Log24

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Sunday November 30, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:30 pm

Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
Well, I got down on my knees
Got down on my knees
And I pretend to pray
I pretend to pray
The preacher locked the door
Preacher locked the door

He knows I’m gonna stay
Knows I’m gonna stay
California dreamin
California dreamin
On such a winter’s day

Related material:

Yesterday’s “Happy birthday” for the late Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas

Today’s New York Times story on this morning’s rededication of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Sunday November 30, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:31 am
Abstraction and Faith
 

From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:

THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE
by Sol LeWitt

The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed.

Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al., "Homage to the Square," Art in America 55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt's contribution was originally untitled.)

A vulgarized version
of LeWitt's remarks
appears on a webpage of
the National Gallery of Art.

Today's Sermon

"Closing the Circle on Abstract Art"

On Kirk Varnedoe's National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003):

"Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself."

For related remarks on abstraction perhaps less easily vulgarized than those of LeWitt, see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

For the relation of this sort of geometry to faith, see All Hallows' Eve, 2006.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Saturday November 29, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 pm
The Messier Brand

Virginia Heffernan on the film version of A Wrinkle in Time:

"… the film is also sad, and soaring. It recalls the hippie days when a perverse, hubristic originality was a quality to be cultivated, not medicated. Told not from an aloof remove– through the eyes of a wise Yoda or Peter Jackson– the movie glitters irregularly, woven through with the sparkling fibers of a righteous child's tormented imagination. Steven Spielberg also attempted, with the same ambiguous but moving results, this messier brand of science fiction in 'A.I.'"

Log24 on
 Jan. 21, 2007:

 

California Dreamin', Part II

Spielberg, A.I., and Robot Wisdom

Related material:

An entry of
Dec. 29, 2006,
and entries of
Jan. 20, 2007.

See also today's
 previous entries.

Happy birthday,
Denny Doherty.

Saturday November 29, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:29 am
An Astrophysicist
Goes Missing,
And His Children
Search the Stars

Related material:

Happy birthday, C. S. Lewis.

Saturday November 29, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:06 am

A Story
for Madeleine

Part One: Frame Tale

Part Two:
A Little Princess

Part Three:
Happy Birthday

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Wednesday November 26, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Meanwhile…

Recent abstracts of interest:

Kuwait Foundation Lectures

Jan. 29, 2008: J. P. Wintenberger, “On the Proof of Serre’s Conjecture

Oct. 28, 2008: Chandrashekhar Khare, “Modular Forms and Galois Representations

Background:


The Last Theorem, a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl published Aug. 5, 2008

Going Beyond Fermat’s Last Theorem,” a news article in The Hindu published April 25, 2005

Wikipedia: Serre Conjecture (Number Theory)

Henri Darmon, “Serre’s Conjectures

Monday, November 24, 2008

Monday November 24, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:16 pm

Wow wow wow. Who the heck is this guy?

Monday November 24, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Frame Tale

'Brick' octads in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis

Click on image for details.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Sunday November 23, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
At the Still Point

This morning’s entry quoted Ezra Pound:

“The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good.”

Dance critic Clive Barnes died Wednesday. Pound may have whispered his advice in St. Peter’s ear when Barnes stood before the Janitor Coeli at heaven’s gate. If so, another angel may have whispered in the other ear,

“Vide Forever Fonteyn.”

Sunday November 23, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am
The Idea of Identity

“The first credential
 we should demand of a critic
 is his ideograph of the good.”

— Ezra Pound,
  How to Read

Music critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:

The Juilliard’s
Half-Century Ripening

Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday regardless of what might have changed in the interim. Medical science tells us that the body’s cells replace themselves wholesale within every seven years, yet we tell ourselves that we are what we were….

Schubert at the end of his life had already passed on to another level of spirit. Beethoven went back and forth between the temporal world and the world beyond right up to his dying day.

Exercise

Part I:
Apply Holland’s Monday-to-Friday “idea of identity” to the lives and deaths during the week of Monday, Nov. 10 (“Frame Tales“), through Friday, Nov. 14, of a musician and a maker of music documentaries– Mitch Mitchell (d. Nov. 12) and Baird Bryant (d. Nov. 13).

Part II:
Apply Holland’s “idea of identity” to last week (Monday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 21), combining it with Wigner’s remarks on invariance (discussed here on Monday) and with the “red dragon” (Log24, Nov. 15) concept of flight over “the Hump”– the Himalayas– and the 1991 documentary filmed by Bryant, “Heart of Tibet.”

Part III:

Discuss Parts I and II in the context of Eliot’s Four Quartets. (See Time Fold, The Field of Reason, and Balance.)

Friday, November 21, 2008

Friday November 21, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 pm
Gatsby Starts Over:
Cleaning Up the
St. Olaf Mess

St. Olaf College,
Northfield, Minnesota —
From The MSCS Mess
(Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics,
and Computer Science)
November 14, 2008
Volume 37, Number 9

Math Film Festival 2008
The MSCS Department is sponsoring the second of two film-discussion evenings this Wednesday, November 19. Come to RNS 390 at 7:00 PM to see watch [sic] two short [sic]Whatchu  Know 'bout Math and Just a Finite Simple Group of Order Two— and our feature film, Good Will Hunting. Will Hunting is a mathematical genius who's living a rough life in South Boston, while being employed at a prestigious college in Boston, he's [sic] discovered by a Fields Medal winning mathematics Professor [sic] who eventually tries to get Will to turn his life around but becomes haunted by his own professional inadequacies when compared with Will. Professor Garrett will explain the “impossible problem” and its solution after the film.

Background:

Log24 entries of Wednesday, November 19, the day "Good Will Hunting" was shown:
Damnation Morning revisited and
Mathematics and Narrative continued
 

From a story in the November 21
 Chronicle of Higher Education
on a recent St. Olaf College
reading of Paradise Lost:

"Of man's first disobedience,
     and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree,
     whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World,
     and all our woe….

A red apple made the rounds,
each reader tempting the next."

________________________

"Do you like apples?"
Good Will Hunting   
 

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Wednesday November 19, 2008

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

"Through the unknown,
remembered gate…."

Four Quartets

(Epigraph to the introduction,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs
by Peter J. Cameron,
Merton College, Oxford)

"It's still the same old story…."
— Song lyric

The Great GatsbyChapter 6:

"An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through."

There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily  today:

"John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost  has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…" more»

The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For related material on Paradise Lost  and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.

Wednesday November 19, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:56 am

Sympathy for Baird Bryant

"Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game"

The Rolling Stones

"'Don't you want to
hear him call your name
when you're standing
at the pearly gates?'
I told the Preacher 'Yes, I do,
but I hope he don't call today.'"

— Kenny Chesney, song at the CMA Awards on Wednesday, November 12, quoted here at 9:00 AM on Thursday, Novermber 13

Related material:

LA Times obituary for the experienced bohemian writer and filmmaker Baird Bryant, who died at 80 on Thursday, November 13. Bryant filmed parts of "Easy Rider" in 1968 and of the Altamont concert in 1969. He was apparently a member of the Harvard College Class of 1950.

A more complete account of Bryant's life

Thirty references to the Devil in a book by Bryant

Solace With Interruptions

(Log24 entries for November 12, 13, and 14 — the day before Bryant's death, the day of his death, and the day after)
 

Monday, November 17, 2008

Monday November 17, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am
Limits

From the previous entry:

“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
 pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
  within which such a work can exist.”

— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye

The 3x3 square

Happy birthday
to the late
Eugene Wigner

… and a belated
Merry Christmas
 to Paul Newman:

Elke Sommer, former Erlangen Gymnasium student, in 'The Prize' with Paul Newman, released Christmas Day, 1963

“The laws of nature permit us to foresee events on the basis of the knowledge of other events; the principles of invariance should permit us to establish new correlations between events, on the basis of the knowledge of established correlations between events. This is exactly what they do.”

— Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize Lecture, December 12, 1963

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Sunday November 16, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Atwood on Art

From the previous entry:

“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
 pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
  within which such a work can exist.”

— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye

“The power of the dark is ascending.
 The light retreats to security, so that
 the dark cannot encroach upon it.”

Richard Wilhelm

 Related material:
Darkness Visible

Sunday November 16, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Art and Lies

Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– "What is Art For?"–  in today's New York Times Magazine:

Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

"Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "…  almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

For more about
"where things are
joined together," see
 Eight is a Gate and
The Eightfold Cube.
Related material:

The Trickster
and the Paranormal

and
Martin Gardner on
   a disappearing cube —

"What happened to that… cube?"

Apollinax laughed until his eyes teared. "I'll give you a hint, my dear. Perhaps it slid off into a higher dimension."

"Are you pulling my leg?"

"I wish I were," he sighed. "The fourth dimension, as you know, is an extension along a fourth coordinate perpendicular to the three coordinates of three-dimensional space. Now consider a cube. It has four main diagonals, each running from one corner through the cube's center to the opposite corner. Because of the cube's symmetry, each diagonal is clearly at right angles to the other three. So why shouldn't a cube, if it feels like it, slide along a fourth coordinate?"

— "Mr. Apollinax Visits New York," by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, May 1961, reprinted in The Night is Large


For such a cube, see

Cube with its four internal diagonals


ashevillecreative.com

this illustration in


The Religion of Cubism
(and the four entries
preceding it —
 Log24, May 9, 2003).

Beware of Gardner's
"clearly" and other lies.

Sunday November 16, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 am
ART WARS
continued

From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:

“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”

Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.

Paperback edition of 'The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World,' by Kati Marton

From another book related to this exodus:

“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”

— Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:

“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”

Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.

For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Saturday November 15, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 am
Middle Kingdom
Space Machine Family
 
From “The Chung,” by
 W. C. McDonald, Jr.– 

“CHUNG is a Chinese character which means ‘in the middle of’ or ‘the center,’ or, as applied to our CNAC aircraft, ‘MIDDLE KINGDOM SPACE MACHINE FAMILY.'”

(Here CNAC stands for “China National Aviation Corporation,” an organization that in World War II, as part of the Army Air Transport Command, made high-altitude flights over the Himalayas.)

Related material on poetry:

Related material on space machines:

Friday, November 14, 2008

Friday November 14, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 pm
Ballistics and Faith

From a review of José Saramago‘s new novel, Death With Interruptions:

“The church has never been asked to explain anything,” the cardinal assures the prime minister. “Our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith.”

Related material:

Sept. 7, 2006- Birthday of Elizabeth I
Sept. 7, 2007- Madeleine L’Engle is Dead
Sept. 7, 2008- From the Finland Station

For some mythology relevant to the first two of these three dates, see “Damnation Morning” and The Big Time. For some non-mythology related to ballistics, faith, and the third of these dates, see Rudy Ratzinger vs. Joseph Ratzinger.

As for the main character
  of Saramago’s novel…

V. is whatever lights you to
 the end of the street
:
 she is also the dark annihilation
 waiting at the end of the street.”

— Tony Tanner, page 36,
 “V. and V-2,” in
 Pynchon: A Collection
 of Critical Essays.
 Ed. Edward Mendelson.
 Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
 Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55.

Happy birthday,
Olga Kurylenko.

Friday November 14, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am

Riverrun
 

(The first word in Finnegans Wake.
S
ee also the Log24 entries following
the death of Pope John Paul II.)

At Inside Higher Ed, Margaret Soltan ("UD") discusses…

"moments of clarity [cf. related essay (pdf)] that seem, when you look at all of them together late in the day, to disclose our life’s otherwise hidden pattern, meaning, and flow.

'Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.'"

A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean, a story about trout fishing and grace

Related material:

Maclean's fellow author Kilgore Trout and the story he is said to be most proud of, about Bunker Bingo.

See also yesterday's entry, Bob's Country Bunker, and On Linguistic Creation.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Thursday November 13, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am
In Memory of a
Different Drummer

Mitch Mitchell live at Woodstock '69

Drummer Mitch Mitchell, 61, of
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was
found dead at 3 AM yesterday
in his hotel room.

Everybody wants to
go to heaven

— Kenny Chesney, song at last
night’s Country Music Awards

Click to enlarge

Mitch Mitchell Enters Heaven

Make me young

— Kilgore Trout
 (Log24, 5/14/07)

Related material —
the word “experienced”
in yesterday’s entry.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Wednesday November 12, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:35 am

Quantum of Solace

Lottery Numbers
for November 11, 2008:

PA midday 007, evening 628
NY midday 153, evening 069

Experienced
readers of this journal will have little difficulty interpreting these results, except for 153. For that enigmatic number, see Object Lesson.

See also the entries of
this date two years ago:
Grace and Casino Royale.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Tuesday November 11, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am
Conversation in the Oval Office

“With Easter Monday
you get egg roll.”

Monday, November 10, 2008

Monday November 10, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 am

Frame Tales

From June 30

("Will this be on the test?")

Frame Tale One:

Summer Reading

The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil, by Heinrich Zimmer

Subtitle:
Tales of the Soul's
Conquest of Evil

Frame Tale Two:

Barry Sharples
on his version of the
  Kaleidoscope Puzzle

Background:

"A possible origin of this puzzle is found in a dialogue
 between Socrates and Meno written by the Greek philosopher,
 Plato, where a square is drawn inside
a square such that
the blue square is twice the area  of the yellow square.

Plato's Diamond

Colouring the triangles produces a starting pattern
which is a one-diamond figure made up of four tiles
and there are 24 different possible arrangements."

Twenty-four Variations on a Theme of Plato

The King and the Corpse  —

"The king asked, in compensation for his toils during this strangest
of all the nights he had ever known, that the twenty-four riddle tales
told him by the specter, together with the story of the night itself,
should be made known over the whole earth
and remain eternally famous among men."

Frame Tale Three:

Finnegans Wake

"The quad gospellers may own the targum
but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck
of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne."

Monday November 10, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

x

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Sunday November 9, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

“Beauty is a riddle.”

— Dostoevsky

“Seven is Heaven
 Eight is a Gate
 Nine is a Vine”

— Folk rhyme

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Saturday November 8, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am
Roman Religion

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly the modern equivalent of The Grand Inquisitor

ET SUPER HANC PETRAM
AEDIFICABO  ECCLESIAM
MEAM ET PORTAE INFERI
NON  PRAEVALEBUNT
ADVERSUS  EAM

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”

Tom O’Bedlam:

I know more than Apollo….

Wikipedia:

“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….

One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….

The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”

Related material:

Log24 on      
August 24,     
October 5, and
November 8.  

Saturday November 8, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:28 am
From a
Cartoon Graveyard

 “That corpse you planted
          last year in your garden,
  Has it begun to sprout?
          Will it bloom this year? 
  Or has the sudden frost
          disturbed its bed?”

— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land

Wikipedia:

“In the Roman Catholic tradition, the term ‘Body of Christ’ refers not only to the body of Christ in the spiritual realm, but also to two distinct though related things: the Church and the reality of the transubstantiated bread of the Eucharist….

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘the comparison of the Church with the body casts light on the intimate bond between Christ and his Church. Not only is she gathered around him; she is united in him, in his body….’

….To distinguish the Body of Christ in this sense from his physical body, the term ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ is often used. This term was used as the first words, and so as the title, of the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi of Pope Pius XII.”

Pope Pius XII
:

“83. The Sacrament of the Eucharist is itself a striking and wonderful figure of the unity of the Church, if we consider how in the bread to be consecrated many grains go to form one whole, and that in it the very Author of supernatural grace is given to us, so that through Him we may receive the spirit of charity in which we are bidden to live now no longer our own life but the life of Christ, and to love the Redeemer Himself in all the members of His social Body.”

Related material:

Log24 on this date in 2002:

Religious Symbolism
at Princeton

as well as

King of Infinite Space

Coxeter exhuming Geometry

and a
“striking and wonderful figure”
 from this morning’s newspaper–

Garfield brings to the fridge a birthday cupcake for the leftover meatloaf. Nov. 8, 2008.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Friday November 7, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:22 pm
The Sincerest Form
of Flattery

At a British puzzle website today I found this, titled “Tiles Puzzle by Steven H. Cullinane”–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081107-Tilespuzzle.jpg

The version there states that

“there are 322,560 patterns made by swapping rows, swapping columns and swapping the four 2×2 quadrants!”

Actually, only 840 patterns can be made in this version. These are formed by 322,560 permitted permutations of the 16 tiles. This is also true in my Kaleidoscope Puzzle. For a display of all 322,560 permutations as pairs of (orthogonal) patterns, see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.

Update of Nov. 10, 2008: The error has been corrected.

Friday November 7, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am

Billy Graham is 90.
Joni Mitchell is 65.

Buen fin de semana a todos.
Desconvencida

Friday November 7, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am
The Getaway

Log24 on St. Luke’s Day this year:

An example of lifestyle coverage at The New York Times— a 2006 story on visual art in Mexico that included a reference to…

Damien Hirst’s gory new series
 ‘The Death of God–
Towards a Better Understanding
of Life Without God
Aboard the Ship of Fools.’

For descriptions of such life, I prefer the literary art of Robert Stone– in particular, Stone’s novel A Flag for Sunrise.

Credit must be given to the Times for an excellent 1981 review of that novel.

The review’s conclusion:

A Flag for Sunrise is
 the best novel of ideas
 I’ve read since Dostoyevsky
 escaped from Omsk.”

The author of that review, John Leonard, died Wednesday, Nov. 5. This morning’s Times has his obituary.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Thursday November 6, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 pm

This Way to
the Egress

New Yorker cover, issue dated Nov. 10, 2008

Related material:

Directions Out

Outside the World

Exit Strategy

Thursday November 6, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:07 am

Death of a Classmate

Michael Crichton,
Harvard College, 1964

Authors Michael Crichton and David Foster Wallace in NY Times obituaries, Thursday, Nov.  6, 2008

Authors Michael Crichton and
David Foster Wallace in today’s
New York Times obituaries

The Times’s remarks above
on the prose styles of
Crichton and Wallace–
“compelling formula” vs.
“intricate complexity”–
suggest the following works
of visual art in memory
of Crichton.

“Crystal”

Crystal from 'Diamond Theory'

“Dragon”

(from Crichton’s
Jurassic Park)–

Dragon Curve from 'Jurassic Park'

For the mathematics
(dyadic harmonic analysis)
relating these two figures,
see Crystal and Dragon.

Some philosophical
remarks related to
the Harvard background
that Crichton and I share–

Hitler’s Still Point

and
The Crimson Passion.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Wednesday November 5, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:23 am
Proof

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081105-ColorsSm.jpg

Click for details
.

Related material:
Log24, Oct. 5-8, 2006

Wednesday November 5, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

x

Monday, November 3, 2008

Monday November 3, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:06 am

x

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Saturday November 1, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

x

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