets with their complements. This process was described in my note
"The 2-subsets of a 6-set are the points of a PG(3,2)" of May 26, 1986.
The space was later described in the following —
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Making Space
The New York Times online today:
At MoMA, Women at Play in the Fields of Abstraction
" The famous flowchart of Modern art's evolution simply doesn't apply
in 'Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction.' "
Understated Hollywood
From The Boston Globe on Monday, February 27, 2017 —
See also this journal on the above date — Feb. 27, 2017.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Knucklebone
"The state of the universe, physicists say, is a cosmological
relic—a glass ark with hammered-gold seams, pip trapped inside, god’s
knucklebone, nanosecond high-energy outward burst—kaboom!—
and space fills up with proto-stars . . . ."
— "A Natural History of Light," a poem by Marsha de la O,
The New Yorker , issue of December 12, 2016
"Angel's Bone," by Du Yun, premiered on January 6, 2016 . . . ."
Contracting the Spielraum
The contraction of the title is from group actions on
the ninefold square (with the center subsquare fixed)
to group actions on the eightfold cube.
From a post of June 4, 2014 …
At math.stackexchange.com on March 1-12, 2013:
“Is there a geometric realization of the Quaternion group?” —
The above illustration, though neatly drawn, appeared under the
cloak of anonymity. No source was given for the illustrated group actions.
Possibly they stem from my Log24 posts or notes such as the Jan. 4, 2012,
note on quaternion actions at finitegeometry.org/sc (hence ultimately
from my note “GL(2,3) actions on a cube” of April 5, 1985).
Expanding the Spielraum
"Cézanne ignores the laws of classical perspective . . . ."
— Voorhies, James. “Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).”
In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004)
Some others do not.
This is what I called "the large Desargues configuration"
in posts of April 2013 and later.
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Partitioning the Crimson Abyss
For the title, see Crimson + Abyss in this journal.
Monday, April 10, 2017
Bullshit Studies Continued*
Heidegger for Passover
From this journal on August 7, 2010 (footnotes added today) —
The title of this post, "Rift Designs," … is taken from Heidegger. From a recent New Yorker review of Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson— "Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms." Following this advice, we find— "Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying and unfolds it3 in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure4 of a manifold showing." — p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings , edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993 "Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens." — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" 2. "Christ descending into the abyss" 3. Barrancas of Cuernavaca 4. Combinatorics, Philosophy, Geometry |
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Relax, Said the Night Man
Saturday, April 8, 2017
Eye
"I guess I found my future through Billy Name’s eye.
I saw his pictures of the Warhol Factory when I was
in college and thought, 'Oh that’s the place to get to.
Everyone is so beautiful and it looks brilliant and
complicated – art, music, film, but most of all a kind
of wild life.' It looked like the future as I imagined it."
— The late Glenn O'Brien in The Guardian
on November 8, 2014. O'Brien reportedly
died at 70 yesterday, Friday (April 7) morning,
in Manhattan.
"… through Billy Name's eye …."
Then there is Kurt Seligmann's eye …
The above-mentioned Billy Name appeared in this journal
in July 2016 in the post "Coterie (for Philip Rieff)." Also
featured in that post was artist Kurt Seligmann.
A Google Search sidebar on Seligmann today:
Synchronology check of this journal on the above Guardian date:
Saturday, November 8, 2014
At 11:59*
|
See also an 11:59 PM ET post on Thursday, April 6, titled
"Where Entertainment Is God (continues)."
Some related entertainment:
I do not recommend any of the above entertainments,
but they do supply some background for the article
"Fantasy and the Buffered Self" (which is recommended.)
Friday, April 7, 2017
Ambiguity
Alah — עָלָה
Aliyah — עֲלִיָּה
Olah — עֹלָה
Related reading —
"Then a 12-14-day Trans-Siberian train ride to Vladivostok . . . ."
— "My First Halloween After Escaping the Nazis,"
By Masha Leon, October 29, 2015.
Leon reportedly died in her sleep at 86 in Manhattan on the
morning of Wednesday, April 5, 2017.
Other related reading:
Personal Identity
From "The Most Notorious Section Phrases," by Sophie G. Garrett
in The Harvard Crimson on April 5, 2017 —
This passage reminds me of (insert impressive philosophy
that was not in the reading).
This student is just being a show off. We get that they are smart
and well read. Congrats, but please don’t make the rest of the us
look bad in comparison. It should be enough to do the assigned
reading without making connections to Hume’s theory of the self.
Hume on personal identity (the "self") —
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change: nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. |
Related material —
Imago Dei in this journal.
Backstory —
The previous post
and The Crimson Abyss.
Tagged
In an update yesterday by Peter Woit to his post
on a recent paper about the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) —
" Nature Physics highlights the Bender et al. paper
with 'Carl Bender and colleagues have paved the way
to a possible solution [of the RH ] by exploiting a
connection with physics.' Some wag there has categorized
this work as work with subject term 'interstellar medium.' "
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question. |
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Where Entertainment Is God …
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Autistic Enchantment Continues
See also Autistic Enchantment in this journal.
Dem Bones
A note at the end of an article on architecture historian
Christopher Gray in the current online New Yorker —
This article appears in other versions
of the April 10, 2017, issue, with
the headline “Dem Bones.”
"Defeated, you will rise to your feet as is said of Dry Bones .
These bones will rise again." — Agnes Martin, 1973
Accounting for Taste —
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty at the Oscars:
Ben Affleck, star of "The Accountant," at the Oscars:
See also Prisoner + Bones in this journal.
Tuesday, April 4, 2017
Night at the Museum
"Do you know what he called this place? A museum."
Update of 11:06 PM ET —
A search for background on the "Holiday" screenplay leads,
via a useful historical website, to …
Other Hollywood material —
Plan 9 Continues
"Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead."
— Bill Murray in "Ed Wood"
(The plan , as well as the elevation ,
of the above structure is a 3×3 grid.)
Making Science Come Alive
From a post on March 13, 2017 —
Shafarevich was not the only one with a legacy . . .
See also posts in this journal
now tagged The Gray Legacy.
White Cube
“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”
“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
Monday, April 3, 2017
Step Two
"I think you should be more explicit here in step two."
— Caption to a cartoon by Sidney Harris,
American Scientist , November-December 1977
"If any perfection is indicated in the work
it is recognized by the artist as truly miraculous
so he feels that he can take no credit for its
sudden appearance."
— Agnes Martin, 1973, "On the Perfection Underlying Life"
Art News
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Dead Reckoning
From The New York Times online yesterday evening:
“You need firm ground to stand on,”
Mr. Bolles told an interviewer in 2000.
“From there you can deal with the change.”
Mr. Bolles, who reportedly died Friday (March 31, 2017),
was the author of What Color Is Your Parachute? .
See also a Log24 search for Lyche + Rainbow.
Related material — A poster for "Dead Reckoning" (1947).
Saturday, April 1, 2017
ART WARS Koan*
“Show me all the blueprints.”
— Howard Hughes, according to Hollywood
From an old Dick Tracy strip —
This journal in April 2006 —
Cleaning out her studio, Oslo artist Josefine Lyche
has found some frames from an old art-school audition video —
(Click to enlarge.)
* Search for "st.+peter"+eve+adam+"first+words"
Beyond All Recognition
Prequel —
Note that Yale's die design and use of the phrase "rigid motions"
differ from those in the webpage "Solomon's Cube."
Art Space
Click image for some backstory.
“Whatever he drew was the platonic ideal
of what a cartoon should look like.”
— Bob Mankoff on Jack Ziegler, who reportedly
died on Wednesday, March 29, 2017.
See also "Hexagram 64 in Context," March 16, 2017.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Pushing the Envelope
See also Red Dragon in this journal.
From a mah-jongg site:
Red Dragon
Chinese Character: “Chung”
"The true name of this tile is represented by the Chinese character 'Chung' which
means centre or middle. The 'Chung' character represents . . . an arrow striking
the centre of a target. The meaning of this tile is therefore – success or achievement."
Women’s History Month
Thursday, March 30, 2017
The Internet Abyss
Suggested by the previous post, The Crimson Abyss —
“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei
zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst,
blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself
does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss,
the abyss also gazes into you.”
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , Aphorism 146
From the Internet Abyss on Red October Day, October 25, 2010 —
An image reproduced in this journal on that same day —
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
The Crimson Abyss
"And as the characters in the meme twitch into the abyss
that is the sky, this meme will disappear into whatever
internet abyss swallowed MySpace."
—Staff writer Kamila Czachorowski, Harvard Crimson , March 29
1984 —
2010 —
Logo design for Stack Exchange Math by Jin Yang
Recent posts now tagged Crimson Abyss suggest
the above logo be viewed in light of a certain page 29 —
"… as if into a crimson abyss …." —
Update of 9 PM ET March 29, 2017:
Prospero's Children was first published by HarperCollins,
London, in 1999. A statement by the publisher provides
an instance of the famous "much-needed gap." —
"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children
steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld , and
is destined to become a modern classic."
Related imagery —
See also "Hexagram 64 in Context" (Log24, March 16, 2017).
Design Abyss
Hexagram 29,
The Abyss (Water)
This post was suggested by an August 6, 2010, post by the designer
(in summer or fall, 2010) of the Stack Exchange math logo (see
the previous Log24 post, Art Space Illustrated) —
In that post, the designer quotes the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching to explain
his choice of Hexagram 63, Water Over Fire, as a personal icon —
"When water in a kettle hangs over fire, the two elements
stand in relation and thus generate energy (cf. the
production of steam). But the resulting tension demands
caution. If the water boils over, the fire is extinguished
and its energy is lost. If the heat is too great, the water
evaporates into the air. These elements here brought in
to relation and thus generating energy are by nature
hostile to each other. Only the most extreme caution
can prevent damage."
See also this journal on Walpurgisnacht (April 30), 2010 —
Hexagram 29:
|
Hexagram 30: |
A thought from another German-speaking philosopher —
"Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung
unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache."
See also The Crimson 's abyss in today's 4:35 AM post Art Space, Continued.
Art Space Illustrated
Another view of the previous post's art space —
More generally, see Solomon's Cube in Log24.
See also a remark from Stack Exchange in yesterday's post Backstory,
and the Stack Exchange math logo below, which recalls the above
cube arrangement from "Affine groups on small binary spaces" (1984).
Art Space, Continued
"And as the characters in the meme twitch into the abyss
that is the sky, this meme will disappear into whatever
internet abyss swallowed MySpace."
—Staff writer Kamila Czachorowski, Harvard Crimson today
From Log24 posts tagged Art Space —
From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
“The Universal Kummer Threefold,” by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and
Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Bit by Bit
From Log24, "Cube Bricks 1984" —
Also on March 9, 2017 —
For those who prefer graphic art —
Backstory
Click here to enlarge. Click the image for the source page.
The "this page" reference is to …
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
Also from March 14, 2017 —
Monday, March 27, 2017
For Peculiar Children:
A Ghost Ship —
Related tales for the Church of Synchronology —
See excerpts from an RSS feed this evening.
Earlier related material — Peregrine in this journal.
Groundhog Day and After
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Seagram Studies
From a search in this journal for Seagram + Tradition —
Related art: Saturday afternoon's Twin Pillars of Symmetry.
Four-Year* Date
"Eigenvalues. Fixed points. Stable equilibria.
Mathematicians like things that stay put.
And if they can't stay put, the objects of study
should at least repeat themselves on a regular basis. . . ."
— Barry Cipra, "A Moveable Feast," SIAM News , Jan. 14, 2006
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
|
* For a full four years, see also March 18, 2013.
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Twin Pillars of Symmetry
The phrase "twin pillars" in a New York Times Fashion & Style
article today suggests a look at another pair of pillars —
This pair, from the realm of memory, history, and geometry disparaged
by the late painter Mark Rothko, might be viewed by Rothko
as "parodies of ideas (which are ghosts)." (See the previous post.)
For a relationship between a 3-dimensional simplex and the {4, 3, 3},
see my note from May 21, 2014, on the tetrahedron and the tesseract.
Like Decorations in a Cartoon Graveyard
… Continued from April 11, 2016, and from …
A tribute to Rothko suggested by the previous post —
For the idea of Rothko's obstacles, see Hexagram 39 in this journal.
Friday, March 24, 2017
The Southwest Furthers
Note for a Vast Waste Land
"Minow is the daughter of former Federal Communications Commission chairman
Newton Minow, and his wife, Josephine (Baskin) Minow. She graduated from
New Trier Township High School in 1972." — Wikipedia
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?"
A Large Superset
From a post of Feb. 24 —
From a search for "Preparation" in this journal (see previous post) —
"It is almost inevitable to compare this book to Borevich-Shafarevich
Number Theory . The latter is a fantastic book which covers a large
superset of the material in Cohn's book. Borevich-Shafarevich is,
however, a much more demanding read and it is out of print.
For gentle self-study (and perhaps as a preparation to later read
Borevich-Shafarevich), Cohn's book is a fine read."
"I meant a larger map." — Number Six in "The Prisoner" (1967)
Swimmer in the Ocean of Night
For Scarlett
From a search for "Preparation" in this journal —
"In a nutshell, the book serves as an introduction to
Gauss' theory of quadratic forms and their composition laws
(the cornerstone of his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae ) from the
modern point of view (ideals in quadratic number fields)."
From a film in which Scarlett portrays a goddess —
Madness related to several recent posts —
Then, with an unheard splash which sent from the silver water to the shore a line of ripples echoed in fear by my heart, a swimming thing emerged beyond the breakers. The figure may have been that of a dog, a human being, or something more strange. It could not have known that I watched—perhaps it did not care—but like a distorted fish it swam across the mirrored stars and dived beneath the surface. After a moment it came up again, and this time, since it was closer, I saw that it was carrying something across its shoulder. I knew, then, that it could be no animal, and that it was a man or something like a man, which came toward the land from a dark ocean. But it swam with a horrible ease.
— From "The Night Ocean," by H. P. Lovecraft |
Related news —
"When hard-liners seized power in Moscow in August 1991
and imprisoned Mr. Gorbachev in his vacation house on the
Black Sea, Mr. Chernyaev, a guest there and a powerful swimmer,
offered to smuggle out a note by swimming to a beach more than
three miles away. Uncertain where he could take the note, they
dropped the plan. The coup quickly failed in any case."
Thursday, March 23, 2017
More Harvard Ignorance
"… the leftist war on truth, the never-ending campaign
to recast objective fact as subjective and open to question."
— Kyle Smith in The New Criterion on March 18
"A sort of flint stone" —
See also the above six-part image in the previous post.
Best Frame
From yesterday's post "The Story of Six" —
"… death ultimately provides a frame
for the magnificent picture that is life."
— Publisher's Weekly , summarizing the
1987 fable Numberland .
Related news —
From the online Harvard Crimson today …
Related images —
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
The Story of Six
On a psychotherapist who died at 86 on Monday —
"He studied mathematics and statistics at the Courant Institute,
a part of New York University — he would later write … a
mathematical fable, Numberland (1987)."
— The New York Times online this evening
From Publishers Weekly
|
See also The Prisoner in this journal.
Pulp Fiction Incarnate
So Set ’Em Up, Jo
“Danes have been called the happiest people.
I wonder how they measure this.”
— Copenhagen designer in today's online New York Times .
A version of this article is to appear in print on March 26, 2017,
in T Magazine with the headline: "Gray Matters."
See also last night's quarter-to-three post as well as
the webpage "Grids, You Say?" by Norwegian artist Josefine Lyche.
Harvard Lovecraft
The review quoted in the previous post continues . . .
"Blue’s book is an attempt to untangle the mystery of her demise,
from the safe remove of Harvard Yard . . . ."
Another attempted untanglement, from today's Harvard Crimson —
Mystery Woman
From a book review quoted here in yesterday’s post
of 12:41 PM ET, “Special Topics” —
“That teacher, Hannah Schneider, has the magnetism of
Miss Jean Brodie and the film-noir mystique of Lauren Bacall.
When Blue meets her, in a ‘Hitchcock cameo,’ by the frozen-food
section at a grocery store, she falls under her spell. ‘She had an
elegant sort of romantic, bone-sculpted face, one that took well to
both shadows and light,’ Blue recalls. ‘Most extraordinary though
was the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her, a sense
of RKO, which I’d never before witnessed in person.’ Hannah
teaches a course on cinema in a room lined with posters . . . .“
From a Facebook page related to the death yesterday morning at
Webster University of the teacher of a course on cinema —
“I need a photo opportunity . . . .” — Paul Simon
The title of the film in the cover photo above is not without relevance.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Requiescat in Pace
The Chicago Tribune today —
H. Wilbert Norton, college president
and Christian missionary, dies
Norton reportedly died at 102 on Feb. 20, 2017.
This evening's previous post linked the death dates of two
academics to two Log24 posts that both contained the
following image —
For some backstory, see the Log24 posts from the date
of Norton's reported death, February 20.
Love and Death in Academia
For tales of the above two professors getting married
(but not to each other) see their obituaries: Deutsch and Dehmelt.
See also this journal on the above two dates: March 13 and March 7.
Res Ipsa
Special Topics
A roundup of posts now tagged "Apollo Psi" led to the name
Evan Harris Walker in the post Dirac and Geometry of
Dec. 14, 2015. That post mentions …
"… Evan Harris Walker’s ingenious theory of
the psi force, a theory that assigned psi
both positive and negative values in such a way
that the mere presence of a skeptic in the near
vicinity of a sensitive psychic investigation could
force null results. Neat, Dr. Walker, thought
Peter Slater— neat, and totally without content."
— From the 1983 novel Broken Symmetries
by Paul Preuss
It turns out that Walker died "on the evening of August 17, 2006."
From this journal on that date —
Monday, March 20, 2017
December 1987 at Yale
"I was at the time a Yale English major (we read, appreciated,
and discussed the meaning of literature) sunk in the toxic quagmire
of the one and only course I ever took in the literature department
(where authorial intent was ignored and every 'text' was considered
solely on how comfortably it nestled within the shackles of Marxism)."
"For decades de Man had been an avatar not just of leftist politics
but also of the leftist war on truth, the never-ending campaign
to recast objective fact as subjective and open to question."
— Kyle Smith in The New Criterion on March 18
See as well other posts mentioning Kyle Smith in this journal.
Silvers’s Cartoon Graveyard
Sunday, March 19, 2017
For the Church of Synchronology*
"… and all I got was this lousy sweatshirt" —
Some posts related to the above Rasmus Hungnes exhibition
opening date — Feb. 10, 2017 — are now tagged Bewitchment.
* See Synchronology in this journal.
Gravedigger’s Handbook
In memory of Jimmy Breslin, who reportedly died today at 88 —
From "Dimensions," (Log24, Feb. 15, 2015) —
"Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’ve come to talk with you again."
Norwegian Sermon
Raiders of the Lost Blocks
Delos Incorporated* Sunday School
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Back to the Past
"Old men ought to be explorers" — T. S. Eliot
"All on a Saturday night" — Johnny Thunder, 1962
Update of 8:25 PM ET on March 18 —
"Analysis." — Dr. Robert Ford in "Westworld"
"Master theorist and conceptual genius."
— Jon Pareles, front page, online New York Times tonight
News Search
See also, in this journal, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead."
Gamers
A search for Gamers in this journal yields …
This is not unrelated to the title of a 2008
book by Jeremy Gray:
Plato's Ghost:
The Modernist Transformation
of Mathematics .
Friday, March 17, 2017
To Coin a Phrase
(A sequel to the previous post, Narrative for Westworld)
"That corpse you planted last year . . . ." — T. S. Eliot
Circle and Square at the Court of King Minos —
Harmonic analysis based on the circle involves the
circular functions. Dyadic harmonic analysis involves …
For some related history, see (for instance) E. M. Stein
on square functions in a 1982 AMS Bulletin article.
Narrative for Westworld
“That corpse you planted
last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?”
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land“
Click the book for a video.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Gaming
Taking place from March 16 – 18, 2017
in the Austin Convention Center . . . .
See also the previous two posts.
Product
"Human perception is a saga of created reality."
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega
See "Important Product" in this journal and the previous post.
Hexagram 64 in Context
“Bulk Apperception”
"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
"Dear boys — We’re going to have some fun, aren’t we?"
— Maeve in "Westworld," Season 1, Episode 6,
after her "bulk apperception" has been upgraded
to the maximum.
"Bulk apperception" is defined in the script as "basically,
overall intelligence." The phrase is apparently unique to "Westworld."
These two words do, however, nearly occur together in
at least one book — Andrew Feffer's The Chicago Pragmatists
and American Progressivism :
Iacta Est
"Though realism is excellent rhetoric, maybe the best,
in a purely technical or instrumental sense,
that cannot be an adequate reason to accept it
as a serious intellectual position. In its tropes of
Death and Furniture we see a rhetoric that refuses
to acknowledge its own existence; a politics that
can claim a critical-radical credibility only by
the selective use of its opponents' analytic tools;
and a theology which is deeply conservative and
seeks nothing less than the death of disruptive,
disturbing inquiry. While tedium, good taste, political
and moral sensibility will properly determine what
sorts of given realities are thought worthy of inquiry,
those considerations are no grounds for promoting
a realist ontology for social science, nor any other
science, nor for rejecting relativism. On the contrary,
relativism is social science par excellence . . . ."
Loughborough University
— Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., and Potter, J. (1995),
"Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology
of bottom line arguments against relativism,"
History of the Human Sciences , 8, 25-49.
Related material:
Platonic realism in this journal, yesterday's post Ripples, and …
Gravity's Shadow , 2004 —
Gravity's Ghost , 2010 —
See also an "Inception"-related object —
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Ripples
A Scottish physicist credited with key experimental work
in the sensing of space-time ripples has died, today's
online New York Times reports.
From a BBC obituary online on Wed., March 8, 2017 —
An unconventional R.I.P. from this journal on March 7,
the reported date of the ripple-seeker's death —
"The supervisory read-only memory (SROM)
in question is a region of proprietary code
that runs when the chip starts up,
and in privileged mode."
— Elliot Williams at Hackaday , March 4, 2017,
"Reading the Unreadable SROM"
Some R.I.P. backstory from a recent film, "Passengers" —
DECK TWO – LIBRARY – DAY
Aurora sits at a library workstation . . .
AURORA
What about research articles, any kind of
technical documents?
WORKSTATION
Hibernation technology is proprietary.
The following articles deal with the subject
on a theoretical level.
For a "theoretical level" I prefer, see a passage quoted in
the above March 7 Log24 post, "Hackaday Story" —
" You will find to the left of the House of Hades
a spring,
And by the side thereof standing
a white cypress.
To this spring approach not near.
But you shall find another,
from the lake of Memory
Cold water flowing forth, and there are
guardians before it.
Say, 'I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven alone.
This you know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish.
Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth
from the lake of Memory.' "
See as well today's previous post.
Middle March:
The Key to All Mythologies in a Cartoon Graveyard
This is a sequel to yesterday's post Review, which
suggested a look at Lévi-Strauss's The Raw and The Cooked
in Derrida's “Structure, Sign, and Play," and then a look at the …
Financial Times of February 26, 2010 —
"The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock."
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
In Adam’s Fall / We Sinnèd All
Backstories
"Backstories do more than amuse guests.
They anchor the hosts.
It's their cornerstone.
The rest of their identity is built around it, layer by layer."
— Elsie Hughes in "Westworld," Season 1, Episode 3,
"The Stray," at 30:09
See also cornerstone in the Bible.
Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) earlier in that same episode —
Monday, March 13, 2017
Pragmatism at the Church of the Transformers*
"I would drop the keystone into my arch . . . ."
Click the Auto Body image for some backstory.
* For the church, see Transformers in this journal.
Gray Space
Image in Log24 from the date of the architecture writer's death —
See also the post Gray Space of Palm Sunday, 2014.
Underground Comix
Continued from last night
From the American Mathematical Society, a news item
dated Thursday, March 9, 2017 —
Remarks by Schwartz quoted here on March 7—
Sunday, March 12, 2017
… And Hell Followed With Him
Continued from Sunday, March 5 .
According to this evening's New York Times , that was
the date of death for underground comix creator Jay Lynch —
From Log24 on Sunday, March 5, 2017
|
See as well a sample of Lynch's work from 2015:
Dialogue
A Yale Law professor on Saturday, March 4, 2017 —
"Donald Trump is Shiva the Destroyer."
Related dialogue from the new film "Assassin's Creed"—
Marion Cotillard— You've thought of everything.
Jeremy Irons— Not quite. My speech. It could do
with one of your elegant openings.
Marion Cotillard— "Now I've become death,
the destroyer of worlds."
Jeremy Irons—Not sure that I could make that work.
Raise High the Ridgepole, Architects*
A post suggested by remarks of J. D. Salinger in
The New Yorker of November 19, 1955 —
Wikipedia: Taiji (philosophy) Etymology The word 太極 comes from I Ching : "易有太極,是生兩儀,兩儀生四象,四象生八卦,八卦定吉凶,吉凶生大業。" Taiji (太極) is a compound of tai 太 "great; grand; supreme; extreme; very; too" (a superlative variant of da 大 "big; large; great; very") and ji 極 "pole; roof ridge; highest/utmost point; extreme; earth's pole; reach the end; attain; exhaust". In analogy with the figurative meanings of English pole, Chinese ji 極 "ridgepole" can mean "geographical pole; direction" (e.g., siji 四極 "four corners of the earth; world's end"), "magnetic pole" (Beiji 北極 "North Pole" or yinji 陰極 "negative pole; cathode"), or "celestial pole" (baji 八極 "farthest points of the universe; remotest place"). Combining the two words, 太極 means "the source, the beginning of the world". Common English translations of the cosmological Taiji are the "Supreme Ultimate" (Le Blanc 1985, Zhang and Ryden 2002) or "Great Ultimate" (Chen 1989, Robinet 2008); but other versions are the "Supreme Pole" (Needham and Ronan 1978), "Great Absolute", or "Supreme Polarity" (Adler 1999). |
See also Polarity in this journal.
* A phrase adapted, via Salinger,
from a poem by Sappho—
Ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον,
Υ᾽μήναον
ἀέρρετε τέκτονεσ ἄνδρεσ,
Υ᾽μήναον
γάμβροσ ἔρχεται ἶσοσ Ά᾽ρευϊ,
[Υ᾽μήναον]
ανδροσ μεγάλο πόλυ μείζων
[Υ᾽μήναον]
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Atque Vale
Jeremy Irons and the Apple of Eden —
Jeremy Gray, Valediction —
See also this journal on Thursday, 11 September, 2014.
Transformer Group*
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Transformers (2007)
Plot summary — "An ancient struggle between two Cybertronian races,
the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, comes to Earth, with
a clue to the ultimate power held by a teenager."
* A post suggested by J. D. Salinger's phrase "a fresh impetus"
in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (1955)
Friday, March 10, 2017
The Transformers
"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards,
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"
— The Social Logic of Space ,
by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
Cambridge University Press, 1984
For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .
Related material —
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
Transformers
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Yale Architectural Figure
See also Log24 posts related to "Go Set a Structure"
as well as "New Haven" + Grid.
One Eighth
From Wikipedia's Iceberg Theory —
Related material:
The Eightfold Cube and The Quantum Identity —
See also the previous post.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Inscapes
"The particulars of attention,
whether subjective or objective,
are unshackled through form,
and offered as a relational matrix …."
— Kent Johnson in a 1993 essay
The 16 Dirac matrices form six anticommuting sets of five matrices each (Arfken 1985, p. 214): 1. , , , , , 2. , , , , , 3. , , , , , 4. , , , , , 5. , , , , , 6. , , , , . SEE ALSO: Pauli Matrices REFERENCES: Arfken, G. Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 3rd ed. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 211-217, 1985. Berestetskii, V. B.; Lifshitz, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. "Algebra of Dirac Matrices." §22 in Quantum Electrodynamics, 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, pp. 80-84, 1982. Bethe, H. A. and Salpeter, E. Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms. New York: Plenum, pp. 47-48, 1977. Bjorken, J. D. and Drell, S. D. Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Dirac, P. A. M. Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982. Goldstein, H. Classical Mechanics, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 580, 1980. Good, R. H. Jr. "Properties of Dirac Matrices." Rev. Mod. Phys. 27, 187-211, 1955. Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha: Dirac Matrices CITE THIS AS: Weisstein, Eric W. "Dirac Matrices."
From MathWorld— A Wolfram Web Resource. |
The Matrix Hypothesis
"And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of
a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix,
and something has gone wrong with the controllers. . . .
The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be
running our lives are having some kind of breakdown.
There’s a glitch, and we are in it.
Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else
begins to fall in order."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , Feb. 27, 2017
More recently …
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Signature Backdrop
"The Bitter End’s signature stage backdrop —
a bare 150-year-old brick wall — helped distinguish it from
other popular bohemian hangouts like the Village Gate
and the Village Vanguard. It appeared on the cover of
Peter, Paul and Mary’s first album."
— The New York Times this evening on a Sunday death
“Looking carefully at Golay’s code is like staring into the sun.”
See also Schwartz in "The Omega Matrix," a post of 5 PM ET Sunday: