See also the previous post.
Monday, October 31, 2016
How do you stop an elephant from charging?
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Nine Years Ago…
And tomorrow's New York Times
Scene from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" included in
"The Living Dead," a 1995 BBC TV series by Adam Curtis —
Related material — A post from nine years ago today and
Adam Curtis in tomorrow's New York Times Magazine :
"Several times, Curtis and I circled back to
the notion of the 'hyperobject' — that which
is too big in time and space to comprehend."
See as well the BBC TV series in the previous post, "Boo."
Boo
The word "intruders" in the previous post suggests
a Log24 search that yields …
A scene from the 2014 BBC TV series “Intruders”
(Season 1, Episode 1, at 9:22 of 45 min.)
Friday, October 28, 2016
Diamond-Theorem Application
Abstract: "Protection of digital content from being tapped by intruders is a crucial task in the present generation of Internet world. In this paper, we proposed an implementation of new visual secret sharing scheme for gray level images using diamond theorem correlation. A secret image has broken into 4 × 4 non overlapped blocks and patterns of diamond theorem are applied sequentially to ensure the secure image transmission. Separate diamond patterns are utilized to share the blocks of both odd and even sectors. Finally, the numerical results show that a novel secret shares are generated by using diamond theorem correlations. Histogram representations demonstrate the novelty of the proposed visual secret sharing scheme." — "New visual secret sharing scheme for gray-level images using diamond theorem correlation pattern structure," by V. Harish, N. Rajesh Kumar, and N. R. Raajan.
Published in: 2016 International Conference on Circuit, Power and Computing Technologies (ICCPCT). |
Excerpts —
Related material — Posts tagged Diamond Theorem Correlation.
Thursday, October 27, 2016
“Space Is the Place!”
Or: Pentagram Meets Counting-Pattern, Continued
Arts & Letters Daily today links to a Chronicle of Higher Education
piece on philosophy with an illustration by the late Paul Laffoley …
This suggests a review of Laffoley's work. In particular —
For a larger view of the above Laffoley pentagram, click here.
Contrast with Wittgenstein's "counting-pattern" above, which
is, in fact, a hyperspace.
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Cartoonist’s Requiem
In memory of Jack T. Chick, 1924-2016.
Related material —
See also Log24 on the date of Chick's death.
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Monday, October 24, 2016
Princeton Space
From the Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016, Daily Princetonian — The ever-elusive “space” is a word spoken into a great expanse of hopes and fears and delusions: “safe spaces,” “inclusive spaces,” “open spaces,” “green spaces,” “learning spaces.” In this space, words float around abstractly, almost effortlessly, seemingly without the weight of any gravity; appearing to be a distant glimmer of an idea, a once bright and assuring light, which— without much definition— easily fades into obscurity. Coming to Princeton, it’s tempting to feel as though the rhetoric surrounding the term “space” stretches the word out, magnifies it, and tacks it onto well-designed brochures and anonymous invitations. Yet the question remains— how do you comfortably situate yourself within the incredibly abstruse concept of “space,” especially when you happen to exist in a territory that has been occupied and claimed by an endless sea of others, and which has been upheld by an impregnable and deeply rooted history? In the process of interviewing various members of the University, one thing has become clear; the question of space is an issue that is pertinent to all members of the Princeton community. |
For greater depth on this topic, see the previous post.
For less depth, see a post of January 18, 2005.
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Voids
From mathematician Izabella Laba today —
From Harry T. Antrim’s 1967 thesis on Eliot —
“That words can be made to reach across the void
left by the disappearance of God (and hence of all
Absolutes) and thereby reestablish some basis of
relation with forms existing outside the subjective
and ego-centered self has been one of the chief
concerns of the first half of the twentieth century.”
… And then there is the Snow White void —
A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of a 2x2x2 array
of cubes —
The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).
Quartet
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church
is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow
at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
Or Sunday dinner.
Platonic |
Shakespearean |
Not to mention Euclid and Picasso. | |
|
|
In the above pictures, Euclid is represented by |
Saturday, October 22, 2016
Magis
From "The Magis way: Notes on the publishing culture,"
by Giampiero Bosoni, at http://www.magisdesign.com/magis-world/ —
"… perhaps it is interesting to reflect further on the relationship between a design object and a literary work, by reading (in whatever interpretative key you choose) the illuminating definition given by the great semiologist Roland Barthes of the act of writing and of the literary value of a text. 'Writing,' Barthes tells us, 'is historically an action that involves constant contradiction, based on dual expectations. One aspect of writing is essentially commercial, a means of control and segregation, steeped in the most materialistic aspect of society. The other is an act of pleasure, connected to the deepest urges of the body and to the subtlest and most successful products of art. This is how the written text is woven. All I have done is to arrange and reveal the threads. Now each can add his own warp to the weft.' [3] Magis’ long and highly advanced experience has given evidence, further confirmed by this latest publishing catalogue, of an ever-growing awareness of this necessary interweaving between warp and weft, between the culture of craftsmanship and that of industry, between design culture and business culture, between form and technique, between symbolic codes and practical functions, between poetry and everyday life." — Giampiero Bosoni [3] Barthes R., Variations sur l’écriture (1972), Editions du Seuil, Paris 1994, published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes 1966-1975 (freely translated from the Italian translation, Variazioni sulla scrittura seguite da Il piacere del testo , Ossola C. (editor) Einaudi, Turin 1999). |
See as well "Interweaving" in this journal.
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
Friday, October 21, 2016
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
The Intelligent User:
A Meditation on Two Dates
The dates are October 14, 2016, the release date of
the new film "The Accountant" —
"… clearer, more economical and formal, more liturgical."
— David Remnick on lyrics of Leonard Cohen
vs. those of Bob Dylan, quoted here on Oct. 14
— and May 12, 2016, the publication date of
a YouTube trailer for "The Accountant."
Also quoted in the May 12 post —
See as well the Ape with Skull (Affe mit Schädel) statue in
the Oct. 17 post Memorial Encounter. The version of the statue
pictured there omits the inscription "ERITIS SICUT DEUS"
in a book at the statue's base. There are related remarks on
Mephistopheles and Faust at a different weblog.
Decoration
A search for "Crosswicks Curse" in this journal leads (indirectly) to …
The Crosswicks Curse Continues
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Parametrization
The term "parametrization," as discussed in Wikipedia,
seems useful for describing labelings that are not, at least
at first glance, of a vector-space nature.
Examples: The labelings of a 4×4 array by a blank space
plus the 15 two-subsets of a six-set (Hudson, 1905) or by a
blank plus the 5 elements and the 10 two-subsets of a five-set
(derived in 2014 from a 1906 page by Whitehead), or by
a blank plus the 15 line diagrams of the diamond theorem.
Thus "parametrization" is apparently more general than
the word "coodinatization" used by Hermann Weyl —
“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively
a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to
ascertain the group of transformations S
mediating between them.”
— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups ,
Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16
Note, however, that Weyl's definition of "coordinatization"
is not limited to vector-space coordinates. He describes it
as simply a mapping to a set of reproducible symbols .
(But Weyl does imply that these symbols should, like vector-space
coordinates, admit a group of transformations among themselves
that can be used to describe transformations of the point-space
being coordinatized.)
Monday, October 17, 2016
A Wrinkle in Space
"There is such a thing as a counting-pattern."
— Saying adapted from a young-adult novel
See also the previous post and …
Memorial Encounter:
Pentagram Meets Counting-Pattern
Illustrations by Wittgenstein:
See posts from September 16, 2016, the date of death
for Professor Whitman A. Richards.
See also MIT News today —
Groundhog Day Tablet
This journal on that date —
The Los Angeles Times this morning reported that poet
David Antin died at 84 last Tuesday, October 11.
From this journal on that date —
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Weiner* Mantra
* For the title, see the Wikipedia article
on the creator of the TV drama Mad Men .
For another illustration of the mantra,
see the previous post.
Sunday Dinner
"I love those Bavarians." — Don Henley, "The Garden of Allah"
See also a BBC story from March 11, 2005, and Log24 on that date.
Saturday, October 15, 2016
Twelve and Twelve
See All Saints 2014 in this journal and listen to
the new Stevie Nicks reissue of Bella Donna.
Related religious imagery —
Lyric Poetry
A Marxist Perspective
The previous post, Nobel Perspective, suggests a review of
the following passage pictured here on August 27, 2013.
Click image for a better view of the original.
There are, of course, more sophisticated approaches
to the place of perspective in the history of art.
Friday, October 14, 2016
Nobel Perspective
A brief tale by Dario Fo, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature —
The Birth of the Jongleur
from Mistero Buffo (1969)
A Little Solitaire
Him Too
. . . .
"Cohen’s links to Dylan were obvious—Jewish, literary,
a penchant for Biblical imagery, Hammond’s tutelage—
but the work was divergent. Dylan, even on his earliest
records, was moving toward more surrealist, free-
associative language and the furious abandon of
rock and roll. Cohen’s lyrics were no less imaginative
or charged, no less ironic or self-investigating, but he
was clearer, more economical and formal, more liturgical."
— David Remnick in the Oct. 17, 2016, New Yorker ,
"Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker." The title refers to
a new Cohen song.
See also …
"…Hashem has guaranteed our eternity…."
— Hineni founder Esther Jungreis, quoted in obit
by Matthew Williams in Tablet (Aug. 24, 2016).
Perhaps.
A phrase from the date of Jungreis's reported death —
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Elementary Art
The above cycle may have influenced the design
of Carl Jung's symbol of the self —
Related art by
Steven H. Cullinane
See also Levi-Strauss Formula in this journal.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Noto*
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/ On the 10th day of the Jewish month of Tishri comes Yom Kippur, meaning the 'Day of Atonement'. It's the holiest day of the year. To mark the 'Sabbath of Sabbaths', Jews fast for 25 hours and pray devoutly for most of the day, with five different sessions – Maariv, Shacharit, Musaf, Minchah and Neilah. [Link added.]
When is Yom Kippur?
|
* For the title, see yesterday's post "Noto." See also yesterday's
"Saturday Dialectics." For further background, see an October 2
Rosh Hashanah piece in Politico Magazine by Ben Wofford.
From "Saturday Dialectics" —
"You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher"
— Song written by Robby Krieger, The Doors
(album produced by Paul A. Rothchild)
Monday, October 10, 2016
Saturday Dialectics
See also…
Jacob Neusner, Judaic Scholar Who Forged
Interfaith Bonds, Dies at 84
Neusner reportedly died on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016.
For Log24 on that date, see posts now tagged
Saturday Dialectics.
Mono Type 1, by Sultan (1966)
"Sultan" was a pseudonym of Peter Lindbergh, now a
well-known fashion photographer. Click image for the source.
Related art — Diamond Theory Roullete, by Radames Ajna,
2013 (Processing code at ReCode Project based on
"Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane, 1977).
Sinosphere
Sunday, October 9, 2016
The Left Space
See a 1.5 MB Google Image Search for
Jumpers + Stoppard + "Leave a Space".
For the source of some of the images,
see a Log24 search for "Leave a Space."
Tinguely Museum
Tinguely, "Martin Heidegger,
Philosopher," sculpture, 1988
See also Talman in this journal.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
The Upshot
George Steiner's phrase "the language animal" as examined by
Charles Taylor —
Steiner attributes his "language animal" phrase, in the transliterated
form "zoon phonanta," to the ancient Greeks. This attribution
is apparently bogus. See Steiner on Language (March 30, 2012).*
It is highly relevant that Taylor is a Catholic and Steiner is a secular Jew.
* More generally — See Steiner + Language + Animal in this journal.
Unity of Opposites: Plato and Beyond
The "unity" of the title was suggested by this morning's update
at the end of yesterday's post Paz.
For the Plato of the title, see the Sept. 27, 2016, post
Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss in China
Or: Philosophy for Jews
For glyphs representing the "unity of opposites" of the title,
see a webpage linked to here on Groundhog Day 2014 —
The above image is related to Jung's remarks on Coincidentia
Oppositorum . (See also coincidentia in this journal.)
A different Jung, in a new video with analogues of the rapidly
flashing images in Ajna's webpage "Diamond Theory Roullete" —
The above video promotes Google's new open-source "Noto" font —
Friday, October 7, 2016
Paz
The Paz quote below is from the last chapter
of his book, titled "The Dialectic of Solitude."
The phrase "dialectic of solitude" has been applied also to a 1967
book by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez:
The conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude , "He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations. Only then did he discover that Amaranta Úrsula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." |
Update of Saturday, October 8:
I do not recommend taking very seriously the work of Latin American leftists
(or American academics) who like to use the word "dialectic."
A related phrase does, however, have a certain mystic or poetic charm,
as pointed out by Wikipedia —
"Unity of opposites is the central category of dialectics,
and it is viewed sometimes as a metaphysical concept,
a philosophical concept or a scientific concept."
See also Bullshit Studies.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
A Labyrinth for Octavio
The title refers to the previous post.
From Middlemarch (1871-2), by George Eliot, Ch. III — "Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton's 'affable archangel;' and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or speedy work." |
See also the term correspondence in this journal.
Key to All Mythologies…
According to Octavio Paz and Claude Lévi-Strauss
"Poetry…. 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…."
— Octavio Paz in The Monkey Grammarian (written in 1970)
"Strata" also seem to underlie the Lévi-Strauss "canonic formula" of myth
in its original 1955 context, described as that of permutation groups —
I do not recommend trying to make sense of the above "formula."
Related material —
Cuber
Nobel Flashback:
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
|
Mirror Play
See posts tagged Spiegel-Spiel.
"Mirror, Mirror …." —
A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of
a 2x2x2 array of cubes —
The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
The Crichton Prize …
Goes to Feynman, Epstein, and Kaplan
“A self-replicating swarm of predatory molecules
is rapidly evolving outside the plant.”
— Amazon.com synopsis of Michael Crichton’s
2002 novel Prey
Washington Post online today —
Nobel Prize in chemistry is awarded
for molecular machines
” The physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman
gave a seminal lecture on the subject in 1959,
envisioning a ‘great future’ in which ‘we can arrange
the atoms the way we want; the very atoms,
all the way down.’ ” — Sarah Kaplan
“How do we write small?”
Related material quoted here on Sunday morning, Oct. 2, 2016 —
” Westworld is especially impressive because it builds two worlds
at once: the Western theme park and the futuristic workplace.
The Western half of Westworld might be the more purely
entertaining of the two, with its shootouts and heists and chases
through sublime desert vistas. Behind the scenes, the theme park’s
workers show how the robot sausage is made. And as a dystopian
office drama, the show does something truly original.”
— Adam Epstein at QUARTZ, October 1, 2016
Sources
From a Google image search yesterday —
Sources (left to right, top to bottom) —
Math Guy (July 16, 2014)
The Galois Tesseract (Sept. 1, 2011)
The Full Force of Roman Law (April 21, 2014)
A Great Moonshine (Sept. 25, 2015)
A Point of Identity (August 8, 2016)
Pascal via Curtis (April 6, 2013)
Correspondences (August 6, 2011)
Symmetric Generation (Sept. 21, 2011)
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Celebrity Hurricane
The New York Times today on the late LA theater director
Gordon Davidson —
" When Mr. Davidson announced his retirement in 2002,
Mr. Eustis summed up his achievement succinctly.
Mr. Davidson, he told The Los Angeles Times ,
'has managed to make serious theater in the eye of
the celebrity hurricane.' " — William Grimes
From a Google image search today for "Mobius 8 4" Configuration —
See also this morning's Square Ice and an image from yesterday's
Recursion Revisited —
Westworld
The title refers to a Log24 post of 9:45 AM ET Sunday, Oct. 2.
From the "Westworld" post of Sunday, Oct. 2 —
"It was rather like watching a play."
QED.
Square Ice
The discovery of "square ice" is discussed in
Nature 519, 443–445 (26 March 2015).
Remarks related, if only by squareness —
this journal on that same date, 26 March 2015 —
The above figure is part of a Log24 discussion of the fact that
adjacency in the set of 16 vertices of a hypercube is isomorphic to
adjacency in the set of 16 subsquares of a square 4×4 array,
provided that opposite sides of the array are identified. When
this fact was first observed, I do not know. It is implicit, although
not stated explicitly, in the 1950 paper by H.S.M. Coxeter from
which the above figure is adapted (blue dots added).
Monday, October 3, 2016
Ein Eck
Friday, July 11, 2014
|
Recursion Revisited
Hudson’s Inscape
Yesterday evening's post Some Old Philosophy from Rome
(a reference, of course, to a Wallace Stevens poem)
had a link to posts now tagged Wittgenstein's Pentagram.
For a sequel to those posts, see posts with the term Inscape ,
a mathematical concept related to a pentagram-like shape.
The inscape concept is also, as shown by R. W. H. T. Hudson
in 1904, related to the square array of points I use to picture
PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the 2-element field.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Neville Marriner, 1924-2016
The Washington Post online today —
Neville Marriner, who led renowned
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, dies at 92.
Some Old Philosophy from Rome
See also Log24 posts from the above reported date of death —
posts now tagged Wittgenstein's Pentagram.
Sermon
"I don't care about what anything was designed to do,
I care about what it can do."
Westworld
On a new HBO series that opens at 9 PM ET tonight —
Watching Westworld , you can sense a grand mythology unfolding before your eyes. The show’s biggest strength is its world-building, an aspect of screenwriting that many television series have botched before. Often shows will rush viewers into plot, forgetting to instill a sense of place and of history, that you’re watching something that doesn’t just exist in a vacuum but rather is part of some larger ecosystem. Not since Lost can I remember a TV show so committed to immersing its audience into the physical space it inhabits. (Indeed, Westworld can also be viewed as a meta commentary on the art of screenwriting itself: brainstorming narratives, building characters, all for the amusement of other people.) Westworld is especially impressive because it builds two worlds at once: the Western theme park and the futuristic workplace. The Western half of Westworld might be the more purely entertaining of the two, with its shootouts and heists and chases through sublime desert vistas. Behind the scenes, the theme park’s workers show how the robot sausage is made. And as a dystopian office drama, the show does something truly original. — Adam Epstein at QUARTZ, October 1, 2016 |
"… committed to immersing its audience
into the physical space it inhabits…."
See also, in this journal, the Mimsy Cube —
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves," "… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example– They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play." |
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens
Log24 in review — Logos and Logic, Crystal and Dragon .
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Rippling Rhythms
The previous post presented Plato's Meno diagram as
an illustration of (superimposed) yin and yang.
For those who prefer a more fluid approach to yin and yang —
From a June 15, 2016, Caltech news release on gravitational waves —
Audio The "chirp" tones of the two LIGO detections are available for download. Formats are suitable as ringtones for either iPhone or Android devices. (Instructions for installing custom ringtones) September 2015 Detection December 2015 Detection |
Related commentary from July 2015 and earlier —
See posts tagged Haiku.
A different perspective —
“A Matrix of Four”
The title is from a book quoted in the previous post.
A related illustration from 7:31 AM Tuesday, September 27 —
"The matrix at left below represents the feminine yin principle
and the diamond at right represents the masculine yang ."
Doris and Oscar
An image from last night's post Brand Name —
"Squared into a matrix of four"
YouTube data suggested by the above passage —
Related literary remarks —
— A Heart for the Gods of Mexico , Conrad Aiken, 1939
Friday, September 30, 2016
Desmic Midrash
The author of the review in the previous post, Dara Horn, supplies
below a midrash on "desmic," a term derived from the Greek desmé
( δέσμη: bundle, sheaf , or, in the mathematical sense, pencil —
French faisceau ), which is related to the term desmos , bond …
(The term "desmic," as noted earlier, is relevant to the structure of
Heidegger's Sternwürfel .)
The Horn midrash —
(The "medieval philosopher" here is not the remembered pre-Christian
Ben Sirah (Ecclesiasticus ) but the philosopher being read — Maimonides:
Guide for the Perplexed , 3:51.)
Here of course "that bond" may be interpreted as corresponding to the
Greek desmos above, thus also to the desmic structure of the
stellated octahedron, a sort of three-dimensional Star of David.
See "desmic" in this journal.
“Profound archaeological wells”
From a review by Dara Horn of …
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, & Other Literary Essays
by Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pp., $25
"… the credo that has emerged throughout her career:
against idolatry, yes, but also in favor of the particular,
context, rootedness, the profound archaeological wells
from which no writer can be removed without removing
his or her greatest powers.
For Ozick herself, that archaeological well is not only Anglo-
American literature, but the far deeper well of Judaism."
— "Cynthia Ozick: Or, Immortality,"
Jewish Review of Books , Fall 2016
See also Michener's The Source in this journal.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Articulation
Cassirer vs. Heidegger at Harvard —
A remembrance for Michaelmas —
A version of Heidegger’s “Sternwürfel ” —
From Log24 on the upload date for the above figure —
Reading for Michaelmas 2016
A review of …
Continental Divide : Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
By Peter E. Gordon
(Harvard University Press, 426 pp., $39.95)
The reviewer: David Nirenberg in The New Republic .
The review, dated January 13, 2011, ran in the
February 3, 2011, issue of the magazine.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Quotes for Michaelmas (2015)
For remarks by a non-fictional Harvard professor,
see the previous post.
See also Jews Telling Stories.
Star Wars
See also in this journal "desmic," a term related
to the structure of Heidegger's Sternwürfel .
Logos
From RIP, a post of Wednesday, March 16, 2016 —
See also earlier posts tagged Sermon Weekend.
From Balboa Press —
More than a pretty face designed to identify a product, a logo combines powerful elements super boosted with sophisticated branding techniques. Logos spark our purchasing choice and can affect our wellbeing. Lovingly detailed, researched and honed to deliver a specific intention, a logo contains a unique dynamic that sidesteps our conscious mind. We might not know why we prefer one product over another but the logo, designed to connect the heart of the brand to our own hearts, plays a vital part in our decision to buy. The power of symbols to sway us has been recognised throughout history. Found in caves and in Egyptian temples they are attributed with the strength to foretell and create the future, connect us with the divine and evoke emotions, from horror to ecstasy, at a glance. The new symbols we imbue with these awesome powers are our favourite brand logos. • Discover the unconscious effect of these modern symbols that thrust our most successful global corporations into the limelight and our lives. • Learn to make informed choices about brands. • Find out how a logo reflects the state of the brand and holds it to account. |
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss in China
Or: Philosophy for Jews
From a New Yorker weblog post dated Dec. 6, 2012 —
"Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky" by Gary Marcus—
"… two titans facing off, with Chomsky, as ever,
defining the contest"
"Chomsky sees himself, correctly, as continuing
a conversation that goes back to Plato, especially
the Meno dialogue, in which a slave boy is
revealed by Socrates to know truths about
geometry that he hadn’t realized he knew."
Socrates and the slave boy discussed a rather elementary "truth
about geometry" — A diamond inscribed in a square has area 2
(and side the square root of 2) if the square itself has area 4
(and side 2).
Consider that not-particularly-deep structure from the Meno dialogue
in the light of the following…
The following analysis of the Meno diagram from yesterday's
post "The Embedding" contradicts the Lévi-Strauss dictum on
the impossibility of going beyond a simple binary opposition.
(The Chinese word taiji denotes the fundamental concept in
Chinese philosophy that such a going-beyond is both useful
and possible.)
The matrix at left below represents the feminine yin principle
and the diamond at right represents the masculine yang .
From a post of Sept. 22,
"Binary Opposition Illustrated" —
A symbol of the unity of yin and yang —
Related material:
A much more sophisticated approach to the "deep structure" of the
Meno diagram —
Monday, September 26, 2016
The Embedding
From this morning's 3:33 AM ET post —
Adapted from a post of Dec. 8, 2012, "Defining the Contest" —
From a post of Sept. 22,
"Binary Opposition Illustrated" —
From Sunday's news —
Palmervision
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Saturday, September 24, 2016
The Seven Seals
From Hermann Weyl's 1952 classic Symmetry —
"Galois' ideas, which for several decades remained
a book with seven seals but later exerted a more
and more profound influence upon the whole
development of mathematics, are contained in
a farewell letter written to a friend on the eve of
his death, which he met in a silly duel at the age of
twenty-one. This letter, if judged by the novelty and
profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most
substantial piece of writing in the whole literature
of mankind."
Some Galois geometry —
See the previous post for more narrative.
Core Structure
For the director of "Interstellar" and "Inception" —
At the core of the 4x4x4 cube is …
Cover modified.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Annals of Scientism
Last night, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre,
the annual Ig Nobel prizes were awarded.
This journal earlier that day —
Related material —
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Binary Opposition Illustrated
Click the above image for remarks on
"deep structure" and binary opposition.
See also the eightfold cube.
Equinox Note
"The Genesis of an Icon:
The Taiji Diagram's Early History"
By François Louis
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
Vol. 63, No. 1 (June 2003), pp. 145-196
See also "arrowy, still strings" in this journal.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Cork
The phrase "binary opposition" in the previous post suggests
a review of some binary-related concepts —
From a post on St. Finbarr's Day 2015 —
From http://www.chosentwo.com/buffy/quotes/harvest.php —
Buffy: So, Giles! Got anything that can make this day any worse?
Giles: This is what we know. Some sixty years ago, a very old, very powerful vampire came to this shore, not just to feed. |
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Savage Logic
From "The Cerebral Savage," by Clifford Geertz —
(Encounter, Vol. 28 No. 4 (April 1967), pp. 25-32.)
The Diamond Theorem …
As the Key to All Mythologies
For the theorem of the title, see "Diamond Theorem" in this journal.
"These were heavy impressions to struggle against,
and brought that melancholy embitterment which
is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his
religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his
own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian
hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality
of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies."
— Middlemarch , by George Eliot, Ch. XXIX
Related material from Sunday's print New York Times —
Sunday's Log24 sermon —
See also the Lévi-Strauss "Key to all Mythologies" in this journal,
as well as the previous post.
Monday, September 19, 2016
Squaring the Pentagon
The "points" and "lines" of finite geometry are abstract
entities satisfying only whatever incidence requirements
yield non-contradictory and interesting results. In finite
geometry, neither the points nor the lines are required to
lie within any Euclidean (or, for that matter, non-Euclidean)
space.
Models of finite geometries may, however, embed the
points and lines within non -finite geometries in order
to aid visualization.
For instance, the 15 points and 35 lines of PG(3,2) may
be represented by subsets of a 4×4 array of dots, or squares,
located in the Euclidean plane. These "lines" are usually finite
subsets of dots or squares and not* lines of the Euclidean plane.
Example — See "4×4" in this journal.
Some impose on configurations from finite geometry
the rather artificial requirement that both points and lines
must be representable as those of a Euclidean plane.
Example: A Cremona-Richmond pentagon —
A square version of these 15 "points" —
A 1905 square version of these 15 "points"
with digits instead of letters —
See Parametrizing the 4×4 Array
(Log24 post of Sept. 13, 2016).
Update of 8 AM ET Sunday, Sept. 25, 2016 —
For more illustrations, do a Google image search
on "the 2-subsets of a 6-set." (See one such search.)
* But in some models are subsets of the grid lines
that separate squares within an array.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Symmetry and Logic
"Symmetry, yes, but logic?"
— Photo caption in the New York Times review of the 2008 Albee play
at Princeton titled "Me, Myself & I"
Above: Albee rests on Wittgenstein.
Composition
The late Edward Albee, as quoted today in The Telegraph :
“I tell my students, if you want to know something
about the structure of a play, listen to some Bach
preludes and fugues. I discovered classical music
when I was eight, nine, 10 years old, and I think
I learnt something about the nature of dramatic
structure from the nature of the music I was
listening to. I probably think of myself half the
time as a composer.”
A Box of Nothing
Friday, September 16, 2016
Wittgenstein’s Pentagram
Related material —
See the story of a British man who reportedly had a doctorate in
physics and mathematics and became a witchcraft enthusiast.
He is said to have died at 85 on September 11, 2016.
As Wittgenstein noted, it is not always clear whether the pentagram
expresses a mathematical or an experiential proposition.
For some mathematical propositions related to the pentagram,
see (for instance) John Baez's slides for his 2008 Glasgow
lecture on the number 5.
For som experiential propositions, see Pentagram in this journal.
A Counting-Pattern
Thursday, September 15, 2016
The Smallest Perfect Number/Universe
The smallest perfect number,* six, meets
"the smallest perfect universe,"** PG(3,2).
* For the definition of "perfect number," see any introductory
number-theory text that deals with the history of the subject.
** The phrase "smallest perfect universe" as a name for PG(3,2),
the projective 3-space over the 2-element Galois field GF(2),
was coined by math writer Burkard Polster. Cullinane's square
model of PG(3,2) differs from the earlier tetrahedral model
discussed by Polster.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Bialystock* Story
* Spelling altered from the Stanford memorial page
to reflect the use of the term in this journal.