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)