Log24

"… to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic"

— The aim of the artist, according to Thomas Wolfe 

Related entertainment—

High-minded— Many Dimensions .

Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube .

A non-Lyche* gate—

Part of the Andrew Amesbury series Archway to Highgate.

* See Lyche gate  in this journal.

Happy feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

Click image for some context. See also tonight's previous
post and Cliffs of Moher in this journal.

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

  Click word for details.

  See also a related poetic meditation
  from one for whom…

  The world is not enough. 

* Continued.

In memory of two figures from tonight's NY Times  obituaries index
(not  Nora Ephron and Anthony J. Wiener)—

Tower Envy

Erin Burnett and Jenga blocks yesterday

Related material—

The Bible Puzzle Book

and the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain

The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.

Remarks on Wallace Stevens's poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"
from Michael Bryson—

Or the woman-hero…

From a Log24 post on June 1, 2004—

“A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.’  Regular expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive. That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone as writing any other complex programming code.”

– David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

Happy birthday to the late Willard Van Orman Quine.

The New York Times  this morning reports the death
last Tuesday (June 19, 2012) in Boston
of Gerhard Kallman, a Brutalist architect
born in Berlin in 1915.

Some Log24 images from the date of his death—

The above view shows the south side of Kirkland Street (at Quincy).

A more appealing architectural image, from the other side
of Kirkland Street—

"The Double-Cross System, or XX System, was a World War II
anti-espionage and deception operation of the British military
intelligence arm, MI5. Nazi agents in Britain… were captured,
turned themselves in or simply announced themselves and were
then used by the British to broadcast mainly disinformation to
their Nazi controllers." —Wikipedia

The XX —

The Double Cross of Fritz Leiber—

Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

The New York Times  today—
 "Reality and our perception of it are incommensurate…."

The above New York Times Wire  item from 3:35 PM ET today
mentions two topics touched on in today's earlier Log24 post
Bowling in Diagon Alley— magic (implied by the title) and
incommensurability. The connection in that post
between the two topics is the diagonal  of a square.

The  wire item shows one detail from a Times  illustration
of the linked article— a blindfolded woman.

Another detail from the same illustration—

Hands-on Wand Work

See also remarks on Magic in this journal and on Harry Potter.

I dislike both topics.

In memory of art historian John Golding,
whose obituary appeared (finally) in
today’s online Telegraph—

“His most recent book, Paths to the Absolute  (based on
his 1997 series of AW Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts
delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC),
addressed seven abstract artists — Mondrian, Kazimir
Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Rothko
and Clyfford Still — and argued that abstract art was
not simply decorative but ‘heavily imbued with meaning
[and] with content’. The book won the Mitchell Prize for
the History of Art in 2002.”

Commentary on Golding’s obituary suggested by
this evening’s 4-digit New York Lottery number,
1051—

Post  1051 in this journal, together with a post from
April 1, 2012 found in a search for the digits  1051
in Log24. That search may serve as a review.

* A phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow

In memory of actor Richard Lynch, 76, who was found
dead at his California home on Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Lynch's last role was apparently as the Reverend John Hawthorne 
in the upcoming film The Lords of Salem .

(For a post on some related theological territory, see this journal
on the date Lynch's body was found.)

Wikipedia on the Salem film—

Lords of Salem  is the third film from Haunted Films,*
the first two being Paranormal Activity  and Insidious .

For other tales of paranormal activity, see the Bible.

For a post in this journal from the Insidious  release date,
see Mathematics Awareness Month (April 1, 2011).

See, too, related discussions of Finnegans Wake  by 
James S. Atherton in The Books at the Wake—

Pages 146-147 and 199-200.

* At IMDb, Haunted Movies. See also Blumhouse Productions.

For those who prefer a cinematic approach…

"I was alone, I took a ride…"

— Sound track of the 2010 film Steve Jobs on Flash

A quote from The Oxford Murders , 
a novel by Guillermo Martinez—

"Anyone can follow the path once it’s been marked out.
But there is of course an earlier moment of illumination, 
what you called the knight’s move. Only a few people, 
sometimes only one person in many centuries, 
manage to see the correct first step in the darkness.”

“A good try,” said Seldom.

In memory of Victor Spinetti, who died today—

"Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."

— Courtesy of Steve Jobs and Aldous Huxley—

The New York Times online front page last night—

"Microsoft introduced its own tablet computer,
called Surface, illustrating the pressure
Apple's success has put on it to marry
software and hardware more tightly."

Commentary—

Google Maps image

Related material—

"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
 erfassen und gestalten?"

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus  (1923)

Update of Feb. 3, 2013:
See also The Perception of Doors in this journal.

In memory of Paul Sussman, author of archaeological 
mystery novels about Egypt—

Sussman's last novel, not yet published, was

The Labyrinth of Osiris .

Sussman, 45, reportedly died suddenly on May 31, 2012.

A perhaps relevant thought—

"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical 
ultraomnipotence."

– e. e. cummings, 1944

The Fog of Law continues…

Egypt's highest court
declares parliament invalid

By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 11:36 AM EDT, Thu June 14, 2012

* See State of a Nation (Alicia Keys's birthday, 2012)

"What we need is… a third way
between the longstanding models
of war and peace. Movement in
this direction is already under way."

— Yale Law professor John Fabian Witt,
"The Legal Fog Between War and Peace"

Tolstoy he ain't.

Witt's remarks appeared yesterday
evening (between 8 and 9 PM EDT)
in the online New York Times .

For related "third way" material, see
yesterday's 7 PM EDT post in this  journal.

Lee Marvin in the 1983 film Gorky Park

For related material, see yesterday's post on Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy  and a May 27, 2010, post— Masks .

The link to the Masks  post was suggested by four things:

1. Tonight's Tony Awards
2. A speech dated May 27, 2010 (the Masks  date)—
   "Russia— Getting It Right the First Time"
3. The name of the organization on whose website
   the speech appears— Tertium Datur
4. Tertium Datur  in this journal—

   

* The title is in memory of business writer Mike Hammer.

A remark from the prepared text of Salman Khan,
who spoke at the MIT commencement today—

"I always tell people that MIT is the closest
thing to being Hogwarts— Harry Potter’s
wizarding school— in real life."

A detail from one computer's view of
the webcast of the commencement—

Time elapsed (from the start
of the browser's window, not  
from the start of the webcast) 

This suggests a look at the date  11/27—

Click on St. Patrick's for further details.

* See June 6, 2007.

The Khan calmed himself by degrees.

Click image for background.

In memory of Arthur P. Stern, a link to Feb. 23, 2010.

Related material— Not Quite Nothing.

… and Money Talks—

This morning's post Chinese Epiphany discussed interpretations of Chinese
stock market numbers.  A followup is shown above.

Here 12:12, the time of the New York Times  market quotes pictured,
may be interpreted as 12/12, Sinatra's birthday. The percentage
numbers +0.07 and +0.11 are, of course, lucky for gamblers.

The percentage number -0.01 is perhaps less lucky, but for whom?

"… Western academic philosophy will likely come to appear
utterly parochial in the coming years if it does not find a way
to approach non-Western traditions that is much more rigorous
and respectful than the tokenism that reigns at present."

— Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times  philosophy
    column "The Stone" yesterday

For example—

Selected Bibliography on Ancient Chinese Logic

Some background for this morning's post:
Margaret Masterman's Language, Cohesion and Form .
(See the morning post's footnote.)

Update of 12:25 PM EDT June 4, 2012—

See also "The Epiphany Philosophers" in the online
New York Times , a brief article dated September 19, 2008.

Jungians might enjoy a synchronistic note—

"Toward the Light," a brief post from this  journal
on that same date.

Yesterday's post Child's Play displayed a cube formed
by a Hasse diagram of the 8 subsets of a 3-set.*

This suggests a review of a post from last January—

* See a comment on yesterday's post relating it to earlier,
  very similar, remarks by Margaret Masterman.
  I was unaware yesterday that those remarks exist. 

In memory of Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, who died on May 30, 2012

C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge—

He played his games and indulged his eccentricities.
He was living in some of the best intellectual company
in the world— G. E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell,
Trevelyan, the high Trinity society  which was shortly to
find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury. (Hardy himself
had links with Bloomsbury, both of personal friendship
and of sympathy.)

See also "Max Black" + Trinity  in this journal.

"Like I said, it ain't me you gotta worry about."

— Riddick in Pitch Black

(Click Huntsman image below to enlarge.)

(The sequel to yesterday's Matrix Problem Reloaded)

Wikipedia on the sci-fi weblog  io9.com—

Newitz explained the significance of the name "io9":

"Well, io9s are input-output devices that let you see into the future.
They're brain implants that were outlawed because they drove
anyone who used one insane. We totally made that (device) up
to name the blog."

— Jenna Wortham at wired.com, Jan. 2, 2008

From io9.com itself—

"Science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has another term for io9ers.
He calls them rapture fuckers.*"

— io9.com/explanations/

For the relevance of the term "revolutions" in this post's title, see
Wikipedia on Ken MacLeod.

I prefer to associate the number 9 with The Holy Field.

* MacLeod used this phrase in one of his novels, Newton's Wake.