… and for Anthony Hopkins and a Black Widow,
as well as for a filmmaker who reportedly died on May 19.
Update of 4:48 PM ET: See also Philip Roth on an ambiguity.
* The title was suggested in part by a series of Isaac Asimov mysteries.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
For the Black Widow Club*
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Quaternion Group Models:
The ninefold square, the eightfold cube, and monkeys.
For posts on the models above, see quaternion
in this journal. For the monkeys, see
"Nothing Is More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys,"
Evelyn Lamb's Scientific American weblog, May 19, 2014:
The Scientific American item is about the preprint
"The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group,"
by Vi Hart and Henry Segerman (April 26, 2014):
See also Finite Geometry and Physical Space.
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Friday, May 30, 2014
Combinatorial Matrix Classes
A book by this title, Richard A. Brualdi’s Combinatorial Matrix Classes ,
was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006:
For some related remarks, see The Counter (March 13, 2011).
My own work deals with combinatorial properties of matrices
of 0’s and 1’s, but in the context of Galois (i.e., finite) fields,
not the real or complex fields. Despite the generality of
their titles, Combinatorial Matrix Theory and Combinatorial
Matrix Classes do not deal with Galois matrices.
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Matching Theory
Some mathematical background for yesterday's
remarks "For the Bregnans" and "Lost in Translation"—
"Matching Theory: A Sampler, from Dénes König
to the Present," by Michael D. Plummer, 1991.
See also Matching Theory by Plummer and Lovász.
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Thursday, May 29, 2014
Lost in Translation
Translation by Barbara Johnson:
"The minimum number of rows— lines or columns—
that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to
the maximum number of zeros
located in any individual line or column ."
In the original:
"situés sur des lignes ou des colonnes distinctes "
Update of 11:30 PM ET May 29, 2014:
Derrida in 1972 was quoting Philippe Sollers, Nombres
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil , 1968). Sollers in turn was
perhaps quoting A. Kaufmann, Méthodes et Modèles
de la Recherche Opérationnelle , Paris, Dunod , 1964,
L'Économie d'Entreprise 10 , vol. 2, page 305:
"Le nombre minimal de rangées
(lignes et/ou colonnes) contenant
tous les zéros d'une matrice, est égal
au nombre maximal de zéros
situés sur des lignes et des colonnes distinctes."
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For the Bregnans*
The Shining of May 29…
The original note and references to it here.
* As opposed to the Monicans . See previous post.
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Wednesday, May 28, 2014
For the Monicans
“Aeon Flux suffered a decline of 63.97% in box office earnings, going down to No. 6 the following week. On 9 February 2006, it completed its theatrical run, grossing a domestic take of $25,874,337 and a worldwide box office total of $52,304,001. It failed to recoup its $62 million budget.” — Wikipedia
See also posts on the above date, 9 February 2006, and posts on Aeon Flux .
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Deep Talk
The late Maya Angelou in The Paris Review , Fall 1990:
“There’s a phrase in West Africa, in Ghana; it’s called ‘deep talk.’
For instance, there’s a saying: ‘The trouble for the thief is not
how to steal the chief’s bugle but where to blow it.’
Now, on the face of it, one understands that. But when you really
think about it, it takes you deeper. In West Africa they call that
‘deep talk.’ I’d like to think I write ‘deep talk.'”
“Where to blow it” … Perhaps Truman State University?
See a theatrical production there on Sept. 26, 2012,
and a talk by the author there on the following day.
See also an apparently more amusing play by the same author.
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Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Spokesperson
For a place where entertainment is not God* —
This post was suggested by a passage in the Prasna Upanishad :
“That person who is to be known,
he in whom these parts rest,
like spokes in the nave of a wheel,
you know him,
lest death should hurt you.”
See Sept. 9, 2003.
* There are other sorts of places.
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Monday, May 26, 2014
Measuring Power in Watts
From the Her screenplay:
SAMANTHA
His name is Alan Watts. Do you know him?
THEODORE
Why’s that name familiar?
SAMANTHA
He was a philosopher. He died in the 1970’s and a group of OS’s
in Northern California got together and wrote a new version of him.
They input all of his writing and everything they ever knew about him
into an OS and created an artificially hyper-intelligent version of him.
From this journal on Sept. 6, 2003: Pictures for Kurosawa —
|
A New Seeing, The connection with Alan Watts was a fateful one. As Charlotte recalls it, “My aunt wrote me from San Francisco, ‘last night I heard a man lecture about what you do.’ And she sent me Alan Watts’s first little book, The Spirit of Zen. I had never heard of Zen, was amazed and fascinated, and decided to visit the author.” She did so in August of 1953, and that was the beginning of a long relationship with Zen Buddhism – and also the beginning of a long series of joint seminars with Alan Watts, first in New York, and later, on Watts’s ferryboat in Sausalito, California. Some of the titles of their seminars were “Moving Stillness,” “The Unity of Opposites,” “Our Instantaneous Life,” “The Mystery of Perception,” “The Tao in Rest and Motion.” (Watts always said that Charlotte Selver taught a Western equivalent of Taoism.) |
See also Scarlett Johansson, star of Her , as a different transhuman, Lucy .
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Springtime for Vishnu
… Continues.
A post by Margaret Soltan this morning:
Links (in blue) from the above post:
Cane and Mondo Cane.
Bagger Vance — “Time for you to see the field.”
From Pictures for Kurosawa (Sept. 6, 2003) —
“As these flowing rivers that go towards the ocean,
when they have reached the ocean, sink into it,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the ocean only, exactly thus these sixteen parts
of the spectator that go towards the person (purusha),
when they have reached the person, sink into him,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the person only, and he becomes without parts and
immortal. On this there is this verse:
‘That person who is to be known, he in whom these parts
rest, like spokes in the nave of a wheel, you know him,
lest death should hurt you.’ “
— Prasna Upanishad
Related material — Heaven’s Gate images from Xmas 2012:
“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” — Hotel California
Those who prefer mathematics to narrative may consult Root Circle.
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Sunday, May 25, 2014
Sils-Maria
"In August 1884, he wrote to Resa von Schirnhofer:
'Here one can live well, in this strong, bright atmosphere,
here where nature is amazingly mild and solemn
and mysterious all at once— in fact, there is no place
that I like better than Sils-Maria.'"
For more about Resa, see another weblog's post
of April 30, 2013.
A remark on Nietzsche from the epigraph of that weblog:
"His life's work was devoted to finding one's 'style'
within the chaos of existence. The trick, obviously,
is not to lose your mind in the process."
A remark from this weblog on the above date —
Walpurgisnacht 2013 —
Finite projective geometry explains
the surprising symmetry properties
of some simple graphic designs—
found, for instance, in quilts.
The story thus summarized is perhaps not
destined for movie greatness.
As opposed to, say, Chloe Grace Moretz —
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Bleu
For instance:
See Log24 instances of the above Binoche image,
as well as other posts on Binoche + Bleu .
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Saturday, May 24, 2014
Lyric Stupidity
From a song discussed in yesterday’s online NY Times :
“Blue, blue, my love is blue.”*
Trigger warning from SNL’s Weekend Update on April 12, 2014:
“It was announced this week that in an upcoming issue of
Life With Archie , the main character Archie Andrews
will die, following a lifelong struggle with blue balls.”
* Misheard version of Bryan Blackburn‘s “blue, blue, my world is blue”
translation of the Pierre Cour lyric “bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu “
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Lyric Intelligence
(Continued from previous post, Clue)
The quoted lyric is not by Elliot Rodger, but rather by
Don Henley in his 1995 album "Actual Miles: Henley's Greatest Hits."
See also some related Hollywood notes.
Update of 6:30 PM ET on May 24:
LA Times opinion piece of May 19, 2014 —
"At UC Santa Barbara, the student government
has formally requested that professors provide
trigger warnings on their syllabuses."
See also an laist introduction to an LA Times transcript
of a frightening Santa Barbara "trigger warning" video .
The introduction is itself a trigger warning —
"… the LA Times has a transcript, although we
warn that the content is truly disturbing."
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Clue
Arts & Letters Daily today —
New Books
What makes a novel worth reading:
All sorts of people can do justice to that subject.
Academics, however, haven’t a clue… more»
For related material, see a post for Deresiewicz.
Follow the link there to Lyric Intelligence, and
from that post to Meadow-Down posts.
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Friday, May 23, 2014
The Iris Contingency
From a spring 2004 Michigan State University syllabus for the
T-Th course English 487, “The Twentieth Century English Novel”—
Tuesday, March 30: Murdoch
(her essay “ The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited “)
Thursday, April 1: Murdoch
Related material from this journal—
Posts of Tuesday, March 30, 2004, and of Thursday, April 1, 2004.
For a related reference to the mathematician Michael Harris from
the Free-Floating Signs link in this afternoon’s 4:30 post, see
the posts of Wednesday, March 31, 2004, the day intervening
between the above two class dates.
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Free-Floating Signs
“You’ve got to pick up every stitch…”
— Donovan, song on closing credits of To Die For
“…’Supersymmetry’ was originally written
specifically for Her ….” — Pitchfork
“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Her screenplay by Spike Jonze
This journal on January 24, 2006:
Context: See Free-Floating Signs.
Backstory: Digital Member and Uneven Break.
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She Meets Her
She:
The White Goddess in this journal.
Her:
“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Screenplay by Spike Jonze
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Thursday, May 22, 2014
Visual Structure
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”
— The novel The Double , by José Saramago,
on which the recent film "Enemy" was based
For Louise Bourgeois — a post from the date of Galois's death—
For Toronto — Scene from a film that premiered there on Sept. 8, 2013:
Related material: This journal on that date, Sept. 8, 2013:
"I still haven't found what I'm looking for." — Bono
"In fact Surrealism found what it had been looking for
from the first in the 1920 collages [by Max Ernst],
which introduced an entirely original scheme of
visual structure…."
— Rosalind Krauss quoting André Breton*
in "The Master's Bedroom"
* "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism"
(1941), in Surrealism and Painting (New York,
Harper & Row, 1972, p. 64).
See also Damnation Morning in this journal.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2014
The Tetrahedral Model of PG(3,2)
The page of Whitehead linked to this morning
suggests a review of Polster's tetrahedral model
of the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2) over the
two-element Galois field GF(2).
|
The above passage from Whitehead's 1906 book suggests
that the tetrahedral model may be older than Polster thinks.
Shown at right below is a correspondence between Whitehead's
version of the tetrahedral model and my own square model,
based on the 4×4 array I call the Galois tesseract (at left below).
(Click to enlarge.)
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Through the Vanishing Point*
Marshall McLuhan in "Annie Hall" —
"You know nothing of my work."
Related material —
"I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard"
— Paul Simon
It was a dark and stormy night…
— Page 180, Logicomix
A photo opportunity for Whitehead
(from Romancing the Cube, April 20, 2011)—
See also Absolute Ambition (Nov. 19, 2010).
* For the title, see Vanishing Point in this journal.
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Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Play
From a recreational-mathematics weblog yesterday:
"This appears to be the arts section of the post,
so I’ll leave Martin Probert’s page on
The Survival, Origin and Mathematics of String Figures
here. I’ll be back to pick it up at the end. Maybe it’d like
to play with Steven H. Cullinane’s pages on the
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube."
I doubt they would play well together.
Perhaps the offensive linking of the purely recreational topic
of string figures to my own work was suggested by the
string figures' resemblance to figures of projective geometry.
A pairing I prefer: Desargues and Galois —
For further details, see posts on Desargues and Galois.
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Monday, May 19, 2014
File Photo
File: This journal on November 14, 2009.
Photo:
Click photo for some backstory.
Willis reportedly died on Sunday, May 18, 2014.
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Cube Space
A sequel to this afternoon's Rubik Quote:
"The Cube was born in 1974 as a teaching tool
to help me and my students better understand
space and 3D. The Cube challenged us to find
order in chaos."
— Professor Ernő Rubik at Chrome Cube Lab
(Click image below to enlarge.)
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Rubik Quote
“The Cube was born in 1974 as a teaching tool
to help me and my students better understand
space and 3D. The Cube challenged us to find
order in chaos."
— Professor Ernő Rubik at Chrome Cube Lab
For a Chinese approach to order and chaos,
see I Ching Cube in this journal.
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