Wednesday, March 11, 2015
1:46 AM March 11, 2015 EDT
(Eastern Daylight Time in USA) is
5:46 AM March 11, 2015 UTC
(Coordinated Universal Time worldwide).
"On March 11, 2011 at 5:46 a.m.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC),
a magnitude 8.9 earthquake occurred
off the East Coast of Japan…."
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Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Backstory for the "Surf's Up!" in the previous post:
"A Dante for Our Times," Part I and Part II.
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Related material:
According to Emory University, Sitton
"graduated from Emory in 1949, where he served as
editor in chief of the Emory Wheel. Sitton returned to
Emory to teach from 1991 to 1994, served as a
member of the Board of Counselors of Emory's
Oxford College from 1993 to 2001, and was
instrumental in establishing Emory's journalism
program in the mid-1990s."
See as well an Emory mascot:
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"… sometimes the best path to short-term goals
is through the unplanned byways of
the long-term perspective."
— Harvard President Drew Faust
For one such byway, see the bottom line
of the image search in Monday's post.
Comments Off on The Big Screw
From an interview by Glen Duncan with author
Susanna Moore published on January 29, 2013 —
When did you first realize that you wanted to write fiction? Was there an epiphanic moment?
I was a voracious reader as a child, clearing out the local library (my mother had given me a letter for the librarian, attesting that the books that I borrowed were for her reading alone), and I began to write plays, usually starring myself, when I was 9 or 10. There were years of bad poetry. I was features editor of the Punahou school newspaper. But at no moment did I clearly decide that I was going to be a writer, nor did it feel as if I had always been one. I left home for the mainland (I grew up in Hawaii) when I was 17 with no money or education beyond Punahou and the books that I’d read, and knew that I had to earn my living. I had a fantasy that I’d be a reporter and was sent by an equally naïve friend to Walter Annenberg, the owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer , who promptly sent me to the classified ad room, where I became an ad-taker. I’ve always thought that it was very good training: A man would call to place an ad in the hope of selling his used bed, and I would have to write a convincing few sentences on his behalf. I later read scripts for Jack Nicholson and oddly enough had to do the same thing – condense a complicated proposal into a statement of a dozen words.
We’ve talked before about how feeling different from the people around us – “mutant” was the word you used – informs or underpins the burgeoning writer’s mentality. Could you expand on that?
By mutant, I mean that state in childhood and adolescence of isolation, sometimes blissful, often bewildering, when you realize that you have little in common with the people closest to you – not because you are superior in intelligence or sensitivity, but because you perceive the world in an utterly different way, which you assume to be a failing on your part. It was only through reading and discovering characters who shared that feeling that I realized when I was about 14 that I wasn’t insane. And yes, I think that the sensation, the awareness and then the conviction that your perception of the world is not what might be called conventional, is essential to the making of an artist. It is a little like speaking a different language from the people around you – it affords you solitude, but it also means that you are sometimes misunderstood.
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Related material:
Midnight Politics, X-Woman, "Welcome to Me," and
the following meditation on the word "binder"—
Comments Off on Literary Notes
Monday, March 9, 2015
"Program or Be Programmed:
Ten Commands for a Digital Age"
— Title of a book by Douglas Rushkoff, quoted here on Jan. 18, 2015
"Cultural Software:
A Theory of Ideology"
— Title of a book by Yale Law School professor J. M. Balkin
Related image search:
See as well some related Bible verses.
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Saturday, March 7, 2015
Continued from All Hallows' Eve, 2014.
Last year's Halloween post displayed the
Dürer print Knight, Death, and the Devil
(illustrated below on the cover of the book
Film and Phenomenology by Allan Casebier).
Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil,
by Albrecht Dürer
Some mathematics related to a different Dürer print —
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Friday, March 6, 2015
Three Colorful Tales —
See also the recent film Nightcrawler .
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Thursday, March 5, 2015
"The study of the diverse ways in which
people of different cultures approach problems
provides students with a more comprehensive
understanding of topics introduced in previous courses."
From today's diplomatic news:
Readings:
Log24 posts tagged Frenkel-Metaphors, as well as
For Turing's Cathedral and Philadelphia Story.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2015
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Tuesday, March 3, 2015
End of the Line Blues
A film with a related title had a limited
USA theatrical release on Feb. 27, 2015.
See also some New Yorker theology .
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Monday, March 2, 2015
Item from the British press on Oct. 17, 2014:
Item from this journal on that same date:
Raiders of the Inarticulate.
A related "slash" —
Elementary, my dear Watson.
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Or: Elements of Design Continued
"Show me all the blueprints."
Comments Off on Shades of Grey (1949)
From "How the Guggenheim Got Its Visual Identity,"
by Caitlin Dover, November 4, 2013 —
For the square and half-square in the above logo
as independent design elements, see
the Cullinane diamond theorem.
For the circle and half-circle in the logo,
see Art Wars (July 22, 2012).
For a rectangular space that embodies the name of
the logo's design firm 2×4, see Octad in this journal.
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Sunday, March 1, 2015
The previous post suggests a review of
the phrase "strange loop" in this journal.
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Saturday, February 28, 2015
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This evening's New York Times —
"William Thomas McKinley, a prolific American composer
whose music was infused with the jazz he had performed
since childhood, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Reading,
Mass. He was 76.
He died in his sleep, his son Elliott said."
"William Thomas McKinley: Elegy for Strings (2006)
[Elliott McKinley]
137 views as of 9:45 PM ET Feb. 28, 2015
Published on Feb 11, 2015
Composed as an elegy and tribute for friends and family
that have passed, spurred by the passing of McKinley's
long time friend, drummer Roger Ryan. The performance
heard here is by the Seattle Symphony under the direction
of Gerard Schwarz.
Photos by Elliott McKinley (Rho Ophiuchi nebula complex…
and the Pleiades…) shot at Cherry Springs State Park."
Related material from the date of McKinley's death —
Expanding the Spielraum.
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The previous post's Kirkridge link leads to
a mention of religious philosopher Parker J. Palmer.
From an Utne Reader page on Palmer:
See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1949 story "What Dead Men Tell"—
"… He’d read about it in a magazine or somewhere.
He took a strip of scrap film about eighteen
inches long and put the ends together. He turned
one end over and spliced ’em. Now, if you trace
that strip, or mark it with a grease pencil, right up
the center, you find that the doggone thing only
has one side!”
The doctor nodded, and the girl said:
“A Möbius strip.”
“That what they call it?” said Hulon. “Well, I figured
this corridor must be something like that. On that
strip, a single continuous line touched both sides.
All I had to do was figure out an object built so that
a continuous line would cover all three of three sides,
and I’d have it. So I sat down and thought it out…."
— and the following mathematical illustration —
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Related material:
Comments Off on A Kirk for Spock
Theodore Sturgeon, 1949 :
"I thought I had an important idea.
It's part of a … call it a philosophy,
if that doesn't sound too high-
falutin'," he said.
"It's a philosophy," she said.
"We can call things by their names."
Leonard Nimoy, 2015 :
"A life is like a garden.
Perfect moments can be had,
but not preserved, except in memory."
* A tale from Astounding Science Fiction
Vol. 44, No. 3, November 1949
Comments Off on What Dead Men Tell*
Friday, February 27, 2015
"Final Tweet Will Make You Cry"
Or not.
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"Give faith a fighting chance." — Country song
"The proof uses modal logic, which distinguishes
between necessary truths and contingent truths."
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For a former president of Notre Dame
who reportedly died at 11:30 PM last night —
"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."
— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega
Comments Off on Stranger than Dreams
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Comments Off on Nicht Spielerei
The previous post's
illustration was
rather complicated.
This is a simpler
algebraic figure.
Comments Off on A Simple Group
Comments Off on The Forking
See Pythagorean Letter in this journal.
Comments Off on Forkpoint
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer makes pitch to app developers
By Matt O'Brien
mobrien@mercurynews.com
POSTED: 02/20/2015 06:12:32 AM PST
"Mayer described the conference as a 'forkpoint'
in Yahoo's evolution toward a stronger mobile
presence and a chance to share with independent
developers some of the fruits of Yahoo's recent
growth. It also helps Yahoo leave its mark, and its
ads, on an entire network of apps not developed
by the company."
See also yesterday's post on the film "App."
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A followup to the Feb. 24 10 PM ET post
on the new researchers' site InvenZone:
A screenshot as of 10:46 AM ET today—
Comments Off on A Coldbed of Activity
"The Brit Awards are… the British equivalent
of the American Grammy Awards." — Wikipedia
Detail of an image from yesterday's 5:30 PM ET post:
Related material:
From a review: "Imagine 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'
set in 20th-century London, and then imagine it
written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies
but in Dante and the things of the spirit, and you
might begin to get a picture of Charles Williams's
novel Many Dimensions ."
See also Solomon's Seal (July 26, 2012).
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Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Comments Off on Words and Images
From a Jan. 8, 2015, review of the 2013 Dutch film "App"—
"It is sort of like the old cult favorite 'Electric Dreams'…."
"Digital security is not static."
— Statement today from the Dutch SIM card maker Gemalto
Comments Off on Sort Of
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
The Cumberbatch Conundrum
A quote from Benedict Cumberbatch in this journal
on Nov. 15 last year:
"… this film’s been up my ass
for the last five years.”
The quote, in connection with today's previous post,
suggests a check of this journal five years ago.
The check yields a paper at the new research site InvenZone.
Comments Off on Where Entertainment Is God (continued)
Comments Off on Amy’s After-Party
Continued from earlier posts.
Comments Off on Ay Que Bonito
Monday, February 23, 2015
See also this journal on the date of Mr. Howard's death:
"Mark my words
This love will make you levitate
Like a bird"
— Katy Perry, "Dark Horse"
“It’s the Super Bowl, I guess,”
Michael Keaton said in the first minutes
of ABC’s official Oscar red-carpet special."
— Hallie Cantor in the online New Yorker today
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“When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?”
— Man of La Mancha
Perhaps the late Sidney Lumet?
The setting for the Sidney Lumet film "Deathtrap" (1982)
* Continued from yesterday's Backstory and Sermon.
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Sunday, February 22, 2015
Comments Off on Upon a Time
“Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers,
not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.” ― Max Lüthi
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" Some works are less visually striking
than infused with a kind of symbolic poetry.
Is a good backstory enough to make
a compelling work of art? "
— "The Meaning of Art? It's Complicated" —
Sarah Moroz yesterday on a Paris exhibition
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Saturday, February 21, 2015
Steven Pressfield on April 25, 2012:
What exactly is High Concept?
Let’s start with its opposite, low concept.
Low concept stories are personal,
idiosyncratic, ambiguous, often European.
“Well, it’s a sensitive fable about a Swedish
sardine fisherman whose wife and daughter
find themselves conflicted over … ”
ZZZZZZZZ.
Fans of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche know she has
valiantly struggled to find a high-concept approach
to the diamond theorem. Any such approach must,
unfortunately, reckon with the following low
(i.e., not easily summarized) concept —
The Diamond Theorem Correlation:
From left to right …
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-1202w.jpg
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140731-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-747w.jpg
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Picturing_the_Smallest-1986.gif
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140806-ProjPoints.gif
For some backstory, see ProjPoints.gif and "Symplectic Polarity" in this journal.
Comments Off on High and Low Concepts
Edward Frenkel in The New York Times ,
in an op-ed piece dated Feb. 20, 2015 —
"… I suggest that we regard the paradoxes
of quantum physics as a metaphor for
the unknown infinite possibilities
of our own existence. This is poignantly
and elegantly expressed in the Vedas:
'As is the atom, so is the universe;
as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm;
as is the human body, so is the cosmic body;
as is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.'"
The Times : "Edward Frenkel, a professor of mathematics
at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. "
See also Con Vocation (Sept. 2, 2014).
Comments Off on Putting the Con in Conceptual
Friday, February 20, 2015
See High White in this journal.
Related material:
The Astoria Column
on Coxcomb Hill,
Astoria, Oregon
See also a tale from today's Daily Astorian
(click the AP link in Parks and Recreation) and…
Early Coxcomb Hill …
"McArthur and McArthur in Oregon Geographic Names (2003, Oregon Historical Society) states:
'… Coxcomb Hill, Clatsop. This is the summit of the ridge south of Astoria, between the Columbia River and Youngs Bay. The compiler has been unable to learn who first applied the name. The spelling used is the customary form applied to court fools and jesters who wore an imitation coxcomb, and were frequently called coxcombs. …'"
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Comments Off on Conceptual Art
From the Associated Press today —
"It's a magic wonderland," said Miriam Leibowitz,
a Jerusalem resident, as she reached a snow-filled
city park with her family. "In the middle of Jerusalem
we felt like we're in Switzerland."
Comments Off on Parks and Recreation
Thursday, February 19, 2015
From YouTube —
"Published on Oct 13, 2014" * —
Tine Goat Cheese ad by Henry Moore Selder
Prod Co: Bacon
Agency: Try Oslo
Creatives: Caroline Ekrem & Sara Hødnebø
* See also, in this journal, that date, and The Ten.
Comments Off on Happy Chinese Year of the Goat
"I CAN TELL you about my friend Andrew,
the cognitive scientist. But it’s not pretty."
— Opening of Andrew's Brain: A Novel by
E. L. Doctorow, Random House, Jan. 14, 2014*
"…whirligig consciousness…."
—The New York Times Book Review
See also Inside the White Square (Log 24, Feb. 15, 2015):
.
* Cf. Log24 on that date.
Comments Off on In the Place of the Skull
(Chinese style)
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Wednesday, February 18, 2015
"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."
— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega
Comments Off on Song for a Night Bird
For the late Paul Halmos —
Keith Devlin's column is a monthly feature of the Mathematical
Association of America (MAA). This month's column apparently
first appeared online on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2015. The column
itself, however, is, as of today, dated 12:00 AM Feb. 1, 2015.
It is doubtful whether the professor honored in the column
would approve of this temporal subterfuge.
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Text and Context.
Comments Off on Noon on Ash Wednesday
"I am trying to introduce a narrative,
something magical and seductive…."
— Oslo artist Josefine Lyche, translated
from the Norwegian by Google
Perhaps something like Arcade Fire or
Taylor Swift? (Click links for related posts.)
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Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Part I:
Part II:
Part III: The Daily Princetonian yesterday.
Part IV: A midrash for Princeton —
Comments Off on Style News
Or: Debriefing Josefine
From the CV of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche:
Selected Collections/ Public Commissions:
2016 Jarfjord Grensevaktstasjon,
Jarfjord/Kirkenes, NO (upcoming)
From an Amazon.com customer review of a book on
northern Norway in World War II, Fire and Ice —
"… Hunt doesn't take sides. He approaches
the story as a journalist and documentary maker,
rather than as an academic."
The book, as the author notes, was published in Britain
on October 6, 2014.
A synchronicity check of the publication date yields
a variation on the "Fire and Ice" theme —
____________________________
"Jeg prøver å innføre et narrativ, noe magisk og forførende,
samt erstatte den iboende materialistiske logikken med
esoterisk kosmologi og symbolikk." — Josefine Lyche
Comments Off on Fire and Ice
Comments Off on The Craft
See a Log24 search for "Her wallet's filled with pictures."
A link from Grammy Night, 2003 in the search leads to
Today in Music: A Look Back at Pop Music
by United Press International, Feb. 23, 2003 :
Today's musical quiz:
Name the 1970s Sweet tune
that was featured in the 1992 movie
"Wayne's World."
Answer: "Ballroom Blitz."
Comments Off on Presidents’ Day Theme continues…
Monday, February 16, 2015
In memory of singer-songwriter Lesley Gore,
May 2, 1946 – February 16, 2015
“Her wall is filled with pictures…”
— Sweet Little Sixteen
Two posts from Gore’s birthday last year:
“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.” — Lesley Gore
Comments Off on Witch Ball
For Eustace Tilley …
… A 1950 example of Galois coordinates .
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Sunday, February 15, 2015
Comments Off on Au Revoir
Comments Off on The Quest for Meaning
"Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’ve come to talk with you again."
Comments Off on Dimensions
"… vibrantly, angrily, and often painfully alive…."
— The New York Times today reviews the work of
a dead poet:
"Sound, Smell, Sinew!" — The New York Times
Comments Off on Plan 9 continues…
See Tempular.
"In the minds of many, the museum
is the cathedral of our time."
—Ada Louise Huxtable,
"Museums: Making It New"
Comments Off on Sermon
Review:
See also the phrase "a dance results" in the original
source and in yesterday's Valentine Dance.
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"To Carthage then I came"
— The Waste Land , by T. S. Eliot
"To Carthage I came, where
there sang all around me in my ears
a cauldron of unholy loves."
— Confessions of St. Augustine, Book III
Comments Off on Sunday School
Saturday, February 14, 2015
For Eliot and von Franz —
"A dance results."
— Marie-Louise von Franz
in Number and Time
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"Continue a search for thirty-three and three."
— Katherine Neville in The Eight
"Close enough for government work."
— Stephen King in Doctor Sleep
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Friday, February 13, 2015
Part I: From The Librarians —
Part II: From Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center —
Part III: From the air date of The Librarians ' labyrinth episode —
Comments Off on Labyrinths
In memory of reporter Bob Simon —
NY Lottery midday Feb. 12, 2015:
788 2970.
In memory of reporter David Carr —
NY Lottery evening Feb. 12, 2015:
601 1469.
Comments Off on Random Remarks
I do not know what equation the title
"Media Equation" of the late David Carr's
column refers to.
Perhaps "0 = Dark 30" ?
(Here the "30" refers to the traditional
code signifying the end of a news story.)
Comments Off on Zero Theorem
New York Times —
"David Carr, a writer who wriggled away from
the demon of drug addiction to become a
name-brand media columnist at
The New York Times , and the star of 'Page One,'
a documentary about the newspaper, died on
Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58.
Mr. Carr collapsed in The Times newsroom,
where he was found shortly before 9 p.m.
He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where
he was pronounced dead."
AP —
"New York Times : David Carr, who wrote the
Media Equation column, has died at age 58."
Comments Off on Media Equation
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Continued from yesterday.
The passage on Claude Chevalley quoted here
yesterday in the post Dead Reckoning was, it turns out,
also quoted by Peter Galison in his essay "Structure of Crystal,
Bucket of Dust" in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of
Mathematics and Narrative (Princeton University Press, 2012,
ed. by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur).
Galison gives a reference to his source:
"From 'Claude Chevalley Described by His Daughter (1988),'
in Michèle Chouchan, Nicolas Bourbaki: Faits et légendes
(Paris: Éditions du Choix, 1995), 36–40, translated and cited
in Marjorie Senechal, 'The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki:
An Interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997,'
Mathematical Intelligencer 1 (1998): 22–28."
Galison's essay compares Chevalley with the physicist
John Archibald Wheeler. His final paragraph —
"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"
See also posts tagged Wheeler.
Comments Off on Dead Reckoning
Comments Off on Capitalizing Car
Five W's and an H
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150211/chelsea/60-minutes-bob-simon-killed-west-side-highway-crash-police-network
60 Minutes' Bob Simon Killed in West Side Highway Crash: Police and Network
By Janon Fisher on February 11, 2015 11:48pm
CHELSEA — Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon died in an horrific crash on the West Side Highway Wednesday night when the livery car he was riding in struck another vehicle, lost control and smashed into the median strip, police said.
The 2010 Lincoln Town Car was traveling southbound on the West Side Highway just before 7 p.m. near the Hudson Rail Yards when it hit the driver's side of a black 2003 Mercedes Benz that was stopped at a red light on the highway at West 30th Street, according to the NYPD.
Simon's vehicle spun out of control and smashed into the metal stanchions in the median strip of the highway, authorities said.
The driver and the newsman had to be cut out of the car by first responders. ….
[Edits to "Town Car" sentence: "Car" capitalized, link added.]
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* Abramson, now teaching at Harvard
From "Teacher's Pet" (1958) —
373
00:22:36,480 –> 00:22:39,233
Well, Kipling said
it quite well in a poem that he wrote:
374
00:22:39,320 –> 00:22:42,790
"I keep six honest serving men,
they taught me all I knew
375
00:22:43,160 –> 00:22:47,756
"Their names are: What and Why and
When and How and Where and Who"
Comments Off on For Journalism Jill*
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Continued from yesterday evening
Today's mathematical birthday —
Claude Chevalley, 11 Feb. 1909 – 28 June 1984.
From MacTutor —
Chevalley's daughter, Catherine Chevalley, wrote about
her father in "Claude Chevalley described by his daughter"
(1988):—
For him it was important to see questions as a whole, to see the necessity of a proof, its global implications. As to rigour, all the members of Bourbaki cared about it: the Bourbaki movement was started essentially because rigour was lacking among French mathematicians, by comparison with the Germans, that is the Hilbertians. Rigour consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigour gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure. When that structure had been constructed, he would say it was an object which interested him, something to look at, to admire, perhaps to turn around, but certainly not to transform. For him, rigour in mathematics consisted in making a new object which could thereafter remain unchanged.
The way my father worked, it seems that this was what counted most, this production of an object which then became inert— dead, really. It was no longer to be altered or transformed. Not that there was any negative connotation to this. But I must add that my father was probably the only member of Bourbaki who thought of mathematics as a way to put objects to death for aesthetic reasons.
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Recent scholarly news suggests a search for Chapel Hill
in this journal. That search leads to Transformative Hermeneutics.
Those who, like Professor Eucalyptus of Wallace Stevens's
New Haven, seek God "in the object itself" may contemplate
yesterday's afternoon post on Eightfold Design in light of the
Transformative post and of yesterday's New Haven remarks and
Chapel Hill events.
Comments Off on Dead Reckoning
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Yale Daily News staff columnist Scott Greenberg today,
in a piece titled "Filling Religion's Void" —
"The secularization of college students in America
has seemed a foregone conclusion for some time,
yet it represents a momentous shift for our university
and society at large that we have not yet
come to grips with….
Is the solution for our society and our University
to return to religion en masse?"
So to speak.
A Midrash for Greenberg:
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Meets an Evening in the Garden of Allah —
Comments Off on En Masse
… industrial designer Kenji Ekuan —
Eightfold Design.
The adjective "eightfold," intrinsic to Buddhist
thought, was hijacked by Gell-Mann and later
by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
(MSRI, pronounced "misery"). The adjective's
application to a 2x2x2 cube consisting of eight
subcubes, "the eightfold cube," is not intended to
have either Buddhist or Semitic overtones.
It is pure mathematics.
Comments Off on In Memoriam…
Monday, February 9, 2015
See also Sabol in this journal and The Literary Field .
Comments Off on Touchdown
For Jews of Hungarian background
who do not worship Paul Erdős and
Rubik’s Cube:
The Great Escape.
Comments Off on Escape Clause
Comments Off on For Blacklist Fans
Continued from earlier posts.
The Washington Post online yesterday:
"Val Logsdon Fitch, the Nebraska rancher’s son who shared the Nobel Prize for detecting a breakdown in the overarching symmetry of physical laws, thus helping explain how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, died Feb. 5 in Princeton, N.J. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by Princeton University, where he had been a longtime faculty member and led the physics department for several years.
Dr. Fitch and his Princeton colleague James Cronin received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1980 for high-energy experiments conducted in 1964 that overturned fundamental assumptions about symmetries and invariances that are characteristic of the laws of physics."
— By Martin Weil
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Fans of synchronicity may prefer some rather
ig -Nobel remarks quoted here on the date
of Fitch's death:
"The Harvard College Events Board presents
Harvard Thinks Big VI, a night of big ideas
and thinking beyond traditional boundaries.
On Thursday February 5th at 8 pm in
Sanders Theatre …."
— Log24 post The Big Spielraum
Comments Off on Overarching Symmetry
Sunday, February 8, 2015
See also today's previous post,
Hungarian Phenomenon.
Comments Off on For Grammy Night
For Autism Sunday —
Mathematician John von Neumann
reportedly died on this date.
“He belonged to that so-called
Hungarian phenomenon….”
— A webpage titled
“Von Neumann, Jewish Catholic”
Illustrations of another Hungarian phenomenon:
Comments Off on Hungarian Phenomenon
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Comments Off on November 19 Address
Comments Off on Words and Pictures, continued
Comments Off on In Other News…
From actor James Spader, whose birthday is today —
"… my father taught English. My mother taught art…."
— Spader in a 2014 interview
See as well the 2013 film "Words and Pictures"
and Log24 posts on a 2007 film, "The Last Mimzy."
Above: A scene from Spader's TV series "The Blacklist"
that was aired on Thursday, February 5, 2015.
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For Emma Watson and the late Lizabeth Scott —
"… a groundbreaking impact …."
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Friday, February 6, 2015
"'Relax,' said the night man .
'We are programmed to receive.'"
— "Hotel California," quoted here on
the evening of January 30, 2015
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Comments on two sub-images from yesterday's
The Big Spielraum (image, 1 MB) that may or
may not interest Emma Watson —
The Potter Sub-Image
This is from a link in a July 8, 2011, post:
The above "Childhood's End" link leads to
a midrash on the Harry Potter series:
"After pg. 759 in Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows , my childhood ended."
The Carmichael Sub-Image
The number of the last page in the last Harry Potter
book is 759. This number may, for those with
cabalistic tendencies, be interpreted as the
number 3*23*11 from a 1931 mathematics paper:
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Thursday, February 5, 2015
From the Office for the Arts at Harvard:
Harvard Thinks Big VI
College Events Board
Location: Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall,
45 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Parking: none
On Sale Date: 1/29/2015
How to get tickets: The Harvard Box Office
617-496-2222
Thursday 2/5 08:00 PM
Ticket Prices: Free. Harvard ID only.
2 tickets per person per ID.
Tickets valid until 7:45PM.
Ticket Availability: Good
The Harvard College Events Board presents Harvard Thinks Big VI, a night of big ideas and thinking beyond traditional boundaries. On Thursday February 5th at 8 pm in Sanders Theatre, 7 Harvard professors and lecturers will speak for ten minutes each to discuss a topic that intrigues and excites them. This annual event was first started in order to introduce the Harvard community to the fascinating research and developments from some of the greatest minds on campus.
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See as well The Big Spielraum (1 MB).
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(As opposed to "The Hard Problem")
Sharon Gaudin at computerworld.com
on artificial intelligence (AI) today—
"Google's [Geoffrey] Hinton said he's most excited
about gains in neural networks that would enable
computers to understand the content of sentences
and documents.
'That is close to the core of Google because
it involves understanding sentences, and if you can
understand what a document is saying, you can do
a much better search,' Hinton said. 'That's a core
AI problem. Can you read a document and know
what it's saying?'"
Sometimes. How about you?
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Wednesday, February 4, 2015
See Einstein's Orgy (Log24, Nov. 28, 2005),
a post on Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.
Related material:
Two articles mentioning Gilbert in The Harvard Crimson —
Exams Interrupt Jewish High Holidays
(October 3, 2011)
Sorry NYTimes, But SLS 20 Is Actually Very Hard
(April 19, 2014)
* A sequel to today's earlier post on The Great Gilbert.
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Tuesday, February 3, 2015
A short poem by several authors:
"The role of
the 16 singular points
on the Kummer surface
is now played by
the 64 singular points
on the Kummer threefold."
— From Remark 2.4 on page 9 of
"The Universal Kummer Threefold,"
by Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam,
Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1229v3,
August 6, 2012 — June 12, 2013.
See also "Expanded Field" in this journal.
Illustration from "Sunday School," July 20, 2014.
Other Log24 background: Kummer, Spielraum, Art Space.
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Monday, February 2, 2015
From "Origins of the Logical Theory of Probability: von Kries, Wittgenstein, Waismann," by Michael Heidelberger —
"Von Kries calls a range of objective possibilities of a hypothesis or event (under given laws) its Spielraum (literally: play space), which can mean ‘room to move’, ‘leeway’, ‘latitude of choice’, ‘degree of freedom’ or ‘free play’ and ‘clearance’ – or even ‘scope’. John Maynard Keynes translated it as ‘field’, but the term ‘range’ has generally been adopted in English. Von Kries now holds that if numerical probability were to make any sense at all it must be through this concept of the Spielraum . Von Kries’s theory is therefore called a ‘Spielraum theory’ or ‘range theory of probability’."
— International Studies in the Philosophy of Science , Volume 15, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 177-188
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See also the tag Points Omega.
(Scroll down to January 11-12, 2015.)
Related material:
"Now, for example, in how far are
the six sides of a symmetric die
'equally possible' upon throwing?"
— From "The Natural-Range Conception
of Probability," by Dr. Jacob Rosenthal,
page 73 in Time, Chance, and
Reduction: Philosophical Aspects of
Statistical Mechanics , ed. by
Gerhard Ernst and Andreas Hüttemann,
Cambridge U. Press, 2010, pp. 71-90
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Sunday, February 1, 2015
From today's Super Bowl Halftime:
Click for image in context.
See also Spielraum in this journal.
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For Katy Perry
Halftime Show —
The "Pyramid Dance" from this journal
on Dec. 3, 2014, the date of death for
mathematics author James Stewart —
Backstory:
When Stewart died on Dec. 3, it ended a two-year ordeal that began when doctors discovered multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow, while he was being treated for a broken hip.
As the end neared, the meticulously well organized Stewart came to conclude that he would prefer his wake take place before he died. So he set out to organize an extraordinary salon for the people he loved, in the building he loved, featuring music he loved.
There was a giant buffet and among the performers was Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman using a concert hall that was part of his sprawling 18,000 square foot architectural masterpiece he called Integral House in Toronto's Rosedale.
"It was pretty epic. Everyone lined up to talk to him. They'd come up to him and lean down in front of him as he sat," said Joe Clement, a documentary filmmaker who had been filming Stewart for the past three years. The film Integral Man is scheduled for release in early 2016.
"I said to myself, 'This is it and this is everything.' It was very powerful."
— Mark McNeil in The Hamilton Spectator today
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Saturday, January 31, 2015
Von Weizsäcker reportedly
died sometime last night.
* A reference to this journal's
final post from 2014.
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For those who prefer Heidegger to Hausdorff:
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From the concluding paragraph of a new book by
mathematician Michael Harris:
"A team of eminent scholars is completing a definitive
edition of Hausdorff’s collected works—'unique …
in the annals of mathematical publishing'— with the
care befitting the literary figure he undoubtedly was….
… he is honored as, perhaps, the first modern
mathematician to give a name to what we have been
calling the 'relaxed field'— he called it the
'Spielraum of thought'— and as a mathematician
who never lost his sensitivity to his chosen field’s
problematic attractions while remaining fully aware that
every veil lifted only reveals another veil."
— Harris, Michael, Mathematics without Apologies:
Portrait of a Problematic Vocation (2015-01-18)
(pp. 324-325). Princeton U. Press. Kindle Edition.
Related material: Spiel ist nicht Spielerei .
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The New York Times this morning, in an
obituary for a maker of crossword puzzles :
"… the first known crossword puzzle appeared in
an American newspaper. (Called a 'word-cross'
and shaped like a diamond, it was published in
The New York World on Sunday, Dec. 21, 1913.)"
See St. Nicholas magazine, November 1874, p. 59 :
For the answer, see this journal on Aug. 29, 2002
(with a scene from Spellbound ) and on July 15, 2004.
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Friday, January 30, 2015
In memory of a dead poet —
"Relax," said the night man.
"We are programmed to receive."
* A phrase from a new book by mathematician
Michael Harris, Mathematics without Apologies .
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Thursday, January 29, 2015
The Yale Daily News on Sept. 9, 2014 —
Related material on "the hard problem" of consciousness—
Wikipedia on the problem, and Tom Stoppard's first new
play in nine years, "The Hard Problem."
See also, in this journal, the posts of Sept. 9, 2014,
the date of the above Yale Daily News story
"Research Suggests New Consciousness Hub."
The above scene from the new Stoppard play
suggests also a review of Kulturkampf for Princeton.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015
See also a tribute to Wang (a Yale math major).
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Click on the image above for the LA Times obituary of Charles Townes, inventor of the laser.
See also a statement at Adherents.com —
From: "'STATEMENT BY CHARLES HARD TOWNES
At The Templeton Prize News Conference, March 9, 2005,'
posted on Templeton Prize official website"—
"Science and religion have had a long history of interesting interaction. But when I was younger, that interaction did not seem like a very healthy one. For example, when I was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, even my professor who was directing my research jumped on me for being religiously oriented. I myself have always thought that science and religion are not unrelated, and should be honestly and openly interacting. Later, in the early 1960s, I was at Columbia University and the men's group of Riverside Church, near Columbia, asked if I would talk to them about my views, since I was one of few scientists they knew who attended church. Surprisingly, a week after my talk someone telephoned to ask if he could publish my talk he had heard on the relation between science and religion. Of all things, he wanted to publish it in THINK magazine of IBM, of which he was editor. Shortly after that, the editor of the MIT Alumni Journal read it and also wanted to publish it in his journal, and did. But a prominent MIT alumnus wrote him that if he ever published anything like it again on religion, he would never have anything more to do with MIT. This of course only encouraged me to provide many other talks and articles on the subject as I was invited, but it reflected a common view at the time among many scientists that one could not be a scientist and religiously oriented. There was an antipathy towards discussion of spirituality."
See as well a post, American Activities, from the above-mentioned date— March 9, 2005— in this journal.
A passage relevant to that post from a review of the recent film Predestination :
"By the end, even bad jokes and tired riddles come together in a giddy concatenation of thought and feeling. When a central character asks, 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?' he answers for himself: 'The rooster.' We learn that he’s not just being absurd, imbecilic or sarcastic. He’s presaging the movie’s existential triple whammies."
— "Deep Focus: Predestination," by Michael Sragow, Jan. 8, 2015
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Or: Spectral Theory
(continued from Oct. 2, 2013, and earlier)
A memorable phrase by Verity Stob
at theregister.co.uk on Jan. 26:
"… remember you're not just an emotionless Dalek.
You are in the lavender band of the autistic spectrum."
See also lavender in this journal…
("Dalek, Spacek. Spacek, Dalek.")
Verity herself —
Verity's column, illustrated above, on Nov. 12, 2013,
was titled "Three Men in a Tardis."
Connoisseurs of synchronicity may consult my own
remarks on that date. Three men discussed there
are the two X-Men patriarchs Patrick Stewart and
Ian McKellen, as well as a more interesting character,
composer Sir John Tavener.
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Columbia University physics writer Peter Woit dubbed
yesterday Snowpocalypse 2015 in New York City.
Woit used the day to ponder a new book by mathematician
Michael Harris, Mathematics without Apologies .
Related material: a search for Michael Harris in this journal.
That search includes…
The above art includes an image of William Rubin,
former director of painting and sculpture at the
Museum of Modern Art. Rubin reportedly died on
January 22, 2006. See Log24 posts from that date.
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Julianne Moore at the Screen Actors Guild awards
on Sunday evening:
"When I was 17, I decided I wanted to be
an actor. It didn't seem possible because
I'd never met a real actor," Moore said.
"So I want to say to all the kids in the
drama club, you guys are the real actors."
On the main character of the new film "Birdman"—
"Thomson is clearly talented, yet unable to get out of
the shadow of his superhero role. He is filled with
a simmering rage as Robert Downey Jr. appears
on the TV, arguably the highest profile actor alive
courtesy of a role in the Marvel films."
— Grant Pearsall at The Snapper
A midrash for Robert:
See The Stars My Destination and Cube of Ultron.
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Monday, January 26, 2015
Continued from June 17, 2013
(John Baez as a savior for atheists):
As an atheists-savior, I prefer Galois…
The geometry underlying a figure that John Baez
posted four days ago, "A Hypercube of Bits," is
Galois geometry —
See The Galois Tesseract and an earlier
figure from Log24 on May 21, 2007:
For the genesis of the figure,
see The Geometry of Logic.
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