Log24

Friday, April 30, 2010

Bridge to Nowhere

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(continued from April 26, 28, and 29):

http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/hexagram29.gif

Hexagram 29:
Water

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100430-Commentary.jpg

http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/hexagram30.gif

Hexagram 30:
Fire

"Hates California,
it's cold and it's damp.
"

Image--'The Fire,' by Katherine Neville

Excerpt from The Fire,
by Katherine Neville —

"'Alaska's Aleutian Trench,' Key told us…. 'It's called the Ring of Fire because it boasts the largest collection of active volcanoes in the world.'….

'But you said that my father's not in Alaska…. So what does this Ring of Fire have to do with the place where we're actually going?'

'It's the Yellow Brick Road,' she told me."

Sarah Palin and friends-- Doonesbury, April 30, 2010

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Spider Woman

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:32 am

Mathematics and Narrative
(continued from April 26 and 28):

The Web

Image-- Google search for 'eightfold geometry'-- top result-- the Goddess as Spider Woman

See also

Leiber's Big Time, Spider Woman, and The Eight.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Eightfold Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Image-- The 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets

Image-- Analysis of structure of the 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets

Image-- Miracle Octad Generator of R.T. Curtis

Related web pages:

Miracle Octad Generator,
Generating the Octad Generator,
Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Related folklore:

"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2) such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding triples have exactly one element in common." –"Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries," by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem, April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6

The Miracle Octad Generator may be regarded as illustrating the folklore.

Update of August 20, 2010–

For facts rather than folklore about the above bijection, see The Moore Correspondence.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Types of Ambiguity

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

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
(1974)—

Chapter One

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

Note—

“We note that the phrase ‘instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry’ is mere fatuousness. If there is an idea here, degenerate, mere, and geometry  in concert do not fix it. They bat at it like a kitten at a piece of loose thread.”

— Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction  (Dragon Press, 1977), page 110 of revised edition, Wesleyan University Press, 2009

(For the phrase mere geometry  elsewhere, see a note of April 22. The apparently flat figures in that note’s illustration “Galois Affine Geometry” may be regarded as degenerate  views of cubes.)

Later in the Le Guin novel—

“… The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, ‘Number the Indisputable,’ as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct– in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to prove it– the Saeba variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence– the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days. and indeed these last ten years– really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.”

Related material—

Time Fold, Halloween 2005, and May and Zan.

See also The Devil and Wallace Stevens

“In a letter to Harriet Monroe, written December 23, 1926, Stevens refers to the Sapphic fragment that invokes the genius of evening: ‘Evening star that bringest back all that lightsome Dawn hath scattered afar, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the child home to the mother.’ Christmas, writes Stevens, ‘is like Sappho’s evening: it brings us all home to the fold’ (Letters of Wallace Stevens, 248).”

— “The Archangel of Evening,” Chapter 5 of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous, by Barbara M. Fisher, The University Press of Virginia, 1990

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Today’s Sermon —

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Simplify.

Image-- Richard Kiley with record collection in 'Blackboard Jungle,' 1955

Saturday, April 24, 2010

… and Dorothy

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 pm

(Continued from previous entry, Go Ask Alice)

Black Shellac

Image-- R. Crumb cover-- 'The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of'

Related material:

Groundhog Day, 2009

and Groundhog Day, 2006

Image-- Miles Davis ESP album
Alicia Keys

Quotations thanks to Stephen King —

The sleep of reason breeds monsters.
– Goya

It'll shine when it shines.
– Folk Saying

Go Ask Alice

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:13 pm

McLuhan in Space  by Richard Cavell—

As the word "through" in the title of Through the Vanishing Point hints… key reference points for McLuhan and Parker in writing Through the Vanishing Point  were the "Alice" books.

[The footnote symbol here is mine.]

Alice Rae, McLuhan's Unconscious, doctoral dissertation, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, May 2008

What McLuhan calls the "unconscious"' is more often named by him as Logos, "acoustic space" or the "media environment," and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung, but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth.

The declaration section of the thesis is dated November 19, 2008.

Related material— Halloween 2005 and The Gospel According to Father Hardon.

A work suggested by Ander Monson's new Vanishing Point . (See April 17 and April 23, together with the April 22 picture of a non-Euclidean  point in the context of "The Seventh Symbol.")

Friday, April 23, 2010

Phantasmagoria

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

Today's NY Times obituaries —

Image-- John Carl Warnecke, Architect to Kennedy, Dies at 91

Warnecke died April 17, last Saturday.
From an entry linked to on that date

Rebecca Goldstein
   on first encountering Plato

"I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)"

Screenwriter Joan Didion

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

Happy Shakespeare's birthday.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Mere Geometry

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

Image-- semeion estin ou meros outhen

Image-- Euclid's definition of 'point'

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Mereology (from the Greek μερος, ‘part’) is the theory of parthood relations: of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole. Its roots can be traced back to the early days of philosophy, beginning with the Presocratics….”

A non-Euclidean* approach to parts–

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Corresponding non-Euclidean*
projective points —

Image-- The smallest Galois geometries

Richard J. Trudeau in The Non-Euclidean Revolution, chapter on “Geometry and the Diamond Theory of Truth”–

“… Plato and Kant, and most of the philosophers and scientists in the 2200-year interval between them, did share the following general presumptions:

(1) Diamonds– informative, certain truths about the world– exist.
(2) The theorems of Euclidean geometry are diamonds.

Presumption (1) is what I referred to earlier as the ‘Diamond Theory’ of truth. It is far, far older than deductive geometry.”

Trudeau’s book was published in 1987. The non-Euclidean* figures above illustrate concepts from a 1976 monograph, also called “Diamond Theory.”

Although non-Euclidean,* the theorems of the 1976 “Diamond Theory” are also, in Trudeau’s terminology, diamonds.

* “Non-Euclidean” here means merely “other than  Euclidean.” No violation of Euclid’s parallel postulate is implied.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

A Saint for Stephen

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:26 pm

Stephen King On Writing

"My plan was to link all these characters,
the good, the bad, and the ugly,
in two places: Boulder and Las Vegas."

Image--'Little Miss Sunshine' meets 'Kick-Ass' meets 'Carrie'

Sunday, April 18, 2010

For Trevanian

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

Where Entertainment Is God
(continued)

Google News at about 7:37 PM —

Image -- Google News, 'Dragon' Edges Out 'Kick-Ass' At Box Office

The Eiger Sanction, by Trevanian –

"Because CII men worked in foreign countries without invitation, and often to the detriment of the established governments, they had no recourse to official protection. Organization men to the core, the CII heads decided that another Division must be established to combat the problem. They relied on their computers to find the ideal man to head the new arm, and the card that survived the final sorting bore the name Yurasis Dragon. In order to bring Mr. Dragon to the United States, it was necessary to absolve him of accusations lodged at the War Crimes Tribunal concerning certain genocidal peccadillos, but CII considered him worth the effort."

Sermon for the Cruelest Month

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

In the Details

For kids– NY Times— "Hit-Girl survives."

For adults– LA Times

"Dede Allen dies at 86; editor revolutionized
 imagery, sound and pace in U.S. films

 Her work on 1967's 'Bonnie and Clyde' ushered in
 a new aesthetic that's now the standard in American film
"

Claudia Luther of the LA Times on Allen, who died yesterday—

"… she learned the craft of editing: the assemblage of various scenes to create a coherent film.

In the early days of Hollywood, the cutters, as they were called, were often women, perhaps because, as Allen once commented to author Ally Acker, 'women have always been good at little details, like sewing.'"….

"Ebert wrote of Allen's work on 'The Hustler' that she found the rhythm in the pool games— 'the players circling, the cue sticks, the balls, the watching faces— that implies the trance-like rhythm of the players. Her editing "tells" the games so completely that if we don't understand pool, we forget that we don't.'"

____________________________________________

“Oscar is your name,” she said firmly.
Oscar and Aster.  Scar and Star.

The Hustler

A Generation Lost in Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:29 am

or, Deja Vu All Over Again

Top two obituaries in this morning's NY Times list–

David Simons, Who Flew High
on Eve of Space Age, Dies at 87

Dr. Simons, a physician turned Air Force officer, had sent animals aloft for several years before his record-breaking flight.

James Aubrey, who Portrayed the Hero
in ‘Lord of the Flies’, Is Dead at 62

Mr. Aubrey portrayed Ralph in the film version of the William Golding novel and had a busy career on stage and television in England.

Simons reportedly died on April 5,
Aubrey on April 6.

This journal on those dates–

April 5 —

Monday, April 5, 2010

Space Cowboys

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM Edit This

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100405-Eastwood.jpg

Google News, 11:32 AM ET today–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100405-SpaceCowboysSm.jpg

Related material:

Yesterday's Easter message,
film notes from March 13,
and Dagger Definitions.

April 6 —

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Clue

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM Edit This

Excerpt from 'Cosmic Trigger'
 by Robert Anton Wilson

See also Leary on Cuernavaca,
John O'Hara's fleeting reference
to Cuernavaca in Hope of Heaven,
and Cuernavaca in this journal.

Team Daedalus

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 AM Edit This

"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162

"Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys"

"Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction\

 

Commentary by T.S. Eliot

"At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death'—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward."

 

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Ander’s Game

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:32 am

"Unsheathe your dagger definitions." –James Joyce, Ulysses

See also David Shields and Ander Monson.

Related material: God's Dice.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Symbology, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:23 pm

LA Confidential

Tom Hanks presents the Cecil B. DeMille
award to Warren Beatty–

"And by balls I mean… artistic vision."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090722-ArtisticVision-Sm.jpg

For some background, see July 23, 2009–
"A Tangled Tale."

The Craft, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:22 pm

Image--Movie poster for 'The Craft'

"Honesty's the best policy."
— Miguel de Cervantes   

"Liars prosper."
— Anonymous   

— Epigraphs to On Writing:
A Memoir of the Craft
,
by Stephen King

Lavender Blue,
Dilly, Dilly,
Lavender Green…
Image-- Spacek as Carrie

The cruelest month continues…

"…as Newton conceived it, the distinction between
the individualities of two particles is so marked that
it is impossible for them ever to coincide or for
either of them to alter the being of the other…."

"Waves interfere with each other because they are
interchangeable and thus not distinguishable;
two processes can coincide in space and time
but two substances cannot. Thus the wave
reveals a whole new possibility of identity…."

"The concept of a field is elusive."

— Peter Pesic, Seeing Double: Shared Identities
in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature
,
Chapter 6, "The Fields of Light"

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Theology 101

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Part IIf Superior Beings Exist, How Would We Know?

Part IIProfessor Corcoran's Boxes

Part IIICorcoran 101

The Bourne Yarn

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:29 am

In memory of Nina Bourne,
who died on Friday at 93

Recent posts here have featured the
fictional character Jason Bourne,
perpetually confused about his identity.

The following excerpt shows that
being fictional, though confusing,
may be more interesting than
the alternative.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100414-TheBourneYarn.jpg

See also 11:11 AM yesterday.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Identity Crisis

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:11 am

Some sources of identity…

For Jason
Bourne–

Cover of 'The Eight,' by Katherine Neville

and for Lem Dobbs
(co-writer of
"Romancing the Stone"),
from March 22, 2005
"The Enemy"–

The image “Serpent's Tail Publishing logo” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Tuesday October 5, 2004

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 3:28 PM

The Joyce Identity,
or Treadstone vs. Blarneystone

From The Bourne Identity:

ABBOTT: Can you really bring him in?
CONKLIN: I think we’re past that, don’t you? What, do you have a better idea?
ABBOTT: Well, so far, you’ve given me nothing but a trail of collateral damage from Zurich to Paris. I don’t think I could do much worse.

Joyce’s grave
in Zurich

Ward Abbott,
Dick-Cheney-like
head of
Treadstone

Plaque, Rue de
l’Odeon, Paris
 

CONKLIN: Well why don’t you go upstairs and book a conference room. Maybe you can talk him to death.

 Related material: Stanley Fish's column on Habermas in today's NY Times and Habermas in this journal. (Some references to Habermas occur only in links.)

Material with some relevance to the concept of romancing the stone

Entries of June 28-29, 2008, and March 22, 2005, and

Object lesson (Sunday, July 1, 2007)

 

Monday, April 12, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Saturday's post quoted a mathematical narrative with the following opening sentence–

"Let G  be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D),
where V  is an n-dimensional vector space over the division ring D."

If that narrative were a novel, its opening might win a Bulwer-Lytton prize.

As might the opening of another nonfiction narrative

"What are we are doing?"

A partial answer to this profound metaphysical question
for fans of the classic film "Dark City"
(which was written in part by one "Lem Dobbs")–

Part I — Fiction —

Wednesday August 4, 2004

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:29 AM

Shell Beach

“It was a dark and stormy night….”

– Opening of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic novel by Madeleine L’Engle.

For those who seek religious significance in the name of Hurricane Alex:

Alex Proyas directs this futuristic thriller about a man waking up to find he is wanted for brutal murders he doesn’t remember. Haunted by mysterious beings who stop time and alter reality, he seeks to unravel the riddle of his identity.”

– Description of the 1998 film Dark City

[See also June 14, 2005.]


Part II — Nonfiction —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100412-ShellBeachInn.jpg

http://www.shellbeachinn.com/

Part III — Fiction —

"The bench on which Dobbs was sitting
was not so good."

— B. Traven, opening sentence
of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Weaveworld

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am

"Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels
 like a shell game." –R. B. Kitaj
 as quoted by Marco Livingstone

'The Bourne Ultimatum,' starring Matt Damon, cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material: Prime Designer,
Shell Game, and Evil Daemon.

See also remarks by root@matrix.net.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Sunday’s Theater, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

See Sunday's Theater for an update on whether painter R. B. Kitaj was a model for the protagonist of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater.  It seems that, at least in part, he was.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Geometry for Generations

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:25 pm

"Let G  be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D), where V  is an n-dimensional vector space over the division ring D.  Assume that G  is generated by 'nice' transformations.  The problem is then to try to determine (up to GL(V)-conjugacy) all possibilities for G.  Of course, this problem is very vague.  But it is a classical one, going back 150 years, and yet very much alive today."

— William M. Kantor, "Generation of Linear Groups," pp. 497-509 in The Geometric Vein: The Coxeter Festschrift, published by Springer, 1981

This quote was added today to "A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168."

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Second Billing, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 pm

From the current online Daily Telegraph

Daily Telegraph obituaries of Sex Pistols manager and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, in that order

In memory of Anatoly Dobrynin–

"You will find to the left of the House of Hades a spring…"

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Veritas

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

Some historians consider today's date, April 7, to be the date of the Crucifixion in the Roman calendar (a solar calendar, as opposed to the Jewish lunar scheme).

Since the ninefold square has been called both a symbol of Apollo and the matrix of a cross, it will serve as an icon for today–

The 3x3 square

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051202-Cross.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Clue

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Excerpt from 'Cosmic Trigger' by Robert Anton Wilson

See also Leary on Cuernavaca,
John O'Hara's fleeting reference
to Cuernavaca in Hope of Heaven,
and Cuernavaca in this journal.

Team Daedalus

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162

"Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys"

"Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction

Monday, April 5, 2010

Space Cowboys

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100405-Eastwood.jpg

Google News, 11:32 AM ET today–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100405-SpaceCowboysSm.jpg

Related material:

Yesterday's Easter message,
film notes from March 13,
and Dagger Definitions.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

URBI ET ORBI

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

URBI
  (Toronto)–

Toronto Globe and Mail: AWB 'Three Sevens' flag

Click on image for some background.

ORBI
   (Globe and Mail)–

From March 19, 2010-- Weyl's 'Symmetry,' the triquetrum, and the eightfold cube

See also Baaad Blake and
Fearful Symmetry.

Easter Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 am

From Maureen Dowd's Easter sermon

"As they say in Latin, 'Ne eas ibi.' Don’t go there."

Or "Should you not go there," or perhaps, "Lest you go there."

Related material:

Conjugation of ire and ROMANES EUNT DOMUS.

Virgil Vigil

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

Two definitions–

"In Dante's Inferno  the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia

"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia

Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff

"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning

Related material:

VIA CRUCIS

The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100403-WallaceLemniscate.jpg

The Cartesian cross

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-CartesianCross.jpg

The lemniscate

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-InfinitySymbol.jpg

Lemniscate with Cartesian cross

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-LemniscateCross.gif
 
A more traditional symbol
that has been described as
  the cross of St. Boniface
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-%20BonifaceCross.gif
 
See also The Eight, a novel
by Katherine Neville related
to today's date, 4/4–
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-TheEight.jpg

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Infinite Jest

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:05 am

"Democrats– in conclusion– Democrats in America
were put on earth to do one thing– Drag the
ignorant hillbilly half of this country into the next
century, which in their case is the 19th."

Bill Maher on March 26

Reply to Maher:

"Hell is other people."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

With a laugh track.

Related material:

Dragging Maher into the 18th  century–

From
N. H. Abel on Elliptic Functions:
Problems of Division and Reduction
,
by Henrik Kragh Sørensen —

Related material– Lemniscate to Langlands (2004)
and references to the lemniscate in
Galois Theory, by David A. Cox (Wiley-IEEE, 2004)

Watchman…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:07 am

What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?

— Wallace Stevens

Friday, April 2, 2010

The Dance

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:09 pm

"I danced on the Friday when the World turned black,
  It's hard to dance with the Devil on your back."

"What we have called a set of possible dance steps,
  modern math calls a group."

The Meadow

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Appalachian meadow

"Is it a real meadow?"

Yes, of course.”

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Deliverance

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:28 am

Pizza man at Heaven's gate-- 'Wiles of the Devil or not, someone's gotta pay for these pies.'

Update of 6:06 PM ET:

See also the "one thing" link
from the Palm Sunday entry
and Dickey's Heaven.

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