From a search for "snowflake" in this journal —
See also the January 13 death of a mathematician,
graph theorist Ralph Faudree of the University of Memphis.
Two hymns that may or may not be relevant:
Walking in Memphis and Come Falda di Neve,
the song that plays over the ending credits of
Exorcist III —
†
Those who prefer more-secular music may consult
Princeton Requiem, a post from the day of Faudree's death.
Yesterday's online LA Times had an obituary for a
traveling salesman:
"Besides writing and teaching, Borg was a frequent speaker,
usually racking up 100,000 frequent flier miles a year.
He and Crossan, along with their wives, led annual tours
to Turkey to follow the path of the Apostle Paul and to give
a sense of his world. They also led tours to Ireland to
showcase a different brand of Christianity."
Borg and Crossan were members of the Jesus Seminar.
For Crossan, see remarks on "The Story Theory of Truth."
See also, from the date of Borg's death, a different salesman joke.
Some backstory —
"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence."
— G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology
Wikipedia on a 1953 novel by Theodore Sturgeon:
"The novel concerns the coming together of
six extraordinary people with strange powers…."
Review of the novel by Ted Gioia at Conceptual Fiction :
"If there is a flaw to More Than Human , it comes from
the writer’s desire to achieve more than fiction. If you
think that sci-fi books don’t pay attention to deep
inner meanings, you will be surprised by the conclusion
to this work, in which Sturgeon reaches for something
bigger than a story of this scale can deliver."
Background: Sturgeon's novella Baby is Three (1952).
See also 6! in this journal.
"We are not isolated free chosers,
monarchs of all we survey, but
benighted creatures sunk in a reality
whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform
by fantasy."
—Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness"
in Encounter , p. 20 of issue 88
(vol. 16 no. 1, January 1961, pp. 16-20)
"We need to turn our attention away from the consoling
dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry
symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards
the real impenetrable human person."
— Iris Murdoch, 1961
"Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd…."
– The Midrash Jazz Quartet
in the novel City of God
by E. L. Doctorow (2000)
From a search in this journal
for "Against Dryness":
See also the previous three posts.
(Continued.)
“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
Photo opportunity
for the late John Bayley and Iris Murdoch —
From a cartoon graveyard, in memory of
a British artist who reportedly died yesterday:
The Dark Fields Meet The Big Seal .
Recall the punchline of Tuesday afternoon's post
on the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman" —
"What am I, the farmer's daughter?"
For background from the dark fields of the republic,
see a speech last night by Iowa Senator Joni Ernst.
Related material:
At the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman,"
the main character holds up to the light a letter that has
at the top the presidential seal of the United States:
The camera pans down, and the character then
sees a watermark that echoes another famous seal,
from the U.S. one-dollar bill:
For related paranoia, see the novels of Dan Brown
as well as…
See also Shema and Clocks Striking 13.
The Malfunctioning TARDIS continues…
The New York Times this evening claims that
this is a photo from the Year of Our Lord 1970:
It clearly is not. [See correction below.]
Related material:
See the reference to 1970 in a post from last Saturday night
and an image from the 2002 film Minority Report :
Update to Log24 at 6:52 PM ET Jan. 21
copied from an earlier correction at the Times :
On Alice K. Turner, fiction editor at Playboy magazine
for two decades, who reportedly died on Jan. 17:
"To have Alice publish a science-fiction story
of yours was a big seal of approval."
— Robert Silverberg, according to Turner's
obituary by Emily Langer in yesterday evening's
online Washington Post
Also from that obituary:
"Ms. Turner wrote a nonfiction and scholarly
book of her own, 'The History of Hell' (1993).
She professed that she did not believe in the
afterlife and described her book as a 'real
history of an imaginary place.' The erudite
work encompassed theology, art, literature
and history."
See as well this journal on the date of Turner's death.
"The character and events depicted in this
motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental."
— Ending credits of the 2012 film
"Travelling Salesman"
From that film's introduction to the
main character:
"He is presently the Rouse Ball Professor
of Mathematics in the Department of
Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
at Cambridge University and a fellow at
Trinity College. In 2008… he was awarded
the greatest honor in our profession
when he was presented with the Fields Medal
….
Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great honor
that I now present to you Dr. Timothy Horton."
See also…
A line for a fellow of Trinity:
"What am I, the farmer's daughter?"
The New York Times Sunday Style section
(online three days ago):
As for the elder Mr. Gilbert, he could have
leapt out of a novel by Louis Auchincloss….
According to his wedding announcement
in The New York Times, [the elder]
Mr. Gilbert’s father was the chief executive
of a company that made machines for
the textile industry….
— "The Price of Privilege," by Landon Thomas Jr.
"Machines for the textile industry" —
Try a Web search for
"Cutting Room Appliances" + Abner + Gilbert.
Compare and contrast with Gilbertville Historic District.
"By Louis Auchincloss" … or by F. Scott Fitzgerald?
In memory of a mathematician who
reportedly died on Dec. 16, 2014:
"Four dimensions is where things change a lot."
Backstory: Or Only Die.
Revisionism
From Wikipedia as of today:
"In fiction, revisionism is the retelling of a story
or type of story with substantial alterations in
character or environment, to 'revise' the view
shown in the original work. Unlike most usages
of the term revisionism, this is not generally
considered pejorative.
The film Dances with Wolves is a revisionist
Western because it portrays the Native Americans
sympathetically instead of as the savages of
traditional Westerns, which have been criticized
as racist. Similarly, the novel Wicked by
Gregory Maguire is a revisionist account of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , which portrays the
Wicked Witch of the West fighting for what she
believes is right, and the Wizard as a ruthless
dictator of Oz."
See also another Wikipedia article's Revision History.
Cross of Gold:
"I would tell them about Rhiannon,
and about my treasured gold cross…."
— Stevie Nicks
Dagger Cross:
See Dagger Definitions, by James Joyce:
"Hold to the now, the here, through which
all future plunges to the past."
A Jew's View:
"… as though echoing the road's vanishing point
up ahead…." — Album review, 2002
See Vanishing Point in this journal.
See as well Rolling Stone four days ago
on Stevie Nicks in 1976:
Keep in mind, the audience has
no idea who Stevie Nicks is.
In memory of music pioneers Kim Fowley
and Ervin Drake, each dead on Jan. 15…
The street was deserted late Friday night
We were buggin' each other while
we sat out the light….
Dead Man's Curve, it's no place to play
Dead Man's Curve, you best keep away
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
From the series of posts tagged "Defining Form" —
The 4-point affine plane A and
the 7-point projective plane PA —
The circle-in-triangle of Yale's Figure 30b (PA ) may,
if one likes, be seen as having an occult meaning.
For the mathematical meaning of the circle in PA
see a search for "line at infinity."
A different, cubic, model of PA is perhaps more perspicuous.
Remarks from The Harvard Crimson
last October on a library visit —
Remarks today by Margaret Soltan
(University Diaries , or UD )
of George Washington (GW) University
on writing well —
A post yesterday linked to a discussion
of the Faustian music of Milton Babbitt,
a serial composer who reportedly died
in Princeton on Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011.
Related material from this journal in
January 2005:
See also "me into you, you into me"
("Taking Lucifer Seriously," Jan. 24, 2004)
and the Saturday night "cold open" in this
journal on the date of Babbitt's death.
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
A sequel to Princeton Requiem,
Gesamtkunstwerk , and Serial Box —
Fearful Symmetry, Princeton Style:
* See as well other instances of Kulturkampf in this journal.
Enotes.com on Herman Wouk's 1985 novel Inside, Outside :
"The 'outside' of the title is the goyish world
into which David’s profession has drawn him;
the 'inside' is the warm life of his Russian-
Jewish family on which he, as narrator, reflects
in the course of the novel."
For a different sort of 'inside' life, see this morning's post
Gesamtkunstwerk , and Nathan Shields's Feb. 8, 2011,
tribute to a serial composer "In Memoriam, Milton Babbitt."
Some other context for Shields's musical remarks —
Doctor Faustus and Dürer Square.
For a more interesting contrast of inside with outside
that has nothing to do with ethnicity, see the Feb. 10,
2014, post Mystery Box III: Inside, Outside, about
the following box:
.
Angel Eyes
|
From The Daily Princetonian ,
U. community gathers to BY JACOB DONNELLY Students, faculty, staff and community members circled around a table supporting a single lit candle in the lobby of Murray-Dodge Hall on Monday night as they remembered the life of Audrey Dantzlerward ’16, who was found dead in her room in Edwards Hall today. The gathering, led by Dean of Religious Life and the Chapel Alison Boden, was moved to the lobby after a room reserved for the meeting overflowed.
Participants spoke commonly of Dantzlerward’s contributions to campus life, sharp intellect, supportive gestures and friendly demeanor, and the Wildcats, an |
See a YouTube video, uploaded on May 26, 2014,
of the Princeton Wildcats singing "Angel Eyes."
See also "Angel Eyes" and "Proginoskes" in this journal.
The previous post displayed a set of
24 unit-square “points” within a rectangular array.
These are the points of the
Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis.
The array was labeled Ω
because that is the usual designation for
a set acted upon by a group:
* The title is an allusion to Point Omega , a novel by
Don DeLillo published on Groundhog Day 2010.
See “Point Omega” in this journal.
A professor at Harvard has written about
"the urge to seize and display something
real beyond artifice."
He reportedly died on January 3, 2015.
An image from this journal on that date:
Another Gitterkrieg image:
The 24-set Ω of R. T. Curtis
Click on the images for related material.
From a recent Gitterkrieg post:
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
See also the cover of the February 2015
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .
"Omega is as real as we need it to be."
— Burt Lancaster in The Osterman Weekend
For Kristen Wiig, a 10 if ever there was one.
“To be is to be the value of a variable.”
See also "Ten'll Getcha."
From The New York Times this morning:
"David Henry Marlowe was born in Brooklyn
on June 6, 1931, the youngest of three children
of Karl and Lena Marlowe, Jewish immigrants
from Russia and Ukraine. His father sold
insurance, among other things, and his mother
ran the household.
For a time, the couple had a 'mind reading' act
on the Coney Island boardwalk, and their son
never forgot it. 'I can’t read minds, like my
parents,' he liked to say to friends. 'What I can
read is behavior.'"
For the rest of the story, see Marlowe's obituary.
For synchronicity, see this journal on the reported
date of his death.
* "I wrote another book." — Harlan Kane
(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative .)
Mathematician Peter J. Cameron this morning
on a Paris anthropological exhibition subtitled
Révélation d’un temps sans fin —
"I was reminded of Herbert Read’s
novel The Green Child ."
Related recent posts from this journal:
Seal for the Seventh, Forthright, and Fourth Right.
A passage from The Green Child :
"He watched over her until he too began to feel
overpowered by a desire to sleep. He therefore
got out on to the ledge of the trough and pulled
the Green Child after him. The rock there was
warm, smooth as jade to the flesh. They lay there
and sank into a profound slumber."
Sweet dreams, Mr. Taylor.
Green Child on the Rocks —
In memory of Rod Taylor, who
reportedly died at 84 on Wednesday,
the seventh day of 2015 —
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 1941-2014
The noted historian of mathematics reportedly
died on December 12, 2014.
"His forthright style of operating meant
he could occasionally ruffle academic feathers."
— An acquaintance quoted today in
Times Higher Education
See a quote from Grattan-Guinness in this
journal on April 19, 2004 ("Cartesian Theatre").
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
See also Cube Trinity in this journal.
From the abstract of a talk, "Extremal Lattices," at TU Graz
on Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Nebe
(RWTH Aachen) —
"I will give a construction of the extremal even
unimodular lattice Γ of dimension 72 I discovered
in summer 2010. The existence of such a lattice
was a longstanding open problem. The
construction that allows to obtain the
minimum by computer is similar to the one of the
Leech lattice from E8 and of the Golay code from
the Hamming code (Turyn 1967)."
On an earlier talk by Nebe at Oberwolfach in 2011 —
"Exciting new developments were presented by
Gabriele Nebe (Extremal lattices and codes ) who
sketched the construction of her recently found
extremal lattice in 72 dimensions…."
Nebe's Oberwolfach slides include one on
"The history of Turyn's construction" —
Nebe's list omits the year 1976. This was the year of
publication for "A New Combinatorial Approach to M24"
by R. T. Curtis, the paper that defined Curtis's
"Miracle Octad Generator."
Turyn's 1967 construction, uncredited by Curtis, may have
been the basis for Curtis's octad-generator construction.
See Turyn in this journal.
"Pilgrims to James Joyce's grave in Zurich, Switzerland,
continue to have their reveries fed by Hebald's 1966
life size bronze capturing the great modernist author
deep in thought, with open book in hand."
— LA Times obituary for Milton Hebald, sculptor,
who reportedly died at 97 on Twelfth Night
(Monday, January 5, 2014)
Related material: Joyce + Zurich + Serpent
in this journal.
(Continued from Jan. 3 and Jan. 5.)
Introduction: "Grids, You Say?" by Josefine Lyche,
and AntiChristmas 2010:
Related material:
Chapter 42 in
A History of Graphic Design ,
by Guity Novin.
See Instantia Crucis and Josefine Lyche's
One-Night-Only exhibition in Oslo Jan. 5.
In memory of my former sixth-grade
teacher at the school below —
A song he taught us —
The teacher died on Sunday, May 19, 2013.
See from that date a post titled Sermon.
See as well Lucy’s Day 2014.
"Bercovitch’s first published article, in 1964, was on
'Dramatic Irony in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground ';
his second and his third, in 1965, on 'Romance and Anti-Romance
in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ' and 'Three Perspectives on
Reality in Paradise Lost .' Only thereafter does his publication record
begin to reflect his interest in the vagaries of early American culture,
when he published in 1966 his essay, 'New England Epic:
Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana .'"
— "Scholar and Exegete: A Tribute to Sacvan Bercovitch,
Honored Scholar of Early American Literature," by
Christopher Looby
Bercovitch reportedly died at 81 on Dec. 9, 2014.
See his New York Times obituary from this evening
as well as a passage from Nicholas of Cusa quoted
here, also on Dec. 9, 2014 —
Bercovitch was a professor at Harvard (an institution
apparently unable to state accurately the date of
his death). The translator of of the above Nicholas of
Cusa passage may, I surmise, have been my section
man in a freshman philosophy course at Harvard
in the academic year 1960-1961.
"The way which directs a pilgrim to a city
is not the name of that city."
— Nicholas of Cusa
For some backstory, see Ajna in this journal
as well as Groundhog Day, 2014.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
|
"I pondered deeply, then, over the
adventures of the jungle. And after
some work with a colored pencil
I succeeded in making my first drawing.
My Drawing Number One.
It looked something like this:
I showed my masterpiece to the
grown-ups, and asked them whether
the drawing frightened them.
But they answered: 'Why should
anyone be frightened by a hat?'"
* For the title, see Plato Thanks the Academy (Jan. 3).
From a NY Times obituary for an Arkansas poet,
Miller Williams, who reportedly died at 84
on New Year's Day —
The title of Lucinda Williams’s most recent album,
"Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone,” is a
slightly altered line from one of her father’s poems,
which reads in its entirety:
Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.
Related material:
And from a sequel to
New Year's Greeting from Franz Kafka:
The above phrase "aimed at the heart of poetic language"
suggests an image from the poet's daughter's album —
A search for antimetaphoric yields…
"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."
See also other instances of "As It Were" in this journal.
See also Interpenet- in this journal.
"Interpenetration, that's what I say!"
— Adapted from Humpty Dumpty
A sequel to New Year's Greeting from Franz Kafka:
|
http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/buddhism/mccort/mccort.html
From "Kafka and the Coincidence of Opposites," by … my aim in the following pages is to identify and examine the particular dynamics of Kafka's mysticism through an analysis of this principle of the coincidence of opposites, first as a recurrent motif in his intellectual life, and then as a thematic and structural force in several key works of short fiction. Since the coincidentia, as the "abstract essence" of dialectical logic, may be said to subsume all experiential content, it becomes intrinsically more interesting as form than as content, and we will thus be examining a variety of Kafka's coincidentia-generated binaries (e.g., conscious/unconscious, freedom/bondage, wisdom/ignorance), first in a series of short parables and finally in two of the longer short fictions, "Die Verwandlung" [“The Metamorphosis”] and “Vor dem Gesetz” [“Before the Law”]. Moreover, since the coincidentia, understood in the German and other mystical traditions familiar to Kafka as the original Oneness of the pairs of opposites, is precisely what the human mind obscures as it conceptually bifurcates things in order to "get at them," we will be focusing especially on those relatively rare instances in Kafka's fiction in which the mind of the character or persona goes beyond its own intrinsic limits. This is in support of the case for Kafka's mystical insight as a mainspring of his literary creativity and, more generally, for Kafka as essentially a spiritual writer, convinced in the end of the human being's capacity to transcend, however remote the possibility, the suffering of separation built into his or her own dualistic consciousness. |
The title refers to a set of fifteen Göpel tetrads
that form the lines of a Cremona-Richmond configuration .
"Spiel ist nicht Spielerei.
Es hat hohen Ernst
und tiefe Bedeutung."
— Friedrich W.A. Fröbel
(1782-1852)
An image that led off the year-end review yesterday in
the weblog of British combinatorialist Peter J. Cameron:
See also this weblog's post final post of 2014,
with a rectangular array illustrating the six faces
of a die, and Cameron's reference yesterday to
a die-related post…
"The things on my blog that seem to be
of continuing value are the expository
series like the one on the symmetric group
(the third post in this series was reblogged
by Gil Kalai last month, which gave it a new
lease of life)…."
A tale from an author of Prague:
| The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message into his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald repeat it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those who’ve come to witness his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. He will never he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally did burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes. |
See also a passage quoted in this weblog on the original
date of Cameron's Prague image, July 26, 2014 —
"The philosopher Graham Harman is invested in
re-thinking the autonomy of objects and is part
of a movement called Object-Oriented-Philosophy
(OOP)." — From “The Action of Things,” a 2011
M.A. thesis at the Center for Curatorial Studies,
Bard College, by Manuela Moscoso
— in the context of a search here for the phrase
"structure of the object." An image from that search:
Huffington Post this morning, noting that
today is the birthday of Henri Matisse:
"On this most holy of art holidays…."
JOSEFINE LYCHE
ABSOLUTE ALT. VOL. 2
17. april – 23. mai [2015] —
"I kjernen av mitt arbeid er en pågående
utforskning av esoteriske konsepter…."
"At the core of my work is an ongoing
exploration of esoteric concepts…."
See also
http://issuu.com/tmrk/docs/spritenkunsthall_2015_cut .
Related material: Hard Core.
From the obituary of a two-time Oscar winner,
Luise Rainer, who reportedly died today at 104 —
Her oft-repeated account of her last meeting
with [producer Louis B.] Mayer is the stuff of
Hollywood legend.
"Louis B. sent for me and said, 'I understand
that you want to leave us?' I said, 'Yes,
Mr. Mayer, my source is dried out,'" she said.
"He looked at me and he said, 'What do you
need a source for? Don't you have a director?'"
— Claudia Luther in the Los Angeles Times
See also "Would you like some water?"
AP Today in History
Thought for the Day:
“I respect faith, but doubt is what
gives you an education.”
— Wilson Mizner,
American playwright (1876-1933)*
From this journal on the (wide) release date
of "X-Men: First Class" —
A minimalist 3×3 matrix favicon—
This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation. See Jim Holt on physics.
* A source —
In memory of Cuban architect
Ricardo Porro, who died
on Christmas Day, 2014:
See also Rubik + Revolution
and Launched from Cuber.
Bogus religion from a bogus "research lab" —
|
Journal of Scientific Exploration,
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research "… Consequently, the inferred models of reality are limited to those substances, processes, and sources of information that constitute conventional contemporary science. In this paper we ally ourselves with the sharply contrary position that there exists a much deeper and more extensive source of reality, which is largely insulated from direct human experience, representation, or even comprehension. It is a domain that has long been posited and contemplated by metaphysicians and theologians, Jungian and Jamesian psychologists, philosophers of science, and a few contemporary progressive theoretical physicists, all struggling to grasp and to represent its essence and its function. A variety of provincial labels have been applied, such as 'Tao,' 'Qi,' 'prana,' 'void,' 'Akashic record,' 'Unus Mundi,' 'unknowable substratum,' 'terra incognita,' 'archetypal field,' 'hidden order,' 'aboriginal sensible muchness,' 'implicate order,' 'zero-point vacuum,' 'ontic (or ontological) level,' 'undivided timeless primordial reality,' among many others, none of which fully captures the sublimely elusive nature of this domain. In earlier papers we called it the 'subliminal seed regime,' (2,3) but for our present purposes we shall henceforth refer to it simply as the 'Source.' "* References:
2. Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (2001). A modular model of mind/matter manifestations (M5). Journal of Scientific Exploration , 15(3), 299–329. Note: * This assortment of contexts, labels, or models should not be regarded as mutually exclusive or hierarchical; nor are they isomorphic to one another. Rather, they represent different perspectives on the same basic search, and hence should be respected as collectively complementary. Where they reinforce one another, or display common features, this may indicate some degree of basic insight. Where they disagree on details, testable hypotheses may present themselves. |
This was quoted approvingly in a recent book by
Joseph Jaworski, Source (Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
1st ed. Jan. 11, 2012, pp. 2-3).
Jaworski, a lawyer-turned-guru,
in 1980 founded a cult for executives
called the American Leadership Forum.
A synchronicity cult I prefer —
the Roman Catholic Church:
Recent posts tagged Sagan Dodecahedron
mention an association between that Platonic
solid and the 5×5 grid. That grid, when extended
by the six points on a "line at infinity," yields
the 31 points of the finite projective plane of
order five.
For details of how the dodecahedron serves as
a model of this projective plane (PG(2,5)), see
Polster's A Geometrical Picture Book , p. 120:
For associations of the grid with magic rather than
with Plato, see a search for 5×5 in this journal.
See also Sagan Dodecahedron, which includes
an image posted at 12 AM ET December 25, 2014:
The image stands for the
phrase "five by five,"
meaning "loud and clear."
The Blacklist “Pilot” Review
"There is an element of camp to this series though. Spader is
quite gleefully channeling Anthony Hopkins, complete with being
a well educated, elegant man locked away in a super-cell.
Speaking of that super-cell, it’s kind of ridiculous. They’ve got him
locked up in an abandoned post office warehouse on a little
platform with a chair inside a giant metal cube that looks like
it could have been built by Tony Stark. And as Liz approaches
to talk to him, the entire front of the cube opens and the whole
thing slides back to leave just the platform and chair. Really?
FUCKING REALLY ? "
— Kate Reilly at Geekenstein.com (Sept. 27, 2013)
The previous post, More To Be Done, quotes an
opera lyric by physicist Lisa Randall :
The opera, about a physics of hidden dimensions,
may of course be given a theological spin —
See Hope of Heaven in this journal.
The Ball-Weiner date above, 5 September 2011,
suggests a review of this journal on that date —
"Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram,
a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram.
It tells you what to do or not do, but not why.
The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture."
— Customer review at Amazon.com
This passage was quoted here on August 10, 2009.
Also from that date:
The Sept. 5, 2011, Ball-Weiner paper illustrates the
"doily" view of the mathematical structure W(3,2), also
known as GQ(2,2), the Sp(4,2) generalized quadrangle.
(See Fig. 3.1 on page 33, exercise 13 on page 38, and
the answer to that exercise on page 55, illustrated by
Fig. 5.1 on page 56.)
For "another view, hidden yet true," of GQ(2,2),
see Inscape and Symplectic Polarity in this journal.
Or: Entartete Kunst für Max .
Rail: You speak about your friendships with Mike Nichols and
Steve Martin, and I can understand the affinity in your sense
of timing, of knowing what to include and what to leave out.
Fischl: I had the great privilege the other night actually of
having dinner with Mike and Steve after looking at a workshop
that Steve and Edie Brickell are doing. Afterward we sat
around a table and Steve was asking for feedback because he is
still early in the process….
This evening's NY Times wire:
Mabee reportedly died on December 18, 2014.
The cover of Harvard Design Magazine , Spring/Summer 2014:
See also Sigla (Dec. 22, 2014):
"Everyword for oneself but Code for us all."
— James Joyce in Scribbledehobble
Or: Chessboard continued
"Time is irrelevant in these matters.
Joyce and the monastic brethren who
painted their manuscript ornaments
a thousand years ago were working on
the same project. There was a pattern
to be abstracted…."
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God
"She made me laugh a lot. She had a wicked
sense of humour and could be devastatingly funny."
— Film director Edgar Wright on the late Billie Whitelaw
Update of 11:01 AM — See Omen.
"How often in the course of a lifetime
is the third eye, our organ for detecting
the hidden luster of the front door key,
capable of opening? Up to now, this has
not been investigated. And why should it be?
One single time is enough, and then
all the cold shark eyes of the world
start to look a touch friendlier.
Time is irrelevant in these matters.
Joyce and the monastic brethren who
painted their manuscript ornaments
a thousand years ago were working on
the same project. There was a pattern
to be abstracted from the confused mesh
of tangled lines that was the reality
of the world, a pattern that would have
staying power, a pattern to which one could
say Yes. Every now and then a work
succeeded in accomplishing such a task,
and the heavens opened once more.
On February 2, 1922, for example…."
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God
Related material: This morning's NY Times obituaries—
Scully reportedly died on Dec. 16, 2014.
See that date in this journal —
A date in the previous post suggests a flashback to March 11, 2014,
and a post on that date titled "Dark Fields of the Republic"—
This uncredited translation of Plato is, Google Books tells us,
by “Francis MacDonald Cornfield.” The name is an error,
but the error is illuminating —
* See posts mentioning the novel with that title, republished as Limitless.
The President of the United States
on the Sony hacking
in his Dec. 19 press conference:
"But let’s talk of the specifics of what we now know.
The FBI announced today and we can confirm that
North Korea engaged in this attack. I think it says
something interesting about North Korea that they
decided to have the state mount an all-out assault
on a movie studio because of a satirical movie…."
This post was suggested in part by the contemptibly
misleading remarks of Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos"
TV series (see yesterday's Colorful Tale) and by the
following remarks in a Presentation Zen piece dated
March 11, 2014, "More Storytelling Lessons from 'Cosmos',"
praising Sagan's vulgarizations —
"Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions
as your narrative progresses. As the storyteller you can
ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach
is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience
to come up with the questions themselves. And yet we must
not be afraid to leave some (many?) questions unanswered.
When we think of a story we may think of clear conclusions
and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more
complicated than that."
This post was suggested by the book Turing's Cathedral and by
comments 29 and 31 on Scott Aaronson's Dec. 16 post about
"The Imitation Game."
See Church-Turing thesis at Wikipedia and Church Logic here.
Wikipedia on a tale about one Hippasus of Metapontum,
who supposedly was drowned by Pythagoreans for his
discovery of irrational numbers and/or of the dodecahedron —
"In the hands of modern writers this combination of vague
ancient reports and modern guesswork has sometimes
evolved into a much more emphatic and colourful tale."
See, for instance, a tale told by the late Carl Sagan,
who was bitterly anti-Pythagorean (and anti-Platonic):
For a related colorful tale, see "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal.
(Five by Five continued)
As the 3×3 grid underlies the order-3 finite projective plane,
whose 13 points may be modeled by
the 13 symmetry axes of the cube,
so the 5×5 grid underlies the order-5 finite projective plane,
whose 31 points may be modeled by
the 31 symmetry axes of the dodecahedron.
See posts tagged Galois-Plane Models.
You are here > Home > Mystery > Contact (1997) > Five by Five
"This is Control. Do you copy?"
"Reading you five by five…"
Continued from Nobel Note (Jan. 29, 2014).
From Tradition in Action , "The Missal Crisis of '62,"
remarks on the revision of the Catholic missal in that year—
"Neither can the claim that none of these changes
is heretical in content be used as an argument
in favor of its use, for neither is the employment of
hula girls, fireworks, and mariachis strictly speaking
heretical in itself, but they belong to that class of novel
and profane things that do not belong in the Mass."
— Fr. Patrick Perez, posted Sept. 11, 2007
See also this journal on November 22, 2014…
… and on Bruce Springsteen's birthday this year —
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
|
The title refers to yesterday evening's remarks titled
"Free the Philosophical Beast" in The Stone , a NY Times weblog.
The January 2015 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society
has an article by Michael J. Barany. From November 2012 remarks
by Barany :
"A highlight of the workshop was Cathryn Carson’s interpretation
of the transcendental phenomenology and historicism of Husserl,
Heidegger, Cassirer, and a few others, launched from a moving
reflection on the experience of reading Kuhn."
See Carson's paper "Science as Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas,
Heisenberg," Continental Philosophy Review (2010) 42: 483–509.
Related material: Monday's Log24 posts Rota on Husserl and Annals of Perception.
… to last night's TV premiere of the Syfy miniseries "Ascension,"
also known as "Mad Men in Space" —
See also Sunday's observances here and at
St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, CT.
Today’s 8:01 PM post quoted Husserl on
the perception of the cube.
Another approach to perception of the cube,
from Narrative Metaphysics on St. Lucia’s Day —
 See also Symplectic Structure and Stevens’s Rock. |
From today’s 11:29 AM post —
John Burt Foster Jr. in Nabokov’s Art of Memory and
European Modernism (Princeton U. Press, 1993, p. 224) —
At the time of The Waste Land , in a comment on
Joyce’s Ulysses that influenced many later definitions
of modernism in the English-speaking world, Eliot
announced, “instead of narrative method, we may
now use the mythical method.”13
For some illuminating remarks on a mythical approach
to perception of the cube, see Gareth Knight on Schicksalstag 2012.
The previous Log24 post quotes Husserl on the perception
of the cube. See also Mort de Grothendieck .
John Burt Foster Jr. in Nabokov’s Art of Memory and
European Modernism (Princeton U. Press, 1993, p. 224) —
At the time of The Waste Land , in a comment on
Joyce’s Ulysses that influenced many later definitions
of modernism in the English-speaking world, Eliot
announced, “instead of narrative method, we may
now use the mythical method.”13
May we? … Further details —
|
From T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order and Myth,” the last two paragraphs: It is here that Mr Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a novel; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. Mr Joyce has written one novel – the Portrait ; Mr Wyndham Lewis has written one novel – Tarr . I do not suppose that either of them will ever write another “novel.” The novel ended with Flaubert and with James. It is, I think, because Mr Joyce and Mr Lewis, being “in advance” of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are unaware of its obsolescence. In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and <i”>The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance. </i”> |
Some words and an image related to today's posts —
A sequel to Space Station 76 :
"Starship 63," alias "Mad Men in Space," alias …
"Ascension," a 3-night miniseries
on the Syfy Channel,
Monday-Wednesday, Dec. 15-17.
See also 1963 in this journal.
"In digital circuit theory, combinational logic
(sometimes also referred to as time-independent logic)
is a type of digital logic which is implemented by
Boolean circuits, where the output is a pure function of
the present input only."
— Wikipedia, quoted in this morning's previous post as
commentary on Nabokov's phrase "combinational delight"
"Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
"I confess I do not believe in time."
— Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory
Continued from Halloween 2012.
Suggested by yesterday afternoon's Combinational Delight.
"…the output is a pure function of the present input only.
This is in contrast to sequential logic, in which the output
depends not only on the present input but also on the
history of the input. In other words, sequential logic has
memory while combinational logic does not."
The title refers to remarks linked to this afternoon :
"An ingenious story line serves to convey
the mysteriousness of destiny, the 'grim pen'
of fate that encloses Hazel Shade."
— John Burt Foster Jr. on page 224 of
Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism
(Princeton University Press, 1993)
Vide a relevant page on Wallace Stevens.
For St. Lucia's Day —
A book that links the title of today's previous post,
Narrative Metaphysics, with Nabokov's "combinational delight."
From "Guardians of the Galaxy" —
"Then the Universe exploded into existence…"
For those who prefer a more traditional approach :
See also Symplectic Structure and Stevens's Rock.
This post was suggested by today's Harvard Crimson story
Protest at Primal Scream Leads to Chaotic Exchange.
Frederick Seidel in the September 3, 2012, New Yorker —
"Biddies still cleaned the student rooms."
Above, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in
"Sunshine Cleaning" (2008).
The Cleaner:
A scene from Bridget Fonda's "Point of No Return" (1993)
in a video uploaded six years ago on this date.
“I can hardly do better than go back to the Greeks.”
— G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology
See also Hardy and Brosnan in today's earlier post Stark and Bleak.
Continued from Monday, Dec. 8, 2014.
“The undermining of standards of seriousness
is almost complete.”
— Susan Sontag (See November 24, 2007.)
"Respect is often the last and only thing
that the world can offer a deceased or dying person."
— Photojournalist Michel du Cille, who reportedly
died today at 58 while on assignment in Liberia
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to
A Mathematician's Apology :
"… he had another favourite entertainment.
'Mark that man we met last night,'
he said, and someone had to be marked
out of 100 in each of the categories
Hardy had long since invented and defined.
STARK, BLEAK ('a stark man is not necessarily
bleak: but all bleak men without exception
want to be considered stark')…."
Related material :
Tommy Lee Jones in The New York Times on Nov. 6th, 2014,
and Pierce Brosnan in the 2014 film "The November Man" :
“Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”
— The Missing ART (Log24, November 7th, 2014)
Related material from this journal (Sept. 6, 2013) —
"Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be
content to be as though they had not been, to be found
in the Register of God, not in the record of man."
— Sir Thomas Browne
See also the post Monolith of August 23, 2014, as well as
the history of Farkas Hall at Harvard and posts with that tag.
Today's previous post, on a Harvard Crimson story,
omitted the name of the Crimson author. It is Sonya A. Karabel.
Related material:
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