Language Games:

Now You’re Playing
with Power

My latest preoccupation…

Using search-and-replace programs to reformat earlier Xanga entries.  This involves the use of “regular expressions,” which lead to the following thoughts….

Notes on
Formal Language Theory
and Parsing

James Power

Department of Computer Science
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.

Click on picture
for details.

Here’s more on
language games and robot wisdom
from an authority on James Joyce,

Star Wars

In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:

“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”

— Obituary in the Telegraph 

Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004.  From a journal entry of my own on that date:

This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.

Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star.  Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:

From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:

Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:

Different.

Language Game

In memory of
Samuel Iwry, Hebrew scholar,
who died on May 8, 2004:

From a log24 entry of May 8, 2004,
on Wittgenstein’s “language games” —

    “Let us imagine a language …”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
    Philosophical Investigations

Okay…

Moral of the story:
If you must have a
religious language,
Elvish may,
in some situations,
do as well as Hebrew.

See also

The Unity of Mathematics,
or Shema, Israel.

Popcorn Theology,
Part II:

Justice at
the Supremes’ Court

From today’s New York Times:

LeRoy Myers, tap dancer and
road manager for the original Supremes,
died April 26, 2004.

From a log24 entry of April 26, 2004:

Popcorn Theology

Today is the birthday of Star Wars director George Lucas and also the date of Frank Sinatra’s death.

Two notes that may be
suitable for the occasion —

From All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta:

POPCORN THEOLOGY
“On Friday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m. in Ellis Hall, Popcorn Theology is pleased to present Chicago. This is a cautionary tale set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, told with sharp satire and black humor.”

From Chicago photographer Art Shay:

His Kind of Town 

“We are not saints”
— Alcoholics Anonymous

Moral Hazard —
The Devil and Wallace Stevens,
continued from May 1-2 entries:

Law Day,
Readings for Law Day,
Fallen from Heaven, and
The Script  

University of Southern California, Department of Economics — Industrial Organization ECN 680 – Autumn 2002 — Introduction to Contract and Organization Theory —

Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont
(September 4 – October 21):

“The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to modern contract and organization theory. Part 1 of the course focuses upon models with moral hazard and adverse selection.”

From the insurance page at 

http://ingrimayne.saintjoe.edu/:

“The size of the insurance industry indicates that people are eager to pay to avoid risk. They pay and get nothing if fortune smiles on them, whereas if misfortune strikes, they break even because the insurance should just pay back the value lost in the misfortune.

Sometimes, however, people do better than break even when misfortune strikes, and this possibility has greatly interested economists. If, for example, the misfortune costs a person $1000, but insurance will pay $2000, the insured person has no incentive to avoid the misfortune and may act to bring it on. This tendency of insurance to change behavior is called moral hazard.

Sometimes moral hazard is dramatic….

People who know that they face large risks are more likely to buy insurance than people who face small risks. Insurance companies try to minimize the problem that only the people with big risks will buy their product, which is the problem of adverse selection ….”

From today’s New York Times:

“Jean-Jacques Laffont, an economist known for developing mathematical models to estimate what something is worth in situations of deep uncertainty, died on May 1 in Toulouse, France. He was 57….

…Jerry R. Green of Harvard said he was ‘an architect of systems’ and ‘a very original figure.’

Eric Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., called Dr. Laffont ‘simply one of the major figures of our time.’

‘Many people would say he was the leading economist in Europe,’ he added, ‘and that wouldn’t be an unfair judgment.’

Although Dr. Laffont’s models were abstruse enough to satisfy the most theoretical economists, Dr. Green said they were adapted for practical purposes by companies, as well as by public television for scheduling programs.”

The Wind and the Lion

Pat Buchanan
as A Mighty Wind —

Whose War?

Fallujah: High Tide of Empire?

A Time for Truth

For more about The Wind as a religious symbol, see Adolf Holl’s Biography of The Holy Spirit.

For more about The Lion as a religious symbol, see

Charles Krauthammer
as The Lion of Zion —

Acceptance Speech, Guardian of Zion Award.

For passionate views of the conflict between The Wind and The Lion, see

x

Lamed-Vavnik

Click on the above for further details.

“Jane Marie Law, professor of world religions at Cornell, who spoke at the funeral April 23 at Temple Beth-El in Ithaca, said Fuller had told her she believed a society is judged not by its artistic or scientific achievements but ‘by how it treats its prisoners.’ “

— Cornell Chronicle, April 29, 2004

Anyone Want to Buy a
Bridge to the 21st Century?

 Fareed
 Zakaria

See Zakaria’s
Newsweek column today,
The Price of Arrogance.

Religion of the Lottery:

Ground Zero Revisited

The midday New York lottery number for Thursday, May 6, 2004, the National Day of Prayer, was

000.

Since the log24 entry for the preceding day (Wednesday) was written in gratitude for a new transcription of Bach, and the log24 entry for the following day (today) has the time 11:11, signifying peace, the following seems as good a religious interpretation of yesterday’s lottery as any:

“In the Mass in B-Minor, Bach constructs a twenty-one-movement symmetry in which the Crucifixus is placed precisely between the Gratias and the Dona Nobis Pacem.“

— Timothy A. Smith,
Intentionality and Meaningfulness
in Bach’s Cyclical Works

“Nothing is random.”
— Mark Helprin,
   Winter’s Tale

Quartets

1. Charles Small’s new transcription of The Goldberg Variations for string quartet
2. Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
   
   
3. Theme and Variations
4. Poetry’s Bones

Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil, continued

Buddies Show Us
the Real Tillman

By MARK PURDY

San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Once the out-of-towners stopped talking, the people from San Jose were allowed to speak. And the honesty erupted.

“Thank you for coming,” said Richard Tillman, the younger brother of Pat Tillman. “But with all respect to those who have been up here before me, Pat’s not with God. He’s not religious. He’s dead. It was amazing to be his little brother. He was the biggest champion I’ve ever seen.”

Commentary:

Maybe God doesn’t like religious people.

See The Four Last Things (6/4/03),

With Honors (6/5/03), and

Directions Out (4/26/04).

Campaign Song

Review of previous themes:

From Black Rain:

Masahiro: “Now — music and movies are all America is good for.“

From Lost in Translation:

Charlotte: I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.
Bob: You’ll figure that out.

From The Devil and Wallace Stevens:

“Stevens pays ironic tribute to Aphrodite Pandemos, the fleshly passion, and then his respects to

Aphrodite Ouranos,
the philosopher’s passion….”

From a midlife crisis:

Select the best John Kerry
campaign song from this classic
Top 10 list of Nov. 7, 1964.

To see if you have made the
right choice, click on

Campaign Song.
(Requires RealOne Player.)

The Script

Hollywood Writers, Producers
 Fail to Reach Agreement

Some scripts just write themselves.

Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse

The Siege, 1998

Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:

“My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin…. He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties….

Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.

The New Yorker,
online images

‘Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.’

I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: ‘Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.’ ”

See, too, The New Yorker‘s press release for

 May 1, 2004 — Law Day —

on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:

“Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. ‘I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,’ Kerry says, ‘and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.’ “

Recall the conclusion of Devil’s Advocate:

“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

Trinity Test

Some background on the previous entry, Honorable Bird….

A note on the Michael Douglas film in that previous entry:

“This film is not to be confused with Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s BLACK RAIN, which was produced around the same time. Imamura’s film deals with the lives of a Japanese family who survived the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima. The phrase ‘black rain,’ used in both films, refers to the deadly fallout caused by the detonation of an atomic weapon.”

For related material on the religion of Trinity, see Hiroshima Mayor Says US Worships Nukes, a news story quoted in Death of a Holy Man (8/10/03).  The phrase “holy man” there is from John Steinbeck, who once wrote a sentence saying that sons of bitches, viewed from another perspective, are holy men.

Here is the death of another holy man, Clayton S. White, a medical researcher who developed the field of blast biology — the study of how nuclear explosions affect people immediately and over time.  This holy man died on April 26, 2004.  A log24 entry of that date supplies an appropriate epitaph for the holy man, dead at 91, who has now joined his younger brother, the late Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, in some region of the afterworld.