Log24

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Thursday May 31, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:06 pm

Blitz by anonymous
New Delhi user

From Wikipedia on 31 May, 2007:

Shown below is a list of 25 alterations to Wikipedia math articles made today by user 122.163.102.246.

All of the alterations involve removal of links placed by user Cullinane (myself).

The 122.163… IP address is from an internet service provider in New Delhi, India.

The New Delhi anonymous user was apparently inspired by an earlier blitz by Wikipedia administrator Charles Matthews. (See User talk: Cullinane.)

Related material:

Ashay Dharwadker and Usenet Postings
and Talk: Four color theorem/Archive 2.
See also some recent comments from 122.163…
at Talk: Four color theorem.

May 31, 2007, alterations by
user 122.163.102.246:

  1. 17:17 Orthogonality (rm spam)
  2. 17:16 Symmetry group (rm spam)
  3. 17:14 Boolean algebra (rm spam)
  4. 17:12 Permutation (rm spam)
  5. 17:10 Boolean logic (rm spam)
  6. 17:08 Gestalt psychology (rm spam)
  7. 17:05 Tesseract (rm spam)
  8. 17:02 Square (geometry) (rm spam)
  9. 17:00 Fano plane (rm spam)
  10. 16:55 Binary Golay code (rm spam)
  11. 16:53 Finite group (rm spam)
  12. 16:52 Quaternion group (rm spam)
  13. 16:50 Logical connective (rm spam)
  14. 16:48 Mathieu group (rm spam)
  15. 16:45 Tutte–Coxeter graph (rm spam)
  16. 16:42 Steiner system (rm spam)
  17. 16:40 Kaleidoscope (rm spam)
  18. 16:38 Efforts to Create A Glass Bead Game (rm spam)
  19. 16:36 Block design (rm spam)
  20. 16:35 Walsh function (rm spam)
  21. 16:24 Latin square (rm spam)
  22. 16:21 Finite geometry (rm spam)
  23. 16:17 PSL(2,7) (rm spam)
  24. 16:14 Translation plane (rm spam)
  25. 16:13 Block design test (rm spam)

The deletions should please Charles Matthews and fans of Ashay Dharwadker’s work as a four-color theorem enthusiast and as editor of the Open Directory sections on combinatorics and on graph theory.

There seems little point in protesting the deletions while Wikipedia still allows any anonymous user to change their articles.

Cullinane 23:28, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Thursday May 31, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:57 pm
A Bipartisan Hymn

Clint Eastwood and Rolling Thunder

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Wednesday May 30, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Al Gore and the
Absence of Truth

"Evil is a negation, because
it is the absence of truth."

— Mary Baker Eddy,
founder of Christian Science,
in Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures,
(Boston, 1906,
page 186, line 11)

 M. Scott Peck on evil:

"There are quite popular
systems of thought these days,
such as Christian Science
or the Course in Miracles,
which define evil as unreality.
It is a half-truth. The spirit of evil
is one of unreality, but it itself
is real. It really exists."

"We must not fall back into Saint
Augustine's now discarded doctrine
of the 'privatio boni,' whereby evil
was defined as the absence of good.
Satan's personality cannot be
characterized simply by
an absence, a nothingness."

People of the Lie:
The Hope for Healing Human Evil,
by Morgan Scott Peck, 1986.
(Touchstone paperback,
2nd ed., 1998, page 208)
 

Al Gore on M. Scott Peck:

Al Gore trains a global army – USATODAY.com

"Peck wrote that 'Evil is the absence
of truth,' " Gore says, his fingers laced
together at the waist, eyes scanning
eager faces as he wraps up his remarks …

— www.usatoday.com/news/nation/
2007-04-24-gore-trainees_N.htm – 55k
— Google search 5/30/07

He did?

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070531-Gore.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
was convincing the world he didn't exist."
Verbal Kint in "The Usual Suspects"

Monday, May 28, 2007

Monday May 28, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 5:00 pm
Space-Time

and a Finite Model

Notes by Steven H. Cullinane
May 28, 2007

Part I: A Model of Space-Time

The following paper includes a figure illustrating Penrose’s model of  “complexified, compactified Minkowski space-time as the Klein quadric in complex projective 5-space.”
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070528-Twistor.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture to enlarge.

For some background on the Klein quadric and space-time, see Roger Penrose, “On the Origins of Twistor Theory,” from Gravitation and Geometry: A Volume in Honor of Ivor Robinson, Bibliopolis, 1987.


Part II: A Corresponding Finite Model

 

The Klein quadric also occurs in a finite model of projective 5-space.  See a 1910 paper:

G. M. Conwell, The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group, Ann. of Math. 11, 60-76.

Conwell discusses the quadric, and the related Klein correspondence, in detail.  This is noted in a more recent paper by Philippe Cara:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070528-Quadric.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

As Cara goes on to explain, the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell’s discussion of eight heptads.  These play an important role in another correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions of the large Mathieu group M24.


Related material:

The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin.

The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China’s I Ching.

There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube.  This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2).  This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams.

Geometry of the I Ching.
“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed.  ‘You’ll see how it turns out.  Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'”
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,
  translated by Richard and Clara Winston

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Sunday May 27, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
Random Number
The previous entry links back to May 18’s “Devil in the Details,” an entry quoting Peter Woit.  Yesterday afternoon Woit, who sometimes writes on pure mathematics as well as physics, posted an entry on a talk said to be related to something called “the ABC-conjecture,” which has been called “the most important unsolved problem in diophantine analysis.” (Dorian Goldfeld,  “Beyond the Last Theorem,” The Sciences, March/April 1996, 34-40)

On the ABC-conjecture in number theory:

“We hope to elucidate the beautiful connections between elliptic curves, modular forms and the ABC–conjecture.” —Dorian Goldfeld (pdf)

An Edinburgh postgraduate student on the conjecture:

“… abc brings us full circle to Fermat’s Last Theorem….” —Graeme Taylor at Everything2.com

I regret I can add nothing to Taylor’s admirable exposition and to Goldfeld’s “beautiful connections” except the following observation of a rather ugly connection.

The previous Log24 entry, from yesterday afternoon, related the May 18 “details” entry to Friday’s PA evening lottery number, 005.  A  followup seems (if only to honor the madcap tradition of John Nash) to be called for.  The PA evening number yesterday evening, Saturday, was 443.  Nash, in his younger days, might have been pleased to note that this number is associated (if only by coincidence) with a topic Woit mentioned earlier yesterday– Fermat’s famed conjecture:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070527-Fermat.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Page 443

in The Annals of Mathematics,
2nd Ser., Vol. 141, No. 3 (May, 1995)
This is the first page of a rather
 famous paper by Andrew Wiles.

Such coincidences are, of course, anathema to believers in the religion of Scientism.  But one such believer, Natalie Angier (yesterday morning’s entry), at least acknowledges the charm of “the atheist’s favorite Christmas movie, ‘Coincidence on 34th Street.'” (pdf)

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Saturday May 26, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:09 pm

A Baffled Reader

A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):

“To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think),” … William Safire regarding “blogs”.

I still don’t know what you think.  Yet … I try, try, try.

Here’s one thing that I think– today– based on my “Hate Speech for Harvard,” on “Devil in the Details” (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on

  1. last evening’s PA lottery number 005,
  2. the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
  3. the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:
Revised New Yorker cover from 5/21/07
Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07
Commentary on the cover
by the PA lottery
on 5/25/07
in the form of the
evening number, 005.
In the I Ching, this
is the number of

HSU:
WAITING
(NOURISHMENT)

See also the previous entry
and Natalie Angier’s sneer
at a politician’s call for
prayer, which, she
said, involved the
“assumption that prayer is
some sort of miracle
Vicks VapoRub.”

Detail from the
5/21/07 New Yorker:

Detail, New Yorker cover, 5/21/07

THE IMAGE

Hexagram 5: Waiting (Nourishment)

Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of WAITING.
Thus the superior man
eats and drinks,
Is joyous and
of good cheer.

AMEN.

Saturday May 26, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:13 am

On the Religion of Scientism

Recently, believers in the religion of Scientism have become increasingly militant.  Christians, though seldom able, like Jesus, to love their enemy, might at least try, like Don Vito Corleone, to know their enemy.

“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” –Nabokov

Steven Pinker at The New York Times,
review of a new book by Natalie Angier,
a priestess of Scientism,
online today but dated May 27, 2007

Jesse Tisch at JBooks.com,
interview with Angier, undated, 2007

Harvey Blume at The Boston Globe,
interview with Angier, May 13, 2007

Marcela Valdes at Publishers Weekly,
interview with Angier, March 5, 2007

Angier at The New York Times,
“Confessions of a Lonely Atheist,”
Jan. 14, 2001

Angier at The American Scholar,
“My God Problem,” Spring 2004

For other recent background,
see the May 21 New Yorker.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Friday May 25, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 7:11 am
Dance and the Soul

From Log24 on
this date last year:

"May there be an ennui
of the first idea?
What else,
prodigious scholar,
should there be?"

— Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction"

The Associated Press,
May 25, 2007–

Thought for Today:
"I hate quotations.
 Tell me what you know."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Journals, on May 3, 1849]

The First Idea:

The Line, by S. H. Cullinane

Four Elements:
 

Four Elements (Diamond)

Square Dance:

Square Dance (Diamond Theorem)

This "telling of what
I know" will of course
mean little to those
who, like Emerson,
have refused to learn
through quotations.

For those less obdurate
than Emerson —Harold Bloom
on Wallace Stevens

and Paul Valery's
   "Dance and the Soul"–

"Stevens may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is 'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valery's Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular, in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:

A cold and perfect clarity is a poison impossible to combat. The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously….[…] To a handful of ashes is the past reduced, and the future to a tiny icicle. The soul appears to itself as an empty and measurable form. –Here, then, things as they are come together, limit one another, and are thus chained together in the most rigorous and mortal* fashion…. O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is.

Valery's formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be cured only by what Valery's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid observer.'" —Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

* "la sorte… la plus mortelle":
    mortal in the sense
   "deadly, lethal"

Other quotations

(from March 28,
the birthday of
Reba McEntire):

Logical Songs

Reba McEntire, Saturday Evening Post, Mar/Apr 1995

Logical Song I
(Supertramp)

"When I was young, it seemed that
Life was so wonderful, a miracle,
Oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees,
Well they'd be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me"

Logical Song II
(Sinatra)

"You make me feel so young,
You make me feel like
Spring has sprung
And every time I see you grin
I'm such a happy in-
dividual….

You and I are
Just like a couple of tots
Running across the meadow
Picking up lots
Of forget-me-nots"

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Thursday May 24, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am
Born Again

Lady Marmalade
was a 1974 hit featured
in the film “Moulin Rouge”:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070524-Moulin.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The hit was made famous
by Patti LaBelle.
Below is an online profile
of LaBelle from AOL.com:
AOL bio of Patti LaBelle

This agrees with the birth date
in a Log24 entry of 10/4/02,
The Agony and the Ya-Ya.

It now, however, appears that
LaBelle was born
on today’s date, May 24.

My apologies to Charlton Heston,
the archangel Michael,
and the city of New Orleans–
all featured in the Ya-Ya entry.

Congratulations to
Bob Dylan and Rosanne Cash
on their new birthday-mate.

Related material:

1. An entry from last year
on this date,  the
pilgrimage day of St. Sarah
 
2. An entry from another
religious holiday
, the opening
 date of the real Moulin Rouge

3. The works of Robert Langdon,
author of “the renowned
collegiate textbook
Religious Iconology

Gitchi gitchi ya-ya, Dada….

Thursday May 24, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:00 am
Day 24

The miraculous enters….

 
Array for the MOG of R. T. Curtis

Discuss.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:00 am
 
Strong Emergence Illustrated:
 
The Beauty Test
 
"There is no royal road
to geometry"

— Attributed to Euclid

There are, however, various non-royal roads.  One of these is indicated by yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery numbers:

PA Lottery May 22, 2007: Mid-day 515, Evening 062

The mid-day number 515 may be taken as a reference to 5/15. (See the previous entry, "Angel in the Details," and 5/15.)

The evening number 062, in the context of Monday's entry "No Royal Roads" and yesterday's "Jewel in the Crown," may be regarded as naming a non-royal road to geometry: either U. S. 62, a major route from Mexico to Canada (home of the late geometer H.S.M. Coxeter), or a road less traveled– namely, page 62 in Coxeter's classic Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070523-Coxeter62.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The illustration (and definition) is
of regular tessellations of the plane.

This topic Coxeter offers as an
illustration of remarks by G. H. Hardy
that he quotes on the preceding page:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070523-Hardy.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

One might argue that such beauty is strongly emergent because of the "harmonious way" the parts fit together: the regularity (or fitting together) of the whole is not reducible to the regularity of the parts.  (Regular triangles, squares, and hexagons fit together, but regular pentagons do not.)

The symmetries of these regular tessellations of the plane are less well suited as illustrations of emergence, since they are tied rather closely to symmetries of the component parts.

But the symmetries of regular tessellations of the sphere— i.e., of the five Platonic solids– do emerge strongly, being apparently independent of symmetries of the component parts.

Another example of strong emergence: a group of 322,560 transformations acting naturally on the 4×4 square grid— a much larger group than the group of 8 symmetries of each component (square) part.

The lottery numbers above also supply an example of strong emergence– one that nicely illustrates how it can be, in the words of Mark Bedau, "uncomfortably like magic."

(Those more comfortable with magic may note the resemblance of the central part of Coxeter's illustration to a magical counterpart– the Ojo de Dios of Mexico's Sierra Madre.)

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:15 am
Angel in the Details

See the Dickinson poem quoted here on May 15 (the date, as it happens, of Dickinson’s death) in the entry “A Flag for Sunrise.”  See also Zen and Language Games and a discussion of a detail in a Robert Stone novel.

“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”

Emily Dickinson

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:29 am
Devil in the Details
 
(cont. from May 18)

From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:

“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”

Related material:

“In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.” —Wikipedia

“In the 1920’s… the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are confident that there is no mysterious ‘vital principle,’ but that life is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world become quite pervasive.” –Harvard mathematician George Mackey, “What Do Mathematicians Do?

Opposed to reductionism are “emergence” and “strong emergence“–

“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic.” —Mark A. Bedau

Or comfortably.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Tuesday May 22, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:11 am
 
Jewel in the Crown

A fanciful Crown of Geometry

The Crown of Geometry
(according to Logothetti
in a 1980 article)

The crown jewels are the
Platonic solids, with the
icosahedron at the top.

Related material:

"[The applet] Syntheme illustrates ways of partitioning the 12 vertices of an icosahedron into 3 sets of 4, so that each set forms the corners of a rectangle in the Golden Ratio. Each such rectangle is known as a duad. The short sides of a duad are opposite edges of the icosahedron, and there are 30 edges, so there are 15 duads.

Each partition of the vertices into duads is known as a syntheme. There are 15 synthemes; 5 consist of duads that are mutually perpendicular, while the other 10 consist of duads that share a common line of intersection."

— Greg Egan, Syntheme

Duads and synthemes
(discovered by Sylvester)
also appear in this note
from May 26, 1986
(click to enlarge):

 

Duads and Synthemes in finite geometry

The above note shows
duads and synthemes related
to the diamond theorem.

See also John Baez's essay
"Some Thoughts on the Number 6."
That essay was written 15 years
ago today– which happens
to be the birthday of
Sir Laurence Olivier, who,
were he alive today, would
be 100 years old.

Olivier as Dr. Christian Szell

The icosahedron (a source of duads and synthemes)

"Is it safe?"

Monday, May 21, 2007

Monday May 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm
No Royal Roads
Illustration from a
1980 article at JSTOR:

Coxeter as King of Geometry

A more recent royal reference:

"'Yau wants to be the king of geometry,' Michael Anderson, a geometer at Stony Brook, said. 'He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn't like people encroaching on his territory.'" –Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber in The New Yorker, issue dated Aug. 28, 2006

Wikipedia, Cultural references to the Royal Road:

"Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry.' Charles S. Peirce, in his 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878), says 'There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention.'"

Related material:

Day Without Logic
(March 8, 2007)

and
The Geometry of Logic
(March 10, 2007)
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070521-Tesseract.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

There may be
no royal roads to
geometry or logic,
but…

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— Madeleine L'Engle, 
A Wrinkle in Time

Monday May 21, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:57 pm

x

Monday May 21, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:48 am
Down the
Up Staircase

Commentary on a
Jonathan Borofsky
painting in the
May 21 New Yorker:

IMAGE- Borofsky's 'Four Gods' and related structures
 
Commentary

"… Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite
or any other form of matter.
They are talking about about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal…."

Rosalind Krauss
 

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Sunday May 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm
Robert A. Heinlein,
Glory Road:

“Rufo’s baggage turned out
to be a little black box
about the size and shape
of a portable typewriter.
He opened it.
And opened it again.
   And kept on opening it….”
 
60 Minutes logo

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte’s dream is to put a laptop computer into the hands of every child as an educational aid. Lesley Stahl reports on his progress in Cambodia and Brazil. Catherine Olian is the producer.

Related material:
Log24 entries of 11/18/05

Sunday May 20, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:00 am
Plato and Shakespeare:
Solid and Central

"I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX

From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):
 

"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps."
— Willard Van Orman Quine, 1948, "On What There Is," reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, 1980

"The Consul could feel his glance at Hugh becoming a cold look of hatred. Keeping his eyes fixed gimlet-like upon him he saw him as he had appeared that morning, smiling, the razor edge keen in sunlight. But now he was advancing as if to decapitate him."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947, Ch. 10

 

"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
Hamlet

Coxeter: King of Infinite Space

Coxeter exhuming geometry

From today's newspaper:

Dilbert on space, existence, and the dead

Notes:

For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.

For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006
.

For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
 "hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"

For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Saturday May 19, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:29 am
Point of View

"In a sense, too, Wallace Stevens has spent a lifetime writing a single poem. What gives his best work its astonishing power and vitality is the way in which a fixed point of view, maturing naturally, eventually takes in more than a constantly shifting point of view could get at.

The point of view is romantic, 'almost the color of comedy'; but 'the strength at the center is serious.'  Behind Wallace Stevens stand Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and, surprisingly enough, La Fontaine and Pope. This poetic lineage is important only in so far as it proves that a master can claim the world as ancestor. Knowing where he stands, the poet can move as a free man in the company of free men."

Samuel French Morse, review 
of The Collected Poems
of Wallace Stevens, in
The New York Times
(October 3, 1954)
 
Related material

The point of view
expressed in Log24 on
  today's date in 2004:

For a related gloss on Stevens's remark
"the strength at the center is serious,"
see "Serious" (also on an October 3).

Friday, May 18, 2007

Friday May 18, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Making a Difference:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Reba2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
Reba McEntire:
 
“Kids who may never
get out of their town
will be able to see
the world through books.
But I’m talking about
my passion. What’s yours?”
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070518-Popocatepetl..jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Happy May 18, Reba.

 

Friday May 18, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
Born
on this date:

Pope John Paul II,
Comedian/writer Tina Fey

“It’s just bad luck for me
that in my first attempt

at prime time
I’m going up against the
most powerful writer
 on television.”

— Tina Fey (The New Yorker,
Shows About Shows“)

But, fortunately,

not up against…

 
Click on picture
for details.
 
See also
a serendipitously
 embedded cartoon:
 
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Friday May 18, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:29 am
Devil in the Details

Today’s Harvard Crimson:

“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”

From the weblog of Peter Woit
:

The New Yorker keeps its physics theme going this week with cover art that includes a blackboard full of basic equations from quantum mechanics.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070518-Cover2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
May 21, 2007
New Yorker cover

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070518-CoverDetail.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
Detail

The detail suggests
the following
religious images from
Twelfth Night 2003:

Devil’s Claws, or
Hourglass Var. 3

Yankee Puzzle, or
Hourglass Var. 5

 
“Mercilessly tasteful”
 
— Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega’s
Songs in Red and Gray

Friday May 18, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:18 am
Selections from
The Stephen King Hymnal

Log24, April 21:

Shine on… shine on…  
There is work to be done
     in the dark before dawn

Daisy May Erlewine of
    Big Rapids, Michigan

And from
the granddaughter of
Nobel-Prize-winning
physicist Max Born:

Olivia Newton-John, The Rumour

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thursday May 17, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:31 am

Logos
 
for
Yolanda King,
who died May 15,
the birthday of
L. Frank Baum:

Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070517-Trinity.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Symbols of, left to right,
Philip K. Dick (see 3/2/06),
Robert Anton Wilson (see 6/11/03),
and Kurt Vonnegut (see Palm Sunday,
an Autobiographical Collage
).
See also An Unholy Trinity (5/6/07).
The "sunrise" logo at top,
along with the three-part motto
"Educate, Empower, Entertain,"
is Yolanda King's own.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Wednesday May 16, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:37 pm

Entertainer of the Year

Frank Rich on the United States:

“… a country where
     entertainment is god”

In another country:

Question:

Que pasa, pendejo?”

— Question in a music video,
   “You Save Me,” by last night’s
    Academy of Country Music
    Entertainer of the Year

Answer:


“… líbranos de mal

Church candles

Wednesday May 16, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:22 am
Second Billing

Today’s online New York Times:

NYT obits, 11:15 AM May 15, 2007

“Yolanda King founded and led Higher Ground Productions, billed as a ‘gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation.'” —New York Times

“Yolanda King’s Lecture Performances are tailored to suit your company’s immediate need for a critical and timely message delivered with a high-level of entertainment value.” —Higher Ground Productions

Higher Ground Productions logo

From the five log24 entries
ending with “Dinner Theater?”

(linked to in yesterday afternoon’s
Perspective on the News):

Frank Rich has the last word:

“A ‘moral values’ crusade
that stands between a TV show
this popular and its audience
will quickly learn the limits
of its power in a country
where entertainment is god.”

Wednesday May 16, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:01 am
Star Wars

From this morning's New York Times:

"In April, Wiccans won an important victory when the Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit and agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans' headstones….

Many Wiccans practice some form of magic or witchcraft, which they say is a way of affecting one's destiny, but which many outsiders see as evil. The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, is often confused with symbols of Satanism."

A version of the pentacle or pentagram symbol

"Don't underestimate the Force."

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Tuesday May 15, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:11 pm

Tony Nominations Announced

The Rev. Jerry Falwell Dies

The Rev. Jerry Falwell in Montgomery, 2003

The Rev. Jerry Falwell speaks at a rally
on the steps of the Alabama Capitol
in Montgomery in this Saturday,
Aug. 16, 2003, file photo.
(AP Photo/Dave Martin)

The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2004:

"The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University [at Lynchburg, Virginia] is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law."

Religious perspective:

See the five Log24 entries ending with "Dinner Theater?" (Nov. 26, 2004).  Note Charles Williams's discussion of the Salem witchcraft trials.

See also yesterday's "Seven Bridges."  In light of that entry's picture of Nicole Kidman in "To Die For," and of Charles Williams's remarks, a discussion of Kidman's "Practical Magic" may also interest some.

"Hey, good lookin',     
whatcha got cookin'?"
Hank Williams      

Tuesday May 15, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 am
A Flag for Sunrise

The title of the Robert Stone
novel comes from Emily Dickinson:

A Wife -- at daybreak I shall be --
Sunrise -- Hast thou a Flag for me?
At Midnight, I am but a Maid,
How short it takes to make a Bride --
Then -- Midnight, I have passed from thee
Unto the East, and Victory --

Midnight -- Good Night! I hear them call,
The Angels bustle in the Hall --
Softly my Future climbs the Stair,
I fumble at my Childhood's prayer
So soon to be a Child no more --
Eternity, I'm coming -- Sire,
Savior -- I've seen the face -- before!

Monday, May 14, 2007

Monday May 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

Seven Bridges

"Make me young…"
Kilgore Trout

For the old at heart:  

The Mathematical Association of America in this
Euler Tercentenary Year honors the seven bridges of
Königsberg, Prussia (birthplace of David Hilbert).

For Kilgore Trout:

A song about the road to (and from)
Hank Williams's memorial marker:

"There are stars in the Southern sky
and if ever you decide you should go
there is a taste of time-sweetened honey
down the Seven Bridges Road

Now I have loved you like a baby
like some lonesome child
and I have loved you in a tame way
and I have loved you wild"

Steve Young

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070514-Dance.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Nicole Kidman dances 
"Sweet Home Alabama"

Monday May 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 am

Crossing Point

From Log24's
"Footprints for Baudrillard"–

"Was there really a cherubim
waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973,
conclusion of Chapter Three,
"The Man in the Night"

"Oh, Euclid, I suppose."

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962,
conclusion of Chapter Five,

"The Tesseract"

From Log24's
Xanga footprints,
3:00 AM today:

 

Texas /431103703/item.html 5/14/2007 3:00 AM

The link leads to a Jan. 23, 2006 entry
on what one philosopher has claimed is
"exactly that crossing point
of constraint and freedom
which is the very essence
of man's nature."

Monday May 14, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 am
“What is real?”

— Pope Benedict XVI  
on Sunday in Brazil

“Dare to struggle,
dare to win!”

“Dare to guzzle
Gordon’s gin.”

— dialogue from 
Masks of the Illuminati

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Sunday May 13, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:31 pm

Prime Blue

“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
The Birth of Tragedy,
    by Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Penguin, 1993, page 14.
    Quoted in “A Mass for Lucero.”

Half the Answer:
Commentary by spookytruth
from Log24, 2/22/2005:

“I mean, come on, Hunter, a stupid bullet through the head??? how creative, you brain-addled simpleton… if you take the assignment, if you are going to hook up your afterlife keyboard and transmit back and tell us about what it is REALLY like out there, if you decided to let your electric-shock fingers hot wire us the truth of the afterlife… if you really planned to tell us the answer to our ultimate, emotional question…… ‘does God prefer beer, wine, or a shot of whiskey.’ well, if that is what you decided to do well then, for God’s sake, don’t forget (oh, wait, yeah, you already DID FORGET, you half-baked, half brained, half witted, half-a-loaf, half pint pin head, you forgot, THE JOURNEY IS HALF THE ANSWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

On Dionysus:

“For wine, he loves to view
    his altars stain,
 But prime blue ruin*–
    goes against the grain.”
— page 69, Jack Randall’s Diary

  *name “given by
   the modern Greeks to gin
— page 4, Jack Randall’s Diary

Sunday May 13, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:23 pm
“Make me young…”
Kilgore Trout   

Prime Green, by Robert Stone

Sunday May 13, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 am

After Winter

Apollo's Temple

Sunday May 13, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am
In Memoriam
 
Dr. John K. Lattimer,
 
who died Thursday:

Dr. John K. Lattimer, who died Thursday, May 10, 2007

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The kind of space that the ship perceives, operates in, is to creatures such as you and I, chaotic, meaningless, and dangerous, when perceived directly, if we can at all. To confront it directly is destructive to the primate mind, indeed the whole vertebrate nervous system…. Basic to the universe: that its inmost reality cannot be perceived. A limit. So we interpose a symbolizer, and that translates the view into something we can perceive, and control….”

“…I see; the symbolizer portrays a Game….”

 
The Legend of the Green Knight

Click on pictures for details.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Saturday May 12, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 am
Artistic Vision

Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers– mid-day 384, evening 952.

In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers.

First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters– "You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary."  An example was given illustrating this saying.  Here is another example:

Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary–

Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960–

Page 384: "Defender of the Faith"
Related Log24 entries:
"To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006,
and earlier Log24 entries from
that year's Halloween season

Page 952: "monolith"
Related Log24 entries:
"Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line"
(with the four entries that preceded it).

It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry– "Lonesome No More!"– was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis."

 

See also April 7, 2003:

 

April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim    

Friday, May 11, 2007

Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm
Today’s Lottery Commentary:

Lonesome No More!

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 384
Evening 952

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games
and “Is Nothing Sacred?

Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:11 pm

Film Review

“No offense to either of them, but ‘Georgia Rule’ suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie.” –John Anderson at Variety.com, May 8, 2007

Sounds perfect to me.

Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:29 am
Two-Part Invention

"O for a muse of fire,
that would ascend
The brightest heaven
of invention"
Henry V, Prologue  

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070511-Fire2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast." –G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Thursday May 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm
Riverdance

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070510-Dance.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The above scene from
The Best of Riverdance
furnishes an exercise in
what Victor Turner has called
comparative symbology.”

The circular symbol at top
may be seen as representing
the solar deity Apollo,
Leader of the Muses.

The nine female dancers
may be seen as
the nine muses,
with Jean Butler
at the center
as Terpsichore,
Muse of Dance.

Related Material —

ART WARS:
To Apollo

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

For another look at
Terpsichore in action,
see Jean Butler at
CRC Irish Dance Camp.

For those who prefer
a different sort of camp
there is of course
Xanadu.

I prefer Butler.

Thursday May 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
Thanks to Xangan JadedFey
for the following

Commentary

on the previous entry:

Wikipedia entry - Green

Related material:

All Hallows’ Eve, 2005

Tesseract on the cover of The Gameplayers of Zan

— as well as
Balanchine’s Birthday
and the color worn by
Jean Butler in
Women of the Sidhe
(Wednesday’s entry).

Thursday May 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
Existential Dread in LA,
Illustrated


Click to enlarge.

For background on photo-surrealist
Charlie White, click here.

The Times story is another excellent
example of the New York Times’s
 highly sophisticated– some might
say, degenerate– approach to
cultural and lifestyle coverage.

The story is from the paper’s
Home and Garden section.

Related material:
The Garden of Allah.

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Wednesday May 9, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:09 am

1. Jean Butler at CRC Irish Dance Camp
2. Women of the Sidhe

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Tuesday May 8, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm

News from Belfast

“I was a child in the sixties
Dreams could be held through TV
With Disney and Cronkite and Martin Luther
Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed”

— “It’s a Hard Life
     Wherever You Go,”
     by Nanci Griffith

“Today we will witness
  not hype but history.”

— Martin McGuinness, of the
   republican and mainly Catholic
   Sinn Fein party, on today’s
   home rule ceremony in Belfast

Tuesday May 8, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm
The Public Square

Center of Town, Cuernavaca, from Paul Goodman's Communitas

On the words “symbology” and “communitas” (the former used, notably, as the name of a fictional field at Harvard in the novel The Da Vinci Code)–

Symbology:

“Also known as ‘processual symbolic analysis,’ this concept was developed by Victor Turner in the mid-1970s to refer to the use of symbols within cultural contexts, in particular ritual. In anthropology, symbology originated as part of Victor Turner’s concept of ‘comparative symbology.’ Turner (1920-1983) was professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and finally he was Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia.” —Wikipedia

Symbology and Communitas:

 From Beth Barrie’s
  Victor Turner
“‘The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt, whose elements acquire their significance from the system as a whole’ (Turner, 1967:51). Turner considered himself a comparative symbologist, which suggests he valued his contributions to the study of ritual symbols. It is in the closely related study of ritual processes that he had the most impact.

The most important contribution Turner made to the field of anthropology is his work on liminality and communitas. Believing the liminal stage to be of ‘crucial importance’ in the ritual process, Turner explored the idea of liminality more seriously than other anthropologists of his day.

As noted earlier Turner elaborated on van Gennep’s concept of liminality in rites of passage. Liminality is a state of being in between phases. In a rite of passage the individual in the liminal phase is neither a member of the group she previously belonged to nor is she a member of the group she will belong to upon the completion of the rite. The most obvious example is the teenager who is neither an adult nor a child. ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969:95). Turner extended the liminal concept to modern societies in his study of liminoid phenomena in western society. He pointed out the similarities between the ‘leisure genres of art and entertainment in complex industrial societies and the rituals and myths of archaic, tribal and early agrarian cultures’ (1977:43).

Closely associated to liminality is communitas which describes a society during a liminal period that is ‘unstructured or rudimentarily structured [with] a relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders’ (Turner, 1969:96).

The notion of communitas is enhanced by Turner’s concept of anti-structure. In the following passage Turner clarifies the ideas of liminal, communitas and anti-structure:

I have used the term ‘anti-structure,’… to describe both liminality and what I have called ‘communitas.’ I meant by it not a structural reversal… but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses (1982:44).

It is the potential of an anti-structured liminal person or liminal society (i.e., communitas) that makes Turner’s ideas so engaging. People or societies in a liminal phase are a ‘kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change’ (Turner, 1982:45).

Turner’s ideas on liminality and communitas have provided scholars with language to describe the state in which societal change takes place.”

Turner, V. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.

Turner, V. (1977). Variations of the theme of liminality. In Secular ritual. Ed. S. Moore & B. Myerhoff. Assen: Van Gorcum, 36-52.

Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theater: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications.

Related material on Turner in Log24:

Aug. 27, 2006 and Aug. 30, 2006.  For further context, see archive of Aug. 19-31, 2006.

Related material on Cuernavaca:

Google search on Cuernavaca + Log24.

Monday, May 7, 2007

Monday May 7, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 am
FIN
et début

Singing the Marseillaise

New York Times,
May 7, 2007

Related material:

Social Change in the
Twentieth Century
,
by Daniel Chirot
(Harvard ’64)

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Sunday May 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 pm
Almonds

 Nabokov, Colette's present
 
— Nabokov: Speak, Memory;
  Vintage paperback, 1989

Sunday May 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:09 pm

Masters of Chaos

“Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations.”
Julia Kristeva

Paris vaut bien une messe.”
Henri IV

“Certain details might be considered and elucidated more fully.”
A Mass for Lucero

“There is never any ending to Paris….”
Ernest Hemingway

Sunday May 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:02 am

Three Souls

From today’s New York Times, Charles McGrath on Philip K. Dick:

His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.'”

Now perhaps enjoying the afterlife together:

Philip K. Dick
Robert Anton Wilson
Kurt Vonnegut

Friday, May 4, 2007

Friday May 4, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 5:01 pm

May '68 Revisited

"At his final Paris campaign rally… Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.'

'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago.

'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.'

Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the ideology of 1968."

— Emma-Kate Symons, Paris, May 1, 2007, in The Australian

Related material:

From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi —

"Both Numbers and 'Dissemination' are attempts to enact rather than simply state the theoretical upheavals produced in the course of a radical reevaluation of the nature and function of writing undertaken by Derrida, Sollers, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other contributors to the journal Tel Quel in the late 1960s. Ideological and political as well as literary and critical, the Tel Quel program attempted to push to their utmost limits the theoretical revolutions wrought by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Heidegger."

This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard.

Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"–

"… the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such….

Now, my understanding of what is most radical in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition….

Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or', nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither/nor', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."

— "Nothing Fails Like Success," SCE Reports 8, 1980

Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's  translation of Dissemination, from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):

"The minimum number of rows– lines or columns– that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to the maximum number of zeros located in any individual line or column."

For a correction of Sollers's  Johnson's damned nonsense, click here.

Update of May 29, 2014:

The error, as noted above, was not Sollers's, but Johnson's.
See also the post of May 29, 2014 titled 'Lost in Translation.'

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Thursday May 3, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm
A Web
of Links

"Some postmodern theorists like to talk about the relationship between 'intertextuality' and 'hypertextuality'; intertextuality makes each text a 'mosaic of quotations' [Kristeva, Desire in Language, Columbia U. Pr., 1980, 66] and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web." —Wikipedia
 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070503-Tiffany.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material

Day Without Logic,
Introduction to Logic,
The Geometry of Logic,
Structure and Logic,
Spider-Man and Fan:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070503-Devillers.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time  
 

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Tuesday May 1, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:20 pm
Today’s Commentary
by the Pennsylvania Lottery:

PA Lottery May 1, 2007: Mid-day 713, Evening 692

For the meaning
of 714, see 7/14.

For the meaning
of 692, see
Is Nothing Sacred?

Related material:

Law Day 2001:
The Devil and
Wallace Stevens

Tuesday May 1, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
May 1, 2007
2:45 AM

I could tell you a lot,
but you gotta be
true to your code.
— Sinatra

At the still point…
— Eliot

George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm

da ist der Tanz;
Doch weder Stillstand noch Bewegung.
Und nenne es nicht Beständigkeit,
Wo Vergangenheit und Zukunft sich sammeln.

 
IMAGE- Scenes from 'Der Einsatz' with ninefold square

 
to put one's back
into something
bei etwas
Einsatz zeigen
to up the ante
den Einsatz erhöhen
to debrief den Einsatz
nachher besprechen
to be on duty
im Einsatz sein
mil.to be in action im Einsatz sein
to play for
high stakes
mit hohem
Einsatz spielen

"Nine is a very
powerful Nordic number
."
— Katherine Neville,
The Magic Circle

Happy Walpurgisnacht.
 

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