Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Announcement of a Harvard event:
"The Future of News: Journalism in a Post-Truth Era,"
Tuesday, January 31, 4 – 6 pm., Sanders Theatre,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass."
The event as reported by The Harvard Crimson —
Related material — This journal at 12:31 PM ET Tuesday —
"The Devil's Arithmetic," a post with title taken from a 1988
fiction by Jane Yolen.
From the Jan. 28 post Cranking It Up —
"We are rooted in yoga and love the magic
that happens when that practice is
cranked up to eleven." — The late Trevor Tice
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In the new film Arrival , Amy Adams plays a linguist
who must interpret the language used by aliens whose
spaceships hover at 12 points around the globe.
Yesterday's events at 6407 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood,
together with the logic of number and time from recent
posts based on a Heinlein short story, suggest that the
character played by Adams is a sort of "fifth element"
needed to save the world.
In other words, the strange logic of recent posts ties the
California lottery number 6407 to the date April 12, 2015,
and a check of that date in this journal yields posts tagged
Orthodox Easter 2015 that relate to the "fifth element."
Midrash by Ted Chiang from the story on which Arrival was based —
|
After the breakthrough with Fermat's Principle, discussions of scientific concepts became more fruitful. It wasn't as if all of heptapod physics was suddenly rendered transparent, but progress was suddenly steady. According to Gary, the heptapods' formulation of physics was indeed topsy-turvy relative to ours. Physical attributes that humans defined using integral calculus were seen as fundamental by the heptapods. As an example, Gary described an attribute that, in physics jargon, bore the deceptively simple name “action,” which represented “the difference between kinetic and potential energy, integrated over time,” whatever that meant. Calculus for us; elementary to them.
Conversely, to define attributes that humans thought of as fundamental, like velocity, the heptapods employed mathematics that were, Gary assured me, “highly weird.” The physicists were ultimately able to prove the equivalence of heptapod mathematics and human mathematics; even though their approaches were almost the reverse of one another, both were systems of describing the same physical universe.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Continues.
Today's previous post suggests:
Not amused …
The above Los Angeles Film School poster publicizes an event
on December 13, 2014 (St. Lucia's Day). Also on that date —
"Grim Pen" and other posts in this journal.
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"Pursue Your Passion" — Motto of The Los Angeles Film School,
displayed below in May 2016 at Ivar Ave. and Sunset Blvd.
(Google Street View facing north from Sunset — Click photo to enlarge.)
This peaceful setting was less peaceful today —
1 dead, several injured after afternoon stabbings in Hollywood
By Chris Perez in the New York Post
January 31, 2017 7:53 pm ET
Related material —
Comments Off on Sunset Passion
Comments Off on The Burton Temptation
Related Things —
The obituary of a psychoanalyst,
a website, yoism.org, that discusses his method,
and a young actress who stars in both Stranger Things
and the earlier BBC series Intruders —
Not to put too fine a point on it,
here is an illustration
from the website that discusses
the dead psychoanalyst —
See also a Log24 post,
"Inarticulate Image,"
from the date of
the psychoanalyst's death.
Comments Off on The Devil’s Arithmetic
Monday, January 30, 2017
Related posts: Those now tagged Obelisk.
Comments Off on The SAG Dagger
Quotations by and for an artist who reportedly died
on Sunday, January 15, 2017 —
"What drives my vision is a need to locate
a 'genetically felt' devotional space
in which a simultaneous multiplicity
of disparate realities coexists."
— The late Ciel Bergman, in her webpage
"Artist's Statement"
"Once a registered nurse who worked in a hospital
psychiatric ward, Ms. Bergman was a struggling
single mom of two when she couldn’t resist the pull
of her art. In 1969, she entered a painting in the
Jack London Invitational, an art contest in Oakland,
and won first prize. This compelled her to enroll at
the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned
her master of fine arts with honors in painting."
— Sam Whiting in the San Francisco Chronicle
See also Oakland in this journal and
"Only a peculiar can enter a time loop."
"The peculiar kind of 'identity' that is attributed to
apparently altogether heterogeneous figures
in virtue of their being transformable into one another
by means of certain operations defining a group,
is thus seen to exist also in the domain of perception."
— Ernst Cassirer, quoted here on
Midsummer Eve (St. John's Eve), 2010
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The number 8775 in the previous post suggested, via a lottery search,
a look at the date August 16, 2016. The number was from a Hollywood
street address in a 1941 Robert A. Heinlein story. Heinlein himself lived
on the same street, at number 8777.
A lottery search for 8777 like that for 8775 in the previous post
yields the date July 10, 2000. Remark from that date in the
Los Angeles Times —
"As in any company of size, some of the performances
stand out sharply. Walker almost steals the show as Puck
and the officious Quince of the group of dummies who
put on the play-within-a-play at the end."
Walker is "the group's conceptual leader" Matt Walker.
Another conceptual leader — Denzel Washington …
Setting for the La La Playhouse adaptation of "Fences" —
"But if memories were all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck."
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Sunday, January 29, 2017
For some backstory, see Lottery in this journal,
esp. a post of June 28, 2007:
Real Numbers: An Object Lesson.
One such number, 8775, is suggested by
a Heinlein short story in a Jan. 25 post.
A search today for that number —
That Jan. 25 post, "For Your Consideration," also mentions logic.
Logic appears as well within a post from the above "8775" date,
August 16, 2016 —
|
Update of 10 am on August 16, 2016 —
See also Atiyah on the theology of
(Boolean) algebra vs. (Galois) geometry:
|
Related: Remarks by Charles Altieri on Wittgenstein in
today's previous post.
For remarks by Wittgenstein related to geometry and logic, see
(for instance) "Logical space" in "A Wittgenstein Dictionary," by
Hans-Johann Glock (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996).
Comments Off on Lottery Hermeneutics
Saturday, January 28, 2017
From "Core," a post of St. Lucia's Day, Dec. 13, 2016 —
In related news yesterday —
California yoga mogul’s mysterious death:
Trevor Tice’s drunken last hours detailed
"Police found Tice dead on the floor in his home office,
blood puddled around his head. They also found blood
on walls, furniture, on a sofa and on sheets in a nearby
bedroom, where there was a large bottle of Grey Goose
vodka under several blood-stained pillows on the floor."
See as well an image from "The Stone," a post of March 18, 2016 —
Some backstory —
“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical. Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”
—Many Dimensions (1931), by Charles Williams
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Friday, January 27, 2017
Hurt, who reportedly died today, played a purveyor
of magic wands in the Harry Potter series and also
Control in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
“In the original screenplay for the film adaptation
of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley muses that
Control had once told him that Howard Staunton
was the greatest chess master Britain had ever
produced. ‘Staunton’ later turns out to be the name
that Control used for the rental of his flat.”
— Wikipedia, Control (fictional character)
Related images —
Happy Chinese New Year.
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In memory of a photographer —
Click on the above image to search for Jazz in this journal.
Comments Off on Jazz Notes …
From the American Mathematical Society (AMS) today,
an obituary of Hans Witsenhausen —
The obituary mentioned by the AMS (from Legacy.com) says …
"Donations in his memory may be made to the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
American Society for Yad Vashem or
the American Technion Society."
From an image in this journal on Nov. 19, 2016, the date of
Witsenhausen's death, that reviewed earlier posts —
See also posts from this date, January 27, in 2005.
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From a recent column by Reuters Global Affairs Columnist Peter Apps —
"There may, of course, be a strategy behind beginning
the Trump administration with an attack on the media
and even reality itself. One of the principles long used
by both unpleasant governments and individuals over
time is to try and assert their will by questioning people’s
sense of reality and morality. If you can’t trust anyone,
the thinking goes, then it becomes more difficult to
question those in authority.
. . . .
There’s even a term for when it happens within intimate
human relationships – 'gaslighting'. It means to try and
drive one’s partner mad – or at least, force them to
question their sanity – in order to exert one’s will.
(The phrase was popularized by the 1944 film Gaslight,
in which a manipulative husband drives his wife mad by
turning gaslighting in a house up and down –
while denying doing so.)"
Earlier in the same column —
"It was bordering on insanity for Trump, his White House
and press secretary to try and maintain the false claim
that Trump’s inauguration had record turnout."
Fact check —
The White House press secretary Sean Spicer last Saturday :
"This was the largest audience to ever witness
an inauguration — period — both in person and
around the globe."
Despite some ambiguity, this is clearly not the same as Apps's
phrase "record turnout," i.e., in-person attendance.
For comparison with another deplorable journalist in the
previous post, here is Apps at Muck Rack :
Comments Off on Who’s Gaslighting Whom?
Thursday, January 26, 2017
(Continued from Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2017)
"We have reached peak polarization."
— Olga Khazan in the online Atlantic today,
as quoted in the Muck Rack image below.
Perhaps not yet.
Consider the headline below,
"Why Trump Supporters Lie About the Inauguration Photo."
Consider also Olga's "Brain Bro" below in the context of
the film "Limitless" and of the book A Wrinkle in Time .
See also all posts now tagged "Split."
Comments Off on Split
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Comments Off on La La Song
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"Remembering speechlessly we seek
the great forgotten language,
the lost lane-end into heaven,
a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
Where? When?" — Thomas Wolfe
(Suggested by Tom Wolfe, the late Byron Dobell, and
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby .)
See also Great Again? and Great Again.
Comments Off on Requiem for an Editor
Dobell reportedly died on Saturday, January 21, 2017.
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Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Adam Frisk reports from a Canadian network, Global News —
Compare and contrast with the photos in the previous post,
Inauguration Crowd Size According to Getty Images.
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The "Spectators fill the National Mall" photo above seems
to correspond to the crowd during , not before the inauguration
(as shown in the second photo above, the "People gather" photo).
Compare to the photo in today's earlier post taken during the Inauguration:
Comments Off on Inauguration Crowd Size According to Getty Images
At left, just prior to the inauguration in 2009;
at right, during the inauguration in 2017.
Source of photos —
http://news.wgbh.org/2017/01/23/news/
photos-compare-crowd-trumps-inauguration-obamas.
For a more detailed image of the 2017 inauguration
from the new president's point of view, click here.
Comments Off on Split
Monday, January 23, 2017
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"It's not a lie if you believe it."
— Poster for "Operation Avalanche"
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns . . . .”
— Wallace Stevens, quoted in posts tagged Portal1937
Comments Off on Believe It or Not
The New York Times online on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017 —
" 'Split' is being released by Universal under the Blumhouse label,
a brand associated with unpretentious, clever, neo-traditionalist
scare-pictures like 'Insidious,' 'Paranormal Activity' and 'The Purge.'
That seems like the right company for Mr. Shyamalan . . . ."
A check of the Blumhouse label leads to a NY Times article
dated July 15, 2012 —
Related material —
Comments Off on The In Crowd
"The reception which has been accorded 'Our Crowd'
shows that the subject was certainly ripe for exploitation."
— Wikipedia
Comments Off on Whose Crowd? OUR Crowd!
Alternative fact from the New York Times crowd —
Screenshot of online NY Times front page at 11:30 AM ET
on Monday, January 23, 2017 —
"Crowd scientists estimated that 160,000 people
attended President Trump's inauguration."
Comments Off on Crowdsourcing
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Sunday, January 22, 2017
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Saturday, January 21, 2017
A search for the title in this journal yields a phrase,
"unassigned syntactical symbol."
A Google image search for this phrase yields …
Click the above image search for a larger (1.5 MB) version.
Other searchers will not obtain the same results; the above
is an idiosyncratic collage produced by Google acting as
my own personalized Galatea.
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Cover art: "Still Life with Rock and Leaf,"
by David Ligare, oil on canvas, 1994
"Remembering speechlessly we seek
the great forgotten language,
the lost lane-end into heaven,
a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
Where? When?" — Thomas Wolfe
Comments Off on Auguration
Friday, January 20, 2017
David Brooks in The New York Times today
(on the Times Wire at 3:21 AM ET) —
|
It took a lot to get us here. It took a once-in-a-century societal challenge — the stresses and strains brought by the global information age — and it took a political system that was too detached and sclerotic to understand and deal with them.
There are many ways to capture this massive failure, but I’d rely on the old sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. All across the world, we have masses of voters who live in a world of gemeinschaft: where relationships are personal, organic and fused by particular affections. These people define their loyalty to community, faith and nation in personal, in-the-gut sort of ways.
But we have a leadership class and an experience of globalization that is from the world of gesellschaft: where systems are impersonal, rule based, abstract, indirect and formal.
|
This suggests …
Schaft!
The above Schaft dates suggest in turn a review of this journal's
remarks on April 8 through April 11, 2016, which include…
The Schaft robot's world is, like the new whitehouse.gov website,
admirably "impersonal, rule based, abstract, indirect and formal."
The New York Times , on the other hand, offers the sort of
aesthetic experience so aptly described in the above William
Hamilton New Yorker cartoon.
Comments Off on Schaft
Thursday, January 19, 2017
The “inarticulate” image from last night’s
“Raid on the Inarticulate” —
This is, in a sense, an island of nothing in a sea of being.
Contrast with an opposite image in Wittgenstein’s “Diktat für Schlick”:
From The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle ,
ed. by Gordon Baker, first published by Routledge
in 2003. From Ch. 1, “Dictation for Schlick” —
p. 69 —
“Our method resembles psychoanalysis in a certain sense.
To use its way of putting things, we could say that a
simile at work in the unconscious is made harmless by
being articulated. And this comparison with analysis
p.71 —
can be developed even further. (And this analogy is
certainly no coincidence.)
Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and
the nothing, and of the nothing as something primary
in contrast to negation, has in mind, I think, a
picture of an island of being which is being washed
by an infinite ocean of the nothing. Whatever we throw
into this ocean will be dissolved in its water and
annihilated. But the ocean itself is endlessly restless
like the waves on the sea. It exists, it is, and we say
‘It noths’. But how is it possible to demonstrate to
someone that this simile is actually the correct one?
This cannot be shown at all. But if we free him from his
confusion then we have accomplished what we wanted to
do for him.” |
“Ripples spread from castle rock ….” — “Endgame,” 1986
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The Silvia of the title is from the previous post.
For the Time Cube, see …
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Wednesday, January 18, 2017
The title was suggested by the previous post and by
a phrase in Four Quartets.
Author Silvia Jonas tonight at Arts & Letters Daily —
The Inarticulate —
Detail of The Inarticulate —
The Raid —
Logo on the cover of
Joyce's Visible Art
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The late Archie K. Loss* wrote Joyce's Visible Art.
Click on the book for
images from the date
of Loss's death.
For some context, see
the month that Loss died.
* Author of remarks on Joyce in the previous post.
Comments Off on The Loss Cross
Quoted here on December 16, 2006 —
See also …
The date of the "Seconds" review above, 16 Dec. 2006, was
the reason for the requotation in the first paragraph above.
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Tuesday, January 17, 2017
"All roads lead to Rome."
— Xi Jinping, President of the
People's Republic of China,
at Davos today
In memoriam Harvard art historian
James S. Ackerman, who reportedly
died on New Year's Eve 2016 —
"Is this an obelisk* I see before me?"
— Adapted from a play by William Shakespeare
* See the previous post and "The Cherished Gift."
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Monday, January 16, 2017
The title was suggested by a 2009 William Peter Blatty novel
and by a Log24 post last Friday, January 13th —
Related images —
Comments Off on Elsewhere Continued
The New York Times this evening —
"Hans Berliner, a former world champion of correspondence chess
who won one of the greatest games ever played on his way to
the title and later became a pioneering developer of game-playing
computers, died on Friday [Jan. 13th] in Riviera Beach, Fla.
He was 87."
— Dylan Loeb McClain
In memoriam —
Comments Off on Various Schemata
An alternative to Davos —
From a professor at Grand Valley —
* Title suggested by Thomas Mann's 1924 novel about Davos
Comments Off on The Magic Valley*
For the "interality" of the title, click on the tag.
Click the above image for posts tagged "The Positive."
Comments Off on Interality Illustrated
Sunday, January 15, 2017
See also previous posts now tagged with this term.
Comments Off on Interality
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Data for an essay titled "Interality in Heidegger" —
See also Log24 posts
on that same date —
April 1, 2015.
Comments Off on April First Interality
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Comments Off on The Thing and I
See Eightfold 1984 in this journal.
Related material —
"… the object sets up a kind of
frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany."
"… Instead of an epiphany of being,
we have something like
an epiphany of interspaces."
— Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self ,
Cambridge University Press, 1989
"Perhaps every science must start with metaphor
and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor
there would never have been any algebra."
— Max Black, Models and Metaphors ,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1962
Epiphany 2017 —
Click to enlarge:
Comments Off on 1984: A Space Odyssey
Wikipedia on The Exorcist III (1990),
written and directed by William Peter Blatty —
"Kinderman takes his friend, a priest named Father Dyer,
out to see their mutually favorite film It's a Wonderful Life ."
Related material from an RSS feed at noon —
Funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar.
Comments Off on Here We Go Loop De Lie
Friday, January 13, 2017
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For the title, see Wiktionary.
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Thursday, January 12, 2017
From "Solomon's Cube" —
Related material —
"Is this a dagger I see before me?"
"No." (A line suggested by Polanski's 2010 "The Ghost Writer")
Comments Off on The Cherished Gift
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
"Do you like puzzles?" — J. K. Simmons
See also Sunday's post "A Theory of Everything"
and an obituary in this evening's New York Times .
Comments Off on Analogies Between Analogies
From Models and Metaphors , by Max Black,
Cornell University Press, 1962 —
I do not recommend the work of Lewin, nor that of a later
science groupie, Keith Devlin.
In September 2014, Devlin wrote an ignorant column about
a sort of bad mathematical joke based on a divergent infinite series.
He has now returned to the topic, this time writing more about
its proper mathematical background: analytic continuation .
Lewin is to Devlin as Lévi-Strauss is to Chomsky.
None of these four should be taken very seriously.
Max Black, however, should .
Comments Off on Analogical Extension Meets Analytic Continuation
The reported death today at 105 of an admirable war correspondent,
"a perennial fixture at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong,"
suggested a search in this journal for that city.
The search recalled to mind a notable quotation from
a Montreal philosopher —
“… the object sets up a kind of
frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477)
For some context, see St. Lucia's Day, 2012.
See also Epiphany 2017 —
Comments Off on Eightfold Epiphany
Monday, January 9, 2017
From "Night Moves," by Bob Seger —
And oh, the wonder
Felt the lightning
Yeah, and we waited on the thunder
Waited on the thunder
I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far-off, I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain't it funny* how the night moves?
See as well Johnny Thunder on Diamond Records in 1962 —
* Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.
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Click to enlarge the following (from Cornell U. Press in 1962) —
For a more recent analogical extension at Cornell, see the
Epiphany 2017 post on the eightfold cube and yesterday
evening's post "A Theory of Everything."
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Comments Off on A Brief History of 7:35
Sunday, January 8, 2017
The title refers to the Chinese book the I Ching ,
the Classic of Changes .
The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching may be arranged
naturally in a 4x4x4 cube. The natural form of transformations
("changes") of this cube is given by the diamond theorem.
A related post —
Comments Off on A Theory of Everything
Saturday, January 7, 2017
See Log24 posts of January 7, 2012.
That was the date of death for mathematician Herbert S. Wilf.
For some related narrative, see posts tagged Consciousness Growth.
Comments Off on Five Years Ago
"Clearly, there is a spirit of openhandedness in post-conceptual art
uses of the term 'Conceptualism.' We can now endow it with a
capital letter because it has grown in scale from its initial designation
of an avant-garde grouping, or various groups in various places, and
has evolved in two further phases. It became something like a movement,
on par with and evolving at the same time as Minimalism. Thus the sense
it has in a book such as Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art. … Beyond that,
it has in recent years spread to become a tendency, a resonance within
art practice that is nearly ubiquitous." — Terry Smith, 2011
See also the eightfold cube —
Comments Off on Conceptualist Minimalism
Comments Off on The Lotus Lunch
Friday, January 6, 2017
The assignments page for a graduate algebra course at Cornell
last fall had a link to the eightfold cube:
Comments Off on Eightfold Cube at Cornell
The title is a phrase by New York Times obituary writer
William Grimes in yesterday's post on an Oxford philosopher.
Related material —
Comments Off on Terms Not Dissimilar
Thursday, January 5, 2017
Recent reports of the death of a writer on philosophy associated
with All Souls College, Oxford, reflect some confusion.
The New York Times says the death was on Monday, January 2, 2017.
Other sources, including the college itself, say it was the day before —
Sunday, January 1 (New Year's Day), 2017.
At any rate, perhaps the following post from 9 PM ET Sunday night is relevant:
See as well a search for All Souls in this journal.
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Wednesday, January 4, 2017
A post from the end of last year —
Also on New Year's Eve —
Comments Off on Exit
According to art historian Rosalind Krauss in 1979,
the grid's earliest employers
"can be seen to be participating in a drama
that extended well beyond the domain of art.
That drama, which took many forms, was staged
in many places. One of them was a courtroom,
where early in this century, science did battle with God,
and, reversing all earlier precedents, won."
The previous post discussed the 3×3 grid in the context of
Krauss's drama. In memory of T. S. Eliot, who died on this date
in 1965, an image of the next-largest square grid, the 4×4 array:
See instances of the above image.
Comments Off on A Drama of Many Forms
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
The image of art historian Rosalind Krauss in the previous post
suggests a review of a page from her 1979 essay "Grids" —
The previous post illustrated a 3×3 grid. That cultist space does
provide a place for a few "vestiges of the nineteenth century" —
namely, the elements of the Galois field GF(9) — to hide.
See Coxeter's Aleph in this journal.
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Continued
By a disciple of the late John Berger —
For further ideological remarks from this source, see the now-defunct
web journal Everyday Analysis: An International Collective.
For further remarks from the date of the above post, October 9, 2013,
see this journal on that date.
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Monday, January 2, 2017
Screenshot of 11:07 PM ET tonight —
A sample of his work —
An antidote to Berger's remarks —
Comments Off on John Berger Has Died
This journal on December 24, 2016 (Christmas Eve)
quoted some remarks on "constructivism" in art and
added a link to the same word as applied in mathematics:
"The word 'constructivism' also refers to
a philosophy of mathematics. See a Log24 post,
'Constructivist Witness' . . . ."
From that post —
From a post later the same day, Dec. 22— "The Laugh-Hospital"—
This (Jan. 2, 2017) post was suggested by the reported Christmas Eve death
of a Jesuit priest, Joseph Fitzmyer.
Those entertained by the thought of constructivist laugh-hospitals may
contemplate the New Year's Eve death of a sitcom actor who played
a priest. See today's previous post, Sitcom Theology.
Related material — "Laugh Track" in this journal.
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The Hollywood Reporter —
"William Christopher, best known for playing Father Mulcahy
on the hit sitcom M*A*S*H , died Saturday [Dec. 31, 2016] of
lung cancer, his agent confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.
He was 84.
Christopher died at his home in Pasadena, with his wife by
his bedside, at 5:10 a.m. on New Year's Eve, according to a
statement from his agent."
— 5:59 PM PST 12/31/2016 by Meena Jang
Image reshown in this journal on the midnight (Eastern time)
preceding Christopher's death —
Related material —
From a Log24 search for "Deathly Hallows" —
|
Mathematics
The Fano plane block design
|
Magic
The Deathly Hallows symbol—
Two blocks short of a design.
|
Those who prefer Latin with their theology
may search this journal for "In Nomine Patris."
Comments Off on Sitcom Theology
Sunday, January 1, 2017
See "Four Gods" in this journal.
Phaedrus 265b: "And we made four divisions
of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods . . . ."
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From today's previous post —
"The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."
— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015
Related figures —
Art critic Robert Hughes in "The Space of Horizons,"
a Log24 post of August 7, 2012:
Religion writer Huston Smith, who reportedly died
on December 30, 2016:
Comments Off on The Unhurried Curve
(Continued from a remark by art critic Peter Schjeldahl quoted here
last year on New Year's Day in the post "Art as Religion.")
"The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."
— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015
This suggests some further material from the paper
that was quoted here yesterday on New Year's Eve —
"In teaching a course on combinatorics I have found
students doubting the existence of a finite projective
plane geometry with thirteen points on the grounds
that they could not draw it (with 'straight' lines)
on paper although they had tried to do so. Such a
lack of appreciation of the spirit of the subject is but
a consequence of the elements of formal geometry
no longer being taught in undergraduate courses.
Yet these students were demanding the best proof of
existence, namely, production of the object described."
— Derrick Breach (See his obituary from 1996.)
A related illustration of the 13-point projective plane
from the University of Western Australia:
Projective plane of order 3
(The four points on the curve
at the right of the image are
the points on the line at infinity .)
The above image is from a post of August 7, 2012,
"The Space of Horizons." A related image —
Click on the above image for further remarks.
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Saturday, December 31, 2016
Breach's 1981 approach is not axiomatic,
but instead graphic. Another such approach —
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Also on December 16 (Click to enlarge) —
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Friday, December 30, 2016
Or: Lost in Conversion
The main title is the name of Ben Affleck's firm in "The Accountant."
The subtitle was suggested by religious remarks in the previous post.
From "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic" —
"The following June, 1945, von Neumann penned
what would become a historic document entitled
'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,' the first published
description of a stored-program binary computing machine—
the modern computer."
Image from von Neumann's report —
Version converted to text —
See also "Turing + Dyson" in this journal . . .
For a character that "spans both worlds,"
see posts tagged "Oscar Day 2007."
Related image data —
" 'No views' is good." — Christian Wolff
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From "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic" —
"To store the programs as data, the computer would need
something new: a memory. That’s where Pitts’ loops
came into play. 'An element which stimulates itself
will hold a stimulus indefinitely,' von Neumann wrote
in his report . . . ."
— Amanda Gefter, Nautilus , Feb. 5, 2015
Related material —
"Here we go loop de loop" — Johnny Thunder, 1962
* I.e., Ben Affleck in his new film.
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Thursday, December 29, 2016
See also Mayer at Davos in this journal.
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Wednesday, December 28, 2016
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Click to enlarge:
See also Mark 7:28 in this journal.
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Click to enlarge.
Related material: Folk Etymology (Dec. 10, 2016).
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See the title in this journal.
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Tuesday, December 27, 2016
"The record, released on the Diamond label,
became a big hit, rising to no. 4 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in early 1963." — Wikipedia
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See instances of the title in this journal.
Material related to yesterday evening's post
"Bright and Dark at Christmas" —
The Buddha of Rochester:
See also the Gelman (i.e., Gell-Mann) Prize
in the film "Dark Matter" and the word "Eightfold"
in this journal.
" A fanciful mark is a mark which is invented
for the sole purpose of functioning as a trademark,
e.g., 'Kodak.' "
"… don't take my Kodachrome away." — Paul Simon
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Monday, December 26, 2016
See also this journal on Christmas night.
"Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes for NPR's
13.7 blog, described dark matter by comparing it to
a ghost in a horror movie. You can't see it, he writes —
'but you know it's with you because it messes with
the things you can see. ' " — NPR.org this evening
See as well today's post Old News and the Nov. 4, 2008,
book on Charles Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas .
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The previous post introduced the phrase "secondary meaning."
A discussion —
" In order to establish a secondary meaning for a term,
a plaintiff 'must show that the primary significance in
the minds of the consuming public is not the product
but the producer.' "
— FreeAdvice®.com
See also The Zero Theorem and Bialystock in this journal.
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From "Plato Thanks the Academy," March 19, 2014 —
“Click on fanciful .”
A possible result —
See also "Triple Cross."
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From IndieWire on November 11, 2016 —
"Bleecker Street has announced it has acquired
U.S. and select territory rights to 'The Man Who
Invented Christmas,' to be directed by Bharat
Nalluri. The film will start shooting next month
and is targeting a holiday 2017 release date."
This journal on November 11, 2016 —
On Christmas 2015, Log24 featured
the Bleecker Street favicon
in the post 'Dark Symbol.'
Here is the dark symbol again —
The apparent symbols for "times" and "plus"
in the above screenshot are, of course, icons for
browser functions. Readers who prefer the
fanciful may regard them instead as symbols for
"a gateway to another realm," that of number theory.
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|
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 AM
Mirror, Mirror, on the wall,
Robbing Peter, paying Paul
|
This year on December 26 — A Lutheran-related note from 2015 …
… and one from Christmas 2016 —
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Sunday, December 25, 2016
From "Bright Symbol," a post of 12 AM
on December 25, 2015 —
From "Dark Symbol," a post of 12 PM
on December 25, 2015 —
* Title suggested by a song released by Epic Records in 1984.
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See also Robert M. Pirsig in this journal on Dec. 26, 2012.
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Merry Xmas to Katherine Neville.
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Saturday, December 24, 2016
In memory of an American artist whose work resembles that of
the Soviet constructivist Karl Ioganson (c. 1890-1929).
The American artist reportedly died on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2016.
|
"In fact, the (re-)discovery of this novel structural principle was made in 1948-49 by a young American artist whom Koleichuk also mentions, Kenneth Snelson. In the summer of 1948, Snelson had gone to study with Joseph Albers who was then teaching at Black Mountain College. . . . One of the first works he made upon his return home was Early X Piece which he dates to December 1948 . . . . "
— "In the Laboratory of Constructivism:
Karl Ioganson's Cold Structures,"
by Maria Gough, OCTOBER Magazine, MIT,
Issue 84, Spring 1998, pp. 91-117
|
The word "constructivism" also refers to a philosophy of mathematics.
See a Log24 post, "Constructivist Witness," of 1 AM ET on the above
date of death.
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Friday, December 23, 2016
(Continued)
Code Blue
Update of 7:04 PM ET —
The source of the 404 message in the browsing history above
was the footnote below:
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From a Dec. 21 obituary posted by the
University of Tennessee at Knoxville —
"Wade was ordained as a pastor and served
at Oakwood Baptist Church in Knoxville."
Other information —
In a Log24 post, "Seeing the Finite Structure,"
of August 16, 2008, Wade appeared as a co-author
of the Walsh series book mentioned above —
Walsh Series: An Introduction
to Dyadic Harmonic Analysis,
by F. Schipp et al.,
Taylor & Francis, 1990
From the 2008 post —
The patterns on the faces of the cube on the cover
of Walsh Series above illustrate both the
Walsh functions of order 3 and the same structure
in a different guise, subspaces of the affine 3-space
over the binary field. For a note on the relationship
of Walsh functions to finite geometry, see
Symmetry of Walsh Functions.
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Recent posts have featured the Tim Burton films
"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"
(and the Ghost Ship), as well as "Ed Wood" (and Plan 9).
Related material —
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Thursday, December 22, 2016
Related material in this journal: Specter.
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… "icy white and crystalline" — Johnny Mercer
From a search in this journal for Hudson Hawk —
See also Stella Octangula.
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See also this journal on the above "peculiar" date — Sept. 27, 2016.
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See also, from the above publication date, Hudson's Inscape.
The inscape is illustrated in posts now tagged Laughing Academy.
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See also Log24 posts from the above date.
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The title refers to a philosophy of mathematics.
For those who prefer metaphor… Folk Etymology.
See also Stages of Math at Princeton's
Institute for Advanced Study in March 2013 —
— and in this journal starting in August 2014.
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Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Consider Stevens’s verse from “The Rock” (1954):
“That in which space itself is contained.”
Consider also Whitehead in 1906 —
"This is proved by the consideration
of a three dimensional geometry in which
there are only fifteen points."
— and Stevens on the sublime (1935):
"And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space."
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Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Then …
And now.
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See also a Terry Gilliam film on "crunching entities."
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Order of the British Empire
in news photo from 1994
This OBE was in the news again today.
Its recipient reportedly died yesterday.
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From page 180, Logicomix —
Alfred North Whitehead in the first of
the above-named years, 1906 —
"But the project's central problem was always there."
"The deeper we got into our Quest…
…The more I doubted its premises."
— Attributed to Bertrand Russell
by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos
Papadimitriou in Logicomix (2008-9)
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