"I am a town." — Mary Chapin Carpenter
"A town, huh?" — Sydney Prosser
Related material — "Put on your red dress, baby."
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Christmas Ornaments
Continued from December 25—
A link from Sunday afternoon to Nov. 26, 2012,
suggests a review of one of the above structures.
The Dreaming Jewels cover at left is taken from a review
by Jo Walton at Tor.com—
"This is a book that it’s clearly been difficult
for publishers to market. The covers have been
generally pretty awful, and also very different.
I own a 1975 Corgi SF Collectors Library
paperback that I bought new for 40p in the later
seventies. It’s purple, and it has a slightly grainy
cover, and it matches my editions of The Menace
From Earth and A Canticle for Leibowitz .
(Dear old Corgi SF Collectors Editions with their
very seventies fonts! How I imprinted on them at
an early age!) I mention this, however, because
the (uncredited) illustration actually represents and
illustrates the book much better than any of the other
cover pictures I’ve seen. It shows a hexagon with an
attempt at facets, a man, a woman, hands, a snake,
and stars, all in shades of green. It isn’t attractive,
but it wouldn’t put off people who’d enjoy what’s inside
either."
The "hexagon with an attempt at facets" is actually
an icosahedron, as the above diagram shows.
(The geometric part of the diagram is from a Euclid webpage.)
For Plato's dream about these jewels, see his Timaeus.
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Monday, December 30, 2013
A Wilderness of Mirrors
A link to a Nov. 22 post on Arcade Fire was added today
to yesterday's "Dating an OS" post.
That Nov. 22 post suggests a review related to a new film —
"If the spy wars of the later 20th century were fought
in 'a wilderness of mirrors,' beset by paradox and
moral uncertainty— evil done in the name of good—
then John le Carré, or, rather, the narrative voice that
went by the name John le Carré, was the perfect
choice to polish those mirrors. It was the voice of the
urbane, upper-class Englishman: courteous, opaque
and chilly, with a ruthless, penetrative intellect and
razor wit for the delivery of its insights."
— Alan Furst in The New York Times Sunday
Book Review on October 12, 2008
For other material on mirrors, see all posts tagged Arcade Fire.
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Sunday, December 29, 2013
Good Question
Amy Adams in the new film “Her” —
“You’re dating an OS? What is that like?”
— Question quoted in a Hollywood Reporter
story on the film’s second trailer
From the same story, by Philiana Ng —
” The trailer is set to Arcade Fire’s
mid-tempo ballad ‘Supersymmetry.’ “
Parts of an answer for Amy —
Nov. 26, 2012, as well as
Dec. 24, 2013, and
The Hollywood Reporter story is from Dec. 3, 2013.
See also that date in this journal.
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Friday, December 27, 2013
Dreigroschen Trifft Vierfarben
See also Pop Meets Hochkultur in a post of Dec. 18, 2013.
Some background for that post— July 19, 2008.
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Occupy Space
Many people enter the merry- go-round.
Here and there one catches a phrase —
"Room for one more on the hippo's back"….
— Adapted from the prologue to
Liliom , by Ferenc Molnár
Click Elysium for a related image.
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Thursday, December 26, 2013
Dicey
For fans of Hunger Games and Elysium —
Roberta Smith in this evening's* online New York Times—
"Especially with the gap between the wealthiest
and everyone else so wide, it is dicey
for a major museum to celebrate the often frivolous
objects on which the rich spend their ever increasing
surplus income. Such a show must be beyond reproach
in every way: transparent in organization, impeccable
in exhibition design, illuminating in catalog and labeling
and, most of all, self-evidently excellent in the quality of
the objects on display."
Da capo: "I've heard of affairs that are strictly Platonic."
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How It Works
“Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”
— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer (Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746),
Section 16 (p. 716) of Handbook of Combinatorics, Vol. I ,
MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham, Martin Grötschel,
and László Lovász)
For some background on that Steiner system, see the footnote to
yesterday’s Christmas post.
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Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Rotating the Facets
“… her mind rotated the facts….”
Related material— hypercube rotation,* in the context
of rotational symmetries of the Platonic solids:
“I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly Platonic”
* Footnote added on Dec. 26, 2013 —
See Arnold Emch, “Triple and Multiple Systems, Their Geometric
Configurations and Groups,” Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 31 (1929),
No. 1, 25–42.
On page 42, Emch describes the above method of rotating a
hypercube’s 8 facets (i.e., three-dimensional cubes) to count
rotational symmetries —
See also Diamond Theory in 1937.
Also on p. 42, Emch mentions work of Carmichael on a
Steiner system with the Mathieu group M11 as automorphism
group, and poses the problem of finding such systems and
groups that are larger. This may have inspired the 1931
discovery by Carmichael of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24),
which has as automorphisms the Mathieu group M24 .
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Rotating the Facts
"She never looked up while her mind rotated the facts,
trying to see them from all sides, trying to piece them
together into theory. All she could think was that she
was flunking an IQ test."
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
"So you should not feel so all alone…"
— Adapted song lyric
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Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Through a Mirror, Darkly
Review of a book first published in 1989—
Reality's Mirror: Exploring the Mathematics of Symmetry —
"Here is a book that explains in laymen language
what symmetry is all about, from the lowliest snowflake
and flounder to the lofty group structures whose
astonishing applications to the Old One are winning
Nobel prizes. Bunch's book is a marvel of clear, witty
science writing, as delightful to read as it is informative
and up-to-date. The author is to be congratulated on
a job well done." — Martin Gardner
A completely different person whose name
mirrors that of the Mathematics of Symmetry author —
See also this journal on the date mentioned in the Princetonian .
"Always with a little humor." — Yen Lo
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Monday, December 23, 2013
Motto
In memory of Mikhail Kalashnikov, who reportedly died today at 94:
Integrity, Craftsmanship, Tradition .
See also an SNL tracking shot—
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Bat Signal
From the Bacardi website—
"Hamilton, Bermuda, December 13, 2012 —
Bacardi Limited caps off the yearlong celebration
of its 150th anniversary with the creation of a
commemorative time capsule…."
See also this journal on that date.
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Paradise Alley
From The Iceman Cometh (1946, set in 1912) —
HOPE— (calls effusively) Hey there, Larry! Come over
and get paralyzed! What the hell you doing, sitting there?
(Then as Larry doesn't reply he immediately forgets him
and turns to the party. They are all very drunk now, just a
few drinks ahead of the passing-out stage, and hilariously
happy about it.) Bejees, let's sing! Let's celebrate! It's my
birthday party! Bejees, I'm oreyeyed! I want to sing! (He
starts the chorus of "She's the Sunshine of Paradise Alley,"
and instantly they all burst into song. But not the same song.
Each starts the chorus of his or her choice….)
From Paradise Alley (1978, set in 1946) —
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Sunday, December 22, 2013
PSI
From a prequel to The Shining , by Stephen King—
You had to keep an eye on the boiler
because if you didn’t, she would creep on you.
What did that mean, anyway? Or was it just
one of those nonsensical things that sometimes
came to you in dreams, so much gibberish?
Of course there was undoubtedly a boiler
in the basement or somewhere to heat the place,
even summer resorts had to have heat sometimes,
didn’t they (if only to supply hot water)? But creep ?
Would a boiler creep ?
You had to keep an eye on the boiler.
It was like one of those crazy riddles,
why is a mouse when it runs,
when is a raven like a writing desk,
what is a creeping boiler?
See also Steam.
For one answer to the riddle, click here.
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The Bronfman Catechism
Meanwhile…
|
Log24 on Sunday, October 5, 2008— “In a game of chess, the knight’s move is unique because it alone goes around corners. In this way, it combines the continuity of a set sequence with the discontinuity of an unpredictable turn in the middle. This meaningful combination of continuity and discontinuity in an otherwise linear set of possibilities has led some to refer to the creative act of discovery in any field of research as a ‘knight’s move’ in intelligence.” Related material: Terence McKenna: “Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey ‘haunts time like a ghost.’” Anonymous author: “‘Knight’s move thinking’ is a psychiatric term describing a thought disorder where in speech the usual logical sequence of ideas is lost, the sufferer jumping from one idea to another with no apparent connection. It is most commonly found in schizophrenia.” |
Related journalism—
"What's the 'S' stand for?" — Amy Adams
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Saturday, December 21, 2013
House of Secrets*
The title is taken from a book for ages 8-12 published
on Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, 2013.
Also from that date, a note for older readers—
… Half a dozen of the other —
For further context, see all posts for the cruelest month of this past year.
* Secrets : A sometimes dangerous word.
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Logic and Poetry
Headline on an avant-garde-theater piece in
The New York Times that was the subject of
a Log24 post on December 15 (Julie Taymor's birthday):
"To Thine Own Algorithm Be True"
Today is the feast of St. Peter Canisius.
Click on Canisius for material related to the Times
story, and on the feast for a more traditional tale.
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Steps
"It's going to be accomplished in steps,
this establishment of the Talented
in the scheme of things."
— To Ride Pegasus ,
by Anne McCaffrey (Radcliffe '47),
quoted here on December 1, 2013
"Twenty-one days is enough time to build trust
and decimate it several times over, and long enough
for someone to drop their pretensions altogether.
So while 'Dude, You’re Screwed' is about a person
at war with himself, 'Naked and Afraid' is about
people at war with each other. The elements may
get you down, but hell is other people."
— Jon Caramanica in The New York Times
(page C1 of today's New York print edition)
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Miami Link
The Miami-Dade County Public Schools math webpage
now has a link to the Diamond 16 Puzzle.
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Friday, December 20, 2013
For Emil Artin
(On His Dies Natalis )…
This is asserted in an excerpt from…
"The smallest non-rank 3 strongly regular graphs
which satisfy the 4-vertex condition"
by Mikhail Klin, Mariusz Meszka, Sven Reichard, and Alex Rosa,
BAYREUTHER MATHEMATISCHE SCHRIFTEN 73 (2005), 152-212—
(Click for clearer image)
Note that Theorem 46 of Klin et al. describes the role
of the Galois tesseract in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis (original 1976 version). The tesseract
(a 4×4 array) supplies the geometric part of the above
exceptional geometric-combinatorial isomorphism.
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Thursday, December 19, 2013
Review
For Josefine Lyche, artist of High White Noon —
Thursday, October 10, 2013
|
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Annals of Literature
(This morning's Text and Pretext, continued)
"… a reality that only my notes can provide."
— Kinbote in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire
Click the above remarks on screws for another perspective on reality.
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