Log24

"A Phenomenological Perspective,"
Ch. 2 in The Star and the Whole:
Gian-Carlo Rota on Mathematics and Phenomenology ,
by Fabrizio Palombi, A K Peters/CRC Press, 2011—

"Rota is convinced that one of the fundamental tasks of phenomenology is that of highlighting the primordiality of sense. In his words, if 'many disputes among philosophers are disputes about primordiality' then 'phenomenology is yet another dispute about what is most primordial' (Rota, 1991a,* p. 54). In this way he evidently does not intend to deny the existence of matter, of objects, or of that objective dimension proper to science, in favor of a spiritualist option, but rather to posit as primordial another dimension of the world connected with contexts and with roles, which is considered primordial because each one of us is confronted with it primordially."

* The End of Objectivity: The Legacy of Phenomenology ,
Lectures by Rota at MIT 1974-1991, 457 pages,
MIT Mathematics Department, Cambridge, MA

"The Ultimate, Apocalyptic Laptop"
by George Johnson
Published: September 5, 2000, by The New York Times—

"In a paper in the current issue of Nature , Dr. Lloyd describes the ultimate laptop— a computer as powerful as the laws of physics will allow. So energetic is this imaginary machine that using it would be like harnessing a thermonuclear reaction. In the most extreme version of this computer supreme, so much computational circuitry would be packed into so small a space that the whole thing would collapse and form a tiny black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravity."

Related material: Rota and "Black Hole" in this journal, as well as the Sator Square.

Lottery hermeneutics for Michaelmas—

New York Lottery the evening of Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011—

499 and 6985.

For 499, see post  499 in this journal ("Angel Night," Sept. 29, 2002).

For 6985, see a Sunday, 6/9/85, review of Amy's Eyes , a children's book by Richard Kennedy.

"Especially for the adult reader, the narrator's musings comprise many of the book's great pleasures. He discusses the seductiveness of numerology, the 'Wayward Daughter of Mathematics'….''

— Edwin J. Kenney Jr.

The properties of the Mathieu group M ₂₄ have recently interested some physicists—

(Click to enlarge.)

For some related papers, see Mendeley.com.

Daredevil work—

For Dan Brown, author of The Lost Symbol—

Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate
(Syfy channel, 9 PM tonight)

"Klaatu barada nikto."

Random thoughts from A Story (September 13th)—

A September 24th story from The Washington Post —

"James R. Adams was author or co-author of seven books,
beginning in 1971 with 'The Sting of Death.'"

Adams, an Episcopal priest, died on September 13th.

The September 13th Log24 post from which the above numbered links were
taken was in memory of film producer John Calley, who also died on that day.

A quote from Adams on the resurrected body of Christ:

"This new body had peculiar powers."

A quote from Calley:

"Let me put you in this unit."

For instance…

NY Lottery this evening—

Continued from Themes of Sept. 17—

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."

Lottery hermeneutics for this evening—

747 — Source of the sound effect in a post of April 28, 2009:

"And Kali, ‘The Dark One,’ addressed him with the voice of a cloud of thunder…"
— The King and the Corpse , by Heinrich Zimmer

3695 — Number of a post on Steps Toward Salvation  (Dec. 14, 2008)

NY Lottery this afternoon—

See also post 1115.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." — Yogi Berra

This evening's NY Lottery numbers were 375 and 3141.

Subjective interpretations—

There seems to be only one relevant result of a Google search for "375 Log24"—

There are, however, two  relevant interpretations of the number 3141—

1. The Saturday Evening Post  3/1/41 article by Jack Alexander on AA—

"The members of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle
a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic
as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling."

2. Post number 3141 in this  journal— Aesthetics for Jesuits.

Happy Birthday to Bill Murray (61) and Stephen King (64).

Hermann Weyl's 1949 remarks in this morning's post
were made at an event on March 19 in honor of Einstein's
70th birthday five days earlier.

Somehow the conclusion of Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel
Cat's Eye  seems appropriate:

742

as indicated by Gravity's Rainbow— the end of page 742—

by the New York Lottery on the evening of June 17, 2010—

and by this journal on the afternoon of that day—

Detail from New Yorker  cover (fiction issue of June 2010)

Lurching Toward Decision

"Suskind… nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for 'the perfect technical answer' to the myriad of complex issues coming at him."

— Frank Rich on Ron Suskind's new book about the White House, Confidence Men

Very distantly related material—

From "Confidence Game," an Oct. 12, 2008, post in this journal, a quasi-European perspective—

See also …

Gravity’s Rainbow , Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:

"… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….

Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of

   742"

"But Thou knewest not, it seems, that no sooner would man reject
miracle than he would reject God likewise, for he seeketh less
God than 'a sign' from Him." —The Grand Inquisitor

Update of 1:44 AM—

Seek and Ye Shall Find …

(Click images for larger context)

  The Holy Office —

Historic plane crashes at West Virginia air show

"The T-28 aircraft crashed at about 2:40 p.m.
during an acrobatic demonstration at the 2011
Thunder Over the Blue Ridge Open House & Air Show…."

See also Themes—

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."

The previous two posts, Baggage and The Uploading, suggest
a review of Wroclaw's native son Ernst Cassirer.

Dateline WROCLAW—

See also "Feist Sings 1, 2, 3, 4."

"It's A and Z's Kingdom Come" (after The Man in Black)—

See also midnight's Themes.

"'Ain’t No Grave' is Johnny’s final studio recording. The album and its title track
deal heavily with themes of mortality, resurrection, and everlasting life.
The Johnny Cash Project pays tribute to these themes."

And  sells products!

Click image to enlarge.

I prefer "And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."

Click on Black Widow for a video.

"I want one."

(Continued from Tuesday's "A Story")

Tuesday's story, a collection of four random posts, was
suggested by Tuesday's NY lottery numbers.

That story leads, by association, to Frame Tale in
a post of 2:02 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For related
material, see Death Story, a post of 9:40 PM that same Sunday.

Wednesday's numbers—

—suggest a counter-story…

Escape to Pine Mountain

A website on films about Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormons) asks

Was "Escape to Witch Mountain"
based on Zenna Henderson's "People" stories?

The lottery numbers above suggest the names of three women—
none, as far as I know, with any Mormon background—
who might rightly be called, without capital letters,
"latter-day saints"…

1. Madeleine L'Engle (see 529 as the date 5/29),
2. June Christy (a singer first recorded on 5/4/45), and
3. Mary Rockwell Hook, architect of Pine Mountain
   Settlement School, who died on 9/8/78.

These three lives, taken together, may serve as
an antidote to the Death Story mentioned above.

"We tell ourselves stories…" — Joan Didion
"Therefore choose life." —God

For film producer and studio head John Calley, who died today at 81—

"When Death tells a story, you really have to listen." —The Book Thief  (cover)

New York Lottery on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

This suggests the following random thoughts—

The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group

by George M. Conwell, Annals of Mathematics ,
Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1967582

At least for now, this paper may be downloaded without
signing in or making a payment. Click the "View PDF" link.

Update of Sept. 13— From Library Journal  on Sept. 7—

The JSTOR journal archive announced today that it is making nearly 500,000 public domain journal articles from more than 220 journals—or about six percent of JSTOR's total content—freely available for use by "anyone, without registration and regardless of institutional affiliation."

The material, entitled Early Journal Content, will be rolled out in batches starting today over the course of one week. It includes content published in the United States before 1923 and international content published before 1870, which ensures that all the content is firmly in the public domain. JSTOR, in an announcement, said that the move was "a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options" to JSTOR content for independent scholars and others unaffiliated with universities.

Microsoft plans Windows 8 compatibility with mobile devices

"This won't be just another upgrade. Windows 8 is nothing less than the linchpin to Microsoft's strategy for keeping Windows relevant— if not resurgent— as the shift to the post-PC computing era unfolds.

'The stakes are huge,' says Charles King, principal analyst at research firm Pund-IT. 'The company must play outside its comfort zone, but if Microsoft succeeds, the potential opportunities could be significant.'"

— Byron Acohido in USA TODAY this evening

Yesterday's 7:20 AM Google News—

From Cliff Robertson's 1958 TV classic "Days of Wine and Roses"—

From Fritz Leiber's 1959 sci-fi classic "Damnation Morning" —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming implement
that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun,
a slim sceptre, and a delicate branding iron— especially when
its tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”

Betty Skelton, "the First Lady of Firsts," died on the last day of August.

From this  journal on August thirty-first—

"The Tesseract was the jewel of Odin's treasure room."

Hugo Weaving also played Agent Smith
in The Matrix Trilogy .

For Cynthia Zarin, biographer of Madeleine L'Engle—

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

Eight is a gate.

NY Lottery Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011

The sound of singing grows louder.

For Fischer's fellow database enthusiast Codd, see Cross-Referenced (April 24, 2003).

For Birtel's fellow pseudoscience enthusiast Frank Tipler, see the artist's comment linked to in Romancing the Omega (April 19, 2011)—

"Omega Point" is a term used by mathematical physicist Frank Tipler for what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics."

— Josefine Lyche, 2009

At Heaven’s Gate

Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, RSS at 23:59 EDT:
Peter Woit's weblog Not Even Wrong—

"Lisa Randall’s new book is about to come out, it’s entitled
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking
Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World."

Angels & Demons  (the film)—

As she enters the lab she reacts in horror
as she sees an eyeball lying on the floor…

Click images for some backstory —

Woit on Randall—

"She has taken on the role of a public face of physics,
 and has written a book which is in part a very general defense
 of science and the materialist, rationalist world-view
 that modern science is based on."

See also yesterday's "The Stone" column in The New York Times—

"What Is Naturalism?"

I prefer philosophy enacted by Reba.

* A reference to Dan Brown, not Marianne Williamson

(A sequel to The Lost Word)

NY Lottery, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011

The number "38" might refer, notably, to

• The old postal code  of Harvard University,
• the caliber  of one type of handgun…

… and, less notably, to a page number
     that appears in most books.

T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
was first published in 1919.*

For some background on that year, see the Harvard Class  of 1919.

For a notable instance of the page number  38, see
Poetry and Belief in the Work of T.S. Eliot ,
by Kristian Smidt (first published in 1949 by
the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters).

* "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in The Egoist
   at the Modernist Journals Project:
   Part I in Vol. 6, No. 4 (Sept. 1919),
   Parts II-III in Vol. 6, No. 5 (Dec. 1919)

This afternoon's post—

"… If the cliffhanger is done well, it will not
simply introduce a wholly unprepared turn
into the narrative (a random death, a new character,
an entirely unanticipated obstacle) but rather
tighten the configuration of known elements…."

— Michel Chaouli in "How Interactive Can Fiction Be?"

This evening's Los Angeles Times obituary for Gary Hammer—

"He had been called the Indiana Jones of horticulture,
 breaking his leg while hanging from a cliff in Mexico…."

Click to enlarge—

For commentary on the first obituary above,
see Odin's Day (Wednesday, August 31).

"An unlikely story? Perhaps."
— Hans Furth, quoted here on
the date of Hammer's death (Sunday, August 7)

See also this journal on October 10, 2010.