Log24

The title of yesterday's 11:22 PM post was "The Place of the Lion."

This is also the title of a novel by Charles Williams.

See, too, Midsummer Eve's Dream and Midsummer Night 2007.

For C. S. Lewis, who was born on this date in 1898,
and Natalie Wood, who died on this date in 1981

"He was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers…."
— C. P. Snow on mathematician G. H. Hardy

"Whoever you are— I have always depended on
the kindness of strangers." — A Streetcar Named Desire

From this journal on September 24, 2012—

Today's midday New York Lottery: 444 and 5222.

See Deuteronomy  4:44 and 5:2-22.

The New York Lottery:

CATCH OUR LIVE DRAWINGS:
NUMBERS and WIN 4
Draw Day: Twice Daily
Draw Time: Midday: 12:20 p.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Evening: 7:30 p.m. – 7:40 p.m. 

NY Lottery this evening: 674 and 1252 —

.

Contrapuntal themes:

Related Log24 posts today—
at 11:30 AM ET  (see post 674 ) and
at 7 PM ET (see post 1252).

The Devil at Midday:

Interpreting the midday numbers,
172 and 7817, is more difficult. Perhaps 172
refers to a Zen page number in a post from 
the Feast of Saint Louis in 2003, and perhaps,
in a less saintly manner, 7817 refers to
two posts in which these four digits appear
in product numbers within links— namely,
the Garden Party  "Background" link and 
the Seven Bridges  "wild" link.

Then again, perhaps not.

Today's sermon is for Martha B. Helfer, author of
the treatise on Darstellung  in today's previous post
and of the following—

(Click for clearer image.)

Helfer's The Word Unheard  was published by Northwestern University Press
on St. Andrew's Day, 2011. Log24 posts on that day—

Lines, Grids, and Fatuity for St. Andrew's Day.

The last of these warned of an upcoming Jewish Book Week event
on February 22, 2012.

That date turned out to be Ash Wednesday. See a Log24 post on that topic
that quotes a poet, T.S. Eliot, with anti-Semitic proclivities—

"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

This is perhaps not entirely irrelevant to Helfer's title, The Word Unheard .

* A concept of Schopenhauer and Hitler, and the first name of
   a fictional Boston mathematician.

The title of yesterday's post Will and Representation is of course
a reference to Schopenhauer's philosophical work of that name.

As the post itself indicates, the title is also a punning reference to
mathematical representation theory . 

To avoid confusion, it should be noted that Schopenhauer's
representation , in the original German, was Vorstellung .

The German for mathematical  representation theory is,
on the other hand, Darstellungstheorie . (The mathematical
use of Vorstellung  is non-technical, referring to concepts
of pedagogy. (A group presentation  is a Präsentation .))

For a discussion of the Vorstellung-Darstellung  distinction
in philosophy, not mathematics, see… 

The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of  Darstellung
in German Critical Discourse , by Martha B. Helfer,
State University of New York Press, 1996, esp. pp. 24-26.

New today…
John Markoff in this morning's New York Times—

"…what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy
of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks
or just 'neural nets' for their resemblance to the neural connections
in the brain."

Not so new…
From the early days of Mike Lynch's Autonomy Inc.—

"Autonomy 's intelligent agents use neural networking
to search for patterns of information, rather than
specific words or phrases, thereby distinguishing relevant
from irrelevant information." (Business Wire , October 8, 1996)

And from 1999—

For the answer, click here.

Connoisseurs of synchronicity may note two posts
from the date the above photo was taken:

First Draft of History and The Swedish Solution.

(The late Larry Hagman was, according to NBC News, "a longtime member 
of the Peace and Freedom Party, a minor leftist organization in California.")

Arthur C. Clarke—

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"The HP/Autonomy  Debacle," by John C. Dvorak at pcmag.com on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012—

"The whole Autonomy  thing was weird since the company seemed to be performing magic. On co-founder Michael Richard Lynch's Wikipedia page, the company is described as 'a leader in the area of computer understanding of unstructured information, an area which is becoming known as meaning-based computing .'

I do not know how gullible HP's board of directors is, but when I see the sudden emergence of something called 'meaning-based computing,' the alarms sound and the bullcrap meter begins to tag the red line."

A story by Terence K. Huwe in Online  magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2011, defines meaning-based computing (MBC), discusses Autonomy , and llnks to…

John Markoff in The New York Times , March 4, 2011— 

"Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people— who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing 'digital anomalies' that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds 'call me' moments— those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter."

For example…

Jonathan Weil at Bloomberg.com yesterday
on the HP-Autonomy  story—

"The goodwill figure is especially telling."

From remarks by Wallace Stevens featured in recent Log24 posts:

"The poet finds that as between these two sources: the imagination and reality, the imagination is false, whatever else may be said of it, and reality is true; and being concerned that poetry should be a thing of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to reality, which then becomes his inescapable and ever-present difficulty and innamorata. In any event, he has lost nothing; for the imagination, while it might have led him to purities beyond definition, never yet progressed except by particulars. Having gained the world, the imaginative remains available to him in respect to all the particulars of the world. Instead of having lost anything, he has gained a sense of direction and a certainty of understanding. He has strengthened himself to resist the bogus."

— Bard College speech of 1951

Related material:

With Autonomy , H-P Bought An Old-Fashioned
Accounting Scandal. Here's How It Worked.
(Forbes , Nov. 20, 2012)

Hewlett-Packard is losing a star in Mike Lynch
(The Guardian , May 25, 2012)

The Quest for Meaning: The world's smartest search engine
took 250 years to build. Autonomy  is here. 
(Wired , Feb. 2000)

(Continued)

Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012—

"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'

The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"

The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."

These same words in a different tongue—  "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)

"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."

— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization , Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142 

Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.

Last evening's NY Lottery numbers
985 and 3274, interpreted as the
numbers of Log24 posts, suggest
a look at Joyce's nightmare— history.

* The title refers both to a film and to
   a Log24 post, Random Access Memory.

The Telegraph  this evening has an obituary for
Theresa Brown, a Texas madam who reportedly 
died on September 18, 2012.

In her honor, an update has been made to a Log24 post
of that date. I hope she finds the update relevant.

* "Love Stage" — See yesterday's post.

The title refers to today's previous post,
"In the Widening Gyre."

"In modal logic, specifically when representing
possible worlds, @ is sometimes used as
a logical symbol to denote the actual world 
(the world we are 'at')." —Wikipedia

"What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."

— Four Quartets

Click the gyre on the book cover above for further details.

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”
— Ernest Hemingway

A newly coined term— "Spyfall"—

— is good, but not as good as…

NORway.

(Click on NOR for some connotations.
 See also Norway in this journal.)

This post was suggested by other weblogs' 
posts on Owen Barfield* quoted here recently, by
the Apollo Guidance Computer (see below and
MIT Technology Review), and by James Joyce:

"Unsheathe your dagger definitions." — Ulysses

* See The Appearances (Sept. 20, 2009), for
   a correction of Quine by Barfield.

Four southern authors—

Of particular interest in light of previous posts on singer Alicia Keys and on
author Octavia Butler — author Charles G. Bell, second from left above.

See videos of  Bell's Symbolic History  series.

Two news stories for Armistice Day:

Nov. 11, 2012—

Veterans to resurrect war memorial cross
in Mojave desert in Calif., capping long legal dispute

Nov. 6, 2012—

Mojave Cross, stolen two years ago,
discovered in Bay Area

See also this journal on the reported date of the cross theft.

Tablet  magazine, November 9th, 2012,
on Spielberg's Lincoln :

"… the movie’s lone Rocky moment
of ecstatic self-congratulation
is reserved for the amendment’s climactic
passage with the victorious congressmen
spontaneously bursting into
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' "

"Mine eyes have seen the glory…"

Both images above refer to this morning's post
 Professor Lavery's Sunday School.

For other porn from Tablet  magazine, see
Minimalist Whirl.

For other porn from Lincoln's seat of government, see
Physical Poetry and All In .

For further blasphemy, see The Apotheosis of Washington:

Saving an Appearance

(Click images for background.)

See also Isaiah—

For a founder of Symphony Space—

"To assuage this space…"

This post was suggested by today's previous post,
"Bali High Chair," that links to an empty chair award for
evangelical supporters of Mitt Romney, by Bauhaus style,
and by the example of Norwegian  design shown below—

(Happy Frigg's Day to Josefine Lyche.)

The phrase "deep play" in the previous post
was a borrowing from Clifford Geertz.

From another weblog's post on Geertz and
deep play—

When family is involved, the Balinese
are much more engaged.

See also the Balinese empty chair
and Amy Adams in this journal.

The New York Times  top online front page story this morning—

   more »

"A version of this article appeared in print 
on November 9, 2012, on page B1 of
the New York edition with the headline: 
An Innovator vs. a Follower." — The Times

Some related material from this  journal—

The Quality of Diamond,
Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:

The Quality
with No Name

And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?

— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance

Leading this morning's online New York Times  
obituaries list is one for a leftist Episcopal priest.

That obituary contains a link to a 1996 Times  story — 

Old Friends, New Foes:
President and a Preacher;
One 60's Activist Runs Columbia;
One Fights It

A check for background on the Columbia president
in that story yields the following from a leftist journalist's
website in a 2012 post dated October 26 (date of the
1917 October Revolution in Russia)—

Click for further details of this leftist allegation, which is
clearly false (because based on a ludicrously bad
misreading of a Rice University puff piece), and would
be libelous if its target were alive.

See a Rice University obituary for the "Nazi spy"
in question, who died on May 25, 2010. (See also
 this journal on that date.)

The same leftist webpage contains a link to another leftist's
attack on a respected charitable organization that may
or may not have, or have had, CIA connections—

The International Rescue Committee (IRC).

In the spirit of Leonard Cohen's "then we take Berlin" lyric,
here is a note on how the IRC logo

might be rendered in a way that is, though less visually appealing,
more logical— i.e., more purely an example of Bauhaus style—

See also the recent  Black October post
on a Columbia enthusiast of the October Revolution—

See Love Ghost, from the date of Anita Björk's death.

"Friends are often really enemies, and adversaries sometimes secret allies." — Wikipedia on the film Night People  (at right)

From a Washington Post  book review of
The Essays of Leonard Michaels
by Jonathan Yardley, Sunday, July 26, 2009—

"Michaels said that his literary influences included Franz Kafka, Lord Byron and Wallace Stevens (this last is frequently quoted in these essays), but reading that paragraph one can't help thinking that as a young man in the 1950s he must have spent a lot of time listening to Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and the other great Jewish comedians of the day, as his own comic voice and timing bear more than passing resemblance to theirs. In another essay, 'A Sentimental Memoir,' he recalls being 'saved' as a young man by a professor of English at the University of Michigan named Austin Warren, and then he meanders into an account of falling 'insanely in love' (which seems to have been a strong predilection with him) with a girl in Warren's class:

'The girl had a slender boyish figure and blondish hair. I thought nobody but me considered her striking or had noticed the subtle perfection of her beautiful face. When I told my friend Julian that the most beautiful girl in Michigan was in Warren's class, he named her. He told me that she modeled naked for art students, she had a horrible reputation for licentiousness, everybody knew who she was, and that he was in love with her too. I decided that I was ready to forgive her everything. To forgive a girl was a very popular sentiment of the day. There were plays, novels, and movies about forgiving bad girls. As for the girl I was ready to forgive, I now suppose there were a couple of hundred other men who were forgiving her at the same time, all of us subject to a sort of spiritual narcissism that has long since gone out of the world. Too bad, I think, since it had extraordinary intensity and made a man feel tortured by goodness, which is a very high order of feeling.' "

Rigor  (continued from yesterday)…

Mortis

See also, from the date of Current's death, High White Noon.

From Saturday Night Live  last night—

Related material from the Log24 post "Now Lens"
(March 11, 2011)—

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9, 2011—

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything
is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing
more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

See also Borges on Shakespeare, everything, and nothing 
in a note from September 7, 2006.

Everything and nothing in Peter J. Cameron's weblog yesterday—

The existence of everything entails the existence of nothing;
indeed, the existence of anything (any set A) entails
the existence of the empty set (the set {x∈A:x≠x}).
But not the other way round.

Right, I had better put on my anorak and go out now …

Illustration added by m759—

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

* Suggested by the Pindar link in this journal yesterday.

** Quoted in the "Seven is Heaven" post on All Souls' Day.

"Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate" — Memory rhyme

For Rebekah Gay—

Click for image source.

From this journal yesterday (All Saints' Day)—

"But, I asked, is there a difference
between fiction and nonfiction?
'Not much,' she said, shrugging."

— New Yorker  profile of tesseract
author Madeleine L'Engle

For a discussion of this issue in greater depth—

"Truth and fact are not the same thing."

— see a 1998 award acceptance speech by L'Engle.

See also a Log24 post of March 1st, 2008, on the soul.

The late Arthur R. Jensen was an expert on IQ testing.

From a Log24 post on Oct. 22, 2012, the reported date of his death—

Related material — "IT" in A Wrinkle in Time .