Saturday, October 24, 2015
The Academy Strikes Back
The previous two posts touched on two academic
pursuits, mathematics and football. These are united
in the vesica piscis symbol. See posts tagged
"Universe of Discourse."
Two Views of Finite Space
The following slides are from lectures on “Advanced Boolean Algebra” —
The small Boolean spaces above correspond exactly to some small
Galois spaces. These two names indicate approaches to the spaces
via Boolean algebra and via Galois geometry .
A reading from Atiyah that seems relevant to this sort of algebra
and this sort of geometry —
” ‘All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry
and you will have this marvellous machine.’ (Nowadays you
can think of it as a computer!) “
Related material — The article “Diamond Theory” in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977. That
article, despite the word “computer” in the journal’s title, was
much less about Boolean algebra than about Galois geometry .
For later remarks on diamond theory, see finitegeometry.org/sc.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Square Inch Space (Continued*)
* See "Square Inch Space" in this journal.
Retro or Not?
Happy birthday to the late Michael Crichton (Harvard ’64).
See also Diamond Theory Roulette —
Part of the ReCode Project (http://recodeproject.com). Based on "Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane, originally published in "Computer Graphics and Art" Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977. Copyright (c) 2013 Radames Ajna — OSI/MIT license (http://recodeproject/license).
Related remarks on Plato for Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design —
See also posts from the above publication date, March 31,
2006, among posts now tagged “The Church in Philadelphia.”
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Zemeckis* meets von Trier**
A Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Objective Quality
Software writer Richard P. Gabriel describes some work of design
philosopher Christopher Alexander in the 1960's at Harvard:
A more interesting account of these 35 structures:
"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between
the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions
of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2)
such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding
triples have exactly one element in common."
— "Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries,"
by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem,
April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6.
For some context, see Eightfold Geometry by Steven H. Cullinane.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Algebra and Space
"Perhaps an insane conceit …." Perhaps.
Related remarks on algebra and space —
"The Quality Without a Name" (Log24, August 26, 2015).
Liminal Figures
"On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street…."
On an artist who reportedly died last Thursday, October 15 —
See yesterday's post Liminal for a different sort of figure.
Priest Logic for Frodo
Elijah Wood in "The Last Witch Hunter" —
See Graham Priest in this journal.
See also Coxeter + Discursive.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Liminal
The New York Times has a readable, if not informative,
review of a recent controversial account of history —
"For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state,
floating somewhere between fact and mythology."
— Jonathan Mahler, online Times on Oct. 15, 2015
[See Wikipedia on Liminality.]
Mahler begins his review with a statement by the President
on the night of May 1, 2011.
A more easily checked statement quoted here on that date:
"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from
its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt,
whose elements acquire their significance from the
system as a whole."
— Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols , Ithaca, NY,
Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 51, quoted by
Beth Barrie in "Victor Turner."
A Gestalt from "Verhexung ," the previous post —
Guitart's statement that the above figure is a "Boolean logical cube"
seems, in the words of the Times , to be "floating somewhere
between fact and mythology." Discuss.
(My apologies to those who feel that attempting to make sense
of Guitart makes them feel like Vin Diesel in the Dreamworld.)
Verhexung
“Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung
unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.”
— Philosophical Investigations (1953), Section 109
An example of Verhexung from the René Guitart article in the previous post —
See also Ein Kampf .
Monday, October 19, 2015
Symmetric Generation of the Simple Order-168 Group
This post continues recent thoughts on the work of René Guitart.
A 2014 article by Guitart gives a great deal of detail on his
approach to symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168 —
“Hexagonal Logic of the Field F8 as a Boolean Logic
with Three Involutive Modalities,” pp. 191-220 in
The Road to Universal Logic:
Festschrift for 50th Birthday of
Jean-Yves Béziau, Volume I,
Editors: Arnold Koslow, Arthur Buchsbaum,
Birkhäuser Studies in Universal Logic, dated 2015
by publisher but Oct. 11, 2014, by Amazon.com.
See also the eightfold cube in this journal.
Now and Zen
I found today that the following reference to my work —
Steven H. Cullinane.
Geometry of the I Ching. 2006 [text]
— was placed by Anthony Judge in a draft webpage
dated 24 August 2015.
Today's previous Log24 post, Zen and the Art,
suggests some context I prefer to the colorful
remarks of Judge — namely, a Log24 search for
See esp. a post from the date of the Judge webpage,
24 August 2015, titled
Zen and the Art
According to René Guitart in May 2008 —
"In fact, in concrete terms, the Mathematical Pulsation is
nothing else but the thing that everyone does when doing
mathematics, even the most elementary ones. It is a very
special gesture in understanding ('geste de pensée'), well
known by each mathematician. The mind have to go to
and fro between to antinomical postures: to have the
situation under control, to leave the door open. To master
and to fix (a clear unique meaning) or to neglect and to
change (toward other possible meanings). Because of the
similarity of the pulsation of inspiration and expiration in
breath with the pulsation of closing and opening phases
in mathematical thinking, at the end of [Guitart (2003/a)]
I suggested to consider the famous book 'Zen in the Art
of Archery' [Herrigel (1997)] as a true treatise in didactic
of mathematics: just you have to replace everywhere the
words 'archery' by 'mathematical proof'."
Related material: Heisenberg on Beauty and the previous post.
Update of 6:20 AM Oct. 19, 2015 —
„Ich begriff plötzlich, daß in der Sprache oder doch
mindestens im Geist des Glasperlenspiels tatsächlich
alles allbedeutend sei, daß jedes Symbol und jede
Kombination von Symbolen nicht hierhin oder dorthin,
nicht zu einzelnen Beispielen, Experimenten und
Beweisen führe, sondern ins Zentrum, ins Geheimnis
und Innerste der Welt, in das Urwissen. Jeder Übergang
von Dur zu Moll in einer Sonate, jede Wandlung eines
Mythos oder eines Kultes, jede klassische, künstlerische
Formulierung sei, so erkannte ich im Blitz jenes
Augenblicks, bei echter meditativer Betrachtung,
nichts andres als ein unmittelbarer Weg ins Innere
des Weltgeheimnisses, wo im Hin und Wider zwischen
Ein- und Ausatmen, zwischen Himmel und Erde,
zwischen Yin und Yang sich ewig das Heilige vollzieht.“
— Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel.
Berlin: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2012. p. 172,
as quoted in a weblog.
For a version in English, see Summa Mythologica (Nov. 3, 2009).
Borromean Generators
From slides dated June 28, 2008 —
Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —
It seems that Guitart discovered these "A, B, C" generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube.
Some context: The epigraph to my webpage
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168" —
"Let G be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D) ,
where V is an n-dimensional vector space over the
division ring D . Assume that G is generated by 'nice'
transformations. The problem is then to try to determine
(up to GL(V) -conjugacy) all possibilities for G . Of course,
this problem is very vague. But it is a classical one,
going back 150 years, and yet very much alive today."
— William M. Kantor, "Generation of Linear Groups,"
pp. 497-509 in The Geometric Vein: The Coxeter Festschrift ,
published by Springer, 1981
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Shard Sermon
Story the First,
Which Describes a Looking-Glass
and the Broken Fragments
"You must attend to the commencement
of this story, for when we get to the end
we shall know more than we do now about
a very wicked hobgoblin; he was one of the
very worst, for he was a real demon."
Houghton Mifflin edition of 1880, Riverside Press, Cambridge
See as well Shard in this journal.
Sunday School
A Unified Field —
Click the above image for further details.
See also a search in this journal for Jorie Graham.
Related dramatic dialogue for Emma Stone and
Joaquin Phoenix, actors in "Irrational Man" —
"Are you aware of what's going on at that table?"
Philosophical backstory by Hans Christian Andersen —
"He was quite frightened, and he tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer;
but all he could do, he was only able to remember the multiplication table."
Ballet Blanc
For more about the coordinatization problem
of the previous post, see Ballet Blanc .
Coordinatization Problem
There are various ways to coordinatize a 3×3 array
(the Chinese "Holy Field'). Here are some —
See Cullinane, Coxeter, and Knight tour.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Fair Lady (Continued)
From "Class of 64 continues… " (March 18, 2014) —
"To see a difficult uncompromising material
take living shape and meaning
is to be Pygmalion…." — Ex-Prodigy
No, you are not the only.
Contrapuntal Interweaving
(Continued from day before yesterday.)
"Sondheim's story is a dense contrapuntal interweaving
of four main fairy-tale stories…."
— Vladimir V. Zelevinsky, 1998 review
in The Tech at MIT
Related material: "Weaver's Tale" last Sunday,
and the novel Weaveworld in this journal.
Friday, October 16, 2015
Mira’s Dance
"Only in the dance do I know how to tell
the parable of the highest things."
— Nietzsche
Wisconsin Death Trip…
"Claudia Card, an internationally known UW-Madison professor
and a leading expert in the philosophy of evil, died what she
considered a 'good' death…."
Card, 74, died… on Sept. 12."
— Samara Kalk Derby in Wisconsin State Journal
on Columbus Day, 2015
See as well a remark by Lorrie Moore in this journal
on the above death date.
Death on Columbus Day
See as well a meditation by Lorrie Moore quoted here
on the feast of St. Luke in 2003.
Related thoughts: Log24 on Columbus Day, and Plan 9.
Speaking of Birthdays…
Knock, Knock, Knockin' —
A Scene from "Tomorrowland" —
See August 30, 2002, the day that "Tomorrowland"
actress Raffey Cassidy was born. On that date, this
journal contained the following quotation —
"He's a Mad Scientist and I'm his Beautiful Daughter."
— Deety in Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.
George Clooney and Raffey Cassidy in "Tomorrowland" —
Happy birthday to John Polkinghorne, an English
theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and Anglican priest.
Spoils for Harvard
Nian Hu in The Harvard Crimson this morning, Oct. 16:
"Hey Harvard, it’s Friday and it’s the weekend again–
though sadly, not another three-day one. On this day
in 1844, Friedrich Nietzsche was born. Remember
his wise words 'That which does not kill us, makes us
stronger' when prepping for midterms this weekend."
A fact check shows that Nietzsche was born yesterday .
A source check shows that the Nietzsche quote is from a book
with alternative title "How to Philosophize with a Hammer."
Click on the image below for related materal.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Contrapuntal Interweaving
The title is a phrase from R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience .
(Published in the psychedelic year 1967. The later "contrapuntal interweaving"
below is of a less psychedelic nature.)
An illustration of the "interweaving' part of the title —
The "deep structure" of the diamond theorem:
.
The word "symplectic" from the end of last Sunday's (Oct. 11) sermon
describes the "interwoven" nature of the above illustration.
An illustration of the "contrapuntal" part of the title (click to enlarge):
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Grammar of Life
This post was suggested in part by an illustration from Tuesday's
"The Tombstone Source" —
Politically, if not grammatically, correct Columbus Day history
comes from the Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri —
"But armed with guns, steel, and germs,
and driven by the conquistador’s lust for
gold and slaves, the population of the
Americas was decimated."
— Oct. 12 blog post by the church's pastor
The Missouri church should not be confused with other
"Word of Life" churches… esp. not any now in the news for
their activities on Monday, Oct. 12, Columbus Day, 2015.
For a related ungrammatical remark, see Schoolboy Problem.
The Tombstone Code
For Dan Brown enthusiasts, a sequel to the previous post, "The Tombstone Source."
As that post notes, the following symbol is now used as a story-end "tombstone" at
T: The New York Times Style Magazine. The Times uses style-sheet code, not
the rarely used unicode character below, to produce the tombstone.
Related material — The novel The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
that was reviewed in January 2012 by Commentary magazine :
Fiction, Fiction, Burning Bright
D. G. MYERS / JAN. 19, 2012
Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
304 pp. $25.95.
According to the Jews, the world begins
with speech. God says, “There is light,”
and so there is light. But what if something
happened — it doesn’t really matter what —
and speech turned lethal?
That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet ,
the third novel by Ben Marcus,
a creative writing professor at Columbia
University….
A much better novel along these lines is Lexicon (2013) by Max Barry.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
The Tombstone Source
Readings from this afternoon's online New York Times :
THE SOURCE:
<p class="story-body-text story-content" The writer Ari Shavit has written that Ein Harod is ‘‘imprinted on every Israeli’s psyche,’’ a microcosm of the Zionist project itself. ‘‘In a sense it is our Source,’’ he writes, ‘‘our point of departure.’’ And yet the often-overlooked museum at its heart is a different kind of symbol, at once more personal and more universal. God may have been banished from Ein Harod, but there, in a humble building on a kibbutz that has seen better days, you experience the Psalmic ideal of being ‘‘enveloped in light,’’ and with it, a reminder of history’s emotional inner life. <span class="tombstone"><i class="icon"></i></span></p> |
STYLE CODE:
Entertainment at Harvard
(Continued from Monday afternoon's "Con Vocation" link.)
From The Harvard Crimson this morning —
"David Black, author and scholar-in-residence
at Kirkland House, entertained a small group
of attendees with a reading of his latest novel
Fast Shuffle Monday evening in Kirkland’s
Senior Common Room."
From a Kirkus Reviews review of Fast Shuffle last July —
" 'My heritage is of Jewish socialists on one side,'
Black explains, 'and of Jewish gangsters on the
other side. My great aunt was Polly Adler [the
(in)famous Manhattan madam of the '20s, '30s
and early '40s whose girls entertained some of
the guys from the Algonquin roundtable]. It's a
mix of idealism and gritty practicality. I delight
in both.' "
Non-entertainment from the publication date of Fast Shuffle :
Escape from Dark City
The title refers to the 1998 film "Dark City," whose protagonist
seeks an escape to "Shell Beach."
Another postcard, in memory of album cover art director
John Berg, who reportedly died at 83 on Sunday —
Click album cover for a background story.
See also the Log24 post "Hits" (January 5, 2014).
"Well, she was blinded by the light…"
Monday, October 12, 2015
Space, Time, Matter (continued)
Cool Mystery:
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
The above images are from a Log24 post of October 5, 2011.
Related material for fans of recreational math and Manil Suri —
A book that Amazon.com says was published on that same date —
October 5, 2011 —
Space, Time and Matter
by Ashay Dharwadker (Author), Vinay Dharwadker (Author)
Product Details
- Paperback: 98 pages
-
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform (October 5, 2011) - Language: English
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,605,448 in Books
See as well …
Con Vocation (Log24, Sept. 2, 2014).
Ex Tenebris
“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 |
"The Tesseract is where it belongs: out of our reach."
— Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury,
quoted here on Epiphany 2013
Earlier … (See Jan. 27, 2012) …
"And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert."
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Weavers’ Tale
"Andersen's weavers, as one commentator points out,
are merely insisting that 'the value of their labor be
recognized apart from its material embodiment.' The
invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in
material terms, but the description of its beauty
('as light as spiderwebs' and 'exquisite') turns it into
one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen's
fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us
do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful
even when it has no material reality."
— The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen ,
edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar
See also Symplectic in this journal.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
The Mirror of Understanding
From The Snow Queen , by Hans Christian Andersen —
SEVENTH STORY. What Took Place in the Palace of the Snow Queen, and What Happened Afterward The walls of the palace were of driving snow, and the windows and doors of cutting winds. There were more than a hundred halls there, according as the snow was driven by the winds. The largest was many miles in extent; all were lighted up by the powerful Aurora Borealis, and all were so large, so empty, so icy cold, and so resplendent! Mirth never reigned there; there was never even a little bear-ball, with the storm for music, while the polar bears went on their hindlegs and showed off their steps. Never a little tea-party of white young lady foxes; vast, cold, and empty were the halls of the Snow Queen. The northern-lights shone with such precision that one could tell exactly when they were at their highest or lowest degree of brightness. In the middle of the empty, endless hall of snow, was a frozen lake; it was cracked in a thousand pieces, but each piece was so like the other, that it seemed the work of a cunning artificer. In the middle of this lake sat the Snow Queen when she was at home; and then she said she was sitting in the Mirror of Understanding, and that this was the only one and the best thing in the world. 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. "I am going now to warm lands," said the Snow Queen. "I must have a look down into the black caldrons." It was the volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna that she meant. "I will just give them a coating of white, for that is as it ought to be; besides, it is good for the oranges and the grapes." And then away she flew, and Kay sat quite alone in the empty halls of ice that were miles long, and looked at the blocks of ice, and thought and thought till his skull was almost cracked. There he sat quite benumbed and motionless; one would have imagined he was frozen to death. …. |
Related material:
This journal on March 25, 2013:
Epiphany in Paris
Nonphysical Entities
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 catalog, p. 70 —
" 'Ambassadørene' er fysiske former som presenterer
ikk-fysiske fenomener. "
Translation by Google —
" 'Ambassadors' physical forms presents
nonphysical phenomena. "
Related definition —
Are the "line diagrams" of the diamond theorem and
the analogous "plane diagrams" of the eightfold cube
nonphysical entities? Discuss.
Friday, October 9, 2015
The Heisenberg Bedeutung
"… survival, transmission, association,
a strong indifferent persistent order."
— Henry James in The Ambassadors
"You see, you can't please everyone,
so you've got to please yourself." — Rick Nelson
Garden Party
The Ambassadors —
"The place itself was a great impression—
a small pavilion, clear-faced and sequestered,
an effect of polished parquet, of fine white panel
and spare sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and
rare, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain
and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached
to old noble houses. Far back from streets and
unsuspected by crowds, reached by a long passage
and a quiet court, it was as striking to the unprepared
mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure dug up;
giving him too, more than anything yet, the note of
the range of the immeasurable town and sweeping
away, as by a last brave brush, his usual landmarks
and terms. It was in the garden, a spacious cherished
remnant, out of which a dozen persons had already
passed, that Chad's host presently met them; while
the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the
spring and the weather, and the high party-walls,
on the other side of which grave hôtels stood off for
privacy, spoke of survival, transmission, association,
a strong indifferent persistent order. The day was so
soft that the little party had practically adjourned to
the open air, but the open air was in such conditions
all a chamber of state. Strether had presently the
sense of a great convent, a convent of missions,
famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young
priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and
chapel-bells, that spread its mass in one quarter;
he had the sense of names in the air, of ghosts at the
windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of
expression, all about him, too thick for prompt
discrimination."
— Henry James, 1909 edition of the 1903 novel
Eightfold Cube in Oslo
An eightfold cube appears in this detail
of a photo by Josefine Lyche of her
installation "4D Ambassador" at the
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 —
(Detail from private Instagram photo.)
Catalog description of installation —
Google Translate version —
In a small bedroom to Foredragssalen populate
Josefine Lyche exhibition with a group sculptures
that are part of the work group 4D Ambassador
(2014-2015). Together they form an installation
where she uses light to amplify the feeling of
stepping into a new dimension, for which the title
suggests, this "ambassadors" for a dimension we
normally do not have access to. "Ambassadors"
physical forms presents nonphysical phenomena.
Lyches works have in recent years been placed
in something one might call an "esoteric direction"
in contemporary art, and defines itself this
sculpture group humorous as "glam-minimalist."
She has in many of his works returned to basic
geometric shapes, with hints to the occult,
"new space-age", mathematics and where
everything in between.
See also Lyche + "4D Ambassador" in this journal and
her website page with a 2012 version of that title.
Cube Design
For Aaron Sorkin and Walter Isaacson —
Related material —
Bauhaus Cube, Design Cube, and
Nabokov's Transparent Things .
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Redemption
“I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”
— Paul Simon
A portion of the above photo appeared on the cover of
a German edition of a book by the winner of the 2015 Nobel
Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich. The German title,
Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht , is closer to the Russian
original than is the title of an English translation, War's Unwomanly Face .
Further book and photo information —
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Line for a Cartoon Graveyard
Continued from the Oct. 1 post Cartoon Graveyard and from
the Aug. 30 post Lines ("Drop me a line.") —
A related song for Imperator Furiosa
may be found in the previous post.
Volk Song
This post was suggested by
a news item from this afternoon,
"VW Stops the Music."
Onomastic Humor: Seinfeld to Steinfeld
From "Pitch Perfect 2," Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Junk-Hardon —
"I know what nothing means." — Joan Didion
Monday, October 5, 2015
Forms that Rhyme:
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Rima
On a professor of literature who reportedly
died on Michaelmas 2015, a remark by his daughter —
“He was really an artist,” she said.
That’s evident in the 60 years Raffel spent contemplating
how to translate the terza rima style of Dante Alighieri’s
The Divine Comedy — speaking of the three-line rhyme
scheme first used by the author — before he published
a translation of which he was “most proud” in 2010,
his wife said.
It was his final work.
— Lanie Lee Cook, Baton Rouge Advocate
Nicht Spielerei
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Numbers
(A sequel to Letters)
See Page 181 in Source of the Finite (St. Augustine's Day, 2014)
and Page 305 in Lost in Translation (50th Reunion Day, Harvard '64).
Friday, October 2, 2015
Letters
"The close of trading today will spell a new era for Google
as the search giant becomes a part of new holding company
Alphabet Inc." — ABC News, 1:53 PM ET today
From an Aug. 10, 2015, letter by Larry Page announcing the change:
Other business philosophy:
Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from
Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs
by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano
On Sale: 04/14/2015
A not-so-timeless lesson: a synchronicity check
(of this journal, not of the oeuvre of Joseph Jaworski) —
04/14/2015 — Sacramental Geometry.
Source Code
See a search for Bogus Source in this journal.
That search yields a quotation from poet Wallace Stevens,
whose birthday is today —
"The poet finds that as between these two sources:
the imagination and reality, the imagination is false,
whatever else may be said of it, and reality is true;
and being concerned that poetry should be a thing
of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to
reality, which then becomes his inescapable and
ever-present difficulty and innamorata."
The Return
The late Brian Friel on Derry —
"… every going away was a wrench
and every return a fulfilment."
Related material —
Wrench in this journal
and Circle Unbroken.
See as well Hymn (August 30, 2013).
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Another Bad Song for Dave Barry
"All work and no play…."
— Stanley Kubrick's film (1980) of The Shining (1977)
"Each metaphor already modeled the modeler
that pasted it together. It seemed I might have
another fiction in me after all."
— Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
"In the space between what happens
And what gets left behind…."
— "Diamond Space" (2006), song by
Michael Friedman and Sam Masich
Combining, as in a headline from today's Harvard Crimson ,
"programs and public space," we have …
Cartoon Graveyard
The following horrific images —
— were suggested by two pieces I read yesterday in
The Harvard Crimson —
"On Belonging and 'Steven Universe'" and
"Wise Words from the King."
See also a more realistic daydream, starring Amy Adams,
in the previous post, Ornamental Language.
Ornamental Language
See Trevanian's Meadow in this journal as well as…
"Off the Florida Keys, there's a place called Kokomo."
— The Beach Boys, 1988
Harvard’s Science Complex
Utopia or Dystopia? Discuss.
Related scenes for storyboarders —
See the city in the Amy Adams film "Her."
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Balance*
See the circle of keys.
Related material: The links in a Log24 search for Doctor Sax.
* For the title, see posts tagged Dante Time.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Let the Dead Bury the Dead
For a religion writer who reportedly died Sept. 22,
a tune from a sax player who reportedly died today.
Quotes for Michaelmas
A search in this journal for material related to the previous post
on theta characteristics yields…
"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased
novel in progress by American author Dan Brown.
The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the
character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon,
of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and
The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia
"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."
— "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups,"
by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen,
May 5, 2008, preprint.
"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."
— Review of
Faust in Copenhagen
"The page numbers
are generally reliable."
For further backstory, click the above link "May 5, 2008,"
which now leads to all posts tagged on080505.
Geometry for Michaelmas
See searches for "theta characteristics" in Google and in this journal.
A definition of particular interest for finite geometry —
The Grushevsky-Manni paper above was submitted to the arXiv
on 9 Dec. 2012. For some synchronistically related remarks
suitable for Michaelmas, see this journal on that date.
Curvitas
Part I — Donjon
(Notices of the American Mathematical Society , October 2015)
Part II — Curvitas!
(Detail from yesterday afternoon)
Related material: Digital Member.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Cracker Jack Prize
From a post of July 24, 2011 —
A review —
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”
A feeble attempt at a purely mathematical "decoding device"
from this journal earlier this month —
For some background, see a question by John Baez at Math Overflow
on Aug. 20, 2015.
The nonexistence of a 24-cycle in the large Mathieu group
might discourage anyone hoping for deep new insights from
the above figure.
See Marston Conder's "Symmetric Genus of the Mathieu Groups" —
Intruders for Mira
Hypercube Structure
Click to enlarge:
For the hypercube as a vector space over the two-element field GF(2),
see a search in this journal for Hypercube + Vector + Space .
For connections with the related symplectic geometry, see Symplectic
in this journal and Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986.
For the above 1976 hypercube (or tesseract ), see "Diamond Theory,"
by Steven H. Cullinane, Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1,
Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
She Said Carefully
A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:
From the 1959 Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning" — She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, “The person you killed or doomed is still in the room.” An aching impulse twisted me a little. “Maybe I should try to go back––” I began. “Try to go back and unite the selves . . .” “It’s too late now,” she repeated. “But I want to,” I persisted. “There’s something pulling at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Of course there is,” she said. “It’s the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.” |
Box Office
This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012). That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.
See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .
Strings
The dateline from a slide at a string-theory conference:
See also this journal on that date.
A related "string theory," for those who like to compare and contrast:
A paper on the late Michael Weinstein by Robert L. Oprisko —
"Strings: A Political Theory of Multi-Dimensional Reality."*
From the abstract:
"An 'unfaithful' interpretation of Michael Weinstein's oeuvre
illuminates a complex, interpenetrative system of realities
that reflects the lived experience of his vitalist ontology."
* Theoria & Praxis: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought ,
Vol 2, No 2 (2014): On the Concept of Globality.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Symbols, Local and Global
Local:
Global:
Photo by Brendan Smialowski today
Msgr. Mark Miles, the Pope's translator, at
Independence Hall in Philadelphia today.
What, if anything, the Church means by the symbol
he holds is not clear, but presumably its meaning,
if there is one, is more global than local.
Posthumous Man
The above book, a tribute by admirers of the late Michael Weinstein
(not, as a campus obituary states, by Weinstein himself),
was reportedly published by Routledge on December 19, 2014.
This journal on that date had a post on an early Greek philosopher who
supposedly was killed because he discovered irrational numbers.
A later approach to academic life —
Emma Stone being directed by Woody Allen in the recent "Irrational Man":
Fans of Allen and Stone may also enjoy Magic in the Moonlight.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Sparks News
On an incident in Sparks, Nevada, on
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015:
"Reno and Sparks police then approached the apartment
just before 11 a.m. and knocked on the door in an effort
to check on Debra Constantino’s welfare, Sparks police
said. That’s when officers heard gunshots."
— Marcella Corona, Reno Gazette-Journal
(Tuesday 11 a.m. PDT in Sparks was Tuesday 2 p.m. EDT.)
"A file photo of Mark and Debby Constantino taken on
Oct. 24, 2011 near their home in northwest Reno.
The couple worked as paranormal investigators
specializing in EVP voice recordings and were often
featured in the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures ."
(Photo: Reno Gazette-Journal file)
Synchronicity check: Log24 on the date of the above photo.
"… a bee for the remembering of happiness" — Wallace Stevens
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Villanueva
The previous post honored Maurice, one of yesterday's
saints. A note on another —
See Log24 searches for Villanova and Villanueva.
The latter search leads to a link to some posts tagged 922,
from St. Thomas of Villanova's feast day, Sept. 22.
Epismetology for Yogi
"In the Latin language, pompatus is an actual word
meaning 'done with pomp or splendor.'
It is the masculine perfect participle of the Latin
root word pompo ." — Wikipedia
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Saints of the Day
St. Thomas of Villanova, Sts. Maurice and Companions.
See CatholicCulture.org.
Geometry for Jews
Remarks by an ignorant professor quoted here
yesterday suggest a Log24 search for "Lost in Translation."
That search yields instances of the following figure:
See also the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).
Monday, September 21, 2015
Here and Now
From an essay by Mark Edmundson,
University Professor at the University of Virginia,
who was granted a Ph.D. by Yale in 1985 —
The American Scholar The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?
By Mark Edmundson “Aren’t you a Catholic?” People often ask me that question in a gotcha tone. It’s as though they’re saying: I see through you. You pretend to be an intellectual, a more or less secular guy who can maybe lay claim to some sophistication. You want to pass as someone (here’s the rub) who has grown up and is not a child anymore. But I see through all that, the questioner implies. I can tell that you live under the old dispensation. You’re a creature not of light and intellect, light and truth, but of guilt and fear. Light and truth, lux et veritas , was the motto of the university where I went to graduate school. It signifies the power of enlightened intellect to remake the world—or at least to transform and elevate the individual. Religions don’t generally have mottoes, and it is probably not a good idea when they do. But if the Roman Catholic Church had a motto, it surely would not be light and truth. I spent 12 years, give or take, in the faith, the most influential years of my life. And I was surely a Catholic. But what if anything remains of that immersion? What value does it have here and now? |
An example of vincible ignorance:
Edmundson's remarks above, in light of …
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Misgiving
"Charles Kenneth Williams was born on Nov. 4, 1936,
in Newark. His father, Paul, sold office machines,
and, as he prospered, moved with his wife, the former
Dossie Kasdin, and his two sons to suburban South Orange.
Mr. Williams’s conflicted relationship with his parents
takes up much of his 2000 memoir, Misgivings: My Mother,
My Father, Myself . " — NY Times obituary this evening
Near the Haunted Castle
A poem by C. K. Williams
"This is a story. You don't have to think about it,
it's make-believe. / It's like a lie, maybe not quite a lie
but I don't want you to worry about it. . . . ."
For a more interesting cinematic haunting, see the new film "Pay the Ghost."
Orange Mass
"Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously."
In memory of Jackie Collins, a post on Sinatra's favorite color.
In Memoriam
From related literary remarks linked to here yesterday —
"Sloane’s writing is drum-tight, but his approach
is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins
turning up the heat. He understood that before
a pot can boil, it must simmer." — Stephen King
From this journal last July —
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Language Game
"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams." — Hamlet
The New York Review of Books , in a review
of two books on video games today, quotes an author
who says that the Vikings believed the sky to be
“the blue skull of a giant.”
See as well posts tagged The Nutshell.
A Certain Term
"I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night…."
— Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
Related imagery —
Detail:
Closer detail:
Exegesis:
A Certain Term: Not English, Not Chinese —
Philosophy and Art
The current issue (dated Oct. 8, 2015) of
The New York Review of Books has two
(at least) items related to philosophy —
-
"Was Plato ‘Churlish’?", a letter on Joyce Carol Oates's
recent NYRB essay, and a response by Oates
-
"What Philosophers Really Know," a review by
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein of a new book
by Colin McGinn, Philosophy of Language:
The Classics Explained
See also Backstory, a Log24 post of Nov. 22, 2010:
"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
that they just can’t seem to do without.'
He was a symbolic logician.
That was his career…."
The Observatory Mystery
Part I: Magic Moonlight
Part II: To Walk the Night
Cover from a 1944 edition of
the 1937 novel by William Sloane —
Part III: Sept. 18, 2015, review by Stephen King
of the works of William Sloane
Geometry of the 24-Point Circle
The latest Visual Insight post at the American Mathematical
Society website discusses group actions on the McGee graph,
pictured as 24 points arranged in a circle that are connected
by 36 symmetrically arranged edges.
Wikipedia remarks that …
"The automorphism group of the McGee graph
is of order 32 and doesn't act transitively upon
its vertices: there are two vertex orbits of lengths
8 and 16."
The partition into 8 and 16 points suggests, for those familiar
with the Miracle Octad Generator and the Mathieu group M24,
the following exercise:
Arrange the 24 points of the projective line
over GF(23) in a circle in the natural cyclic order
( ∞, 1, 2, 3, … , 22, 0 ). Can the McGee graph be
modeled by constructing edges in any natural way?
In other words, if the above set of edges has no
"natural" connection with the 24 points of the
projective line over GF(23), does some other
set of edges in an isomorphic McGee graph
have such a connection?
Update of 9:20 PM ET Sept. 20, 2015:
Backstory: A related question by John Baez
at Math Overflow on August 20.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
A Word for Willcocks
The title refers to Sir David Willcocks, director of music
at King's College, Cambridge, 1957-1974, who reportedly
died today.
The word:
Related music:
A Christmas Carol.
A Word to the Wise:
Related material:
From the website of the American Mathematical Society today,
a column by John Baez that was falsely backdated to Sept. 1, 2015 —
Compare and contrast this Baez column
with the posts in the above
Log24 search for "Symplectic."
Updates after 9 PM ET Sept. 17, 2015 —
Related wrinkles in time:
Baez's preceding Visual Insight post, titled
"Tutte-Coxeter Graph," was dated Aug. 15, 2015.
This seems to contradict the AMS home page headline
of Sept. 5, 2015, that linked to Baez's still earlier post
"Heawood Graph," dated Aug. 1. Also, note the
reference in "Tutte-Coxeter Graph" to Baez's related
essay — dated August 17, 2015 —
-
"A Wrinkle in the Mathematical Universe"
at The n-Category Café .
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
The World as Myth
Three approaches to The World as Myth…
From Heinlein's 1985 The Cat Who Walks Through Walls … The World as Myth is a subtle concept. It has sometimes been called multiperson solipsism, despite the internal illogic of that phrase. Yet illogic may be necessary, as the concept denies logic. For many centuries religion held sway as the explanation of the universe- or multiverse. The details of revealed religions differed wildly but were essentially the same: Somewhere up in the sky-or down in the earth-or in a volcano-any inaccessible place- there was an old man in a nightshirt who knew everything and was all powerful and created everything and rewarded and punished… and could be bribed. "Sometimes this Almighty was female but not often because human males are usually bigger, stronger, and more belligerent; God was created in Pop's image. "The Almighty-God idea came under attack because it explained nothing; it simply pushed all explanations one stage farther away. In the nineteenth century atheistic positivism started displacing the Almighty-God notion in that minority of the population that bathed regularly. "Atheism had a limited run, as it, too, explains nothing, being merely Godism turned upside down. Logical positivism was based on the physical science of the nineteenth century which, physicists of that century honestly believed, fully explained the universe as a piece of clockwork. "The physicists of the twentieth century made short work of that idea. Quantum mechanics and Schrodringer's cat tossed out the clockwork world of 1890 and replaced it with a fog of probability in which anything could happen. Of course the intellectual class did not notice this for many decades, as an intellectual is a highly educated man who can't do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of his lack. Nevertheless, with the death of positivism, Godism and Creationism came back stronger than ever. "In the late twentieth century -correct me when I' m wrong, Hilda-Hilda and her family were driven off Earth by a devil, one they dubbed 'the Beast.' They fled in a vehicle you have met, Gay Deceiver, and in their search for safety they visited many dimensions, many universes… and Hilda made the greatest philosophical discovery of all time." "I'll bet you say that to all the girls!" "Quiet, dear. They visited, among more mundane places, the Land of Oz-" I sat up with a jerk. Not too much sleep last night and Dr. Harshaw's lecture was sleep-inducing. "Did you say 'Oz'?" "I tell you three times. Oz, Oz, Oz. They did indeed visit the fairyland dreamed up by L. Frank Baum. And the Wonderland invented by the Reverend Mr. Dodgson to please Alice. And other places known only to fiction. Hilda discovered what none of us had noticed before because we were inside it: The World is Myth. We create it ourselves-and we change it ourselves. A truly strong myth maker, such as Homer, such as Baum, such as the creator of Tarzan, creates substantial and lasting worlds … whereas the fiddlin', unimaginative liars and fabulists shape nothing new and their tedious dreams are forgotten. …. |
Friday, November 6, 2009
Where Entertainment is God (continued)
|
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Joyce’s Nightmare…
Schoolgirl Problem
Or: Ten Years and a Day
In memory of film director Robert Wise,
who died ten years ago yesterday.
A search in this journal for "Schoolgirl" ends with a post
from Sept. 10, 2002, The Sound of Hanging Rock.
See as well a Log24 search for "Strangerland"
(a 2015 film about a search for a schoolgirl) and
a Log24 search for "Weaving."
Related mathematics: Symplectic.
Some related images (click to enlarge) —
Monday, September 14, 2015
Happy Birthday to…
The actor who portrayed the angel Uriel in the TV series
"Supernatural," Robert Wisdom.
See also the angel Uriel in the novel Weaveworld .
Earth Meets Sky
The title was suggested by that of a 2013 conference at Harvard,
"When Earth Meets Sky," in an image posted here at 8:48 PM EDT
on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2015.
Also at 8:48 PM EDT on Sunday …
Mount Aso Volcano Erupts in Southern Japan
By Brian Lada, Meteorologist, at AccuWeather.com
September 14, 2015; 1:50 AM EDT
Mount Aso, a volcano located on Japan's
southernmost main island of Kyushu, erupted
on Monday morning, local time, sending a
plethora of smoke and ash 2000 meters
(6560 feet) into the sky.
The eruption began at 8:49 p.m. EDT,
or 9:49 a.m. local time, according to the
Japan Meteorological Agency.
There have been no reports of injuries
from the eruption.
The eruption at 08:48:45 EDT —
(Click for an image in motion.)
From Alejandro Alvarez @aletweetsnews —
From a time-lapse of Mount #Aso, #Japan's
largest active volcano, erupting Sunday
evening (Eastern Daylight Time). The time in
Japan, shown in the photo, was 13 hours later.
(via @kumamoto_rkk)
pic.twitter.com/nMeHBQvBTN
10:18 PM – 13 Sep 2015
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Gameday
See also the footnote to this morning's post
Chinese New Year 2013
and its link to posts now tagged Trophy.
Erlangen Summary
Charles Matthews's question summarizing the Erlangen Program,
Current Validity for Erlangen…? (March 28, 2011)
has been removed from mathoverflow.net.
A cached copy is available at Log24.com. Enjoy.
Chinese New Year 2013
Item from the New Orleans Times-Picayune
in January 2013:
Chinese new year celebrated Welcoming the Chinese New Year, 4710, the Academy of Chinese Studies will hold a celebration Feb. 6 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Dixon Hall, at Tulane University. A student talent show, and lucky "Red Envelope" will be featured. |
See also this journal on the reported* date
of the above celebration, Feb. 6, 2013:
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
A Bus Named Desire
|
* The reported celebration date was later changed to Feb. 3 , 2013.
For a New-Orleans-related Log24 post from that date, plus backstory,
see posts now tagged Trophy.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Ledger
Lorrie Moore, in the current New York Review of Books ,
on a detective in a TV series:
He "takes notes in a large ledger and
speaks as if he were the CEO of
a nihilist fortune cookie company."
— "Sympathy for the Devil," NYRB
issue dated Sept. 24, 2015
See Harvard president Drew Faust as such a CEO.
UPDATED: September 12, 2015, at 4:22 pm.
Luke Z. Tang ’18, a Lowell House sophomore,
Local authorities are investigating the cause |
At the Still Point (continued)
"Now I wanna dance, I wanna win.
I want that trophy, so dance good."
"C'est la vie , say the old folks.
It goes to show you never can tell."
Friday, September 11, 2015
Omega Wrinkle:
A Phrase That Haunts
From this journal on August 23, 2013 —
Illustration from a New York Times review
of the novel Point Omega —
From the print version of The New York Times Sunday Book Review
dated Sept. 13, 2015 —
The online version, dated Sept. 11, 2015 —
From the conclusion of the online version —
On the above print headline, "Wrinkles in Time,"
that vanished in the online version —
"Now you see it, now you don't"
is not a motto one likes to see demonstrated
by a reputable news firm.
Related material: Jews Telling Stories.