Log24

It’s Alive!

“People once worried about the boundary between the living and the nonliving. Today, the boundary seems meaningless….”

— Attributed to Francis Crick
    (now among the nonliving) 

Opening of
the above novel:

“My name is David Tennant, M.D.
I’m professor of ethics at the
University of Virginia Medical School,
and if you’re watching
this tape, I’m dead.”

From a public-relations newsletter
of the University of Southern California’s
Health Sciences Campus
dated April 20, 2001:

See also the previous entry,
on Anderson’s arrest Friday
on charges of child molestation.

For the origin of the title GATTACA,
see The Diamond Code. 

Advanced French

This accusation may, of course, have roots in political or religious fanaticism, even though gene therapy is less controversial than other aspects of genetic engineering.  For reasons why some feel strongly about this area of research, see the remarks of Francis Crick in a Thursday Log24 entry.

For the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola:

In God’s Name

The Fullness of Time

In memory of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who died yesterday:

“Having solved one of the basic mysteries of life here on Earth, Dr. Crick seems happy to skewer any notions of a life beyond. For him, the most profound implication of an operational understanding of consciousness is that ‘it will lead to the death of the soul.’

‘The view of ourselves as “persons” is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth,’ he said. He predicted that ‘this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years.’

‘In the fullness of time,’ he continued, ‘educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.'”

— “After the Double Helix: Unraveling the Mysteries of the State of Being,” by Margaret Wertheim in The New York Times of April 13, 2004

In loving memory of
Fred “Bubba” LaRue,
architect of Nixon’s
   “southern strategy” —

Part of a Log24 entry
for Saturday, July 24,
LaRue’s apparent
date of death —

Southern
Strategy
Galore:

The Agony
and the Ecstasy

and

a mandorla,
symbol of the Episcopal
Diocese of South Carolina.

The New York Times quotes
LaRue’s son as saying,
“His heart failed while he was
reading a book.”
The title is unknown.

Get Your Ticket

From a Log24 entry
on Election Day 2002–
Tuesday, November 5:

Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.

The Freshmen, Part II

From the Daily Princetonian,
Feb. 3, 2004:

Caption: Cate Edwards' Princeton friends support her and her father.

"… when Sen. John Edwards, father of Cate Edwards '04, decided to run for president, the troop of 17 students sacrificed tans and theses to pile into a fleet of minivans headed to New Hampshire….

    These volunteers… were on a first name basis with the man who had helped them move into freshman dorm rooms and had discussed Senate votes with them over Chinese food."

Log24 May 22, 2004:

From Chuck Polisher's
I Ching Lexicon:

"It's claimed that
if you take a mirror
and look backwards
into a well,
you'll see your future
down in the water."

— Cold Mountain,
     Vintage paperback, 1998,
page 48

"Goin' to Carolina in my mind…"
— James Taylor

End of an Era?

 “To put it simply, in those days we had
leadership, respect, discipline.”

— Carmine De Sapio 

Click on screenshot for details.

4:07

Note added on 7/28 at 5:01 AM:

See also Joyce’s definition of “epiphany.”

His Way

Suggested by George Steiner’s phrase in the previous entry, “as in inverse canons”–

1. A revision of Theme and Variations to include a midi of Bach’s variations on the Goldberg ground
2. The following from the screenplay of Cold Mountain—

   EXT. BLACK COVE FARM. DAY. A beautiful day, the farm peaceful. Inman walks up the path to the farmhouse…. He knocks on the door. Monroe answers.             MONROE      Mr. Inman.             INMAN      Reverend.             MONROE      What can I do for you? Inman hovers, awkward. Ada appears, awkward.             INMAN      I have some sheet music.      Belonged to my father.      No use to me. Ada comes forward, takes the package. ****** LATER ******* INT. PARLOUR.  BLACK COVE FARM. DAY. At the piano, Ada unwraps the package of music.  Inside the first book of music, there’s a picture of Inman.  Some of the music has left its imprint on the picture, the notes like a melody over Inman’s face. Ada picks them out on the piano.

3.     Bach, BWV 1087 (midi)

   (Fourteen Canons on the First Eight Notes of the Goldberg Ground)

4.         Bach in the original —
     
      

5.        “Bach in the Original” —
   
   

Be Afraid.
Be Very Afraid.

Click on picture for details.

Name Claim

From a Google Groups search on “diamond theorem” today:

Like the pine trees lining the winding road,
I got a name, I got a name….
And I carry it with me like my daddy did
But I’m living the dream that he kept hid.

— Jim Croce

New Web Page:

The Grid and the Quilt:
Left Brain, Right Brain,
The Two Cultures,
and Mathematics

New Web Page:

Reflections on Symmetry

“Ready for more international espionage and intrigue? On July 23, Matt Damon returns as amnesiac spy Jason Bourne in the sequel to 2002’s surprise hit, ‘The Bourne Identity.’ ….

At the end of ‘Identity,’ Bourne promised retaliation to Treadstone (the super-secret agency that created him) if it came after him.”

Super-secret?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Frances Hansen died on Friday, July 9. For more on words and The Roots of Coincidence (the subject of the previous entry), see the entries of July 8-10.

Yesterday’s first entry contained a picture of the Philadelphia group The Roots:

Yesterday’s last entry, “Welcome to Mr. Motley’s Neighborhood,” dealt with properties of social networks.  Trying to learn more about such properties, I just came across this in the Wikipedia:

 
Small World Phenomenon —

“The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, based on articles originally published in The New Yorker, elaborates the ‘funneling’ concept. In it Gladwell argues that the six-degrees phenomenon is dependent on a few extraordinary people (‘connectors’) with large networks of contacts and friends: these hubs then mediate the connections between the vast majority of otherwise weakly-connected individuals.”

From USA Today —
 
Posted 7/12/2004 10:51 PM
Updated 7/13/2004 4:32 AM

The Roots tap urgent beat
in ‘Tipping Point’

“The Tipping Point refers to Malcolm Gladwell’s book about critical moments that touch off social phenomena, and the album certainly conveys a sense of urgency.

Between the riveting beats and frontman Tariq ‘Black Thought’ Trotter’s razor-sharp lyrics about a range of social ills, it’s almost impossible to turn away.” — Steve Jones

For more on black thought, click on the picture of Willard Motley’s book in the previous entry.

“Perhaps people will revert to private social networks–ones they manage locally….

Perhaps the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links–would become more apparent, and perhaps that would be a good thing.

I’m not sure how good that is as a business model, but it works as a social model.”

The beautiful, brilliant, and charming Esther Dyson seems to have suffered a temporary lapse in brilliance with the above remark on the strength of ties in social networks….

“the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links….”

Here are some useful references encountered while fact-checking Ms. Dyson’s assertion about the “law of networks” —

Links on Graph Theory and Network Analysis

The Navigability of Strong Ties:
Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology (pdf)

Modeling Coleman’s Friendly Association Networks (pdf)

The Strength of Weak Ties:
A Network Theory Revisited (pdf)

Scientific Collaboration Networks, II (pdf)
(Deals specifically with tie-strength computation.) 

Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks

and, finally, a diagram of social networks in Shakespeare that conclusively demonstrates that there is no simple relationship between strength of ties and number of ties:

Cleopatra’s Social Ties (png)

Perhaps what Ms. Dyson had in mind was the following (courtesy of The Motley Fool):

“Metcalfe’s Law of Networks states that the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network. Translated, this means that a network that is twice as large as another network will actually be at least four times as valuable. Why? Because four times as many interconnections are possible between participants in the larger network.

When you add a fourth person to a group of three, you don’t add just one more networked relationship. You add several. The new individual can network with all three of the existing persons, and vice versa. The Internet is no different. It became more and more valuable as the numbers of computers using it grew.”

For another perspective on this alleged law, from science fiction author Orson Scott Card, see The Group, a Log24 entry of Sept. 24, 2002.

Elsewhere, in a discussion of social-networking software:

“Esther Dyson starts with a request that people turn to their left and ask the person next to them, ‘Will you be my friend?’ The room erupts in chatter, but, of course, the problem is we don’t have enough information about one another to make a snap decision about that question.”

Obviously, ties resulting from such a request will be weak, rather than strong.  However, as study of the above network-theory links will reveal, weak ties can sometimes be more useful than strong ties.  An example:

Passing the Peace at Mass.

Compare and contrast with
Ms. Dyson’s request to turn and
ask the Mr. Rogers question,
“Will you be my friend?”

The best response to this question
that I know of was contained in
a good-bye letter from a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:

“Si me deveras quieres,
deja me en paz.”

(See Shining Forth.)

From Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel, Glory Road:

Today’s birthday:

Esther Dyson

In response to this morning’s Wizard-of-Id example (see 1:22 PM entry) of a political Bob-Hope-style Christian wisecrack (a style more apt to make me gag than laugh), some further quotations:

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

Laurance Rockefeller

The Washington Post on the gigolo candidate in Boston Monday:

“In a lunch speech to more than 1,000 women who had donated $500 to $2,000 to his campaign or the Democratic Party, Kerry was joined on stage by his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry….  He focused his comments on improving health care and creating more jobs — notions that he said ‘are not Democratic values. They’re not Republican values. They are American values.’ “

Let us pass over Kerry’s ignorance of the difference between desiderata (things considered desirable) and values (principles, standards, or qualities considered desirable).

A definition of “values” in a different sense, one that might appeal to the late St. Laurance Rockefeller, dead on 7/11, who majored in philosophy at Princeton:

“In an artistical composition, the character of any one part in its relation to other parts and to the whole — often used in the plural: as, the values are well given, or well maintained.”

— Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

Rockefeller is, I hope, now in a place where he can discuss this definition with Bach as it applies to, say, that composer’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Here below, another sort of Goldberg Variations seems appropriate to the times we live in …

The following composition was inspired by Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks at last Thursday’s Radio City Music Hall Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Sources:

Ike Turner, Bad Dreams album,
Mom’s Apple Pie album (X-rated),
and Log24 entries of
July 9-10 and July 12.

Update of 3:17 AM July 13, 2004:

A place in Heaven next to St. Laurance
seems to have been reserved:

Sequel

"J. S. Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' is a self-contained world, immersion in which is transformative….

At the end of Variation 30, Bach writes simply 'Aria da capo.' I have written it out for the convenience of the players. This recurrence of the Aria, after its long journey through thirty variations and especially coming immediately after the exuberant Quodlibet (Variation 30), is magical. It is the same Aria, yet subtly different: transformed."

Campaign Song

“All things return to the One.
 What does the One return to?”

— Zen koan, epigraph to
   The Footprints of God,
by Greg Iles of
Natchez, Mississippi

“Literature begins with geography.”

— attributed to Robert Frost

Scoop

This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:

• The Footprints of God, a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
• Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.

At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection.  Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental.  My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.

A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos.  Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito.  Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.

I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is.  Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:

Related Texts

Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):

"Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. 'This'll put some heart into us,' she said. 'We're setting here like three old sick cats.'  They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips.  Then they began to talk.  They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation."

"In Defense of the Brand":

"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."

Song lyric, Reba McEntire:
 

"I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."

Loren Eiseley, 
Notes of an Alchemist:

I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"

* A significant phrase. See

We Are the Key:
The Shining of December 13,
and
Naturalized Epistemology.

Bandito

12:25 PM July 8:

Personally, I prefer
a blue-green star:

Follow-up of
2 PM July 9, 2004 —

From today's New York Times:

"Texas Bandito, how much money
did you put in your pocket today?"
John Mellencamp crooned
in a country ballad.

In a two-and-a-half hour gala
that raised $7.5 million,
a record for a single event,
Chevy Chase poked fun at
the president's pronunciation
of "nuclear"…
 

The concert brought 6,200 people,
paying $250 to $25,000 each…
beating the $6.8 million haul
from a parallel gala last month
in Los Angeles featuring
Barbra Streisand,
Willie Nelson,
and Billy Crystal.
The take will be split….

Here, Chevy, is another

  way to pronounce "nuclear"–

The Source:

Click on picture for details.

Not-So-Solemn Requiem

Funeral song for Marlon Brando to sing, at long last, to the immortal Grace Kelly…

“Everybody’s just dying to be heard…“

— KHYI radio, Plano, Texas, 4:00 PM EDT

(… followed at 4:04 PM by …
“I guess I just woke up
from my American dream.”)

Relevant theology…

“Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is.  To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be….”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

Elegance

Except, of course, for
Amazing Grace.

— Claudia Luther and Elaine Dutka,
   Los Angeles Times staff writers

Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront:

Terry Malloy: “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night’! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.”
Charley Malloy: “Oh, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.”
Terry Malloy: “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky: