Sunday, January 17, 2016
The author featured in the previous post, one "Stephen Marlowe,"
reportedly died on February 22, 2008.
From his New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox —
"Mr. Marlowe was born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn
on Aug. 7, 1928. He received his bachelor’s degree
in philosophy from the College of William and Mary
in 1949. Under his original name, he began his
career in the early 1950s writing science fiction.
In the late ’50s, Mr. Lesser legally changed his name
to Stephen Marlowe, one of several pen names he
regularly used. (Among the others were Andrew Frazer,
Darius John Granger, C. H. Thames, Stephen Wilder,
Jason Ridgway and Adam Chase. In his 1961 novel
Dead Man’s Tale , Mr. Lesser joined the cavalcade of
ghostwriters who published under the name Ellery Queen.)"
From this journal on the date of Marlowe's reported death —
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte
— Rubén Darío
Comments Off on Joining the Cavalcade
Saturday, January 16, 2016
… Meet the Threads of Fiction
"… where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle
back and forth in the great loom of the artist's imagination"
Comments Off on The Strands of History…
Two approaches to philosophy —
For a global perspective, see Cullinane College in this journal.
For a local perspective, see last night's post on a Pennsylvania philosopher.
Comments Off on Global and Local
Friday, January 15, 2016
The American Mathematical Society today —
George E. Weaver (1942-2015)
Friday January 15th 2016
Weaver was a philosophy professor at Bryn Mawr College before retiring in 2008. He had an interest in mathematics, among other fields, and taught discrete mathematics and mathematical logic at Bryn Mawr. A colleague said that Weaver "taught with passion and rigor, and cared deeply about his courses and the students. Students who studied with him had a deep respect and admiration for him." Weaver was an AMS member since 1972. Read more about his life in an obituary published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Weaver reportedly died on December 4, 2015.
Related material in this journal on the date of Weaver's death —
Comments Off on Local and Global
Click the above image for a web page on the question
"Why was New Haven divided into nine squares?".
Comments Off on An Ordinary Morning in New Haven
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."
Comments Off on Enter Raven
Thursday, January 14, 2016
This unfortunate title seems inevitable in light of the previous post.
Comments Off on Exit Slytherin
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.
Comments Off on “Henceforth S-S”
See Triumph of the Will and Box of Nothing.
"And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert."
Comments Off on Raiders of the Lost Box
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
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 —
The last New York Lottery number
of Women's History Month 2011 was 146.
"…every answer involves as much of history
and mythology as Joyce can cram into
remarks which are ostensibly about
popular entertainment…."
James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake:
A Study of Literary Allusions
in James Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE ,
Southern Illinois University Press,
Carbondale and Edwardsville
(1959. Arcturus Books Edition 1974), p. 146.
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James Joyce reportedly died on today's date in 1941.
Comments Off on Joyce’s Wake
(Continued from previous episodes)
Boole and Galois also figure in the mathematics of space —
i.e. , geometry. See Boole + Galois in this journal.
Related material, according to Jung’s notion of synchronicity —
Comments Off on Geometry for Jews
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
The above sketch indicates, in a vague, hand-waving, fashion,
a connection between Galois spaces and harmonic analysis.
For more details of the connection, see (for instance) yesterday
afternoon's post Space Oddity.
Comments Off on Harmonic Analysis and Galois Spaces
… 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.
Comments Off on Lechner’s Beginning
Monday, January 11, 2016
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.
Comments Off on 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
Comments Off on Left-Handed Critique
It is an odd fact that the close relationship between some
small Galois spaces and small Boolean spaces has gone
unremarked by mathematicians.
A Google search today for “Galois spaces” + “Boolean spaces”
yielded, apart from merely terminological sources, only some
introductory material I have put on the Web myself.
Some more sophisticated searches, however led to a few
documents from the years 1971 – 1981 …
“Harmonic Analysis of Switching Functions” ,
by Robert J. Lechner, Ch. 5 in A. Mukhopadhyay, editor,
Recent Developments in Switching Theory , Academic Press, 1971.
“Galois Switching Functions and Their Applications,”
by B. Benjauthrit and I. S. Reed,
JPL Deep Space Network Progress Report 42-27 , 1975
D.K. Pradhan, “A Theory of Galois Switching Functions,”
IEEE Trans. Computers , vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 239-249, Mar. 1978
“Switching functions constructed by Galois extension fields,”
by Iwaro Takahashi, Information and Control ,
Volume 48, Issue 2, pp. 95–108, February 1981
An illustration from the Lechner paper above —
“There is such a thing as harmonic analysis of switching functions.”
— Saying adapted from a young-adult novel
Comments Off on Space Oddity
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.
Comments Off on Surreal Midrash
Sunday, January 10, 2016
This journal last Sunday —
For a more traditional sermon from last Sunday
at Nassau Presbyterian Church, Princeton NJ,
see "God for Dummies."
Comments Off on Sermons
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
Comments Off on Sunday Morning Narrative
The title is adapted from that of George Steiner's book
Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik
(Published by Viking Adult on June 25, 1974.)
For fields of narrative force, see the previous post.
See as well a memorable review by the late Florence King
of the novel The Eight by Katherine Neville. An illustration
from that review (The New York Times , January 15, 1989) —
Related material: Closing the Circle (Log24, Sept. 24, 2009).
Comments Off on Field of Force
Saturday, January 9, 2016
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 —
Over the years, some critics took Miss King’s writing to task not for its ideology — the ideology, it was widely understood, went hand in glove with the work — but for its rhetorical excesses.
“She is sharp, no doubt about it,” the novelist and journalist Mary Cantwell wrote in The Times Book Review in 1982, reviewing Miss King’s satirical novel “When Sisterhood Was in Flower.” “Too bad she tends to blunt her points by pushing them too hard.”
But even a blunt instrument, Miss King made plain, admirably served her desired ends.
— Margalit Fox in this afternoon's online New York Times
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Comments Off on When Sisterhood Was in Flower
Charlize Theron in “Young Adult” (2011) —
Related material for older adults: Ravenna and Nietzsche.
Comments Off on Logos
Friday, January 8, 2016
"And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert."
Comments Off on Triumph of the Will
See the title phrase in this journal.
See as well The Eight Revisited (Feb. 26, 2003).
Comments Off on Ein Kampf
For the 2016 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle —
"Condescension and a certain amount of hostility
used to mark the critical reaction…."
— Emma Brockes on Stephen King in
The Guardian , 21 Sept. 2013
Related material:
Remarks from Tilings and Patterns , by Branko Grünbaum
and G. C. Shephard, quoted in the webpage Pattern Groups.
Comments Off on Condescension and Hostility
Thursday, January 7, 2016
It's been a long, long time.
Comments Off on Hello Kitty
“… an illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate stage.
But if Holy the Firm is ‘underneath salts,’ if Holy the Firm
is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima , absolute zero,
and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base,
then the circle is unbroken. And it is.”
— Annie Dillard
Comments Off on Annie’s Song
… Continues. See previous episodes.
See as well …
The above image is from April 7, 2003.
Comments Off on Point Omega…
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.
Comments Off on In Memoriam
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
The above passage is from a Dec. 19, 2015, post,
Nunc Stans , on the death of New York Philharmonic
music director emeritus Kurt Masur.
See also a Log24 search for the word "Correspondences."
Comments Off on Correspondences
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
Comments Off on Sousa vs. Boulez
Comments Off on Un point véritablement final
The title is a new URL.
Midrash on the URL suffix —
" 'I/O' is a computer term of very long standing
that means 'input/output,' i.e. the means by which
a computer communicates with the outside world.
In a domain name, it's a shibboleth that implies
that the intended audience for a site is other
programmers."
— Phil Darnowsky on Dec. 18, 2014
Remarks for a wider audience —
See some Log24 posts related to Dec. 18, 2014.
Comments Off on Galois.io
Comments Off on For the Graveyard Shift
Comments Off on Quarter to Three
A quarter to three …
… and a philosopher's Stone —
Comments Off on Epiphany for Jews
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Comments Off on GitHub Finite-Geometry Page
Monday, January 4, 2016
Continued from previous post.
Detail —
Comments Off on “You know my methods…”
Comments Off on Modern Mythology…
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"
Comments Off on Seer and Sneer
Looking
For what was
Where it used to be
Comments Off on After Wallace Stevens
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.
Comments Off on Supplement to Logic
Sunday, January 3, 2016
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 …
Comments Off on Blur and Murk in an Old Year
A new finite-geometry site will, I hope,
display the above attributes. It is intended
to have a more discursive approach than
my current files at finitegeometry.org/sc.
Comments Off on Focus and Clarity in the New Year
Saturday, January 2, 2016
"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
Comments Off on Focus and Clarity
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.
Comments Off on The Beethoven Midrash
The New Yorker on March 2, 1992 —
Related material: Go Set a Structure.
Comments Off on A Very Strange Enchanted Town
Friday, January 1, 2016
"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
Comments Off on Meanwhile, back in 1952…
A recent phrase from art critic Peter Schjeldahl —
"art in essence, immaculately conceived."
But see "symplectic" in this journal.
Comments Off on Art as Religion
Thursday, December 31, 2015
(Continued from this date last year,
"Spiel ist nicht Spielerei. ")
Comments Off on High Concept
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
"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'."
Comments Off on Painting the News
On the exit of an historian from the academic
stage on Sunday, December 13, 2015 —
"History is one thing, drama is another."
— Savonarola Brown
Comments Off on Another Show
The previous post discussed some art related to the
deceptively simple concept of "four colors."
For other related material, see posts that contain a link
to "…mapsys.html."
Comments Off on Inverse Image
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
A passage linked to here on the afternoon of Dec. 6, 2015 —
From news.artnet.com, Dec. 16, 2014 —
"Kosuth's early roots were in analytical philosophy, and his neons fiddle with that legacy: it's language that considers the nature of language as it describes the world—as it makes meaning and creates objects. So the earliest here, Five Fives (to Donald Judd) , from 1965, is five rows of five words, of the numbers one through to 25 which stack up like bricks in an unfinished wall. Like the nearby phrase "An Object Self-Defined" (Self-Defined Object [green], 1966), or the four colored words of Four Colours Four Words (1966) it's a test of the relationship of a thing to an idea to a word. These texts short-circuit the question of how visual art relates to how we speak about it, dating from a period when modern art had gotten stuck with a certain idea of what modern art should look like, and how it should be talked about."
— JJ Charlesworth
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Comments Off on Four and Four
Monday, December 28, 2015
"Tell me the news, something I can use
Something red hot to light my fuse"
— Motörhead, "Bad Magic" album
Illustration from Oct. 25, 2013.
Comments Off on Fuse
Combining two headlines from this morning’s
New York Times and Washington Post , we have…
Deceptively Simple Geometries
on a Bold Scale
Voilà —
Click image for details.
More generally, see
Boole vs. Galois.
Comments Off on ART WARS Continues
The previous post quoted Holland Cotter's description of
the late Ellsworth Kelly as one who might have admired
"the anonymous role of the Romanesque church artist."
Work of a less anonymous sort was illustrated today by both
The New York Times and The Washington Post —
The Post 's remarks are of particular interest:
Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post , Dec. 28, 2015,
on a work by the late Ellsworth Kelly —
“Sculpture for a Large Wall” consisted of 104 anodized aluminum panels, colored red, blue, yellow and black, and laid out on four long rows measuring 65 feet. Each panel seemed different from the next, subtle variations on the parallelogram, and yet together they also suggested a kind of language, or code, as if their shapes, colors and repeating patterns spelled out a basic computer language, or proto-digital message.
The space in between the panels, and the shadows they cast on the wall, were also part of the effect, creating a contrast between the material substance of the art, and the cascading visual and mental ideas it conveyed. The piece was playful, and serious; present and absent; material and imaginary; visually bold and intellectually diaphanous.
Often, with Kelly, you felt as if he offered up some ideal slice of the world, decontextualized almost to the point of absurdity. A single arc sliced out of a circle; a single perfect rectangle; one bold juxtaposition of color or shape. But when he allowed his work to encompass more complexity, to indulge a rhetoric of repetition, rhythmic contrasts, and multiple self-replicating ideas, it began to feel like language, or narrative. And this was always his best mode.
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Compare and contrast a 2010 work by Josefine Lyche —
Lyche's mirrors-on-the-wall installation is titled
"The 2×2 Case (Diamond Theorem)."
It is based on a smaller illustration of my own.
These variations also, as Kennicott said of Kelly's,
"suggested a kind of language, or code."
This may well be the source of their appeal for Lyche.
For me, however, such suggestiveness is irrelevant to the
significance of the variations in a larger purely geometric
context.
This context is of course quite inaccessible to most art
critics. Steve Martin, however, has a phrase that applies
to both Kelly's and Lyche's installations: "wall power."
See a post of Dec. 15, 2010.
Comments Off on Mirrors, Mirrors, on the Wall
Sunday, December 27, 2015
The death of a well-known artist today suggested
a search for Pythagorean Stone in this journal.
An image from that search, together with a sentence
from his obituary, may serve as a memorial.
From a New York Times obituary
by Holland Cotter tonight —
"The anonymous role of
the Romanesque church artist
remained a model."
* For the title, see the two previous posts.
Comments Off on Rigorous Imagist*
Wexler reportedly died this morning in Santa Monica.
Comments Off on Imagist
A death on Xmas Day —
Artist Josefine Lyche —
Symbol —
Monday, November 7, 2011
Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:30 AM
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
The New York Times Magazine on St. Andrew's Day, 2003.
.
For some background on this enigmatic equation,
see Geometry of the I Ching.
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Comments Off on Rigorous
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Mirror, Mirror, on the wall,
Robbing Peter, paying Paul
Comments Off on Midnight Reflection
Friday, December 25, 2015
See Fields of Force and recent posts.
From PR Newswire in July 2011 —
Campus Crusade for Christ Adopts New Name: Cru
60-year-old Int’l Ministry Aims to Increase
Relevance and Global Effectiveness
Related material:
Yin + Yang —
Comments Off on At Play in the Fields
Related material:
The previous post (Bright Symbol) and
a post from Wednesday,
December 23, 2015, that links to posts
on Boolean algebra vs. Galois geometry.
"An analogy between mathematics and religion is apposite."
— Harvard Magazine review by Avner Ash of
Mathematics without Apologies
(Princeton University Press, January 18, 2015)
Comments Off on Dark Symbol
Detail:
Comments Off on Bright Symbol
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Comments Off on Group Actions…
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
(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
Comments Off on Style
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 —
Comments Off on Class of 64
Bleecker Street logo —
Click image for some background.
Related remarks on mathematics:
Boole vs. Galois
Comments Off on Splitting Apart
"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.
Comments Off on Analogy
"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.
Comments Off on Mark
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
This journal on Saturday, Dec. 19 —
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness
is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973,
page 118
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In memory of Madame Claude, who
reportedly died in Nice December 19:
"There were fairies and spirits."
Amen.
Comments Off on Bell de Jour
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
Comments Off on Goal
Comments Off on Boulevard of Broken Punchlines
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 —
Comments Off on How Deep the Darkness
Monday, December 21, 2015
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.
Comments Off on The Eppstein Edit
Related material: Snow White Dance.
Comments Off on Geometry for Snow White
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.
Comments Off on Oral-Aural
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.
Comments Off on ART WARS (continued)
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.
Comments Off on Slouching Towards Christmas (continued)
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Related material: Big Apple and Nunc Stans.
Comments Off on The Eight
Saturday, December 19, 2015
On conductor Kurt Masur, who reportedly died at 88
in Greenwich, Connecticut, today, Saturday, Dec.19, 2015 —
"Rehearsal conductor at Halle State Theater,
Saxony, East Germany, conductor at Erfurt City Theater
and Leipzig Opera, and guest conductor with Leipzig
and Dresden Radio orchestras, 1951-53…."
Motifs from yesterday's 9 PM post —
Design from 1697
— and from a novel by Thomas Mann:
Design from 1514
Related text —
Comments Off on Nunc Stans
Friday, December 18, 2015
Images related to the previous post —
Detail of the 1697 Leibniz medal
Leibniz, letter of 1697:
“And so that I won’t come entirely empty-handed this time, I enclose a design of that which I had the pleasure of discussing with you recently. It is in the form of a memorial coin or medallion; and though the design is mediocre and can be improved in accordance with your judgment, the thing is such, that it would be worth showing in silver now and unto future generations, if it were struck at your Highness’s command. Because one of the main points of the Christian Faith, and among those points that have penetrated least into the minds of the worldly-wise and that are difficult to make with the heathen is the creation of all things out of nothing through God’s omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing. And it would be difficult to find a better illustration of this secret in nature or philosophy; hence I have set on the medallion design IMAGO CREATIONIS [in the image of creation]. It is no less remarkable that there appears therefrom, not only that God made everything from nothing, but also that everything that He made was good; as we can see here, with our own eyes, in this image of creation. Because instead of there appearing no particular order or pattern, as in the common representation of numbers, there appears here in contrast a wonderful order and harmony which cannot be improved upon….
Such harmonious order and beauty can be seen in the small table on the medallion up to 16 or 17; since for a larger table, say to 32, there is not enough room. One can further see that the disorder, which one imagines in the work of God, is but apparent; that if one looks at the matter with the proper perspective, there appears symmetry, which encourages one more and more to love and praise the wisdom, goodness, and beauty of the highest good, from which all goodness and beauty has flowed.”
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See also some related posts in this journal.
Comments Off on Box of Nothing
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.)
Comments Off on Sequel
Thursday, December 17, 2015
British author Peter Dickinson, who reportedly died yesterday,
Dec. 16, 2015, at 88, wrote the following (published in the UK
in 1975 and in the US in 1976) —
Inverted image of the above page —
See also, from the date of Dickinson's death, a post on
"A Fight for the Soul…" and a post on the symbol "S."
Of interest too are some remarks related to today's earlier post,
"Hint of Reality" …
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From an article* in Proceedings of Bridges 2014 —
As artists, we are particularly interested in the symmetries of real world physical objects.
Three natural questions arise:
1. Which groups can be represented as the group of symmetries of some real-world physical object?
2. Which groups have actually been represented as the group of symmetries of some real-world physical object?
3. Are there any glaring gaps – small, beautiful groups that should have a physical representation in a symmetric object but up until now have not?
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The article was cited by Evelyn Lamb in her Scientific American
weblog on May 19, 2014.
The above three questions from the article are relevant to a more
recent (Oct. 24, 2015) remark by Lamb:
"… finite projective planes [in particular, the 7-point Fano plane,
about which Lamb is writing] seem like a triumph of purely
axiomatic thinking over any hint of reality…."
For related hints of reality, see Eightfold Cube in this journal.
* "The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group," by Vi Hart and Henry Segerman
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Wednesday, December 16, 2015
See pages 36 and 37 of Suzanne Gieser's The Innermost Kernel
as well as PyrE in The Stars My Destination and Old St. Patrick's*
in "Gangs of New York."
For some related aesthetic remarks, see a New Yorker essay
published onlne today and this journal's previous post.
* The older version of the "Old St. Patrick's"
of The Stars My Destination . (Update of 4/21/16.)
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Meets the Kernel in the Nutshell.
This post was suggested by the title of Natalie Wolchover’s
article in Quanta Magazine today,
“A Fight for the Soul of Science.”
The post continues a meditation on the number 6
as the kernel in the nutshell of 15.
For an illustration of the 6 in the 15,
see nocciolo in this journal.
For an illustration of the jewel in the lotus,
see that phrase in this journal.
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“How do you get young people excited about space?”
— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012
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In memory of "a phenomenal merchandiser"
who reportedly died on Monday, Dec. 14, 2015:
Click on image for some backstory.
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Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Continued from Dec. 11, 2014.
Click images for related material.
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Click image for some background.
Exercise: Note that, modulo color-interchange, the set of 15 two-color
patterns above is invariant under the group of six symmetries of the
equilateral triangle. Are there any other such sets of 15 two-color triangular
patterns that are closed as sets , modulo color-interchange, under the six
triangle symmetries and under the 322,560 permutations of the 16
subtriangles induced by actions of the affine group AGL(4,2)
on the 16 subtriangles' centers , given a suitable coordinatization?
Comments Off on Square Triangles
Comments Off on Surrealistic Alarm Clock*
Monday, December 14, 2015
From the previous post:
"Neat, Dr. Walker, thought Peter Slater—
neat, and totally without content."
— Paul Preuss's 1983 novel Broken Symmetries
A background check yields …
"Dr. Evan Harris Walker died on the evening of
August 17, 2006…."
A synchronicity check of that date in this journal yields a diagram
that, taken by itself, is "neat, and totally without content." —
The diagram may be viewed as a tribute
to the late Yogi Berra, to the literary
"Garden of Forking Paths," or, more
seriously, to the modular group Γ.
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(Continued)
See a post by Peter Woit from Sept. 24, 2005 — Dirac's Hidden Geometry.
The connection, if any, with recent Log24 posts on Dirac and Geometry
is not immediately apparent. Some related remarks from a novel —
From Broken Symmetries by Paul Preuss
(first published by Simon and Schuster in 1983) —
"He pondered the source of her fascination with the occult, which sooner or later seemed to entangle a lot of thoughtful people who were not already mired in establishmentarian science or religion. It was the religious impulse, at base. Even reason itself could function as a religion, he supposed— but only for those of severely limited imagination.
He’d toyed with 'psi' himself, written a couple of papers now much quoted by crackpots, to his chagrin. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand— for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox. Quantum theory was inextricable from the uncertainty relations.
The classical fox knows many things, but the quantum-mechanical hedgehog knows only one big thing— at a time. 'Complementarity,' Bohr had called it, a rubbery notion the great professor had stretched to include numerous pairs of opposites. Peter Slater was willing to call it absurdity, and unlike some of his older colleagues who, following in Einstein’s footsteps, demanded causal explanations for everything (at least in principle), Peter had never thirsted after 'hidden variables' to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.
The psychic investigators, on the other hand, demanded to know how the mind and the psychical world were related. Through ectoplasm, perhaps? Some fifth force of nature? Extra dimensions of spacetime? All these naive explanations were on a par with the assumption that psi is propagated by a species of nonlocal hidden variables, the favored explanation of sophisticates; ignotum per ignotius .
'In this connection one should particularly remember that the human language permits the construction of sentences which do not involve any consequences and which therefore have no content at all…' The words were Heisenberg’s, lecturing in 1929 on the irreducible ambiguity of the uncertainty relations. They reminded Peter of Evan Harris Walker’s ingenious theory of the psi force, a theory that assigned psi both positive and negative values in such a way that the mere presence of a skeptic in the near vicinity of a sensitive psychic investigation could force null results. Neat, Dr. Walker, thought Peter Slater— neat, and totally without content.
One had to be willing to tolerate ambiguity; one had to be willing to be crazy. Heisenberg himself was only human— he’d persuasively woven ambiguity into the fabric of the universe itself, but in that same set of 1929 lectures he’d rejected Dirac’s then-new wave equations with the remark, 'Here spontaneous transitions may occur to the states of negative energy; as these have never been observed, the theory is certainly wrong.' It was a reasonable conclusion, and that was its fault, for Dirac’s equations suggested the existence of antimatter: the first antiparticles, whose existence might never have been suspected without Dirac’s crazy results, were found less than three years later.
Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem— they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry."
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Particularly relevant …
"Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him,
mere formal relationships which existed at all times,
everywhere, at once."
Some related pure mathematics —
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Sunday, December 13, 2015
Ben Brantley in tonight's online review of a show that
reportedly opened off-Broadway on Dec. 10, 2015 —
" 'Mattress' has its charms, but they do wear thin. "
See also The New York Times on Martin Gardner Nov. 30:
A companion image from this journal
on the "Mattress" opening date —
Midrash:
Vonnegut Asterisk
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"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
— Martin Gardner on the death of Évariste Galois
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Saturday, December 12, 2015
Comments Off on The Frequency Problem
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:
Comments Off on Take This, Waltz
Friday, December 11, 2015
Opening scene from "Synecdoche, New York."
Midnight update: See Sinatra in Popcorn Theology.
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For readers of recent Log24 posts mentioning artificial intelligence
(Church for Rebecca) and Pluto (Street View) —
— Times Wire this afternoon
The post mentioning Pluto contained David Farrell Krell's
misleading conflation of Goethe's "Plutus, god of plenty"
with Pluto, "king of the domain of the dead."
For some background on Plutus, see Wikipedia.
For some background on Pluto by an author I much prefer to Krell,
see A Shadow for Groundhog Day (this journal, February 2, 2014).
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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.
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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 .
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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."
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Thursday, December 10, 2015
Two images from December 2, 2015 …
From Log24 and from
the American Mathematical Society —
Comments Off on Art Brut?
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
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Wednesday, December 9, 2015
"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.
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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
Comments Off on Eternity (Not by Calvin Klein*)
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
"There is a place for a hint somewhere
of a big agent, to complete the picture."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
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"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.
Comments Off on Never Stop Exploring.
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.
Comments Off on Lights, Camera, van Doesburg!
A December 7th New York Times column:
A current exhibition by Joseph Kosuth in Oslo:
From the two texts by Mondrian at the right hand of Kosuth —
"The positive and negative states of being bring about action."
"Through its pure relationships, purely abstract art
can approach the expression of the universal …."
These texts may be viewed as glosses on the following image —
Click image for related posts.
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"Remember, Genesis IS Skynet."
Bloomberg News today:
Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence
"Computers are 'starting to open their eyes,' said a senior fellow at Google."
Comments Off on Church for Rebecca
Monday, December 7, 2015
For the title, see The New York Times and the oeuvre of Joseph Kosuth.
From The Dreaming Jewels , by Theodore Sturgeon:
"Oh. And the crystals make things — even complete things — like Tin Pan Alley makes songs."
"Something like it." Zena smiled. It was the first smile in a long while. "Sit down, honey; I'll bring the toast. Now — this is my guess — when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don't make it from just anything the way the single crystals do. First they seem to die together. For weeks they lie like that. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that's alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. You can't see the change going on in the thing they're replacing. It might be a dog; the dog will keep on eating and running around; it will howl at the moon and chase cats. But one day — I don't know how long it takes — it will be completely replaced, every bit of it."
"Then what?"
"Then it can change itself — if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything if it wants to be."
Bunny stopped chewing, thought, swallowed, and asked, "Change how?"
"Oh, it could get bigger or smaller. Grow more limbs. Go into a funny shape — thin and flat, or round like a ball. If it's hurt it can grow new limbs. And it could do things with thought that we can't even imagine. Bunny, did you ever read about werewolves?"
"Those nasty things that change from wolves to men and back again?"
Zena sipped coffee. "Mmm. Well, those are mostly legends, but they could have started when someone saw a change like that."
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See as well The Dreaming Jewels
and "Steven Universe" in this journal.
You can't make this stuff up.
Comments Off on Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter
From a Log24 post of October 1, 2015 —
Meme, dream, theme … or damned nightmare?
Comments Off on McGinn Illustrated
From "AMNESIA: VARIOUS, LUMINOUS, FIXED,"
An exhibition by Joseph Kosuth at
Sprüth Magers Gallery London,
NOVEMBER 26 2014 – FEBRUARY 14 2015 —
This journal, NOVEMBER 26 2014 –
This journal, FEBRUARY 14 2015 —
Comments Off on Wittgenstein Illustrated
Sunday, December 6, 2015
A Log24 Hanukkah from five years ago (Dec. 5, 2010) —
Related material: Oslo artist Josefine Lyche's
private Instagram photo of her adolescence with
a ZX Spectrum, and Symbols, Local and Global.
Comments Off on American Hustlers
"Those early works are succinct and uncompromising
in how they give shape to the philosophical perplexities
of form and idea…."
J. J. Charlesworth, artnet news, Dec. 16, 2014
"Form" and "idea" are somewhat synonymous,
as opposed to "form" and "substance." A reading:
Discuss.
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By Harlan Kane
See Omega (June 11, 2015).
Comments Off on The Omega Weekend
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