Log24

Suggested by a passage at dazeddigital.com —

"Visser remembers the night everything changed
as if it was yesterday. It was February 3, 2010,
and the band had been booked to play a show
in Johannesburg."

This unfortunate title seems inevitable in light of the previous post.

University of Colorado professor Alexander Soifer has written
a sharp reply to a review of his recent book on the noted
mathematician B. L. van der Waerden (1903-1996).

See in the February issue, online today, of the Notices of the
American Mathematical Society , Letters to the Editor.

Soifer's letter begins …

"The critical September 2015 Notices  review of
my new book 'The Scholar and the State' by
Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze (henceforth S-S)
contradicted his decade of enthusiastic comments
on all my publications about Van der Waerden (VdW)."

Material from this  journal related to the initials "S-S"
and to today's previous post —

Posts now tagged Soul Notes.

This post is thanks to Nicole Kidman …

E! Online  today reminds us that "Bowie's song 'Nature Boy' 
was ... featured in Kidman's 2001 film Moulin Rouge ."

A YouTube video of the Moulin Rouge  "Nature Boy"
was uploaded on April 1, 2011. That date in this journal —

James Joyce reportedly died on today's date in 1941.

… Professionally, at least …

Click image to enlarge.

See also the previous post, Lechner's End.

For a more up-to-date look at harmonic analysis
and switching functions (i.e., Boolean functions),
see Ryan O'Donnell, Analysis of Boolean Functions ,
Cambridge U. Press, 2014.  Page 40 gives an
informative overview of the history of this field.

A check on the author of the title illustrated at
the end of today's post Space Oddity yields the fact that
Robert J. Lechner reportedly died on Sept. 16, 2014.

For a synchronicity check, see posts now tagged Lechner's End.

(Continued from Sousa vs. Boulez, Epiphany 2016)

From Sigla (December 22, 2014) —

"Time is irrelevant in these matters.
Joyce and the monastic brethren who
painted their manuscript ornaments
a thousand years ago were working on
the same project. There was a pattern
to be abstracted…."

— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God

The time of the previous post, 3:10 (AM), suggests, in a
surreal manner that the spirit of the late David Bowie might
find amusing, a review of Log24 posts last year on 3/10 —

An Obit for Dooley and The Big Screw.

As for the time, 6:25, of this  post, see Apocatastasis.

Madeleine L'Engle meets Captain America —

This is from a Jan. 27, 2012, post on mathematics and narrative.

Related literary criticism by the late Florence King —

"Given all the historical personages the author whistles in,
one more won't hurt. Nicolas Boileau, the 17th-century
French literary critic, gave writers a piece of advice that
Ms. Neville could use: 'Make not your tale of accidents
too full / too much variety will make it dull / Achilles' rage
alone, when wrought with skill /Abundantly does a whole
"Iliad" fill.' "

— NY Times  review of The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville

The title is a tribute to the late Florence King, who
reportedly died last Wednesday, January 6, 2016.

It is the title of one of her novels.

Related material from the date of King's death —

An excerpt from King's obituary —

See the title phrase in this journal.

See as well The Eight  Revisited (Feb. 26, 2003).

It's been a long, long time.

The above new David Bowie video may be
viewed, by those who like such things, as
a memorial to a composer who died on
Twelfth Night (Jan. 5), 2016.

Related material: Faustus in this journal.

“Memorializing is a Jewish composer’s job,” Swados said. 

Read more:  http://forward.com/news/
135836/help-us-help-us-help-us-now/#ixzz3wRzJ5HWI.

Continued from previous post.

Detail —

… and reality —

View from the intersection of U.S. Routes 6 and 62

The online New Yorker  today —

"In 2012, Lucas sold his company
and his homegrown mythology —
I think we call it I.P. now — to Disney."

— Bryan Curtis, "The George Awakens"

Looking

For what was

Where it used to be

For the Janus-Faced Human Race

Related material —

Strange Myths and The Starflight Problem.

Synchronicity check —

"On the afternoon of October 10, 2013,
an unusually cold day, the streets of downtown
Dublin were filled …." — "How Stories Deceive"

See also this  journal on October 10, 2013.

The above title is intended to contrast with the title
of this evening's previous post,
Focus and Clarity in the New Year.

For the Blur and Murk, click on the screenshot below.

Alternate title: Enigma Variations …

"Readers will inevitably ask why we have chosen
to speak of 'ideas' and not 'ideologies.'
Mainly it is a matter of focus and clarity."

Chirot and Montgomery, The Shape of the New ,
Princeton University Press, 2015

From Commentary  magazine on Dec. 14, 2015 —

"Three significant American magazines started life in the 1920s.
The American Mercury , founded in 1924, met with the greatest
initial success, in large part because of the formidable reputations
of its editors, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, and it soon
became the country’s leading journal of opinion."

— Terry Teachout, article on the history of The New Yorker  

A search for "American Mercury" in this  journal yields a reference from 2003
to a book containing the following passage —

As Webern stated in "The Path to Twelve-Note Composition":

"An example: Beethoven's 'Six easy variations on a Swiss song.'
Theme: C-F-G-A-F-C-G-F, then backwards! You won't notice this
when the piece is played, and perhaps it isn't at all important,
but it is unity ." 

— Larry J. Solomon, Symmetry as a Compositional Determinant ,
     Chapter 8, "Quadrate Transformations"

This is the Beethoven piece uploaded to YouTube by "Music and such…"
on Dec. 12, 2009. See as well this journal on that same date.

The New Yorker  on March 2, 1992 —

Related material:  Go Set a Structure.

"If the old chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth (1147) 
could be trusted, which he cannot be, 
King Cole had a daughter 
who was well skilled in music, 
but we are not informed whether 
her father appreciated her art."

— Iona and Peter Opie,
    The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes ,
    first published in 1951, reprinted with corrections
    in 1952

(Continued from this date last year,
  "Spiel ist nicht Spielerei. ")

"His paintings weren’t a kind of art.
They seemed to present themselves as
art in essence, immaculately conceived.
They made me feel, precisely, dumb,
with nothing to say."

— Peter Schjeldahl today on the late
    Ellsworth Kelly

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul  continues …

 "He must know somethin',
   but don't say nothin'."

On the exit of an historian from the academic
stage on Sunday, December 13, 2015 —

"History is one thing, drama is another."

— Savonarola Brown

"Tell me the news, something I can use
Something red hot to light my fuse"

— Motörhead, "Bad Magic" album

Illustration from Oct. 25, 2013.

(Continued from December 16, 2015)

The New York Times  obituary this evening 
of a record producer —

"Mr. Garrett signed Gary Lewis & the Playboys in 1964
after discovering them performing at Disneyland.
(Mr. Lewis is the son of the comedian and actor Jerry Lewis.)
The group’s recording of 'This Diamond Ring' reached the top
of the Billboard singles chart in 1965 and sold more than
a million copies." — Sam Roberts in The New York Times

From a Log24 post on the reported date of Mr. Garrett's death —

"That's it, baby, when you've got it, flaunt it, flaunt it!"

— Zero Mostel

The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic 
The I Ching .

For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical  symbols …

A lyric by Ira Gershwin —

A cinematic "T" —

See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega: 

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

"An analogy between mathematics and religion is apposite."

— Harvard Magazine  review by Avner Ash of
     Mathematics without Apologies
     (Princeton University Press, January 18, 2015)

See as well Analogies in this  journal.

"Condescension and a certain amount of hostility
used to mark the critical reaction…."

— Emma Brockes on Stephen King in
    The Guardian , 21 Sept. 2013

For the mark itself, see Black Swan Venus,
Vonnegut Asterisk, and Branding Iron.

This journal on Saturday, Dec. 19 —

In memory of Madame Claude, who
reportedly died in Nice December 19:

"There were fairies and spirits."

Amen.

Quoted by physics writer Heinz Pagels
at the end of The Cosmic Code :

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”

— Robinson Jeffers

Continues.

   "Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" — Under the Volcano

Continues.

See Bauhaus remarks on space and Devil's Night Eve.

See also Klein Group and, for the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, an appropriate Calvin Klein label —

A Wikipedia edit today by David Eppstein, a professor
at the University of California, Irvine:

See the Fano-plane page before and after the Eppstein edit. 
Eppstein deleted my Dec. 6 Fano 3-space image as well as 
today's Fano-plane image.  He apparently failed to read the
explanatory notes for both the 3-space model and the
2-space model. The research he refers to was  original
(in 1979) but has been published for some time now in the
online Encyclopedia of Mathematics, as he could have
discovered by following a link in the notes for the 3-space
model.

For a related recent display of ignorance, see Hint of Reality.

Happy darkest night.

See also the Eve of Devil's Night, 2015 —

Related material from an academic's weblog —

Happy birthday to a star of Tarantino's Yuletide offering.

Today in History —

"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."

Related material: Today's previous post and the Red Book.

Under the Volcano:
A Bottle, a Door, a Box

See also Glory Season (Nov. 12, 2005) and Unique Figure (April 12, 2011).

Update of 11:22 AM —

Today in History —

"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."

Related material:  The Red Book.

A prequel to the 2013 film "The Zero Theorem" —

"Down below, infinitely deep into the blackness,
things were beginning. The blackness had
arranged itself into a whirlpool…."

— Peter Dickinson, A Box of Nothing  (1985),
    "Chapter 19: Star Tree"

— may serve as a sequel to the life of the book's author.

(See Dickinson Sequel in this journal.)

“How do you  get young people excited about space?”

— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012

Continued from Dec. 11, 2014.

Click images for related material.

An excerpt from http://yarchive.net/med/middle_ages.html —

From: ((Steven B. Harris))
Subject: Re: Problems with sci.med.aids FAQ (section 7) Part II
Date: 09 Jun 1995

In <173AD1188AS85.AVIRAMA@UNIVSCVM.CSD.SCAROLINA.EDU>
AVIRAMA@UNIVSCVM.CSD.SCAROLINA.EDU (Amittai F. Aviram) writes to
David Mertz:

>Ahem....  With all due respect, it seems to me to make no sense
>to criticize a scientist or medical doctor for "a childish
>little schoolboy positivism."

    Well, I think he was referring to the Vienna School, where
the schoolboys shout childish things like "Your mother still
believes in Compte!" and "Well, at least my mother has values and
isn't a logical empiricist like YOUR old man!"  Woody Allen went
there, but says he was expelled during a philosophy test for
looking into the soul of the kid next to him.

Midrash —

"There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews"

— Leonard Cohen lyric, "Take This Waltz"

Here's looking at you, kid.

Synchronicity check:

Opening scene from "Synecdoche, New York."

Midnight update:  See Sinatra in Popcorn Theology.

Continued from November 26.

“She was absolutely magical.”

The above quote is from the obituary of a British actress.

Her birth date was July 19.  Her death date was November 25.

In memory of Michael Crichton, Harvard '64.

Those who have not yet seen the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet
should skip this post. For those who know and love it, here is an
aide-mémoire .

Continued from Once Upon a Matrix  (November 27, 2015).

Click image below to enlarge.

“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one  of us 
 gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”

— American adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest , 1956

Midrash —

"Remember me to Herald Square."

Two images from December 2, 2015 …

From Log24 and from
the American Mathematical Society —

Peter Schjeldahl in the current (Dec. 14) New Yorker :

The phrase “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by a
British art historian, Roger Cardinal, to translate
the sense of “art brut ,” which Dubuffet had
considered rendering as art “raw,” “uncouth,” “crude,”
or “in the rough.” But the term misses the full thrust
of Dubuffet’s elevation of “people uncontaminated
by artistic culture,” as he called them. He aspired not
to make outsiders respectable but to destroy the
complacency of insiders. He disqualified even tribal
and folk artists, and spirited amateurs like Henri
Rousseau, for being captive to one tradition or another.
Art brut  must be sui generis, from the hands and minds
of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries,
builders of strange myths.”

The literary  art of Fritz Leiber and Stephen King seems to
fit this definition.

Somewhat less brut — the literary art of Plato.

A non-literary illustration:

  Time as "a moving
   image of eternity.”
       — Plato   

"Bauhaus Designs for Modern Life —
Come to the Harvard Art Museums
for this Gallery Talk at 12:30."

Another design —

Street view in Oslo, August 2014 :  

Take a walk on the wild side… or not.

The two symbols on the monolith

may, if one likes, be interpreted 
as standing for Damnation Morning 
and for the Windmill of Time.

* "Award-winning fashion icon."
— Harvard Graduate School of Design

"There is a place for a hint somewhere
of a big agent, to complete the picture."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

"And we may see the meadow in December…."

Little Kay was quite blue, yes nearly black with cold;
but he did not observe it, for she had kissed away
all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was
a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed
flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible
ways, for he wanted to make something with them;
just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make
geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle.
Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated,
for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding.
In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful,
and of the utmost importance; for the bit of glass
which was in his eye caused this. He found whole
figures which represented a written word; but he
never could manage to represent just the word
he wanted–that word was "eternity"; and the
Snow Queen had said, "If you can discover that figure,
you shall be your own master, and I will make you
a present of the whole world and a pair of new skates."
But he could not find it out.

— From The Snow Queen , by Hans Christian Andersen

See also the Chinese Puzzle in the previous post.

Click image below for some conceptual differences
between Mondrian (previous post) and van Doesburg.

The image is from the post "Janet's Tea Party"
of November 20, 2004.