Log24

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Balance*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:01 pm

See the circle of keys.

Related material: The links in a Log24 search for Doctor Sax.

* For the title, see posts tagged Dante Time.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:44 pm

For a religion writer who reportedly died Sept. 22,
a tune from a sax player who reportedly died today.

Quotes for Michaelmas

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

A search in this journal for material related to the previous post
on theta characteristics yields

"The Solomon Key  is the working title of an unreleased
novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. 
The Solomon Key  will be the third book involving the
character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon,
of which the first two were Angels & Demons  (2000) and 
The Da Vinci Code  (2003)." — Wikipedia

"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."
 — "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups,"
by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, 
May 5, 2008, preprint.

"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."

— Review of   
Faust in Copenhagen

"The page numbers
are generally reliable."

— Michaelmas 2007 

For further backstory, click the above link "May 5, 2008," 
which now leads to all posts tagged on080505

Geometry for Michaelmas

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

See searches for "theta characteristics" in Google and in this journal.

A definition of particular interest for finite geometry —

Theta characteristics as defined in 'On the Coble Quartic,' Grushevsky and Manni, 2012

The Grushevsky-Manni paper above was submitted to the arXiv
on 9 Dec. 2012. For some synchronistically related remarks
suitable for Michaelmas, see this  journal on that date.

Curvitas

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Part I — Donjon

(Notices of the American Mathematical Society , October 2015)

Part II — Curvitas!

(Detail from yesterday afternoon)

Related material: Digital Member.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Cracker Jack Prize

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

From a post of July 24, 2011

Mira Sorvino in 'The Last Templar'

A review —

“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of 
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”

— The New York Times

A feeble attempt at a purely mathematical "decoding device"
from this journal earlier this month

Image that may or may not be related to the extended binary Golay code and the large Witt design

For some background, see a question by John Baez at Math Overflow
on Aug. 20, 2015.

The nonexistence of a 24-cycle in the large Mathieu group
might discourage anyone hoping for deep new insights from
the above figure.

See Marston Conder's "Symmetric Genus of the Mathieu Groups" —

Intruders for Mira

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:25 pm

"Intruders" star Mira Sorvino in "The Last Templar" —

Happy birthday.

Meanwhile

Hypercube Structure

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:01 am

Click to enlarge:

Two views of tesseracts as 4D vector spaces over GF(2)

For the hypercube as a vector space over the two-element field GF(2),
see a search in this journal for Hypercube + Vector + Space .

For connections with the related symplectic geometry, see Symplectic
in this journal and Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986.

For the above 1976 hypercube (or tesseract ), see "Diamond Theory,"
by Steven H. Cullinane, Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1,
Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

She Said Carefully

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:24 pm

A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:

From the 1959 Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning" —

She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, “The person you killed or doomed is still in the room.”

An aching impulse twisted me a little. “Maybe I should try to go back––” I began. “Try to go back and unite the selves . . .”

“It’s too late now,” she repeated.

“But I want to,” I persisted. “There’s something pulling at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.”

She smiled unpleasantly. “Of course there is,” she said. “It’s the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.”

Box Office

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).  That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.

See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .

Strings

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:01 pm

The dateline from a slide at a string-theory conference:

See also this journal on that date.

A related "string theory," for those who like to compare and contrast:

A paper on the late Michael Weinstein by Robert L. Oprisko —

"Strings: A Political Theory of Multi-Dimensional Reality."*

From the abstract:

"An 'unfaithful' interpretation of Michael Weinstein's oeuvre
illuminates a complex, interpenetrative system of realities
that reflects the lived experience of his vitalist ontology."

* Theoria & Praxis: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought ,
   Vol 2, No 2 (2014): On the Concept of Globality.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Symbols, Local and Global

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:19 pm

Local:

Photo by Jimmy Emerson, DVM

Global

Photo by Brendan Smialowski today

Msgr. Mark Miles, the Pope's translator, at
Independence Hall in Philadelphia today.

What, if anything, the Church means by the symbol
he holds is not clear, but presumably its meaning,
if there is one, is more global than local.

Posthumous Man

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:45 pm

The above book, a tribute by admirers of the late Michael Weinstein
(not, as a campus obituary states, by Weinstein himself),
was reportedly published by Routledge on December 19, 2014.

This journal on that date had a post on an early Greek philosopher who
supposedly was killed because he discovered irrational numbers.

A later approach to academic life —

Emma Stone being directed by Woody Allen in the recent "Irrational Man":

Fans of Allen and Stone may also enjoy Magic in the Moonlight.

Friday, September 25, 2015

A Great Moonshine

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:45 pm

Pope's 'have seen a great light' homily on 9/25/15

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Introduction to Yau

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

Home page of Doctor Yau

This is related somewhat distantly to Mathieu moonshine.

A note on the somewhat distant relation —

Illustration of K3 surface related to Mathieu moonshine

See also Kummer in this journal.

Review

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:04 pm

Related material:  What Have We Learned? (Sept. 8, 2015).

“May I aid you, travelers?”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

A file photo of Mark and Debby Constantino on Oct. 24, 2011.

The couple, who worked as paranormal investigators, were often
featured in the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures .

As the above screenshot shows, this post's title is from
"Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World" (1988).

Related material, quoted here on Oct. 24, 2011

"Deja vu all over again." — Yogi Berra

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Sparks News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:45 pm

On an incident in Sparks, Nevada, on
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015:

"Reno and Sparks police then approached the apartment
just before 11 a.m. and knocked on the door in an effort
to check on Debra Constantino’s welfare, Sparks police
said. That’s when officers heard gunshots."

— Marcella Corona, Reno Gazette-Journal

(Tuesday 11 a.m. PDT in Sparks was Tuesday 2 p.m. EDT.)

"A file photo of Mark and Debby Constantino taken on
Oct. 24, 2011 near their home in northwest Reno.
The couple worked as paranormal investigators
specializing in EVP voice recordings and were often
featured in the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures ."
(Photo: Reno Gazette-Journal  file)

Synchronicity check: Log24 on the date of the above photo.

"… a bee for the remembering of happiness" — Wallace Stevens

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Villanueva

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

The previous post honored Maurice, one of yesterday's
saints. A note on another —

See Log24 searches for Villanova and Villanueva.
The latter search leads to a link to some posts tagged 922
from St. Thomas of Villanova's feast day, Sept. 22.

Epismetology for Yogi

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:22 am

"In the Latin language, pompatus  is an actual word
meaning 'done with pomp or splendor.'
It is the masculine perfect participle of the Latin
root word pompo ." — Wikipedia 

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Saints of the Day

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

St. Thomas of Villanova, Sts. Maurice and Companions.

See CatholicCulture.org.

Geometry for Jews

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:01 pm

(Continued)

Remarks by an ignorant professor quoted here
yesterday suggest a Log24 search for "Lost in Translation."
That search yields instances of the following figure

Klein four-group

See also the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).

Hic et Nunc

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:31 am

Monday, September 21, 2015

Here and Now

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:29 pm

From an essay by Mark Edmundson,
University Professor at the University of Virginia,
who was granted a Ph.D. by Yale in 1985 —

The American Scholar
ARTICLE – AUTUMN 2015

Test of Faith

The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?

By Mark Edmundson
SEPTEMBER 7, 2015

“Aren’t you a Catholic?”

People often ask me that question in a gotcha tone. It’s as though they’re saying: I see through you. You pretend to be an intellectual, a more or less secular guy who can maybe lay claim to some sophistication. You want to pass as someone (here’s the rub) who has grown up and is not a child anymore. But I see through all that, the questioner implies. I can tell that you live under the old dispensation. You’re a creature not of light and intellect, light and truth, but of guilt and fear.

Light and truth, lux et veritas , was the motto of the university where I went to graduate school. It signifies the power of enlightened intellect to remake the world—or at least to transform and elevate the individual. Religions don’t generally have mottoes, and it is probably not a good idea when they do. But if the Roman Catholic Church had a motto, it surely would not be light and truth. I spent 12 years, give or take, in the faith, the most influential years of my life. And I was surely a Catholic. But what if anything remains of that immersion? What value does it have here and now?

An example of vincible ignorance:

Edmundson's remarks above, in light of 

Happy Birthday, Stephen King

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

Ding

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Misgiving

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

"Charles Kenneth Williams was born on Nov. 4, 1936,
in Newark. His father, Paul, sold office machines,
and, as he prospered, moved with his wife, the former
Dossie Kasdin, and his two sons to suburban South Orange.
Mr. Williams’s conflicted relationship with his parents
takes up much of his 2000 memoir, Misgivings: My Mother,
My Father, Myself 
. " — NY Times  obituary this evening

Near the Haunted Castle
A poem by C. K. Williams

"This is a story. You don't have to think about it,
it's make-believe. / It's like a lie, maybe not quite a lie
but I don't want you to worry about it. . . . ."

For a more interesting cinematic haunting, see the new film "Pay the Ghost."

Orange Mass

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:08 pm

"Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously."

In memory of Jackie Collins, a post on Sinatra's favorite color.

In Memoriam

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:37 am

From related literary remarks linked to here yesterday

"Sloane’s writing is drum-tight, but his approach
is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins
turning up the heat. He understood that before
a pot can boil, it must simmer." — Stephen King

From this journal last July

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Language Game

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:01 pm

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams." — Hamlet

The New York Review of Books , in a review
of two books on video games today, quotes an author
who says that the Vikings believed the sky to be 
“the blue skull of a giant.”

See as well posts tagged The Nutshell.

A Certain Term

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:48 pm

"I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night…."

— Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

Related imagery —

Detail:

Closer detail:

Exegesis:


 

A Certain Term:  Not English, Not Chinese —

Philosophy and Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The current issue (dated Oct. 8, 2015) of
The New York Review of Books  has two
(at least) items related to philosophy —

See also Backstory, a Log24 post of Nov. 22, 2010:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101122-MartinShopgirl-loq.jpg

"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
 that they just can’t seem to do without.'
 He was a symbolic logician.
 That was his career…."

The Observatory Mystery

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

Part I:        Magic Moonlight

Part II:    To Walk the Night 

Cover from a 1944 edition of
the 1937 novel by William Sloane


Part III:   Sept. 18, 2015, review by Stephen King
                of the works of William Sloane 

Geometry of the 24-Point Circle

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:13 am

The latest Visual Insight  post at the American Mathematical
Society website discusses group actions on the McGee graph,
pictured as 24 points arranged in a circle that are connected
by 36 symmetrically arranged edges.

Wikipedia remarks that

"The automorphism group of the McGee graph
is of order 32 and doesn't act transitively upon
its vertices: there are two vertex orbits of lengths
8 and 16."

The partition into 8 and 16 points suggests, for those familiar
with the Miracle Octad Generator and the Mathieu group M24,
the following exercise:

Arrange the 24 points of the projective line
over GF(23) in a circle in the natural cyclic order
, 1, 2, 3,  , 22, 0 ).  Can the McGee graph be
modeled by constructing edges in any natural way?

Image that may or may not be related to the extended binary Golay code and the large Witt design

In other words, if the above set of edges has no
"natural" connection with the 24 points of the
projective line over GF(23), does some other 
set of edges in an isomorphic McGee graph
have such a connection?

Update of 9:20 PM ET Sept. 20, 2015:

Backstory: A related question by John Baez
at Math Overflow on August 20.

Friday, September 18, 2015

An Evening in New Haven

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

Click images for related material.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

A Word for Willcocks

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:22 pm

The title refers to Sir David Willcocks, director of music
at King's College, Cambridge, 1957-1974, who reportedly
died today.  

The word:

Ledger.

Related music:
A Christmas Carol.

A Word to the Wise:

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

Symplectic.

Related material:

From the website of the American Mathematical Society today,
a column by John Baez that was falsely backdated to Sept. 1, 2015 —

Compare and contrast this Baez column 
with the posts in the above
Log24 search for "Symplectic."

Updates after 9 PM ET Sept. 17, 2015 —

Related wrinkles in time: 

Baez's preceding Visual Insight  post, titled 
"Tutte-Coxeter Graph," was dated Aug. 15, 2015.
This seems to contradict the AMS home page headline
of Sept. 5, 2015, that linked to Baez's still earlier post
"Heawood Graph," dated Aug. 1. Also, note the 
reference in "Tutte-Coxeter Graph" to Baez's related 
essay — dated August 17, 2015 — 

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

The World as Myth

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:48 pm

Three approaches to The World as Myth

From Heinlein's 1985 The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

The World as Myth is a subtle concept. It has sometimes been called multiperson solipsism, despite the internal illogic of that phrase. Yet illogic may be necessary, as the concept denies logic. For many centuries religion held sway as the explanation of the universe- or multiverse. The details of revealed religions differed wildly but were essentially the same: Somewhere up in the sky-or down in the earth-or in a volcano-any inaccessible place- there was an old man in a nightshirt who knew everything and was all powerful and created everything and rewarded and punished and could be bribed.

      "Sometimes this Almighty was female but not often because human males are usually bigger, stronger, and more belligerent; God was created in Pop's image.

      "The Almighty-God idea came under attack because it explained nothing; it simply pushed all explanations one stage farther away. In the nineteenth century atheistic positivism started displacing the Almighty-God notion in that minority of the population that bathed regularly.

      "Atheism had a limited run, as it, too, explains nothing, being merely Godism turned upside down. Logical positivism was based on the physical science of the nineteenth century which, physicists of that century honestly believed, fully explained the universe as a piece of clockwork.

      "The physicists of the twentieth century made short work of that idea. Quantum mechanics and Schrodringer's cat tossed out the clockwork world of 1890 and replaced it with a fog of probability in which anything could happen. Of course the intellectual class did not notice this for many decades, as an intellectual is a highly educated man who can't do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of his lack. Nevertheless, with the death of positivism, Godism and Creationism came back stronger than ever.

      "In the late twentieth century -correct me when I' m wrong, Hilda-Hilda and her family were driven off Earth by a devil, one they dubbed 'the Beast.' They fled in a vehicle you have met, Gay Deceiver, and in their search for safety they visited many dimensions, many universesand Hilda made the greatest philosophical discovery of all time."

      "I'll bet you say that to all the girls!"

      "Quiet, dear. They visited, among more mundane places, the Land of Oz-"

      I sat up with a jerk. Not too much sleep last night and Dr. Harshaw's lecture was sleep-inducing. "Did you say 'Oz'?"

      "I tell you three times. Oz, Oz, Oz. They did indeed visit the fairyland dreamed up by L. Frank Baum. And the Wonderland invented by the Reverend Mr. Dodgson to please Alice. And other places known only to fiction. Hilda discovered what none of us had noticed before because we were inside it: The World is Myth. We create it ourselves-and we change it ourselves. A truly strong myth maker, such as Homer, such as Baum, such as the creator of Tarzan, creates substantial and lasting worlds whereas the fiddlin', unimaginative liars and fabulists shape nothing new and their tedious dreams are forgotten. ….

Friday, November 6, 2009

Where Entertainment is God (continued)

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:06 AM 

Click to enlarge.

Ad, with army base shooter in video, for 'The Men Who Stare at Goats'

Colorado Springs Gazette
movie reviewer Brandon Fibbs yesterday:

“Much of this is genuinely amusing.
So why then am I not laughing?”

NY Times on the Fort Hood shootings that took place in the afternoon of Nov. 5, 2009

Public and Private Instagrams

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:25 pm

Public —

Private —

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Joyce’s Nightmare…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:42 pm

Continues.

Today's AP history notes


The above image suggests a search for Missing Art.

Schoolgirl Problem

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

Or: Ten Years and a Day

In memory of film director Robert Wise,
who died ten years ago yesterday.

A search in this journal for "Schoolgirl" ends with a post
from Sept. 10, 2002, The Sound of Hanging Rock.

See as well a Log24 search for "Strangerland"
(a 2015 film about a search for a schoolgirl) and
a Log24 search for "Weaving."

Related mathematics:  Symplectic.

Some related images (click to enlarge) —

Monday, September 14, 2015

Happy Birthday to…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:15 am

The actor who portrayed the angel Uriel in the TV series
"Supernatural," Robert Wisdom.

See also the angel Uriel in the novel Weaveworld .

Earth Meets Sky

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:16 am

The title was suggested by that of a 2013 conference at Harvard,
"When Earth Meets Sky," in an image posted here at 8:48 PM EDT
on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2015.

Also at 8:48 PM EDT on Sunday 

Mount Aso Volcano Erupts in Southern Japan

By Brian Lada, Meteorologist, at AccuWeather.com

September 14, 2015; 1:50 AM EDT

Mount Aso, a volcano located on Japan's
southernmost main island of Kyushu, erupted
on Monday morning, local time, sending a
plethora of smoke and ash 2000 meters
(6560 feet) into the sky.

The eruption began at 8:49 p.m. EDT,
or 9:49 a.m. local time, according to the 
Japan Meteorological Agency.

There have been no reports of injuries
from the eruption.

The eruption at 08:48:45 EDT —

(Click for an image in motion.)

From Alejandro Alvarez @aletweetsnews

From a time-lapse of Mount #Aso, #Japan's
largest active volcano, erupting Sunday
evening (Eastern Daylight Time). The time in
Japan, shown in the photo, was 13 hours later.
(via @kumamoto_rkk)
pic.twitter.com/nMeHBQvBTN

10:18 PM – 13 Sep 2015

Sunday, September 13, 2015

For Max Beauvoir*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 pm

* See Wikipedia.

Gameday

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:30 pm

See also the footnote to this morning's post 
Chinese New Year 2013
and its link to posts now tagged Trophy.

Erlangen Summary

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Charles Matthews's question summarizing the Erlangen Program,
Current Validity for Erlangen…?  (March 28, 2011)
has been removed from mathoverflow.net.

A cached copy is available at Log24.com. Enjoy.

Chinese New Year 2013

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:42 am

Item from the New Orleans Times-Picayune 
in January 2013:

Chinese new year celebrated

Welcoming the Chinese New Year, 4710, the Academy of Chinese Studies will hold a celebration Feb. 6 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Dixon Hall, at Tulane University.  A student talent show, and lucky "Red Envelope" will be featured.

See also this  journal on the reported* date
of the above celebration, Feb. 6, 2013:

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

A Bus Named Desire

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

Act I:

Current Validity for Erlangen…?

… MathOverflow question dated March 28, 2011

Act II:

Erlangen

… Starring Elke Sommer, former Erlangen student

Act III:

The Sweet Smell of Avon

… See also Bus 318 and 3/18 in 2012.

Act IV:

Desire

… Log24 post dated March 28, 2011

* The reported celebration date was later changed to Feb. 3 , 2013.
   For a New-Orleans-related Log24 post from that  date, plus backstory,
   see posts now tagged Trophy.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Ledger

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:45 pm

Lorrie Moore, in the current New York Review of Books ,
on a detective in a TV series:

He "takes notes in a large ledger and
speaks as if he were the CEO of
a nihilist fortune cookie company."

— "Sympathy for the Devil," NYRB
      issue dated Sept. 24, 2015

See Harvard president Drew Faust as such a CEO.

The Harvard Crimson

UPDATED: September 12, 2015, at 4:22 pm. 

Luke Z. Tang ’18, a Lowell House sophomore,
has died “suddenly and unexpectedly,”
Lowell House Master Diana L. Eck told
House residents in an email Saturday.

Local authorities are investigating the cause
of the death, Eck wrote, and there is “no reason
to believe that foul play was involved.”

At the Still Point (continued)

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

"Now I wanna dance, I wanna win.
I want that trophy, so dance good."

"C'est la vie , say the old folks.
It goes to show you never can tell.
"

Friday, September 11, 2015

Omega Wrinkle:

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:42 pm

A Phrase That Haunts

From this journal on August 23, 2013

Illustration from New York Times  review 
of the novel Point Omega —

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

From the print version of The New York Times Sunday Book Review
dated Sept. 13, 2015 —

The online version, dated Sept. 11, 2015 —

From the conclusion of the online version —

On the above print  headline, "Wrinkles in Time,"
that vanished in the online version —

"Now you see it, now you don't"
is not a motto one likes to see demonstrated
by a reputable news firm.

Related material:  Jews Telling Stories.

Crane Story

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:07 pm

Business

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:22 pm

Oh, would you like to swing on a star…?

Welcome to Vegas

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:44 am

From a Wednesday morning post

From this  morning's New York Times

"Can you make it any more complicated?"

Ocean's 13

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Grapevine

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

"Joseph Traub: I was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1932.
As you know, Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Traube is
the German word for grape, and since my family lived in the
grape-growing region of Baden for generations, I assume
that's how my name originated."

Related material:  The Power of the Center .

Super Overarching Symmetry

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:48 pm

(Continued)

Santa Fe Institute logo (see previous post) —

Symmetry , by Hermann Weyl

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060319-Weyl.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Compare and Contrast

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:12 pm

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Death Link

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

Continued from a post of August 20, 2015 —

Ninevine

(Continued)  See posts of August 9, 2015.
See also a death on that date.

The death link above leads to an obituary for one
"John Henry Holland, Who Computerized Evolution."

A book by Holland published July 13, 2012, by The MIT Press

Signals and Boundaries

Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems

By John H. Holland

Overview

Complex adaptive systems (cas), including ecosystems, governments, biological cells, and markets, are characterized by intricate hierarchical arrangements of boundaries and signals. In ecosystems, for example, niches act as semi-permeable boundaries, and smells and visual patterns serve as signals; governments have departmental hierarchies with memoranda acting as signals; and so it is with other cas. Despite a wealth of data and descriptions concerning different cas, there remain many unanswered questions about "steering" these systems. In Signals and Boundaries, John Holland argues that understanding the origin of the intricate signal/border hierarchies of these systems is the key to answering such questions. He develops an overarching framework for comparing and steering cas through the mechanisms that generate their signal/boundary hierarchies.

How nice to have an overarching framework.

Plan 9 Continues

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:56 pm

See posts tagged Clooney Omega in this journal.

Communitas

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:31 pm

(Continued)

For Annie Kinsella

Steam

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:40 am

For the title, see Stephen King + PSI in this journal.

Related material —

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

What Have We Learned?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:38 pm


Build It and They Will Come. 
 

Another "Four Big Ideas" —

EVOLOUTION!  INFORMATTION!

Starbird

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Illustration from The New York Times  of the
book discussed in today's noon post , subtitled

Four Big Ideas and How
They Made the Modern World  —

Related enumerative rhetoric:  The Starbird Manifesto.

Point Omega*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Fareed Zakaria in an online Aug. 21
New York Times  book review

" Most intellectuals think ideas matter.
In one of his most famous and oft-­quoted lines,
John Maynard Keynes declared, 'Practical men
who believe themselves to be quite exempt from
any intellectual influence are usually the slaves
of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority,
who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy
from some academic scribbler of a few years back.'

Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot concur,
arguing that ideas 'do not merely matter; they matter
immensely, as they have been the source for decisions
and actions that have structured the modern world.' 
In The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How
They Made the Modern World 
, Montgomery and
Chirot make the case for the importance of four
­powerful ideas, rooted in the European Enlightenment,
that have created the world as we know it.
'Invading armies can be resisted,' they quote
Victor Hugo. 'Invading ideas cannot be.' "

* Related material: Point Omega , a book
   by Don DeLillo, in this journal.

Monday, September 7, 2015

Alpha Bet

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The title pun is from a letter about Google's new parent
company, named "Alphabet" by its founders.

Related material:  Alpha and Omega in this journal.

Postulant

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:48 pm

"Sister Mary Kathleen is a beginner."

As are many of us.

Up

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Our Gang, 1922 In memory of an actress
born on August 23 of that year.

Note

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:28 am

See June 7, 2015.

Triangle (percussion instrument)

Jobs

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Sunday, September 6, 2015

“Sacred Space”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 pm

(Continued from August 14, 2015)

The Buffalo News

Demolition of the Amphitheater
will cost Chautauqua Institution part of its soul

By Donn Esmonde | News Senior Metro Columnist | 
on September 5, 2015 – 2:45 PM

" It’s only September, but the American Wrecking Ball Association
already has its Man of the Year.

Tom Becker, president of the Chautauqua Institution,
will add his name to a grim list of destructionists by
unleashing the bulldozers on an irreplaceable icon
in the name – as these mindless demolitions always are –
of 'progress.' " . . . .

Note on the Death of Culture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:00 pm

In memory of the late Claus Adolf Moser,
Baron Moser, who reportedly died at 92  
on Friday, September 4, 2015.

Moser, a statistician, later became an arts
administrator as well. (He was chairman of the
Royal Opera House, 1974-1987).

Arts for Moser:

From the current New Yorker  (Sept. 7, 2015) —

New Yorker blackboard cartoon

From this journal last year —

But Is It Art? and Diamond Star
(Feb. 1 and Jan. 31, 2014)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110905-StellaOctangulaView.jpg

Elementally, My Dear Watson

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:45 am

Sarah Larson in the online New Yorker  on Sept. 3, 2015,
discussed Google’s new parent company, “Alphabet”—

“… Alphabet takes our most elementally wonderful
general-use word—the name of the components of
language itself*—and reassigns it, like the words
tweet, twitter, vine, facebook, friend, and so on,
into a branded realm.”

Emma Watson in “The Bling Ring”

This journal, also on September 3 —

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Rings of August

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:20 AM

For the title, see posts from August 2007
tagged Gyges.

Related theological remarks:

Boolean  spaces (old)  vs. Galois  spaces (new)  in 
The Quality Without a Name. . . .

* Actually, Sarah, that would be “phonemes.”

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Operation Blockhead

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 pm

New Yorker  writer on the new parent corporation of
Google, named Alphabet:

"In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us, Alphabet
is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks. 
Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."

— Sarah Larson

Building blocks, Sarah, are not the same thing
as alphabet blocks.  For the distinction, see a
Log24 post of August 14, 2015, "Being Interpreted."

The New Yorker  apparently also has another fact wrong.
The official version of Page's letter is not  "illustrated."
Perhaps, Sarah, you mistook the new Alphabet website
abc.xyz, which did show alphabet blocks and quoted
Page's letter, for the letter itself.

For the Machiavelli School*

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

See also Weyl + Palermo in this  journal —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110922-TriquetrumCube.jpg

* The title refers to the previous post, on a current New Yorker  cartoon.

Blockheads

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:35 am

(Continued)

Cartoon from the current (Sept. 7, 2015) New Yorker , p. 25 —

See as well searches in this journal for Montessori and Machiavelli.

Midrash from Sept. 3 at the online New Yorker

"We don’t instinctively care about the brand unity
Google wants to achieve with its new mega-company,
Alphabet, of which it is now a part. Especially because
Alphabet takes our most elementally wonderful
general-use word—the name of the components of
language itself—and reassigns it, like the words tweet,
twitter, vine, facebook, friend, and so on, into a branded
realm. In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us,
Alphabet is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks.
Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."

— Sarah Larson

Friday, September 4, 2015

Space Program

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

Galois via Boole

(Courtesy of Intel)

“Tell it to the hand.”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:12 am

A followup to the previous post, Delft Speaks  —

Manohla Dargis, film reviewer, on illusionist Penn Jillette:

“It’s as if Vermeer,” Mr. Jillette says, “were
some unfathomable genius who could just
walk up to a canvas and magically paint
with light.” And everyone knows — perhaps
professional illusionists most of all — that
magic doesn’t exist.

"Tell it to the hand."

Delft Speaks

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:19 am

Items suggested by yesterday's 7:20 AM EDT post on Intel
and by an August 24, 2015, New York Times  piece

(Waldman was quoted here on Aug. 26 and on Aug. 31.)

"September 03, 2015 07:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

DELFT, Netherlands–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Today Intel Corporation announced a 10-year collaborative
relationship with the Delft University of Technology and
TNO, the Dutch Organisation for Applied Research, to
accelerate advancements in quantum computing.
To achieve this goal, Intel will invest US$50 million and
will provide significant engineering resources both on-site
and at Intel, as well as technical support."

A background search for Delft in this journal yields a link
(from "But Is It Art?") to the Vermeer described by Waldman —

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Rings of August

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 am

For the title, see posts from August 2007 tagged Gyges.

Related theological remarks:

Boolean  spaces (old) vs. Galois  spaces  (new) in
The Quality Without a Name
(a post from August 26, 2015) and the

Related literature:  A search for Borogoves in this journal will yield
remarks on the 1943 tale underlying the above film.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Expanding the Field

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

(Continued)

See The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics ,
Vol. 23, No. 42 (2012), pp. 14-31, 
"Art in an Expanded Field: Wittgenstein and Aesthetics,"
by Noël Carroll.

Abstract:

"This article reviews the various ways in which the later writings
of Ludwig Wittgenstein have been employed to address the question
'What is Art?' These include the family resemblance model, the
cluster concept model and the form of life model. The article defends
a version of the form of life approach. Also, addressed the charge that
it would have been more profitable had aestheticians explored what
Wittgenstein actually said about art instead of trying to extrapolate from
his writings an approach to what Nigel Warburton calls the art question."

Sorry, Wyoming… Here’s Faust.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:01 pm

Harvard Gazette  yesterday:

“Your work for the next four years is about discovery:
discovery of the world and its past and future;
discovery of one another and discovery of yourself,”
President Drew Faust told the 1,664 students who have
come to Cambridge from 79 countries — everywhere
from Algeria to Zimbabwe — and from 49 of the 50
states (sorry, Wyoming!).

Click image for a related post from August 3, 2013.

The Virgin’s Island

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:42 am

From Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies 
(London and New York, Macmillan and Co., 1872 edition, p. 13) —

The title of this post, "The Virgin's Island," suggests one possible answer
to the following question

Philosopher Jerry Fodor parodied Wittgenstein with
a page of elaborations on Michael Frayn’s own parody,
'Wittgenstein on Fog-like Sensations,' of which this
is the best:

'I can’t see a thing in this fog.'  Which  thing?

David Auerbach at Slate.com yesterday
 

The Virgin's Island:

Two frames from the Jodie Foster film "Contact"—

Related material — Welcome to Noplace (Log24 on June 10, 2015).

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Speak

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

Continued from A Mirror Darkly (August 26, 2015) —

LIFE magazine for the Feast of St. Nicholas
in The Year of Our Lord 1948

See as well a search for Ex Machina  and a post of August 31, 2015.

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