Log24

Joke

From July 28:

The Guardian, July 26,
on a work by the
late playwright
 George Tabori:

“… inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. ‘Just two,’ says Jay. ‘The boy is bringing his own.’ Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.”

“When may we expect to have
something from you on the
  esthetic question? he asked.”

— A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man

 July 11, 2003
New York State Lottery

7-11 Evening Number: 000.

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In The Garden of Allah

"But not, perhaps,
in the Garden of Apollo":

— "Garden Party" —
Log24, April 9, 2007

Related material:

"When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: 'He was always saying that kind of thing.' But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable."

— Matt Ridley on Odile Crick (The Independent, July 20, 2007), who drew what "may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology," according to Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla quoted by Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post, July 21, 2007

See also "Game Boy"
(Log24 on the Feast
of the Transfiguration–
August 6, 2006):

“Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: ‘Mrs. Crick’s drawing was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard to its shape and size of its spacing.

‘The models you see now have all the atoms in them,’ Sejnowski said. ‘The one in Nature was the backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology.'”

This morning’s previous entry featured contemptibly mediocre Jewish fiction.  In contrast, here is a passage from first-rate Jewish fiction– the little boy and little girl of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime:

“Their desire for each other’s company was unflagging.  This was noted with amusement by the adults.  They were inseparable until bedtime but uncomplaining when it was announced.  They ran off to their separate rooms with not a glance backward.  Their sleep was absolute.  They sought each other in the morning.  He did not think of her as beautiful.  She did not think of him as comely.  They were extremely sensitive to each other, silhouetted in a diffuse excitement, like electricity or a nimbus of light, but their touching was casual and matter-of-fact.  What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other’s fairness.  Yet they were beautiful, he in his stately blond thoughtfulness, she a smaller, darker, more lithe being, with flash in her dark eyes and an almost military bearing.  When they ran their hair lay back from their broad foreheads.  Her feet were small, her brown hands were small.  She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans.  She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements.  The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles.  She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels.  He had never gone without a meal.  He had never been cold at night.  He ran with his mind.  He ran toward something.  He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he.  He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by a coincidence.  A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes.”

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For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic “source of all images,” see Scott McLaren on “Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams.” McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism:

The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give […] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love […] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness […] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)

— Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.

For more on what Bloom calls the “Will-to-Power over nature,” see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in “Log24 – Juneteenth through Midsummer Night.”

For more on what Underhill calls “the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness,” see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter– a writer on the nature of consciousness— by magician Martin Gardner.

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Volta da Morte:
Friday the 13th

TV listing from Brazil
for Friday, Jan. 13th, 2006:

Related material:

If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts,

Friday the 13th
of January, 2006,

and

Catholic Schools Sermon

4:09

Death Flight

Lord Voldemort (in French vol de mort meaning “flight of death” or “steals of/in death,” in Portuguese volta da morte meaning “return from death”) made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

— Wikipedia folk etymology; corrected, but may still contain errors.

Related material: Yesterday’s entries and the remarks from Porto Alegre, Brazil, quoted here on January 25, 2005.

Death Flight

Lord Voldemort (vol de mort meaning “flying in death,” or “steals of/in death”, or, more likely, ‘death flight’ in French. volta de morte in portuguese means return from the dead) made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
— Wikipedia

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“The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church nationwide….

The agreement will end all of the pending abuse litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the U.S….

Although the settlement will effectively end a chapter in the sad saga of clerical abuse that has spanned decades, the resolution will come at a huge cost to the church. More than $114 million has been promised in previous settlements, bringing the total liability for clergy misconduct in the Los Angeles Archdiocese to more than $774 million. The figure dwarfs the next largest settlements in the U.S., including those reached in Boston, at $157 million, and in Portland, Ore., at $129 million.”

— Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006,  April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey’s reductionism– a philosophical, not mathematical, error– see Log24 on May 23, 2007 (“Devil in the Details”).

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

“Another theme developed by Rota is that of ‘Fundierung.’ He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something’s being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as ‘real’ only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota’s arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories.”

— Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. — Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.  The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see Thursday’s Log24 entry “Not Mathematics but Theology.”

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“Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin’ evil….”  —Voodoo Justice

Lois Wyse (previous entry) died “shortly after midnight” on the morning of Friday, July 6, 2007.

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