Click the above image for an obituary. Shanks reportedly died Friday.
See Art and Space from Friday.
Related material:
In Memoriam (August 1, 2015) and Backstory (July 28, 2015).
Monday, August 31, 2015
A Mirror Darkly …
… Continued from a post of Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015 …
This, as noted, was in the online Times on Monday, August 24.
Here is related news about the following day, Tuesday, August 25 —
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Stylist
Or: A Shema for Sacks.
"We’ve already seen the hexagon painted over a
propaganda poster. It’s obviously a mark of defiance,
or maybe a geometry lesson. It’s still not clear.
Hey, it’s that clown dictator again. Who’s his stylist?"
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Nightmare for Wes Craven
Adapted from posts tagged Cryptomorphisms
in this journal:
"Hear it not, Craven, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell. “
Max von Sydow in Branded (2012)
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Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
Thesis and antithesis at last night's
MTV video music awards:
A geometric synthesis —
Related material —
The Wrench and the Nut (Aug. 24) and Cryptomorphisms.
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Sunday, August 30, 2015
Nut
(A companion-piece to the previous post, Bolt)
" In one of her more memorable roles, Ms. Craig
played Marta, a green-skinned slave girl, in the
'Star Trek' episode 'Whom Gods Destroy.' She
performed a seductive, loose-limbed dance that
seemed to nearly overwhelm William Shatner’s
red-blooded Captain Kirk, while Leonard Nimoy’s
Mr. Spock pronounced it 'mildly interesting.' "
— Obituary by Katie Rogers in the online
New York Times of Aug. 19, 2015. Rogers was
describing actress Yvonne Craig, who reportedly
died on Monday, August 17, 2015.
Related material from this morning's online Times —
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Lines
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
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Saturday, August 29, 2015
Studio Time
(The title is a phrase from Oslo artist Josefine Lyche's Instagram page today.)
Note that 6 PM ET is midnight in Oslo.
An image from St. Ursula's Day, 2010 —
Related material:
"Is it a genuine demolition of the walls which seem
to separate mind from mind …. ?"
— Clifford Geertz, conclusion of “The Cerebral Savage:
On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss“
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Friday, August 28, 2015
Art and Space
Observatory scene from "Magic in the Moonlight"
"The sixteen nodes… can be parametrized
by the sixteen points in affine four-space
over the tiny field F2 with two elements."
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Thursday, August 27, 2015
The Space of Art
"Thinking Outside the Square:
Support for Landscape and Portrait
Formats on Instagram"
Related material from March 18, 2015 —
Play Is Not Playing Around
|
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See Saw Seen
See
“ [An] ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world
where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness …
Think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion …
Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet …
Magnetic … a breakout novel. " — Kirkus (starred)
Saw
Seen
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015
A Mirror Darkly
This post was suggested by the publication date — July 7, 2015 —
of a novel reviewed in The New York Times online last Monday.
A synchronicity check of the publication date yields …
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Ride
"Why don't you come with me, little girl,
on a magic carpet ride?" — Steppenwolf lyrics
Related material for fans of Christopher Alexander
(see previous post) — "The 'Life' of a Carpet."
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“The Quality Without a Name”
The title phrase, paraphrased without quotes in
the previous post, is from Christopher Alexander's book
The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979).
A quote from the publisher:
"Now, at last, there is a coherent theory
which describes in modern terms
an architecture as ancient as
human society itself."
Three paragraphs from the book (pp. xiii-xiv):
19. Within this process, every individual act
of building is a process in which space gets
differentiated. It is not a process of addition,
in which preformed parts are combined to
create a whole, but a process of unfolding,
like the evolution of an embryo, in which
the whole precedes the parts, and actualy
gives birth to then, by splitting.
20. The process of unfolding goes step by step,
one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one
pattern to life; and the intensity of the result
depends on the intensity of each one of these
individual steps.
21. From a sequence of these individual patterns,
whole buildings with the character of nature
will form themselves within your thoughts,
as easily as sentences.
Compare to, and contrast with, these illustrations of "Boolean space":
(See also similar illustrations from Berkeley and Purdue.)
Detail of the above image —
Note the "unfolding," as Christopher Alexander would have it.
These "Boolean" spaces of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 points
are also Galois spaces. See the diamond theorem —
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Monday, August 24, 2015
Quality Report:
The Wrench and the Nut
From Schicksalstag 2012 —
The Quality
with No Name
 |
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good —
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
Related material from Wikipedia today:
See as well a search in this journal for “Permutation Group” + Wikipedia .
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Sunday, August 23, 2015
Quality
"William Tell’s weapon of choice has become
the symbol of Switzerland, a sign of sovereignty
and a guarantee of Swiss quality. On the eve of
the Second World War, these values seemed
especially important and necessary to the Swiss.
This five-centime green stamp was issued for
the 1939 national exhibition."
Related material in this journal: Basel.
See also Jung + Imago.
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Saturday, August 22, 2015
It’s 10 PM…
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The Space of Art
In memory of a woman who died on August 5th:
An excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s
“Nostalgic Technology:
Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto” —
For further remarks on art and technology,
see posts tagged Stevens Owl.
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A Tony for Kristen*
From Kulturkampf for Princeton (Jan. 14, 2015) —
| A sequel to Princeton Requiem, Gesamtkunstwerk , and Serial Box — Fearful Symmetry, Princeton Style:
|
* Wiig. See Dancer (June 10, 2013). Happy birthday.
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Friday, August 21, 2015
Finite Geometry at GitHub
(This post was updated on Jan. 10, 2016.)
See galois.io .
(That URL forwards to http://finite-geometry.github.io/galois/ .)
Recommended for editing: c9.io .
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Thursday, August 20, 2015
Sounds Like a Case for Damon
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Figure
— "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
For some backstory, click or touch the dark passage above.
See also Monolith (August 23, 2014).
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For Mario Vargas Llosa
(Author of the recent book Notes on the Death of Culture )
“I’m going to have to culture the shit out of this.”
— Paraphrase of Matt Damon in “The Martian” trailer
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On the Death of Culture
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Ninevine
(Continued) See posts of August 9, 2015.
See also a death on that date.
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Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Stylist
In memory of record producer Ken Barnes,
author of Sinatra and the Great Song Stylists ,
who reportedly died at 82 on August 4, 2015 —
"Incantatory elegiac power"* in the context of
Log24 posts from August 2-4, 2015, that are
now tagged Stevens Owl.
* Phrase by an academic in Antwerp
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A Wrinkle in Terms
The phrase “the permutation group Sn” refers to a
particular group of permutations that act on an
n -element set N— namely, all of them. For a given n ,
there are, in general, many permutation groups that
act on N. All but one are smaller than Sn .
In other words, the phrase “the permutation group Sn”
does not imply that “Sn ” is a symbol for a structure
associated with n called “the permutation group.”
It is instead a symbol for “the symmetric group,” the largest
of (in general) many permutation groups that act on N.
This point seems to have escaped John Baez.
For two misuses by Baez of the phrase “permutation group” at the
n-Category Café, see “A Wrinkle in the Mathematical Universe”
and “Re: A Wrinkle…” —
“There is such a thing as a permutation group.”
— Adapted from A Wrinkle in Time , by Madeleine L’Engle
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Monday, August 17, 2015
Venue
"… Don't you know that when you play at this level
there's no ordinary venue?" — "Chess" lyrics
Venue: Palm Springs International Film Festival —
Update of 6:40 PM Aug. 17, 2015 —
"Books Do Furnish a Room"
Joshua Cohen's New York Times review,
online today, of Mario Vargas Llosa’s new
Notes on the Death of Culture. The review
includes the following illustration by Mark Todd —
See as well the books in "Starting Out in the Evening,"
a post of October 8, 2010.
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Schoolboy Problem
(Continued from Saturday, Aug. 15, 2015)
From Purim Play for St. Paul's (March 5, 2015) —
"The study of the diverse ways in which
people of different cultures approach problems
provides students with a more comprehensive
understanding of topics introduced in previous courses."
See as well today's NBC news …
St. Paul's School: Rape Trial Targets Sexual Culture
at Elite New Hampshire Campus
by JON SCHUPPE
"A former student at an elite New Hampshire prep school
is going on trial on charges he raped a 15-year-old girl
on campus. But it's not just the young man who's facing judgment.
The rape allegedly occurred at the prestigious St. Paul's School,
whose alumni include Secretary of State John Kerry, former FBI
Director Robert Mueller, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist
Garry Trudeau and several members of Congress. …."
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Modern Algebra Illustrated
For illustrations based on the above equations, see
Coxeter and the Relativity Problem and Singer 7-Cycles .
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Sunday, August 16, 2015
Mathematics History
The following book is reviewed in the September 2015
Notices of the American Mathematical Society —
The reviewer is Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, a professor
at the University of Agder in Kristiansand (Norway).
See also references to the book's author in this journal.
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Sunday School
The title of the previous post, "For Quantum Mystics,"
suggests a search in this journal for Quantum + Mystic.
That search in turn suggests, in particular, a review of
a post of October 16, 2007 — a discussion of the
P.T. Barnum-like phrase "deep beauty" used to describe
a topic under discussion at Princeton by physicists.
Princeton, by the way, serves to illustrate the "gutter"
mentioned by Sir Laurence Olivier in a memorable
classroom scene from 1962.
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Saturday, August 15, 2015
Schoolboy Problem
Sir Laurence Olivier, in "Term of Trial" (1962), dangles
a participle in front of schoolboy Terence Stamp:
"Walking to school today
my arithmetic book
fell into the gutter"
Were Stamp a Galois, the reply might be "Try this one, sir."
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Friday, August 14, 2015
Schoolgirl Problem
But first, a word from our sponsa* …
Sir Laurence Olivier in "Term of Trial" (1962),
a film starring Sarah Miles as a schoolgirl —
* Bride in Latin. See also "bride's chair,"
a phrase from mathematical pedagogy.
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Space Station 2015
(A sequel to Space Station 1976)
For Kathleen Gibbons* —
* Note Gibbons's work on "Discrete phase space based on finite fields."
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Discrete Space
(A review)
Galois space:
Counting symmetries of Galois space:
The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine Galois space —
symmetries of the underlying projective Galois space:
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Being Interpreted
The ABC of things —
The ABC of words —
A nutshell —
Book lessons —
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Thursday, August 13, 2015
Anniversary
Today is reportedly the anniversary of the death,
in Paris in 1822, of Jean Robert Argand.
Some related material …
"Wessel's fame as a mathematician rests solely
on this paper, which was published in 1799,
giving for the first time a geometrical interpretation
of complex numbers. Today we call this geometric
interpretation the Argand diagram but Wessel's
work came first. It was rediscovered by Argand
in 1806 and again by Gauss in 1831. ….
Of course it is not unreasonable to call the
geometrical interpretation of complex numbers
the Argand diagram since it was Argand's work
which was influential. It was so named before
the world of mathematics learnt of Wessel's prior
publication. In fact Wessel's paper was not
noticed by the mathematical community until 1895…."
See also Tilting at Whirligigs (Log24 on March 8, 2008)
and The Galois Quaternion.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
The XYZ of Being
"The Stone" column in yesterday's New York Times :
"But where, exactly, is the border between
the private exchange of money or gifts
and the impersonal profit-making of the market?"
Good question.
Some background on the market —
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Not Mocked …
… But not for lack of trying. Click the image for details of the inset.
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Motives for Metaphor
This post is a scholium for Joyce Carol Oates, who has
written a very readable essay in the current New York
Review of Books titled
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature.
Oates mentions three times, without attributing it to the late poet
Wallace Stevens, the phrase "the motive for metaphor."
The following paragraphs are by Denis Donoghue, from
a piece titled "The Motive for Metaphor" in the Winter 2013
issue of The Hudson Review —
Related material in this journal: Copleston and a fellow Jesuit.
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Sunday, August 9, 2015
The Cauldron
From a review of the 2013 film "The Wolverine" —
"The rituals, culture and hierarchies of Japan
have intrigued and baffled the typical Westerner
for centuries …."
Not to mention those of China …
Hexagram 50:
Ding
The Cauldron
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Nine is a Vine
Backstory: That phrase in this journal.
““The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine….”
– Don Henley
With Derrida, as usual, playing the role of
the serpent, see a philosophical meditation from
October 9, 2014, by a perceptive and thoughtful Eve
that includes the following passage:
“But, before this and first of all, there is
the resistance posed by the work itself,
the hard kernel formed when the intelligibility
of a universal ‘message’ is joined to the
unintelligible secret of a singularity.”
See as well the word “kernel” here.
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Cryptomorphisms
Backstory: Other posts tagged “Cryptomorphisms,”
and the word itself in Wikipedia.
Compare and contrast:
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Knell
From a French dictionary —
|
Tintement lent, sur une seule note,
d’une cloche d’église pour annoncer l’agonie, la mort ou les obsèques de quelqu’un. |
” I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell. “
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Saturday, August 8, 2015
Raiders of the Lost Windows
"Why is it called Windows 10 and not Windows 9?"
Good question.
See Sunday School (Log24 on June 13, 2010) —
.
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Seing
From a French dictionary —
|
A. − HIST. Signe de croix, marque ou signature apposé(e)
au bas d'une lettre, d'un document, par celui qui veut attester la validité, l'authenticité de son contenu. |
From Glas , by Jacques Derrida —
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Friday, August 7, 2015
Anschauliche Geometrie
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason ,
translated by Norman Kemp Smith,
London, Macmillan, 1929, p. 92 —
"Without sensibility no object
would be given to us,
without reflection no object
would be thought.
Concepts without percepts are empty,
percepts without concepts are blind."
"Without sensibility no object
would be given to us,
without understanding no object
would be thought.
Thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind."
From the original —
"Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns
kein Gegenstand gegeben,
und ohne Verstand
keiner gedacht werden.
Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer,
Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind."
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
I. Transzendentale Elementarlehre
Zweiter Teil. Die transzendentale Logik
Einleitung. Idee einer transzendentalen Logik
Related remarks on mathematics —
In memory of the late Ernest E. Shult, some less classical remarks —
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Parts
Spielerei —
"On the most recent visit, Arthur had given him
a brightly colored cube, with sides you could twist
in all directions, a new toy that had just come onto
the market."
— Daniel Kehlmann, F: A Novel (2014),
translated from the German by
Carol Brown Janeway
Nicht Spielerei —
A figure from this journal at 2 AM ET
on Monday, August 3, 2015
Also on August 3 —
FRANKFURT — "Johanna Quandt, the matriarch of the family
that controls the automaker BMW and one of the wealthiest
people in Germany, died on Monday in Bad Homburg, Germany.
She was 89."
MANHATTAN — "Carol Brown Janeway, a Scottish-born
publishing executive, editor and award-winning translator who
introduced American readers to dozens of international authors,
died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 71."
Related material — Heisenberg on beauty, Munich, 1970
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Wednesday, August 5, 2015
At Zero Dark Thirty…
"I sing the body electric." (See previous post.)
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Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Drinking Class
A scene from "Nightmare Alley" (1947) …
… in memory of Coleen Gray, who reportedly died yesterday at 92.
"Everybody put your lights up!"
— Brett Eldredge on TV tonight (tape of CMA Music Festival)
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To Fuse Words with Things
A passage suggested by the previous post —
— Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England :
Robert Persons's Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610
by Victor Houliston (Ashgate Publishing, 2007)
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Boundary Value Problem
"'The Owl in the Sarcophagus,' for all its incantatory
elegiac power, consists almost entirely of
a self-generated and self-generating rhetoric.
It points up one of the limits of poetic composition itself,
the boundary where technique turns into technology."
— Bart Eeckhout in Wallace Stevens and the Limits
of Reading and Writing , University of Missouri Press,
2002, p. 210
See as well this morning's previous post.
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Block That Metaphor
"In theory, a robot could be the cloud-connecting Charon
that ushers us into the Internet of Things."
— Bryan Lufkin at Gizmodo.com, July 29, 2015
Related material —
The death of MIT computability theorist Hartley Rogers, Jr.
at 89 on July 17, and this journal on July 17.
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Saturday Morning Coffee
A Saturday post —
Saturday, August 1, 2015
|
A Saturday death —
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Monday, August 3, 2015
Text and Context*
"The ORCID organization offers an open and
independent registry intended to be the de facto
standard for contributor identification in research
and academic publishing. On 16 October 2012,
ORCID launched its registry services… and
started issuing user identifiers." — Wikipedia
This journal on the above date —
A more recent identifier —
Related material —
See also the recent posts Ein Kampf and Symplectic.
* Continued.
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Sunday, August 2, 2015
Symplectic
See "Symplectic" in this journal. Some illustrations —
Midrash —
"Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,
An immaculate personage in nothingness,
With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,
Generations of the imagination piled
In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,
In the weaving round the wonder of its need,
And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness."
— Wallace Stevens, "The Owl in the Sarcophagus"
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Saturday, August 1, 2015
Morning Coffee
The title is from a book quoted here July 30.
Related material: This morning's previous post.
The quoted book has some questionable remarks
on theology. For some better remarks, see the post
"Mystery" (Sept. 25, 2014).
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In Memoriam
Death of an academic on
the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, 2015 —
"Cheuse was involved in a serious car accident
on July 14, 2015 on California State Route 17
while driving from Olympic Valley to Santa Cruz,
California. He was reported to be in a coma on
July 20, 2015 with injuries including fractured ribs,
cervical vertebrae, and an acute subdural hematoma.
He died on July 31, 2015 from his injuries at the age
of 75." — Wikipedia
Also on July 14 …
See as well Cheuse on Santa Cruz …
Home Away From Home in Santa Cruz
There are towns you are born into,
and there are towns you grow into.
Related artistic image —
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