Log24

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Logical Loop

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:45 pm

In memory of Theodore SturgeonLeonard Nimoy,
and William Thomas McKinley —

From the Boston Modern Orchestra Project today :

"In a good way"

Or not.

Elegy with Stars

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:00 pm

This evening's New York Times —

"William Thomas McKinley, a prolific American composer
whose music was infused with the jazz he had performed
since childhood, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Reading,
Mass. He was 76.

He died in his sleep, his son Elliott said."

"William Thomas McKinley: Elegy for Strings (2006)

[Elliott McKinley]  

137 views as of 9:45 PM ET Feb. 28, 2015

Published on Feb 11, 2015

Composed as an elegy and tribute for friends and family
that have passed, spurred by the passing of McKinley's
long time friend, drummer Roger Ryan. The performance
heard here is by the Seattle Symphony under the direction
of Gerard Schwarz. 

Photos by Elliott McKinley (Rho Ophiuchi nebula complex…
and the Pleiades…) shot at Cherry Springs State Park."

Related material from the date of McKinley's death —
Expanding the Spielraum.

Recycled Religion

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:16 pm

The previous post's Kirkridge link leads to
a mention of religious philosopher Parker J. Palmer.

From an Utne Reader  page on Palmer:

See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1949 story "What Dead Men Tell"—

"… He’d read about it in a magazine or somewhere.
He took a strip of scrap film about eighteen
inches long and put the ends together. He turned
one end over and spliced ’em. Now, if you trace
that strip, or mark it with a grease pencil, right up
the center, you find that the doggone thing only
has one side!”
The doctor nodded, and the girl said:
“A Möbius strip.”
“That what they call it?” said Hulon. “Well, I figured
this corridor must be something like that. On that
strip, a single continuous line touched both sides.
All I had to do was figure out an object built so that
a continuous line would cover all three of three sides,
and I’d have it. So I sat down and thought it out…."

— and the following mathematical illustration —

A Kirk for Spock

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:09 pm

Related material:

What Dead Men Tell*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:23 pm

Theodore Sturgeon, 1949 :

"I thought I had an important idea.
It's part of a  call it a philosophy,
if that doesn't sound too high-
falutin'," he said.

"It's a philosophy," she said.
"We can call things by their names."

Leonard Nimoy,  2015 :

"A life is like a garden. 
Perfect moments can be had, 
but not preserved, except in memory."  

* A tale from Astounding Science Fiction
   Vol. 44, No. 3, November 1949

Friday, February 27, 2015

Final Tweet

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:44 pm

"Final Tweet Will Make You Cry"

Or not.

Fighting Chance

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

"Give faith a fighting chance." — Country song

"The proof uses modal logic, which distinguishes
between necessary  truths and contingent  truths."

Stranger than Dreams

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 am

For a former president of Notre Dame
who reportedly died at 11:30 PM last night —

"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."

— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Nicht Spielerei

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:24 pm

(Continued from New Year's Eve, 2014)

Or not.

"On this most holy of art holidays…."

A Simple Group

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm
The Eightfold Cube

The previous post's
illustration was 
rather complicated.

This is a simpler
algebraic figure.

The Forking

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm

Forkpoint

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

See Pythagorean Letter in this journal.

App News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer makes pitch to app developers

By Matt O'Brien
mobrien@mercurynews.com
POSTED:   02/20/2015 06:12:32 AM PST

"Mayer described the conference as a 'forkpoint' 
in Yahoo's evolution toward a stronger mobile
presence and a chance to share with independent
developers some of the fruits of Yahoo's recent
growth. It also helps Yahoo leave its mark, and its
ads, on an entire network of apps not developed
by the company."

See also yesterday's post on the film "App."

A Coldbed of Activity

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

A followup to the Feb. 24 10 PM ET post
on the new researchers' site InvenZone:

A screenshot as of 10:46 AM ET today—

Brit Award

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:06 am

"The Brit Awards are the British equivalent
of the American Grammy Awards." — Wikipedia 

Detail of an image from yesterday's 5:30 PM ET post:

Related material:

From a review: "Imagine 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'
set in 20th-century London, and then imagine it
written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies
but in Dante and the things of the spirit, and you
might begin to get a picture of Charles Williams's
novel Many Dimensions ."

See also Solomon's Seal (July 26, 2012).

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Words and Images

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 5:30 pm

The words:  "symplectic polarity"—

The images:

The Natural Symplectic Polarity in PG(3,2)

Symmetry Invariance in a Diamond Ring

The Diamond-Theorem Correlation

Picturing the Smallest Projective 3-Space

Quilt Block Designs

AI News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

The New Yorker —
TODAY 
Artificial Intelligence Goes to the Arcade
BY  

Sort Of

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:48 pm

From a Jan. 8, 2015, review of the 2013 Dutch film "App"

"It is sort of like the old cult favorite 'Electric Dreams'…."

"Digital security is not static."

Statement today from the Dutch SIM card maker Gemalto

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Where Entertainment Is God (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

The Cumberbatch Conundrum

A quote from Benedict Cumberbatch in this journal
on Nov. 15 last year:

"… this film’s been up my ass
      for the last five years.”

The quote, in connection with today's previous post,
suggests a check of this journal five years ago.

The check yields a paper at the new research site InvenZone.

Amy’s After-Party

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:21 pm

Continued from Putting the A in VANITY,
Putting the AI in FAIR, and Core Problem:

Ay Que Bonito

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

Continued from earlier posts.

Monday, February 23, 2015

For Katy Perry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:15 pm

See also this  journal on the date of Mr. Howard's death:

"Mark my words
This love will make you levitate
Like a bird"

— Katy Perry, "Dark Horse"

“It’s the Super Bowl, I guess,”
Michael Keaton said in the first minutes
of ABC’s official Oscar red-carpet special."

— Hallie Cantor in the online New Yorker  today

Symbolic Poetry*

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

“When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?

Man of La Mancha

Windmill of Time and Diamond of Eternity

Perhaps the late Sidney Lumet?

           The setting for the Sidney Lumet film "Deathtrap" (1982)

* Continued from yesterday's Backstory and Sermon.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Upon a Time

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

“Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers,
not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.” ― Max Lüthi

Backstory

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

" Some works are less visually striking
than infused with a kind of symbolic poetry.
Is a good backstory enough to make
a compelling work of art? "

— "The Meaning of Art? It's Complicated" —
     Sarah Moroz yesterday on a Paris exhibition

Saturday, February 21, 2015

High and Low Concepts

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 pm

Steven Pressfield on April 25, 2012:

What exactly is High Concept?

Let’s start with its opposite, low concept.
Low concept stories are personal,
idiosyncratic, ambiguous, often European. 
“Well, it’s a sensitive fable about a Swedish
sardine fisherman whose wife and daughter
find themselves conflicted over … ”

ZZZZZZZZ.

Fans of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche know she has
valiantly struggled to find a high-concept approach
to the diamond theorem. Any such approach must,
unfortunately, reckon with the following low
(i.e., not easily summarized) concept —

The Diamond Theorem Correlation:

From left to right

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-1202w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140731-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-747w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Picturing_the_Smallest-1986.gif

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140806-ProjPoints.gif

For some backstory, see ProjPoints.gif and "Symplectic Polarity" in this journal.

Putting the Con in Conceptual

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 am

Edward Frenkel in The New York Times ,
in an op-ed piece dated Feb. 20, 2015 —

"… I suggest that we regard the paradoxes
of quantum physics as a metaphor for
the unknown infinite possibilities
of our own existence. This is poignantly
and elegantly expressed in the Vedas:
'As is the atom, so is the universe;
as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm;
as is the human body, so is the cosmic body;
as is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.'"

The Times : "Edward Frenkel, a professor of mathematics
at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. "

See also Con Vocation (Sept. 2, 2014).

Friday, February 20, 2015

Conceptual Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

See High White in this journal.

Related material:

The Astoria Column
on Coxcomb Hill,
Astoria, Oregon

See also a tale from today's Daily Astorian  
(click the AP link in Parks and Recreation) and

Early Coxcomb Hill

"McArthur and McArthur in Oregon Geographic Names  (2003, Oregon Historical Society) states:

'… Coxcomb Hill, Clatsop. This is the summit of the ridge south of Astoria, between the Columbia River and Youngs Bay. The compiler has been unable to learn who first applied the name. The spelling used is the customary form applied to court fools and jesters who wore an imitation coxcomb, and were frequently called coxcombs. …'"

Review

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:11 am

 

Done.

Parks and Recreation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 am

From the Associated Press today —

"It's a magic wonderland," said Miriam Leibowitz,
a Jerusalem resident, as she reached a snow-filled
city park with her family. "In the middle of Jerusalem
we felt like we're in Switzerland."

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Happy Chinese Year of the Goat

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

From YouTube —

"Published on Oct 13, 2014" * —

Tine Goat Cheese ad by Henry Moore Selder
Prod Co: Bacon
Agency: Try Oslo
Creatives: Caroline Ekrem & Sara Hødnebø

* See also, in this journal, that date, and The Ten.

In the Place of the Skull

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

"I CAN TELL you about my friend Andrew,
the cognitive scientist. But it’s not pretty."

— Opening of Andrew's Brain: A Novel  by
     E. L. Doctorow, Random House, Jan. 14, 2014*

"…whirligig consciousness…."
The New York Times Book Review

See also Inside the White Square  (Log 24, Feb. 15, 2015):

The X-Box Sum .

* Cf. Log24 on that date.

The Bluebird of Happiness

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:48 pm

(Chinese style)

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Song for a Night Bird

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:15 pm

"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."

— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega

Late

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

For the late Paul Halmos

Keith Devlin's column is a monthly feature of the Mathematical
Association of America (MAA). This month's column apparently
first appeared online on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2015. The column
itself, however, is, as of today, dated 12:00 AM Feb. 1, 2015.

It is doubtful whether the professor honored in the column
would approve of this temporal subterfuge.

Noon on Ash Wednesday

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

Text and Context.

Magical and Seductive

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 am

"I am trying to introduce a narrative,
something magical and seductive…."

— Oslo artist Josefine Lyche, translated
from the Norwegian by Google

Perhaps something like Arcade Fire or
Taylor Swift? (Click links for related posts.)

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Style News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:   The Daily Princetonian  yesterday.

Part IV:  A midrash for Princeton —

Fire and Ice

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:45 am

Or: Debriefing Josefine

From the CV of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche:

Selected Collections/ Public Commissions:
2016 Jarfjord Grensevaktstasjon,
Jarfjord/Kirkenes, NO (upcoming)
 

From an Amazon.com customer review of a book on
northern Norway in World War II, Fire and Ice 

"… Hunt doesn't take sides. He approaches
the story as a journalist and documentary maker,
rather than as an academic."

The book, as the author notes, was published in Britain
on October 6, 2014.

A synchronicity check of the publication date yields 
a variation on the "Fire and Ice" theme —


____________________________

"Jeg prøver å innføre et narrativ, noe magisk og forførende,
samt erstatte den iboende materialistiske logikken med
esoterisk kosmologi og symbolikk." — Josefine Lyche

The Craft

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:07 am

See Ides of March, 2010, and a guitarist's requiem.

Presidents’ Day Theme continues…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:12 am

See a Log24 search for "Her wallet's filled with pictures."

A link from Grammy Night, 2003 in the search leads to

Today in Music: A Look Back at Pop Music
by United Press International, Feb. 23, 2003 
:

Today's musical quiz:

Name the 1970s Sweet tune
that was featured in the 1992 movie
"Wayne's World."

Answer: "Ballroom Blitz."

Monday, February 16, 2015

Witch Ball

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

In memory of singer-songwriter Lesley Gore,
May 2, 1946 – February 16, 2015

“Her wall is filled with pictures
— Sweet Little Sixteen

Two posts from Gore’s birthday last year:

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.” — Lesley Gore

Chevalier

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:44 pm

For Eustace Tilley 

A 1950 example of Galois coordinates .

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Au Revoir

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

The Quest for Meaning

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 pm

See The meaning, if any, of "2/15" .

Dimensions

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:30 pm

IMAGE- 'When Death tells a story, you really have to listen.'

Black monolith in death-and-rebirth sequence from '2001: A Space Odyssey'

"Hello  darkness,  my  old  friend.
I’ve  come  to  talk  with  you  again."

Plan 9 continues…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

"… vibrantly, angrily, and often painfully alive…."

The New York Times  today reviews the work of 
     a dead poet:

"Sound, Smell, Sinew!" — The New York Times

Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

See Tempular.

"In the minds of many, the museum
  is the cathedral of our time."
   —Ada Louise Huxtable,
   "Museums: Making It New"

Inside the White Square

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:18 am

Review:

Monday, November 7, 2011

The X Box

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:30 AM 
 
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
The New York Times Magazine  on St. Andrew's Day, 2003.

The X-Box Sum .

For some background on this enigmatic equation,
see Geometry of the I Ching.

See also the phrase "a dance results" in the original
source and in yesterday's Valentine Dance.

Sunday School

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

"To Carthage then I came"

The Waste Land , by T. S. Eliot

"To Carthage I came, where
  there sang all around me in my ears
  a cauldron of unholy loves."

 — Confessions  of St. Augustine, Book III

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Valentine Dance

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

For Eliot and von Franz —

"A dance results."

— Marie-Louise von Franz
     in Number and Time

IMAGE- Halftime dance in 4x4 square, 2015 Super Bowl, with Katy Perry

Number and Time

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:33 am

"Continue a search for thirty-three and three."
— Katherine Neville in The Eight

"Close enough for government work."
— Stephen King in Doctor Sleep

Friday, February 13, 2015

Labyrinths

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Part I:  From The Librarians —

Part II:  From Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center —

Part III:  From the air date of The Librarians '  labyrinth episode —

Random Remarks

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:48 am

In memory of reporter Bob Simon —

NY Lottery midday Feb. 12, 2015:

788  2970.

In memory of reporter David Carr —

NY Lottery evening Feb. 12, 2015:

601  1469.

Zero Theorem

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:30 am

I do not know what equation the title
"Media Equation" of the late David Carr's
column refers to.

Perhaps "0 = Dark 30" ?

(Here the "30" refers to the traditional
code signifying the end of a news story.)

Media Equation

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

New York Times —

"David Carr, a writer who wriggled away from
the demon of drug addiction to become a
name-brand media columnist at
The New York Times , and the star of 'Page One,' 
a documentary about the newspaper, died on
Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58.

Mr. Carr collapsed in The Times  newsroom,
where he was found shortly before 9 p.m.
He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where
he was pronounced dead."

AP —

"New York Times : David Carr, who wrote the
Media Equation column, has died at age 58."

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Dead Reckoning

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:48 pm

Continued from yesterday.

The passage on Claude Chevalley quoted here
yesterday in the post Dead Reckoning was, it turns out,
also quoted by Peter Galison in his essay "Structure of Crystal,
Bucket of Dust" in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of 
Mathematics and Narrative  
(Princeton University Press, 2012,
ed. by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur).

Galison gives a reference to his source:

"From 'Claude Chevalley Described by His Daughter (1988),' 
in Michèle Chouchan, Nicolas Bourbaki: Faits et légendes
(Paris: Éditions du Choix, 1995), 36–40, translated and cited
in Marjorie Senechal, 'The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki:
An Interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997,' 
Mathematical Intelligencer  1 (1998): 22–28."

Galison's essay compares Chevalley with the physicist
John Archibald Wheeler. His final paragraph —

"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"

See also posts tagged Wheeler.

Capitalizing Car

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

As in Carthage

The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville

For Journalism Jill*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:36 am

Five W's and an H

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150211/chelsea/60-minutes-bob-simon-killed-west-side-highway-crash-police-network

60 Minutes' Bob Simon Killed in West Side Highway Crash: Police and Network

By Janon Fisher on February 11, 2015 11:48pm 

CHELSEA — Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon died in an horrific crash on the West Side Highway Wednesday night when the livery car he was riding in struck another vehicle, lost control and smashed into the median strip, police said.

The 2010 Lincoln Town Car was traveling southbound on the West Side Highway just before 7 p.m. near the Hudson Rail Yards when it hit the driver's side of a black 2003 Mercedes Benz that was stopped at a red light on the highway at West 30th Street, according to the NYPD.

Simon's vehicle spun out of control and smashed into the metal stanchions in the median strip of the highway, authorities said.

The driver and the newsman had to be cut out of the car by first responders. ….

[Edits to "Town Car" sentence: "Car" capitalized, link added.]

* Abramson, now teaching at Harvard

From "Teacher's Pet" (1958) —

373
00:22:36,480 –> 00:22:39,233
Well, Kipling said
it quite well in a poem that he wrote:

374
00:22:39,320 –> 00:22:42,790
"I keep six honest serving men,
they taught me all I knew

375
00:22:43,160 –> 00:22:47,756
"Their names are: What and Why and
When and How and Where and Who"

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Dead Reckoning

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:28 pm

Continued from yesterday evening

IMAGE- Bogart in 'Casablanca' with chessboard

Today's mathematical birthday — 

Claude Chevalley, 11 Feb. 1909 – 28 June 1984.

From MacTutor —

Chevalley's daughter, Catherine Chevalley, wrote about
her father in "Claude Chevalley described by his daughter"
(1988):—

For him it was important to see questions as a whole, to see the necessity of a proof, its global implications. As to rigour, all the members of Bourbaki cared about it: the Bourbaki movement was started essentially because rigour was lacking among French mathematicians, by comparison with the Germans, that is the Hilbertians. Rigour consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigour gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure. When that structure had been constructed, he would say it was an object which interested him, something to look at, to admire, perhaps to turn around, but certainly not to transform. For him, rigour in mathematics consisted in making a new object which could thereafter remain unchanged.

The way my father worked, it seems that this was what counted most, this production of an object which then became inert— dead, really. It was no longer to be altered or transformed. Not that there was any negative connotation to this. But I must add that my father was probably the only member of Bourbaki who thought of mathematics as a way to put objects to death for aesthetic reasons.

Recent scholarly news suggests a search for Chapel Hill
in this journal. That search leads to Transformative Hermeneutics.
Those who, like Professor Eucalyptus of Wallace Stevens's
New Haven, seek God "in the object itself" may contemplate
yesterday's afternoon post on Eightfold Design in light of the
Transformative post and of yesterday's New Haven remarks and
Chapel Hill events.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

En Masse

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

Yale Daily News  staff columnist Scott Greenberg today, 
in a piece titled "Filling Religion's Void" —

"The secularization of college students in America
has seemed a foregone conclusion for some time,
yet it represents a momentous shift for our university
and society at large that we have not yet
come to grips with….

Is the solution for our society and our University
to return to religion en masse?"

So to speak.

A Midrash for Greenberg:

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Meets an Evening in the Garden of Allah 

In Memoriam…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:25 pm

industrial designer Kenji Ekuan —

Eightfold Design.

The adjective "eightfold," intrinsic to Buddhist
thought, was hijacked by Gell-Mann and later 
by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
(MSRI, pronounced "misery").  The adjective's
application to a 2x2x2 cube consisting of eight
subcubes, "the eightfold cube," is not intended to
have either Buddhist or Semitic overtones.  
It is pure mathematics.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Touchdown

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:23 pm

See also Sabol  in this journal and The Literary Field .

Escape Clause

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:24 pm

For Jews of Hungarian background
who do not  worship Paul Erdős and
Rubik’s Cube:

The Great Escape.

For Blacklist Fans

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Drop off the Qi, Li.

Overarching Symmetry

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

Continued from earlier posts.

The Washington Post  online yesterday:

"Val Logsdon Fitch, the Nebraska rancher’s son who shared the Nobel Prize for detecting a breakdown in the overarching symmetry of physical laws, thus helping explain how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, died Feb. 5 in Princeton, N.J. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by Princeton University, where he had been a longtime faculty member and led the physics department for several years.

Dr. Fitch and his Princeton colleague James Cronin received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1980 for high-energy experiments conducted in 1964 that overturned fundamental assumptions about symmetries and invariances that are characteristic of the laws of physics."

— By Martin Weil

Fans of synchronicity may prefer some rather
ig -Nobel remarks quoted here  on the date
of Fitch's death:

"The Harvard College Events Board presents
Harvard Thinks Big VI, a night of big ideas
and thinking beyond traditional boundaries.
On Thursday February 5th at 8 pm in
Sanders Theatre …."

— Log24 post The Big Spielraum

Sunday, February 8, 2015

For Grammy Night

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

See also today's previous post,
Hungarian Phenomenon.

Hungarian Phenomenon

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:07 pm

For Autism Sunday —

Mathematician John von Neumann
reportedly died on this date.

“He belonged  to that so-called
Hungarian phenomenon….”

A webpage titled
“Von Neumann, Jewish Catholic”

Illustrations of another Hungarian phenomenon:

IMAGE- Anthony Hopkins exorcises a Rubik cube

Saturday, February 7, 2015

November 19 Address

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

http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=46212

Words and Pictures, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

In Other News…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:45 pm

Word and Object

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

From actor James Spader, whose birthday is today —

"… my father taught English. My mother taught art…."

— Spader in a 2014 interview

See as well the 2013 film "Words and Pictures"
and Log24 posts on a 2007 film, "The Last Mimzy."

Above: A scene from Spader's TV series "The Blacklist"
that was aired on Thursday, February 5, 2015.

Impact Statement

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

For Emma Watson and the late Lizabeth Scott —

"… a groundbreaking impact …."

O Captain

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

Related material:
Agents of a Great Despair

Friday, February 6, 2015

Evening in the Garden of Allah

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:42 pm

"'Relax,' said the night man .
'We are programmed to receive.'"

— "Hotel California," quoted here on
      the evening of January 30, 2015

The Annotated Spielraum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 am

Comments on two sub-images from yesterday's
The Big Spielraum  (image, 1 MB) that may or
may not interest Emma Watson —

The Potter Sub-Image

This is from a link in a July 8, 2011, post:

The above "Childhood's End" link leads to
a midrash on the Harry Potter series:

"After pg. 759 in Harry Potter and the 
Deathly Hallows 
, my childhood ended."

The Carmichael Sub-Image

The number of the last page in the last Harry Potter
book is 759.  This number may, for those with
cabalistic tendencies, be interpreted as the
number 3*23*11 from a 1931 mathematics paper:

Thursday, February 5, 2015

The Big Spielraum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:14 pm

From the Office for the Arts at Harvard:

Harvard Thinks Big VI

College Events Board

Location: Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall,
45 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Parking: none

On Sale Date: 1/29/2015
How to get tickets: The Harvard Box Office
617-496-2222

Thursday 2/5 08:00 PM

Ticket Prices: Free. Harvard ID only.
2 tickets per person per ID.
Tickets valid until 7:45PM. 

Ticket Availability: Good 

The Harvard College Events Board presents Harvard Thinks Big VI, a night of big ideas and thinking beyond traditional boundaries. On Thursday February 5th at 8 pm in Sanders Theatre, 7 Harvard professors and lecturers will speak for ten minutes each to discuss a topic that intrigues and excites them. This annual event was first started in order to introduce the Harvard community to the fascinating research and developments from some of the greatest minds on campus. 

See as well The Big Spielraum  (1 MB).

Alphabet Soup

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:03 am

Core Problem

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 am

(As opposed to "The Hard Problem")

Sharon Gaudin at computerworld.com
on artificial intelligence (AI) today—

"Google's [Geoffrey] Hinton said he's most excited
about gains in neural networks that would enable
computers to understand the content of sentences
and documents.

'That is close to the core of Google because
it involves understanding sentences, and if you can
understand what a document is saying, you can do
a much better search,' Hinton said. 'That's a core
AI problem. Can you read a document and know
what it's saying?'" 

Sometimes. How about you?

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Gilbert the Lesser*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:31 pm

See Einstein's Orgy (Log24, Nov. 28, 2005),
a post on Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.

Related material: 

Two articles mentioning Gilbert in The Harvard Crimson —

Exams Interrupt Jewish High Holidays
(October 3, 2011)

Sorry NYTimes, But SLS 20 Is Actually Very Hard
(April 19, 2014)

* A sequel to today's earlier post on The Great Gilbert.

In Memoriam:

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

The Great Gilbert

The Third Reviewer

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 pm

"Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945" —

IMAGE- Adapted from 'Downfall' - 'Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945'

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Expanding the Spielraum

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

A short poem by several authors:

"The role of
the 16 singular points
on the Kummer surface
is now played by
the 64 singular points
on the Kummer threefold."

— From Remark 2.4 on page 9 of
"The Universal Kummer Threefold,"
by Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam,
Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1229v3,
August 6, 2012 — June 12, 2013.

See also "Expanded Field" in this journal.

IMAGE- Concepts of Space

Illustration from "Sunday School," July 20, 2014.

Other Log24 background:  Kummer, Spielraum, Art Space.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Spielraum as Ω

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:29 pm
 

From "Origins of the Logical Theory of Probability: von Kries, Wittgenstein, Waismann," by Michael Heidelberger —

"Von Kries calls a range of objective possibilities of a hypothesis or event (under given laws) its Spielraum   (literally: play space), which can mean ‘room to move’, ‘leeway’, ‘latitude of choice’, ‘degree of freedom’ or ‘free play’ and ‘clearance’ – or even ‘scope’. John Maynard Keynes translated it as ‘field’, but the term ‘range’ has generally been adopted in English. Von Kries now holds that if numerical probability were to make any sense at all it must be through this concept of the Spielraum  . Von Kries’s theory is therefore called a ‘Spielraum  theory’ or ‘range theory of probability’."

— International Studies in the Philosophy of Science , Volume 15, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 177-188

See also the tag Points Omega
(Scroll down to January 11-12, 2015.)

Related material:

"Now, for example, in how far are
the six sides of a symmetric die
'equally possible' upon throwing?"

— From "The Natural-Range Conception
     of Probability," by Dr. Jacob Rosenthal,
     page 73 in Time, Chance, and
     Reduction: Philosophical Aspects of
     Statistical 
Mechanics , ed. by 
     Gerhard Ernst and Andreas Hüttemann, 
     Cambridge U. Press, 2010, pp. 71-90

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Spielraum III

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

From today's Super Bowl Halftime:

Click for image in context.

See also Spielraum  in this journal.

Spielerei

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:06 pm

For Katy Perry

Halftime Show — 

The "Pyramid Dance" from this journal
on Dec. 3, 2014, the date of death for
mathematics author James Stewart —

Backstory:

When Stewart died on Dec. 3, it ended a two-year ordeal that began when doctors discovered multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow, while he was being treated for a broken hip.

As the end neared, the meticulously well organized Stewart came to conclude that he would prefer his wake take place before he died. So he set out to organize an extraordinary salon for the people he loved, in the building he loved, featuring music he loved.

There was a giant buffet and among the performers was Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman using a concert hall that was part of his sprawling 18,000 square foot architectural masterpiece he called Integral House in Toronto's Rosedale.

"It was pretty epic. Everyone lined up to talk to him. They'd come up to him and lean down in front of him as he sat," said Joe Clement, a documentary filmmaker who had been filming Stewart for the past three years. The film Integral Man is scheduled for release in early 2016.

"I said to myself, 'This is it and this is everything.' It was very powerful."

— Mark McNeil in The Hamilton Spectator  today

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