Log24

The late film director Micky Moore playing St. Mark as a child:

See also a clip introducing St. Mark from DeMille's 1927 "The King of Kings." 

Moore reportedly died at 98 at his Malibu home on March 4th.

The previous post described briefly a  2002 
book on magic and religion, Golems of Gotham .

For a Sunday New York Times  review,  click here.

A brief drama inspired by Peter J. Cameron's post today
on a March 4-8  combinatorics conference at
Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton:

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Recommended Reading
for Hogwarts Students
on Devil’s Night (2005):

Click on the above for details.

Click for some background music.

For Robert Langdon  (Angels & Demons )…

See Final Club (Wikipedia) and Kiss Club (this journal).

On the late Hugo Chávez:

"A couple of years later, I asked him why,
so late in the day, he had decided to
adopt socialism. He acknowledged that he
had come to it late, long after most of
the world had abandoned it, but said that it
had clicked for him after he had read
Victor Hugo’s epic novel Les Misérables .
That, and listening to Fidel."

— The New Yorker 's  Jon Lee Anderson

"As you can see, we've had our eye on you
for some time now, Mr. Anderson."

(Continued)

"Now this is fairly serious stuff."

As is this.

In memory of a 1961 graduate of
Beverly Hills High School who died today—

last night's Eiger post and a tall white mountain.

Bruce Reynolds, chief architect of
the Great Train Robbery, who reportedly
died today:

"We all have our benchmarks….
it’s the same madness, I suppose,
that drives people to bivouac on
the north face of the Eiger."

For the Eiger in this journal, see "Parts of a World."

(A sequel to yesterday's post Publication )

Meanwhile, in this journal …

Les Miserables  at the Academy Awards

News summary in today's previous post:

Van Cliburn Dies. Pope Bids Farewell.

Midrash:

Friday, July 11, 2008, 7:11 PM ET and Plato's Ghost.

"Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail.
You would never have thought it when you read
his story—if I did myself, it was both more and
less than thinking. Perhaps you will read the
book again from this point of view. And perhaps
you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge
and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest
reward, for which not only the foolish hero but
the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the
chapter called 'Snow'…."

— Thomas Mann, "The Making of
     The Magic Mountain "

In related entertainment news…

Click image for some backstory.

Mann's tale is set in Davos, Switzerland.
See also Mayer  at Davos.

See also Back Space and Shift Lock .

"Forget about your rainbow schemes,
Spin a little web of dreams."

— Song lyric

Related material: 

Big Time and The Lost Tesseract.

See "Mind of Winter" in this journal.

"And we may see the meadow in December…."

"Currently in post-production": The Zero Theorem.

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract  continues…

SOCRATES: Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?
MENO: I think that he is.
SOCRATES: If we have made him doubt, and given him the 'torpedo's shock,' have we done him any harm?
MENO: I think not.

Torpedo… LOS!

Part I: The Midnight Ending Lincoln's Birthday, 2013

Part II: The Death of Barnaby Conrad on that day

Part III: The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth

Whether Conrad now enjoys a second life, I do not know.

Part I: Professor Marvin W. Meyer (this journal yesterday)

Part II: Producer/writer Richard Collins (Los Angeles Times  today)

In memory of Rabbi David Hartman, who died yesterday.

The architecture is by Lou Gelehrter.
I do not know the logo designer's name.

Related material:  Group Actions and B17.

Suggested by a recent review of a
book by Richard Kearney:

The World,  the Flesh, and the Devil.

Talk amongst yourselves.

For Kiefer Sutherland, Hasty Pudding Man of the Year, 2013

Act I:

Current Validity for Erlangen…?

… MathOverflow question dated March 28, 2011

Act II:

Erlangen

… Starring Elke Sommer, former Erlangen student

Act III:

The Sweet Smell of Avon

… See also Bus 318 and 3/18 in 2012.

Act IV:

Desire

… Log24 post dated March 28, 2011

Related material:  G. H. Hardy on seriousness.

John Berryman in The New York Review of Books :

FEBRUARY 1, 1963 • VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1

"Now he has become, abrupt, an industry.
Professional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost all over
open their mouths
while the quirky medium of so many truths
is quiet. Let’s all be quiet. Let’s listen:
while he begins to talk with Horace."

In memory of the late Ed Koch, 
a poem and a link:

Poem — "The Shoebox," by Sheila Gogol

Link — Sheila in this journal

Today's NY Times  "Stone Links" to philosophy include
a link to a review of a collection of Hilary Putnam's papers.

Related material, from Putnam's "What is Mathematical
Truth?" (Historia Mathematica  2 (1975): 529-543)—

"In this paper I argue that mathematics should be interpreted realistically – that is, that mathematics makes assertions that are objectively true or false, independently of the human mind, and that something answers to such mathematical notions as ‘set’ and ‘function’. This is not to say that reality is somehow bifurcated – that there is one reality of material things, and then, over and above it, a second reality of ‘mathematical things’. A set of objects, for example, depends for its existence on those objects: if they are destroyed, then there is no longer such a set. (Of course, we may say that the set exists ‘tenselessly’, but we may also say the objects exist ‘tenselessly’: this is just to say that in pure mathematics we can sometimes ignore the important difference between ‘exists now’ and ‘did exist, exists now, or will exist’.) Not only are the ‘objects’ of pure mathematics conditional upon material objects; they are, in a sense, merely abstract possibilities. Studying how mathematical objects behave might better be described as studying what structures are abstractly possible and what structures are not abstractly possible."

See also Wittgenstein's Diamond and Plato's Diamond.

    "The serpent's eyes shine as he wraps around the vine" — Don Henley

Continued from previous post —

For what it's worth…

A birth and a death, each on the Feast of St. Patrick

"Donald Frederick Hornig was born on March 17, 1920, in Milwaukee
and attended Harvard, earning his undergraduate degree there
in 1940 and his Ph.D. in 1943, both in chemistry. His dissertation
was titled 'An Investigation of the Shock Wave Produced by an Explosion'…."

— "Donald Hornig, Last to See First A-Bomb, Dies at 92,"
New York Times  print version today (p. A20, New York edition)

A death elsewhere in Wisconsin 92 years later, on March 17, 2012—

more »

The Square Fish logo was designed by Filomena Tuosto.

See noon yesterday …

… and the date of Donald Hornig’s death:

Excerpt from an essay cached nine years ago:

"The current dominant conceptual framework
which pictures the self as an inner entity
is slowly breaking up. And I am convinced that
some, if not all, of the approaches to the self
sketched here will form the basis for a new
conceptual framework…."

Context for the essay: 

A journal issue titled "The Opening of Narrative Space" (pdf, 475 KB)

For one sort of narrative space, see Giordano Bruno in this journal.

See also Nine Years.

Harvard's President Faust:

Last evening's post Moondance was suggested by a check
in this journal of the date October 10, 2012. That date was
in turn suggested by the date of the above remarks.

Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.

Who always striving efforts makes,
For him there is salvation.

— Faust Part 2, Act V, Scene 7: Mountain Gorges.

A Google search for images matching
Amy Adams's door in the 2005 film
"Standing Still" yields a surprising result.

Related material: Adams in "Doubt" (2008).

See also A Touch of Glass.

(Continued from Epiphany 2012)

Yesterday's link to the post Special Topics suggests
a review of the garden of forking paths.

An example of such paths, given in the Special Topics
post, came from a paper describing the modular group:

Here is another view of the modular group's
forking paths:

"Tree for modular group" from the
Algebra page of the University of Glasgow

Introductory Aramaic

See also a theater review in yesterday's print NY Times
and a video in today's online Times:

"Well, I got there!"

— D. H. Lawrence,
"The Rocking-Horse Winner"

"I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the Tree
I am yours—your passages have been paid."

— Maya Angelou, January 20, 1993

     See also Rock,  River,  Tree.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor
that can be bestowed on a civilian, was presented to
Stan Musial at the White House on Feb 15, 2011.

Meanwhile…

For Terry Gilliam

See also, from the the above uploading date, Taylor Made,
with its linked-to passage from a book by Charles Taylor.

For some more recent background, see

• "Fallen" in this journal,
•  the film by that name,
• Wednesday evening's execution in Virginia, and
• Wednesday afternoon's Treasure Hunt

Top of the front page, tonight's online New York Times—

Click the above image for the story of a rather different cyclist.

See also some images from Guy Fawkes Day, 2003—

Related material:

Blade Runner in this journal and posts tagged "Fawkes"—

"Remember, remember the fifth of November."

Or:  Dr. Arroway Flies Again

Today's math news mentioning the Hamming Medal
suggests…

Richard Hamming (d. 1998) as a real-life counterpart to
the techno-wizard S. R. Hadden in the 1997 film Contact .
Hamming devised a famous error-correcting code.

"You gotta be true to your code." —Sinatra

Review of a more recent Jodie Foster film, Flightplan :

"Is she crazy, or is she the victim of a conspiracy
that would have to be fragile, if not tortured, in its logic?"

The Speed of Thought

"I love  Quicksilver. I've been using it since nearly the beginning,
and I cannot live without it…. I just type, and things happen,
pretty much at the speed of thought."

— Mac user, April 22, 2011

See also Speed of Thought in this journal and
Madeleine L'Engle on kything .

The Speed of Inference

See this journal on the above date— April 22, 2011:
Romancing the Hyperspace —and, more generally,
all April 2011 references to romancing .

See also a contributor to Edge.org:

"Sciences can move at the speed of inference
when individuals only need to consider logic and evidence.
Yet sciences move glacially (Planck's 'funeral by funeral')
when the typical scientist, dependent for employment
on a dense ingroup network, has to get the majority of her
guild to acknowledge fundamental, embarrassing
disciplinary errors." 

"The serpent's eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine"
— Don Henley, lyric from
    1995 Greatest Hits  album

"…the film proceeds with implacable logic…."
— Roger Ebert, 2005 review of the
    Jodie Foster film Flightplan

Happy Birthday to Lawrence Kasdan.

See also…

Spelling Bee:
Manifesto I vs. Manifesto II—

I   The Commonist Manifesto
II  The Anti-Commonist Manifesto

Google's Choice:

The People's Choice:

Remarks for a dead mathematician—

Click on the above image for the original post. 

Then click on the Harmonic Analysis  link for
some exposition by Folland.

* As opposed to concrete —
     See yesterday morning's Grapevine Hill and…