Log24

Saturday, August 31, 2013

What Where

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:23 pm

The news item at lower right in the above image, with the phrase "surprise U-turn,"
suggests some remarks related to this summer's Enniskillen festival.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Her

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:20 pm

(A sequel to today's noon post, Hymn)

Portrait, in the 2013 film Oblivion , of  a 2005 graduate
of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art —

London derrière.

Hymn

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Londonderry Air

"By recalling the past and freezing the present
he could open the gates of time…."

— Mark Helprin,  In Sunlight and in Shadow

Comment-Worthy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:01 am

Thursday, August 29, 2013

An End in Itself

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:24 pm

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued from May 9, 2013)

IMAGE- Barry Mazur: 'A good story is an end in itself.'

See also Scriba's The Concept of Number and,
from the date of his death, The Zero Theorem.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Noir sur Blanc

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

IMAGE- Playwright's death announced by his publisher, Noir sur Blanc

Some backstory for this post's title—

IMAGE- 'Iron Sky'- The Nazis set up a secret base on the dark side of the moon.

A post from the day of Mrozek's death may also be relevant—

I have a nightmare.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

What Seems Insanity

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 pm

On a way of seeingsuperimposition
that "seems insanity" (cf. C. S. Lewis's remarks below)

Combining last night's post Spectrum with
the August 14 post Valhalla Is Down

From An Experiment in Criticism 
by C.S. Lewis, 1961–

"If we go steadily through all the myths of any people
we shall be appalled by much of what we read.
Most of them, whatever they may have meant to
ancient or savage man, are to us meaningless and
shocking; shocking not only by their cruelty and
obscenity but by their apparent silliness— almost
what seems insanity. Out of this rank and squalid
undergrowth the great myths— Orpheus, Demeter
and Persephone, the Hesperides, Balder, Ragnarok,
or Ilmarinen's forging of the Sampo– rise like elms."

Voilà —

The Aug. 14 post Valhalla Is Down referred to a New York Times  blackout.
(Jill Abramson, on earlier being named executive editor at the Times, had
said it was like "ascending into Valhalla.")

Another Times blackout occurred today.

Lewis's term Ragnarok refers to the twilight of the gods of Valhalla.

A more conventional illustration from the gamer website Ragnarok/Valhalla Wiki —

Perspective

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:09 pm

For Fans of Bad Movies*

This post was suggested by my viewing last night
the 1995 horror film Species , and by news that 
Scarlett Johansson will be starring in a similar
production at the Venice Film Festival, which
opens tomorrow.

The new Johansson film, Under the Skin
is based on a novel by one Michel Faber.

Faber on books that have influenced him

"Most influential has possibly been John Berger's Ways of Seeing — 
not a novel at all (although Berger has written fiction) but a book of
art criticism. The influence of these wonderfully perceptive and
thought-provoking essays peeps out everywhere in my own work."

An excerpt from the Berger book—

Click image for a better view of the original.

Related material: Johansson in this journal, Sunday's NY Times 
teaser for a piece on Saturday Night Live, and a more serious
approach to the geometry of perspective.

* And of Ben Kingsley, who starred both in Species  and in
  a previous film by  the director of Under the Skin .

Monday, August 26, 2013

Spectrum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 pm

From the weblog of Dr. David Justice today :

C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover
the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes
that that of Orpheus retains its power to spellbind, even in a
bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels,
become as dust upon such summary.

We venture now  upon that territory where words fail ….

Related material :

C. S. Lewis on Orpheus (click to enlarge) —

Lewis, according to Justice, "surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines."

A related image (see, too, today's previous post) —

C. S. Lewis on myth —

"The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—
a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip."

Conceptual Art

For concepts of prism, spectrum, and tulip combined, see Sicilian Reflections.

"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow

Dark Side Tales

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 pm

"Got to keep the loonies on the path."

Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

For those who, like Tom Stoppard, prefer the dark side—

NEW ANGLE:
He runs, panting, until he ends up
in front of a tall, brilliantly lit office building.
As he approaches, the lights in the building
are going off floor by floor.

INT. OFFICE BUILDING – NIGHT
He rushes into
the lobby, running for the elevator.

NIGHT WATCHMAN
Burning the midnight oil, Mr. Smith?
You forgot to sign in.

Bateman wheels around and shoots him.
He runs toward the revolving doors.
As he swings around in the doors, he notices
a JANITOR who has witnessed the shooting.
He revolves back into the lobby and shoots the janitor.

NEW ANGLE:
He runs out of the building
and across the street to an identical office building,
the one that houses Pierce & Pierce.

INT. PIERCE & PIERCE LOBBY – NIGHT
Bateman nods at the Pierce & Pierce NIGHT WATCHMAN
and signs in. He breathes a sigh of relief as
​the elevator doors close behind him.

— AMERICAN PSYCHO
by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner
(Based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, 
Fourth Draft, November 1998)

Not quite so dark—

"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

This journal ten years ago, on August 25, 2003

         … We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,

The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.

— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening
     in New Haven," Canto IX
    (Collected Poems , pp. 471-472)


"A view of New Haven, say…." —

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect 


A similar version of this Apollonian image —

  Detail:

Related material for the loonies:

"the spirit's alchemicana."

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Where Entertainment Is God

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:28 pm

(Continued)

For film and TV director Ted Post, who
reportedly died on Tuesday, Aug. 20.

See that day's post "Conversations with
an Empty Chair
" and today's NY Times

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Being’s Road

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:16 pm

For the late Julie Harris —

By slow and carefully modulated steps Bradford's narrative
has brought his community of separatists to the place he
calls Cape Harbor… where, face-to-face with the bleak
and wintry reduction that is his image for American space,
he finds himself stopped, able to do nothing but come to
an astonished pause. The final step, that of imaginative
crossing into the land that lies before them, remains
beyond the power of narrative to take. Narrative falters, and
finding his journey advanced to an "odd Fork in Being's Road"
and himself nothing so much as an "empty spirit / In vacant
space" (to adopt apt phrases from Dickinson and Stevens…),
Bradford requires the sublime if he is to continue moving
forward: separation becomes exaltation as it becomes
manifest that only an influx 
of "the Spirit of God and His
grace" can have permitted the community to survive its
passage to the limit depicted.

— David Laurence, "William Bradford's American Sublime,"
PMLA , Vol. 102, No. 1, 1987, pp. 55-65

Cast (continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:31 am

The death yesterday of British cinematographer
Gilbert Taylor suggests an image from last evening's
Log24 search Point Omega —

.

The die in the above image (shown here Dec. 28, 2012
displays the numbers 3-6-5 in counterclockwise order.
A similar die in an earlier post served as a metaphor for
a time-jump to 365 days in the past.

For some religious remarks by Umberto Eco that may
serve as a small memorial to Taylor, see this journal 
a year before  the day he died— August 23, 2012.

"Everybody comes to Rick's."

Friday, August 23, 2013

Vacant Space

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

A passage from Wallace Stevens

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit 
In vacant space.

A frame from the film American Psycho  (2000), starring Christian Bale—

IMAGE- 'espace' sign from the film 'American Psycho'

The rest of the film is not recommended.

Related material—

"24 Hour Psycho" at the Museum of Modern Art in the novel Point Omega .

Illustration from a New York Times  review

IMAGE- NY Times headline 'A Wrinkle in Time' with 24 Hour Psycho and Point Omega scene

Ten Years of Nothing

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm

For insatiable actor Patrick Bateman (protagonist of
American Psycho) and anti-theologian Kirk Varnedoe
Pictures of Nothing, this journal ten years ago today )

Philip Rieff, The Crisis of the Officer Class,
University of Virginia Press, 2007

From page 73:

The third culture's life-style, its way, is no way: it is abandonment, 
an ethos of empty seriousness best expressed, I think, by the 
greatest of American poets in the tradition that began with 
Emerson. Wallace Stevens was the greatest American maker of 
that "fictive music" of the "unreal" by which poets "give back to us 
what you [God] gave," Creation itself, now understood, in the third
culture, as the "imagination that we spurned and crave." Stevens
understood the fictive music of faith, that intensity which

proclaims
The near, the clear …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
… an image that is sure,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Yet not too like, yet not so like to be
Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the strange unlike…. [12]

This is masterly anti-theology. This is what no "mickey mockers" of 
the spirit can ever become: the "American sublime," the mar-

[12] Wallace Stevens, "To the One of Fictive Music," in Collected 
Poems
 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 87-88; all citations of 
Stevens are to this edition.

From page 74:

velous panic and emptiness of belief by which the "sublime comes 
down/To the spirit itself" and terrifies the American self:

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit 
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat? [13]

This poet is no great character, nor temple priest. He is a virtuoso 
chef, preparing the food for the American feast of unbeliefs. This 
supreme fictionist invents bread and wine, anything that will act as 
that "act of the mind." [14] Stevens had a shrewd Emersonian idea 
of myth, or Freudian, the "sexual myth" or any other "images of 
metaphors." [15] He knew that it was in "this invented world" that "the 
death of one god is the death of all." This is the most supreme of all 
fictions, by which "He imposes orders as he thinks of them." [16]

[13] Stevens, "The American Sublime," 130-31
[14] Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry," 239-40; modern poetry, which is 
"the finding of a satisfaction," or a script for a theater– whatever 
"will suffice" for the "insatiable actor" of the third culture, even the 
script of "cuisine bourgeoise," where we may "feast on human 
heads" (240, 227).
[15] Stevens, "Men Made out of Words," 355; and "Thinking of a 
Relation between the Images of Metaphors," 356-57.
[16] Stevens, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," 380-81, 403.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Happy Birthday

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm
 

Kristen Wiig turns 40
on Thursday, Aug. 22…

Huffington Post

 

 

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The 21

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 pm

A useful article on finite geometry,
"21 – 6 = 15: A Connection between Two Distinguished Geometries,"
by Albrecht Beutelspacher, American Mathematical Monthly ,
Vol. 93, No. 1, January 1986, pp. 29-41, is available for purchase
at JSTOR.

This article is related to the geometry of the six-set.
For some background, see remarks from 1986 at finitegeometry.org.

Jazz Saint

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:01 am

From an obituary of a jazz pianist and host of
a radio interview program on jazz —

McPartland said the conversations themselves
were very much like jazz, spontaneous and
free-flowing.

"It's so easy to make it a conversation, and
you don't know where it's going to lead,"
McPartland said.

See, too, last night's Conversations with an Empty Chair .

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Conversations with an Empty Chair

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

(Continued from 4 AM Sunday, Sept. 10, 2006 —
Meet Max Black .)

In memory of office chair designer Charles Pollock,
who reportedly died today at 83.

An image from the 2006 Meet Max Black  empty-chair post
appears also in today's previous post, The 20 .

The conversation of this  post's title (see The 20 ) —

The 20

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

In memory of author Elmore Leonard

A graphic symbol and a search for "Nowhere"*
in this journal yield

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

"Cotton Mather died
when I was a boy.
The books/ He read,
all day, all night
and all the nights,/
Had got him nowhere."

— Wallace Stevens,
"The Blue Buildings
in the Summer Air"

* See previous post.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Tale

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

IMAGE- NY Times online front page with caption- 'Thereby hangs a tale.'

The tale is not Thomas Nagel's remarks on philosophy
summarized above, but rather the late John Hollander's
remarks on Nowhere:

"We all know where it is they've gone, the dead:
Beyond Noplace, far into wide Nowhere."

See also Nagel's book The View from Nowhere .

Noon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Last midnight's post quoted poet John Hollander
on Cervantes—

"… the Don’s view of the world is correct at midnight,
and Sancho’s at noon."

The post concluded with a figure that might, if
rotated slightly, be regarded as a sort of Star of
David or Solomon's Seal. The figure's six vertices
may be viewed as an illustration of Pascal's
"mystic hexagram."

Pacal's hexagram is usually described
as a hexagon inscribed in a conic
(such as a circle). Clearly the hexagon
above may be so inscribed.

The figure suggests that last midnight's Don be
played by the nineteenth-century mathematician
James Joseph Sylvester. His 1854 remarks on
the nature of geometry describe a different approach
to the Pascal hexagram—

"… the celebrated theorem of Pascal known under the name of the Mystic Hexagram, which is, that if you take two straight lines in a plane, and draw at random other straight lines traversing in a zigzag fashion between them, from A in the first to B in the second, from B in the second to C in the first, from C in the first to D in the second, from D in the second to E in the first, from E in the first to F in the second and finally from F in the second back again to A the starting point in the first, so as to obtain ABCDEF a twisted hexagon, or sort of cat's-cradle figure and if you arrange the six lines so drawn symmetrically in three couples: viz. the 1st and 4th in one couple, the 2nd and 5th in a second couple, the 3rd and 6th in a third couple; then (no matter how the points ACE have been selected upon one of the given lines, and BDF upon the other) the three points through which these three couples of lines respectively pass, or to which they converge (as the case may be) will lie all in one and the same straight line."

For a Sancho view of Sylvester's "cat's cradle," see some twentieth-century
remarks on "the most important configuration of all geometry"—

"Now look, your grace," said Sancho,
"what you see over there aren't giants,
but windmills, and what seems to be arms
are just their sails, that go around in the wind
and turn the millstone."
"Obviously," replied Don Quijote,
"you don't know much about adventures.”

― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Midnight in the Garden

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

(Continued)

From a 2003 interview by Paul Devlin (PD) with poet John Hollander (JH),
who reportedly died Saturday

PD: You wrote in the introduction to the new edition of  Reflections on Espionage that whenever you have been "free of political callowness" it was partly as a result of reading W.H. Auden, George Orwell, and George Bernard Shaw. Do you think these writers might possibly be an antidote to political callowness that exists in much contemporary literary criticism?

JH: If not they, then some other writers who can help one develop within one a skepticism strongly intertwined with passion, so that each can simultaneously check and reinforce the other. It provides great protection from being overcome by blind, true-believing zeal and corrupting cynicism (which may be two sides of the same false coin). Shaw was a great teacher for many in my generation. I started reading him when I was in sixth grade, and I responded strongly not only to the wit but to various modes, scene and occasions of argument and debate as they were framed by various kinds of dramatic situation. I remember being electrified when quite young by the moment in the epilogue scene of Saint  Joan  when the English chaplain, De Stogumber, who had been so zealous in urging for Joan’s being burned at the stake, returns to testify about how seeing her suffering the flames had made a changed man of him. The Inquisitor, Peter Cauchon, calls out (with what I imagined was a kind of moral distaste I’d never been aware of before), "Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those who have no imagination?" It introduced me to a skepticism about the self-satisfaction of the born-again, of any persuasion. With Auden and Orwell, much later on and after my mental world had become more complicated, it was education in negotiating a living way between a destructively naïve idealism and the crackpot realism—equally inimical to the pragmatic.

PD: Would you consider yourself a "formal" pragmatist, i.e., a student of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead (etc.) or an "informal" pragmatist – someone taking the common-sense position on events…or someone who refuses to be pigeon-holed politically?

JH: "Informal" – of the sort that often leads me to ask of theoretical formulations, "Yes, but what’s it for ?"

PD: Which other authors do you think might help us negotiate between "naïve idealism" and "crackpot realism"? I think of Joyce, Wallace Stevens, perhaps Faulkner?

JH: When I was in college, a strong teacher for just this question was Cervantes. One feels, in an Emersonian way, that the Don’s view of the world is correct at midnight, and Sancho’s at noon.

Then there is mathematical  realism.

A post in this journal on Saturday, the reported date of Hollander's death,
discussed a possible 21st-century application of 19th-century geometry.
For some background, see Peter J. Cameron's May 11, 2010, remarks
on Sylvester's duads  and synthemes . The following figure from the 
paper discussed here Saturday is related to figures in Cameron's remarks.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

The Company He Keeps

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:12 pm

Alexander Pierce and Black Widow, scheduled
to appear in Captain America: The Winter Soldier
on April 4, 2014—

"God, isn't there already enough crap in this story?"
— Margaret Soltan, quoted here on Aug. 7, 2007

Happy birthday, Robert Redford.

Seeing a Form

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:28 pm

A book noted here on Sept. 16, 2010—

On that date, Harvard historian of science
John E. Murdoch died.

"It's still the same old story…"

Related material: Faust + Potter in this journal.

Happy birthday, Roman Polanski.

Today in History

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski is 80.
Actor-director Robert Redford is 77.
Actor-comedian Martin Mull is 70.

— The Associated Press

Related material —

Rented Lips 

and Your Shiny Friend.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

The Story of N…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 pm

Continues.

IMAGE- Marissa Mayer on numbers in Vogue magazine

— Marissa Mayer in the current Vogue  online

Up-to-Date Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:24 pm

The following excerpt from a January 20, 2013, preprint shows that
a Galois-geometry version of the large Desargues 154203 configuration,
although based on the nineteenth-century work of Galois* and of Fano,** 
may at times have twenty-first-century applications.

IMAGE- James Atkinson, Jan. 2013 preprint on Yang-Baxter maps mentioning finite geometry

Some context —

Atkinson's paper does not use the square model of PG(3,2), which later
in 2013 provided a natural view of the large Desargues 154203 configuration.
See my own Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.  Atkinson's
"subset of 20 lines" corresponds to 20 of the 80 Rosenhain tetrads
mentioned in that later article and pictured within 4×4 squares in Hudson's
1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface.

* E. Galois, definition of finite fields in "Sur la Théorie des Nombres,"
  Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques de M. Férussac,
  Vol. 13, 1830, pp. 428-435.

** G. Fano, definition of PG(3,2) in "Sui Postulati Fondamentali…,"
    Giornale di Matematiche, Vol. 30, 1892, pp. 106-132.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Inglorious

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm


                 (From French Wikipedia.  Click image for
                 more about the Théâtre de la Madeleine.*)

For Le Salaud Lumineux  ("The Brilliant Bastard"),
a Devil's advocate who reportedly died on August 15—
a quotation from this journal linked to here on that date

"To me, the most genuine last words are those
that arise naturally from the moment, such as
Voltaire’s response to a request that he forswear
Satan: 'This is no time to make new enemies.' "

— Christopher Orlet, The Vocabula Review
    (http://www.vocabula.com/index.asp)
    July/August 2002 Issue, as quoted in
    Utne Reader

* Le Théâtre de la Madeleine  is apparently named for
 its proximity to L'Église de la Madeleine .

Six-Set Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:24 am

From April 23, 2013, in
​"Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry"—

Click above image for some background from 1986.

Related material on six-set geometry from the classical literature—

Baker, H. F., "Note II: On the Hexagrammum Mysticum  of Pascal,"
in Principles of Geometry , Vol. II, Camb. U. Press, 1930, pp. 219-236  

Richmond, H. W., "The Figure Formed from Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Mathematische Annalen  (1900), Volume 53, Issue 1-2, pp 161-176

Richmond, H. W., "On the Figure of Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions," 
Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics , Vol. 31 (1900), pp. 125-160

Thursday, August 15, 2013

The Crosswicks Curse

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:23 am

(Continued from previous posts)

A check of today's date in this journal
ten years ago yields a reference to the
Brazilian artist Athos Bulcão.

It turns out he died on July 31, 2008.
See that date in this journal.

History’s Nightmare…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 am

Continues.

See Quine + Boxer in this journal.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Valhalla Is Down

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm

Odin's Day continues. 

The title is a reference to the recent film
"Olympus Has Fallen," directed by Antoine Fuqua
(which I watched last night).

Related material:

Ascent to Valhalla,   Times Blackout,
and the post-blackout Times Obituaries.

Update of 6:45-7:59 PM Aug. 14:

See also (in keeping with the ART WARS
theme of today's previous post
Juneteenth (Wednesday, June 19) 2013.
This last link may be regarded as posted in
memory of author Vince Flynn, who reportedly
died at about 2 AM on that date. Background:
Tuesday, June 18.

ART WARS

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am

(Continued from 24 hours ago and from May 9, 2012)

Quoted 24 hours ago in this journal—

Remark by Aldous Huxley on an artist's work:

"All the turmoil, all the emotions of the scenes
have been digested by the mind into a
grave intellectual whole."

Quoted in a video uploaded on May 9, 2012:

Norway Toilet Scene
IMAGE- Privy scene from 'Headhunters'

Norway dance (as interpreted by an American)

IMAGE- 'The geometry of the dance' is that of a tetrahedron, according to Peter Pesic

I prefer a different, Norwegian, interpretation of "the dance of four."

Related material: The clash between square and tetrahedral versions of PG(3,2).

The Gift

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 am

"Give 'em hell." — Ben Bernanke at Princeton's Baccalaureate, 2013

Some background — Janet Leigh and the Museum of Modern Art

"The Varnedoe Debacle," by Hilton Kramer (Dec. 1991)

Hell… Hell. — Sinatra in The Manchuran Candidate

Varnedoe

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

See "August 14" + Varnedoe in this journal.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The Story of N

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

(Continued from this morning)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110107-The1950Aleph-Sm.jpg

The above stylized "N," based on
an 8-cycle in the 9-element Galois field
GF(9), may also be read as
an Aleph.

Graphic designers may prefer a simpler,
bolder version:

Plan 9

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 am

(Continued from August 28 last year)

Backstory— 

Reflections from today's date, August 13, in 2003, that included
the following remark by Aldous Huxley on an artist's work:

"All the turmoil, all the emotions of the scenes
have been digested by the mind into a
grave intellectual whole. It is as though
Bach had written the 1812 Overture."

Related art—

Josefine Lyche, from her 2013 Crackquarelle  series:

IMAGE- From the 2013 Josefine Lyche 'Crackquarelle' series

Steven H. Cullinane, The Story of N ,
from The Misalignment of Mars and Venus series:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110720-Misaligned.jpg

See, too, previous posts on The Story of N.

Monday, August 12, 2013

To the Day

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:29 pm

IMAGE- Scene from 'Oblivion' (2013)

From "Ramble On" lyrics as quoted by OzWho:

"I've been this way ten years to the day"

Form

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The Galois tesseract  appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—

IMAGE- Hypercube and 4x4 matrix from the 1976 'Diamond Theory' preprint, as excerpted in 'Computer Graphics and Art'

The Galois tesseract is the basis for a representation of the smallest
projective 3-space, PG(3,2), that differs from the representation at
Wolfram Demonstrations Project. For the latter, see yesterday’s post.

The tesseract representation underlies the diamond theorem, illustrated
below in its earliest form, also from the above February 1977 article—

IMAGE- Steven H. Cullinane, diamond theorem, from 'Diamond Theory,' Computer Graphics and Art, Vol. 2 No. 1, Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7

As noted in a more recent version, the group described by
the diamond theorem is also the group of the 35 square
patterns within the 1976 Miracle Octad Generator  (MOG) of
R. T. Curtis.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Demonstrations

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:00 pm

IMAGE- Wolfram Demonstrations, '15 Point Projective Space'

IMAGE- From 'Oblivion' (2013), the Mother Ship

"Welcome home, Jack."

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Amor

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

Ya la ronda llega aqui.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Hell’s Bells

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"Ting-a-ling" — Timequake

See also Catholic Analyst's Couch.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

The Date

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:07 pm

IMAGE- Christopher Plummer in 'The Pyx' (1973), starring Karen Black

"Today she has a date from which there is no return."

Jesus for Jews

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:06 pm

(Continued from the previous post, with its
link to Jeff Bridges in a scene from "Heaven's Gate.")

See an obituary for the widow of the late Robert Maxwell 
in today's Jerusalem Post , and The Dude.

Related material Peter O'Toole as another Jesus for Jews.

And then there is Liam Neeson….

Heaven’s Gate

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:01 pm

Yesterday's post Devil's Gate provided a dark view of life and culture.

A more cheerful view is provided by the late Gail Levin,
a maker of PBS "American Masters" documentaries
that included, notably, Jeff Bridges and Marilyn Monroe.

Levin reportedly died at 67 on July 31, 2013.*

An image from an interview with Levin —

The date in the image, July 19th, 2006, is the broadcast
date of the PBS "American Masters" program on Monroe.
A check for synchronicity shows there was no Log24 post
on that date.

See, however, posts for the day before— "Sacred Order"—
and the day after— "Bead Game."

A related quote from an article linked to in the latter—

"First world culture, which is 'pagan and in the majority
everywhere,' has as its defining characteristic
a 'primacy of possibility,' or pop— a broadly inclusive
concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal
dreamtime to Plato’s Forms."

Review by Jess Castle of Philip Rieff’s 
Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the
Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority
,
University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.

This quote may serve as the missing July 19, 2006, post.

Related material:  Dreamtime,  Possibility,  and Plato's Forms.

* See that date in this journal for two less famous American
  masters, artist Edward Valigursky and writer Robert Silverberg.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Devil’s Gate

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 am

(Continued from August 3)

Relevant links:

"Enter to Grow in Wisdom"

Sociology and Death

In the Details

Heaven's Gate

A Small Planet

Trocadero

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Desargues via Galois

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:12 pm

The following image gives a brief description
of the geometry discussed in last spring's
Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.

IMAGE- The large Desargues configuration in light of Galois geometry

Update of Aug. 7, 2013:  See also an expanded PDF version.

Levity

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:15 am

Continued from August 15, 2012.

IMAGE- 'Diamonds Studio Generative Identity,' an OpenProcessing project from Brazil

This is an OpenProcessing project by Radamés Ajna of Brazil.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Diamond Theorem in ArXiv

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

The diamond theorem is now in the arXiv

IMAGE- The diamond theorem in the arXiv

Wikipedia Updates

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:30 pm

I added links today in the following Wikipedia articles:

The links will probably soon be deleted,
but it seemed worth a try.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

For Amy

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

IMAGE- Impression of a meerkat by Amy Adams in 'Junebug'

In the Details

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am

By chance, the latest* remarks in philosopher Colin McGinn's
weblog were posted (yesterday) at 10:04 AM.

Checking, in my usual mad way, for synchronicity, I find
the following from this  weblog on the date  10/04 (2012)—

Note too the time of this morning's previous post here
(on McGinn)— 9:09 AM.  Another synchronistic check
yields Log24 posts from 9/09 (2012):

Related to this last post:

Detail from a stock image suggested by the web page of
a sociologist (Harvard '64) at the University of Washington in Seattle—

Note, on the map of  Wyoming, Devil's Gate.

There are, of course, many such gates.

* Correction (of about 11:20 AM Aug. 3):
  Later  remarks by McGinn were  posted at 10:06 AM today.  
  They included the phrase "The devil is in the details."
  Yet another check for synchronicity leads to
  10/06 (2012) in this  journal with its post related to McGinn's
  weblog remarks yesterday on philosophy and art.
  That 10/06 Log24  post is somewhat in the spirit of other
  remarks by McGinn discussed in a 2009 Harvard Crimson  review.

The Lotos Rose

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:09 am

See the title in this journal.

Related material:

Philosophers on the Beach
George Santayana in Acapulco, Colin McGinn in Miami.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Parts of a World

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

(Continued)

IMAGE-Kristen Wiig in 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'

"When an irresistible force such as you
meets an old immovable object like me…"

— From one whose name was writ in water*

* Scholia:  Art WarsConceptual Coffee, and Day of the Tetraktys

Duende for St. Wallace

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am

IMAGE- Google search on 'Wallace Stevens died'

(The final quote above is bogus. Stevens did write "Death is the mother 
of beauty," but the "perishable" part is from a lesser poet, Billy Collins.)

For the duende  of this post's title, see a dance.

The dance suggests a 1956 passage by Robert Silverberg—

"There was something in the heart of the diamond—
not the familiar brown flaw of the others, but something
of a different color, something moving and flickering.
Before my eyes, it changed and grew.

And I saw what it was. It was the form of a girl—
a woman, rather, a voluptuous, writhing nude form
in the center of the gem. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black,
her eyes a piercing ebony. She was gesturing to me,
holding out her hands, incredibly beckoning from within
the heart of the diamond.

I felt my legs go limp. She was growing larger, coming closer,
holding out her arms, beckoning, calling—

She seemed to fill the room. The diamond grew to gigantic size,
and my brain whirled and bobbed in dizzy circles.
I sensed the overpowering, wordless call."

— "Guardian of the Crystal Gate," August 1956

For similar gestures, see Nicole Kidman's dance in "The Human Stain."

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Conceptual Duende

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:24 am

For a conceptual artist who reportedly died
on Thursday, July 25, 2013—

IMAGE- Book cover by Marc Simont, 'The Lieutenant Colonel and the Gypsy'

Related material:  Art Saint and Wisdom & Metaphor .

Art and Death

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:31 am

Yesterday afternoon's post, combined with Tom Wolfe's
remarks on conceptual art quoted here July 23 and an
obituary this morning for a conceptual artist who reportedly
died on July 25, suggest a review of this journal's content
from the day of the artist's reported death—

Rhetorical Question

"Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?"

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