"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
Thursday, June 11, 2015
In Memoriam
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Epistemic States
Grindhouse Madonna
See also "Welcome to Me" in Log24 and recent posts tagged Grindhouse.
Update of 9 PM:
The book that "The Martian" is based on is by Andy Weir.
A somewhat Hindu (or Socratic) religious meditation from
Weir's earlier story "The Egg" —
“Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic
than you can possibly imagine."
Welcome to Noplace
See an informative essay at noplace.no on the work of
Oslo artist Josefine Lyche in connection with her current
(June 12-21) exhibition, "Contact."
A paragraph from that essay —
See also Lyche in this journal.
Epistemic* Tetrads
"Those that can be obtained…." —
Related music video: Waterloo.
* "In defense of the epistemic view of quantum states:
a toy theory," by Robert W. Spekkens, Perimeter Institute
for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada
Traveling Salesmen
Click the above image for the IMDb page from which it is taken.
"Course material associated with Jack Edmonds’ lectures
can be found here."
See also High Concept (Jan. 21, 2015) —
Image from the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman"
— and another eye in a triangle …
From the Log24 post Prize (June 7, 2015)
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
For the Late Hermann Zapf*
* Zapf, a type designer, reportedly died on Thursday, June 4, 2015.
Talent Scout
"Looking for what was, where it used to be" — Wallace Stevens
Colorful Song
For geeks* —
" Domain, Domain on the Range , "
where Domain = the Galois tesseract and
Range = the four-element Galois field.
This post was suggested by the previous post,
by a Log24 search for Knight + Move, and by
the phrase "discouraging words" found in that search.
* A term from the 1947 film "Nightmare Alley."
Princeton Flashback
From The Daily Princetonian on May 29, 2015:
"… well, isn’t that what Reunions is all about?
Making memories?"
"Try to remember the kind of September …."
From this journal on May 29, 2015:
Openings
|
The Dark Horse Rises
Monday, June 8, 2015
Princeton Prize*
A box of Frosties for Joyce Carol Oates.
Backstory: Oxford Word (July 10, 2004) —
a meditation on the date January 29 —
and that date here this year.
* "Oates to retire after 2015"
— The Daily Princetonian
The Secret Life of the Public Mind
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Prize
The above excerpt from a post of Aug. 3, 2008,
was suggested by the death date of the musician
at left in the photo below.
A related musical note:
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Friday, June 5, 2015
Narratives
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Foundations
Princeton University's president on June 2, 2015 —
“Dream Audaciously,” Eisgruber Urges Graduates
Related news —
Film director Christopher Nolan at Princeton on June 1, 2015:
“In these graduation speeches, generally, you have the
speaker say something along the lines of, ‘You need to
chase your dreams,’ ” Nolan said. “But I’m not going to
say that because I don’t believe it. I don’t want you to
chase your dreams. I want you to chase your realities.
And I want to say: Don’t chase your realities at the
expense of your dreams, but as the foundation of your
dreams.”
"If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Molly Bloom on Education
Two pieces by NPR education writer Molly Bloom:
See also yesterday's post on another NPR / Princeton education figure,
Keith Devlin:
An illustration (click for larger view with context):
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Game Theory
From MAA columnist Keith Devlin yesterday :
"All very depressing. I fear that this state of affairs
will continue all the time US education continues to be
treated as a political football, with our nation’s children
and their teachers treated as pawns while various
groups fight political battles…."
For Soccer Moms
Damsel
See as well a note on "Joyce's Use of Kubla Khan"
and remarks from Jesus College, Oxford , on
"Seeking the Sirens' Song."
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Nightmare
Miniature Lowry
A review describes the main character in the 1981 novel
The Knife in My Hands —
"His other peculiar characteristic is a fascination, developed during
his university years, with the Cabala and, like a miniature Lowry,*
he spends much of his time wandering drunkenly through its
labyrinthine mysteries."
AA motto: "Principles before personalities."
* Related material: Back to the Real.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Excited about Space
Background — A search for the title in this journal.
Grothendieck was at times excited about space:
"The notion of space is certainly one of the oldest
in mathematics. It is fundamental to our 'geometric'
perspective on the world, and has been so tacitly
for over two millenia. It's only over the course of the
19th century that this concept has, bit-by-bit, freed
itself from the tyranny of our immediate perceptions
(that is, one and the same as the 'space' that
surrounds us), and of its traditional theoretical
treatment (Euclidean), to attain to its present
dynamism and autonomy. In our own times it has
joined the ranks of those notions that are most freely
and universally employed in mathematics, and is
familiar, I would say, to every mathematician
without exception. It has become a concept of multiple
and varied aspects, of hundreds of thousands of faces…."
— fermentmagazine.org/rands/promenade12.html
An aspect not so familiar: Diamond Space.
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Precision
An image from yesterday afternoon's post Portal:
Related material:
-
A review of the novel The Knife in My Hands
shown in the photo above.
- Blurbs for a novel by Susanna Moore:
-
A Log24 reference to page 261 of that novel
-
A map and a street view of a portal suggested by
today's news:
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Credit Card
Detail from the online Fortune magazine this morning:
Dateline of linked article:
MAY 30, 2015, 8:12 AM EDT
See yesterday morning's post on G. H. Hardy
and Harvey Cohn as well as a quote from
the 1958 Fortune article on John Nash:
"The pure mathematician judges his work
largely by aesthetic standards;
the applied mathematician is a pragmatist."
The source of the link to 1958 —
Friday, May 29, 2015
For CCNY Commencement Day
The link "an autobiographical essay" in one of the posts now
tagged "on140911" has been updated.
The essay, by the late CCNY number theorist Harvey Cohn, gives
views opposed to those of G. H. Hardy, also a number theorist.
Openings
The film "Pawn Sacrifice" reportedly opened in Toronto on September 11, 2014.
See as well Log24 posts of that day and Autistic Enchantment.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Ten Years Ago
See the tag on050528.
This tag was suggested by Google's pitch today —
Relive 10 epic years of YouTube.
Or not.
See as well Trouble with the Curve —
Show
(A sequel to the previous post, Tell )
Inscapes
An illustration (click image for further details) —
Related reading
From my JSTOR shelf —
Click the above image for a related Log24 post, Groups Acting.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Voiced
"J.A.R.V.I.S. (Stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System),
also stylized as JARVIS, or Jarvis, is a highly advanced
computerized A.I. developed by Tony Stark, and was voiced
by actor Paul Bettany, to manage almost everything, especially
matters related to technology, in Tony's life."
Happy birthday, Mr. Bettany.
View from the intersection of U.S. Routes 6 and 62.
Mainlining
"Looking for what was, where it used to be" —Wallace Stevens
A section of Route 6 at the former location of an A&P store —
"Wake up and smell the coffee" —
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Colorful Tales
See also the Log24 post from May 18,
the date of Eric Caidin's reported death,
as well as Hexagram 50 and May 14, 2014—
Death in Mathmagic Land.
Studies in Gray and Black
From Our House to Bauhaus
Street view in Oslo, August 2014 (thanks to Google):
Vennligst benytt fortau pa andre siden =
Please use the sidewalk on the other side
Take a walk on the wild side… or not.
This post was suggested by a Log24 post, Gaze, of May 21, 2015, and by
an Instagram photo that Oslo artist Josefine Lyche posted today.
Monday, May 25, 2015
The Secret Life of the Public Mind
"… an editor (Anne Meara, half of the comedy team of
Stiller and Meara, who are Ben Stiller's parents) asks
Lelaina to define irony. 'I know it when I see it,' says Lelaina…."
— Rolling Stone , 1994 film review by Peter Travers
A Stitch in Time
The most recent version of a passage
quoted in posts tagged "May 19 Gestalt" —
"You've got to pick up every stitch." — Donovan
Sunday, May 24, 2015
A Swan All Sable
"'Arms:
Party chevronwise sable and gold,
in the chief two open books having
buckles, straps and edges of gold
and in the foot a swan all sable."
Point Omega
“Am I still on?” — Ending line of The Osterman Weekend (1983)
Welcome to Them
For the star of the recent film "Welcome to Me,"
a remark quoted here 12 years ago —
“There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies.
But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies.
And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication,
there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Oscar Views
View of La Quinta (click to enlarge) —
Detail of reported death location —
The Oscar director reportedly died in a car accident somewhat before
9:30 PM PDT Thursday, May 21, 2015. See details from The Desert Sun .
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Group
On the artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944):
"She belonged to a group called 'The Five'…."
Related material — Real Life (Log24, May 20, 2015).
From that post:
Art
"Is Fiction the Art of Lying?" by Mario Vargas Llosa
The above link is to a Google Books Search for references
to a 1984 piece in The New York Times .
To find the Times 's own version, change "Lying" to "Living."
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
Friday, May 22, 2015
Hook
" 'There was one requirement. 'The only thing they were clear
about was they wanted it to be unlike anything anyone had
ever seen before,' Chambliss says. 'Something so fantastic
that Casey (the heroine, played by Britt Robertson) gets
addicted to it.' "
— Peter Caranicas at Variety.com
Math Death
Colorful Tale
See a post of Nov. 17, 2011 — Void.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
— Joan Didion, The White Album
See also John Gregory Dunne.
A Woman for Late Night
See the recent posts below as well as the following
passage from this morning's online New York Times —
"Mr. Belden generally worked fast, but he
lingered for years over the music for his
2003 Blue Note album, “Black Dahlia,” one
of his best-known works. Inspired by the
murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947…."
— Ben Ratliff
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
Synchronicity check on the date of the above Salon story:
Two posts from Log24 on Jan. 5, 2014 —
|
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Gaze
The gaze of Juliette Binoche, star of the film Bleu ,
in a post of December 16, 2003, suggests the following…
From The Philosopher's Gaze, by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999 —
Now, the gathering of re-collection,
as a return to the opening ground,
a Rücknahme in den zu eröffnenden Grund ,
would be crucial to the transfiguration of the
figure-ground Gestalt: its release from the
disfigurements of enframing (Gestell ) and
its emergence and becoming as a gathering
of the fourfold. The opening, gathering, and
laying-down that would take place in and as
the ring of the Geviert is therefore to be
understood as entering into a figure-ground
formation, a Gestalt , that our looking and
seeing would have opened up, gathered,
and laid down by virtue of their being (or say
by virtue of their character as) a hermeneutical
re-collection of being, gathering the presencing
of the lighting, the boundless giving-to-be-hold
of the field, into the pain and the thankfulness
of memory.
A hermeneutical re-collection —
Log24 posts tagged May 19 Gestalt.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Blue Note
This evening's online New York Times —
"Bruce Lundvall, a record executive whose 25-year run
at the helm of Blue Note, preceded by top positions at
CBS and Elektra, made him one of the most influential
figures behind the scenes in recent jazz history, died
on Tuesday in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 79."
See also Moulin Bleu (Dec. 16, 2003).
Mood Music
"Describing this conceptual breakthrough,
which he backed mathematically, thus rocking
modern physics, Arkani-Hamed says: 'At the time,
I was just in the mood for thinking about something different.' "
— Boston Globe , July 26, 2004
See also the previous post and the above date in this journal.
Out of Sequence
A meditation yesterday by physics writer Peter Woit —
Last week on Jeopardy (see here),
no one got this question:
Nima Arkani-Hamed is using this
number dimension, the next one beyond time,
to rock the physics world.
I wouldn’t have either…
A related meditation from this morning's New York Times —
See as well today's Log24 posts Real Life and Earlier… .
YouTube has a related requiem.
Real Life
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Tuesday afternoon —
A 46-year-old Jesuit priest who was a Marquette University
assistant professor of theology collapsed on campus
Tuesday morning and died, President Michael Lovell
announced to the campus community in an email….
"Rev. Lúcás (Yiu Sing Luke) Chan, S.J., died after
collapsing this morning in Marquette Hall. Just last Sunday,
Father Chan offered the invocation at the Klingler College
of Arts and Sciences graduation ceremony…."
Synchronicity check…
From this journal on the above publication date of
Chan's book — Sept. 20, 2012 —
From a Log24 post on the preceding day, Sept. 19, 2012 —
“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job,
a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary,
it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game,
we call the Game Dhum Welur , the Mind of God."
— The Gameplayers of Zan
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
The Lindbergh Manifesto
"Creation is the birth of something, and
something cannot come from nothing."
— Photographer Peter Lindbergh at his website
From a biography of Lindbergh —
"… it took Lindbergh awhile to find his true métier.
Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1944….
Barely out of his teens, he became a painter who
embraced conceptual art and — for reasons he
has since forgotten — adopted the professional
name « Sultan. » Lindbergh… was a few years
short of his 30th birthday when he turned to
photography…."
— "The Man Who Loves Women," by Pamela Young,
Toronto Globe & Mail , September 19, 1996
A Lindbergh work (at right below) from his conceptual-art days —
For a connection between the above work by Paul Talman and the
above "Mono Type 1" of Lindbergh, see…
Monday, May 18, 2015
Ex Nihilo
Yesterday morning's quote from The Politics of Experience :
"Creation ex nihilo has been pronounced impossible even for
God. But we are concerned with miracles."
Related material:
Curtis + Turyn in this journal and Sidney Harris on theology —
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Song for a Blue Guitar
From a 2012 piece on author Oliver Sacks:
"… he successfully set out to envision a splash of
true indigo, the colour he had been fascinated by
since childhood."
Related material: The tag indigo in this journal and
Annie Lennox singing "Mood Indigo."
Thanks to UD for pointing out the Sacks piece.
Metaphysics for Sunday
From Chapter 1 of R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience —
"An activity has to be understood in terms of the experience
from which it emerges. These arabesques that mysteriously
embody mathematical truths only glimpsed by a very few —
how beautiful, how exquisite — no matter that they were
the threshing and thrashing of a drowning man.
We are here beyond all questions except those of being
and nonbeing, incarnation, birth, life and death.
Creation ex nihilo has been pronounced impossible even for
God. But we are concerned with miracles. We must hear the
music of those Braque guitars (Lorca*)."
See also Christmas Day, 2009.
* Update of Sunday afternoon: A search for the Lorca quote yields
no result, but Cocteau wrote that "Mon rêve, en musique, serait
d'entendre la musique des guitares de Picasso. "
(Oeuvres complètes , Vol. 10, p. 107)
See also Stevens + "Blue Guitar" in this journal.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Songs of Experience
Is experience the best teacher?
At Thursday's opening night of U2's "Innocence and Experience"
tour, The Edge falls off the stage —
… Or is the best teacher Buddy Rich?
Bus scene from the recent film "Whiplash" —
Friday, May 15, 2015
Innocence and Experience
Today's guitar news suggests the following —
"… sometimes what we are seeking
is not that which reason can impose…."
For the source, see a Log24 search for Innocence + Experience.
Plan 9 Revisited
Music to wake the dead …
For the fictional corpse Sean Casey of "Whiplash" —
The music of the late jazz drummer Jerome Cooper.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
The Faustian Merry-Go-Round
Imperial Symbology
See Found Symbol in this journal.
See also the Imperial College theorem symbol
and a page from Imperial College about
group actions on a space Ω —
For Han Solo, some less imperial symbology —
Detail of a CKEditor plugin screenshot:
horizontal line, smiley, special characters,
and iframe area.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Motto
See the previous post, "Space," as well as…
SymOmega in this journal and a suggested motto
for The University of Western Australia.
Space
Notes on space for day 13 of May, 2015 —
The 13 symmetry axes of the cube may be viewed as
the 13 points of the Galois projective space PG(2,3).
This space (a plane) may also be viewed as the nine points
of the Galois affine space AG(2,3) plus the four points on
an added "line at infinity."
Related poetic material:
The ninefold square and Apollo, as well as …
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Writing Well*
See Stevens + New Haven.
* The above figure may be viewed as
the Chinese “Holy Field” or as the
Chinese character for “Well”
inscribed in a square.
Zinsser Obituary
"William Zinsser, a writer, editor and teacher
whose book ‘On Writing Well’ sold more than
1.5 million copies by employing his own literary
craftsmanship to urge clarity, simplicity, brevity
and humanity, died on Tuesday [May 12, 2015]
at his home in Manhattan. He was 92."
— Douglas Martin in the online New York Times
Monday, May 11, 2015
Times Link
"A similar account was presented on Aug. 7, 2011…."
— Matthew Rosenberg in this evening's online New York Times
Update: A summary and the time of the above story —
Earlier in the day, Politico had a piece on the "similar account."
George Steiner vs. the Order of St. Benedict
See Steiner's phrase "Language Animal" in this journal
and the corresponding authentic phrase from a webpage
by a Benedictine monk —
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Language Animal Farm
Mother’s Day for Bill Murray
The late Elizabeth Wilson as
the mother of Billl Murray's FDR
in "Hyde Park on Hudson."
Wilson reportedly died at 94 on Saturday, May 9, 2015.
Related material: This journal on that date, and
the following —
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Duckworth*
See pato.jpg and Venn's Cuernavaca.
* A reference to the British publishing company
in the previous post.
Friday, May 8, 2015
Reflections of a Language Animal*
Overlook/Duckworth, pp.48, £9.99
* "Language animal" is a phrase apparently
invented by Steiner in 1969 that he later
attributed vaguely to the ancient Greeks.
Bar Game* for Affleck
The above video frame reads "From Mastermind George Miller."
Click here to enlarge. See also another George Miller in this journal.
* Reference: A review of Gone Girl .
Spielraum
Review:
Illustrating the Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts
"At the point of convergence
by Octavio Paz, translated by |
Friday December 5, 2008
|
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Paradigm for Pedagogues
Illustrations from a post of Feb. 17, 2011:
Plato’s paradigm in the Meno —
Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) —
Ultron: By the Book
If The New York Times interviewed Ultron for its
Sunday Book Review "By the Book" column —
What books are currently on your night stand?
Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times
Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought
John Gray's The Soul of the Marionette
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Narrative Metaphysics
(Continued from Dec. 13, 2014.)
David Lavery's enthusiasm today for the Marvel Comics
"Infinity Stones" suggests a review of The Foundation Stone
mentioned in the post Narrative Metaphysics of 12/13/2014.
See as well "Many Dimensions" in this journal.
Soul
Nonsense…
See Gary Zukav, Harvard ’64, in this journal.
and damned nonsense —
“Every institution has a soul.”
— Gerald Holton in Harvard Gazette today
Commentary —
“The Ferris wheel came into view again….”
— Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcano
See also Holton in a Jan. 1977 interview:
“If people have souls, and I think a few have, it shows….”
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Harvard Cinco de Mayo
Paz
"At the point of convergence
by Octavio Paz, translated by |
Dark to Dark
(A sequel to the previous post)
From this morning's New York Times —
"Thomas R. Shepard Jr., who as the last
publisher of Look magazine oversaw its
sudden and rapid descent from record
advertising revenue and circulation
to its demise, died on Wednesday in
Sarasota, Fla. He was 96." — Sam Roberts
From the reported date of the publisher's death —
See also recent Look -related posts.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Light to Light
From yesterday —
Another remark on "still light" —
" . . . After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world." — Four Quartets
Note the page number, 168, in the above quote from Capobianco.
From another page 168,* a reproduction of a title page —
"In quella parte del libro…."
* In Jewel Spears Brooker's book
T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews ,
Cambridge University Press, 2004
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Das Scheinen
The title of Saturday night's post, "Die Scheinung ," is taken from
a 1920 book on a German poet, where "Scheinung " is associated
with "Maja ," a German spelling of a word with the connotation of
"the veil of illusion."
The phrase "Das Scheinen " is closer to "The Shining" in the
novel of that title by Stephen King. Some related remarks —
From a review of Capobianco's Engaging Heidegger —
"refreshing for its clarity and scholarly precision"
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
From a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne —
"Did you never hear of the 'Fountain of Youth'?"
asked Dr. Heidegger, "which Ponce de Leon,
the Spanish adventurer, went in search of two
or three centuries ago?"
"But did Ponce de Leon ever find it?" said
the Widow Wycherly.
"No, answered Dr. Heidegger, "for he never
sought it in the right place. The famous
Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is
situated in the southern part of the Floridian
peninsula, not far from Lake Macaco.
Its source is overshadowed by several gigantic
magnolias…."
See also the previous post.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Shining Through
A Look magazine article of July 18, 1950,
"Working Debutante," had photos of
Betsy von Furstenberg by Stanley Kubrick.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Scenes from…
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
Cross of Five Ninths
See Five Ninths in this journal and Colorful Tale.
Cross of Black and Gray
See also "Why do Muslims pray five times daily?".