Log24

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Weaving World…

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

Continues.

Addendum —


      See also Symplectic Structure 
      and Stevens's Rock.

Raiders of the Lost Crucible

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:15 am

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —

Paraconsistent Logic

“First published Tue Sep 24, 1996;
substantive revision Fri Apr 5, 2013”

This  journal on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —

The object most closely resembling a “philosophers’ stone”
that I know of is the eightfold cube .

For some related philosophical remarks that may appeal
to a general Internet audience, see (for instance) a website
by I Ching  enthusiast Andreas Schöter that displays a labeled
eightfold cube in the form of a lattice diagram —

Related material by Schöter —

A 20-page PDF, “Boolean Algebra and the Yi Jing.”
(First published in The Oracle: The Journal of Yijing Studies ,
Vol 2, No 7, Summer 1998, pp. 19–34.)

I differ with Schöter’s emphasis on Boolean algebra.
The appropriate mathematics for I Ching  studies is,
I maintain, not Boolean algebra  but rather Galois geometry.

See last Saturday’s post Two Views of Finite Space.
Unfortunately, that post is, unlike Schöter’s work, not
suitable for a general Internet audience.

Friday, October 30, 2015

For Scientific Witch Hunters*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Motto selected by an Oslo artist

Lynx Oslo motto by Alan Moore

Illustration selected by The Boston Globe

Notes on perspective selected at Log24

* I.e. , those who hunt witches scientifically,
   or those who hunt scientific witches —
   a matter of, as it were, perspective.

For Damnation Morning*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:30 am

The Importance of Being Analytic

* Title of a story by Fritz Leiber.

The Eight

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 am

(Continued)

“Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”

— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140

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

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Verhexung

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

(Continued)

When shall we three meet again?

"Carnap, Tarski and Quine met together in 1940-1941 at Harvard
to discuss their views on the nature of language and the differences
between logic, mathematics and science. In this remarkable book
Greg Frost-Arnold presents Carnap’s extensive notes on these
meetings. Frost-Arnold also includes an elegant translation and a
detailed commentary that sets the notes in their philosophical context
and demonstrates their importance for many central debates about
the history of analytic philosophy. This book marks a decisive advance
in our understanding of the philosophical views of Carnap, Tarski and
Quine, and is essential reading for all who work on these topics."

— Christopher Pincock, The Ohio State University

Priest Logic

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:00 pm

Versus the Hobgoblins of Emerson Hall

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

  

A Word in Your Delicate Ear

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:02 am

☯

Oslo Halloween

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

(Suggested by the latest Instagram post of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche)

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

The Tummelplatz of Jerusalem

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

A check of recent tweets by Alexander Bogomolny, who was
mentioned in the previous post, yields a remark of Oct. 26, 2015

This is not unrelated to a word from Freud:

See as well "Digging Out the Truth?" (Jerusalem Post  2/25/2010)
and Michener's The Source  in this  journal.

Symmetry Framed

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:26 pm

The cover of the K. O. Friedrichs book From Pythagoras to Einstein 
shown in the previous post suggests a review (click the Log24 
images for webpages where they can be manipulated) ….

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110209-SymFrameBWPage.gif

The "more sophisticated" link in the first image above
leads to a webpage by Alexander Bogomolny
"Pythagoras' Theorem by Tessellation," that says
"This is a subtle and beautiful proof."

Bogomolny refers us to the Friedrichs book, from which one of
the illustrations of the proof by tessellation is as follows —

For a quite different use of superposition, see
The Lindbergh Manifesto (May 19, 2015).

Assistance in Vienna

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

The Vienna Review

Beyond Freud’s Playground

In the 38th annual Freud Lecture, Siri Hustvedt
pursues the roots of imaginative exchange from
infancy to the therapist’s couch.

by Stephen Doyle on June 14, 2011

It’s May 6, the 155th anniversary of the birth of
Sigmund Freud. I arrive at the Austrian National Bank
just before 17:30 to attend the 38th annual
Sigmund Freud Lecture, given this year by
American novelist Siri Hustvedt. ….

From this  journal on the date of the above Freud lecture —

The Tummelplatz Thesis

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 am

The following is an excerpt from
"Tummelplatz: Exploring playgrounds for creative
collaborations — A qualitative study of generative
dynamics within temporary work contexts,"

by Emily Moren Aanes and Dragana Trifunović.
(Master's thesis, Oslo, 2013).

Related material: Josefine Lyche in this journal.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Club Life

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 pm

On Ice-Breaking

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

" ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns." — Franz Kafka

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker." — Ogden Nash

Monday, October 26, 2015

Expanding the Seagram Spielraum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:20 pm

From the previous post, Expanding the Spielraum

"The knights and squires of nearby Ambras used to let their
steeds romp here, whence came the name Tummelplatz ." 

— Quelle: Ludwig von Hörmann, "Der Tummelplatz  bei Amras,"
in: Der Alpenfreund , 1. Band, Gera 1870, S. 72 – 73.

"Integrity, Craftsmanship, Tradition"

Expanding the Spielraum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm

(Continued)

Halloween meditation  on  the Tummelplatz  at Innsbruck

"Die Ritter und Knappen des nahegelegenen Ambras
pflegten hier ihre Rosse zu tummeln, woher sich auch
der Name Tummelplatz  schreibt."

"The knights and squires of nearby Ambras used to let their
steeds romp here, whence came the name Tummelplatz ." 

— Quelle: Ludwig von Hörmann, "Der Tummelplatz  bei Amras,"
in: Der Alpenfreund , 1. Band, Gera 1870, S. 72 – 73.

See as well Sigmund Freud, Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten
(1914) —

"Wir eröffnen ihm die Übertragung als den Tummel­platz ,
auf dem ihm gestattet wird, sich in fast völliger Freiheit
zu entfalten, und auferlegt ist, uns alles vorzuführen,
was sich an pathogenen Trieben im Seelenleben des
Analysierten verborgen hat."

"We admit it into the transference as a playground
in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom
and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the
way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind."

This passage has been discussed by later psychotherapists,
notably Russell Meares.  Dr. Meares, working from a translation
that has "playground" for Freud's Tummelplatz , uses Spielraum  
in place of Freud's own word.

For related material in this  journal, see Expanding the Spielraum.
An illustration from that search —

IMAGE- Concepts of Space

Art and Theology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:06 am

Yesterday's nonsense from The New York Times  suggests
a better example of cultural criticism is needed.  Try this 

The opening paragraph of "The many faces of Pablo Picasso,"
by Peter Conrad, at theguardian.com on Saturday,
7 February, 2009, 19.01 EST* —

"Picasso," the surrealist poet Paul Eluard said,
"paints like God or the devil." Picasso favoured
the first option. "I am God," he was once heard
telling himself. He muttered the mantra three
times, boasting of his power to animate and
enliven the visible world. Any line drawn by
his hand pulsed with vitality; when he looked
at it, a bicycle seat and its handlebar could
suddenly turn into the horned head of a bull.
But he also took a diabolical pleasure in
warping appearances, deforming faces and
twisting bodies, subjecting reality to a
tormenting inquisition.

As noted here, yesterday was the birth date (in 1811) of Galois.
It was also the birth date (in 1881) of Picasso.

Related material from the 2009 date* of the Conrad article —
The Log24 post "Childish Things." For those who deeply
dislike Picasso, there is also an 1880 opening illustration 
to Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen

Story the First,
Which Describes a Looking-Glass
and the Broken Fragments

"You must attend to the commencement
of this story, for when we get to the end
we shall know more than we do now about
a very wicked hobgoblin; he was one of the
very worst, for he was a real demon." 

Houghton Mifflin edition of 1880, Riverside Press, Cambridge

Click the above illustration for related posts in this journal.

* Also dated the following day, to correspond to the 00.01 GMT publication
  time of The Guardian 's Sunday version, The Observer , in which it appeared.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Buyers and Sellers of Children

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:45 am

(Continued.)

Featured on this morning's online front page of
The New York Times

Some further details —

An example of New York Times  culture is shown above —

"… Mondrian paintings at the Museum of Modern Art
blend symmetry with a tensile volatility."

(To be fair, this contemptible bullshit is from a picture caption,
not from the art review being summarized.)

Related cultural observations —

Math for Child Buyers  and  Fiction for Child Sellers.

Celtic Cross

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:01 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110714-Michelangelo.jpg

The above illustrations are
from posts tagged
"Universe of Discourse." 

Happy birthday to Évariste Galois, who may
prefer a mathematical, not religious,
interpretation of the above Celtic cross.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Irish Architecture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:18 pm

The Academy Strikes Back

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:14 pm

The previous two posts touched on two academic 
pursuits, mathematics and football.  These are united
in the vesica piscis  symbol. See posts tagged
"Universe of Discourse."

Tightrope

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Two Views of Finite Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:00 am

The following slides are from lectures on “Advanced Boolean Algebra” —

The small Boolean  spaces above correspond exactly to some small
Galois  spaces. These two names indicate approaches to the spaces
via Boolean algebra  and via Galois geometry .

A reading from Atiyah that seems relevant to this sort of algebra
and this sort of geometry —

” ‘All you need to do is give me your soul:  give up geometry
and you will have this marvellous machine.’ (Nowadays you
can think of it as a computer!) “

Related material — The article “Diamond Theory” in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977.  That
article, despite the word “computer” in the journal’s title, was
much less about Boolean algebra  than about Galois geometry .

For later remarks on diamond theory, see finitegeometry.org/sc.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Square Inch Space (Continued*)

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:14 pm

* See "Square Inch Space" in this journal.

Retro or Not?

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

Happy birthday to the late Michael Crichton (Harvard ’64).

See also Diamond Theory Roulette —

Part of the ReCode Project (http://recodeproject.com).
Based on "Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane,
originally published in "Computer Graphics and Art" 
Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977.
Copyright (c) 2013 Radames Ajna 
— OSI/MIT license (http://recodeproject/license).

Related remarks on Plato for Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design

See also posts from the above publication date, March 31,
2006, among posts now tagged “The Church in Philadelphia.”

Flashback

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:15 am

Synchronicity check —

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Zemeckis* meets von Trier**

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:01 pm

* See bottom of previous post, A Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
** Danish film director.

A Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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

Later … (Click to enlarge.)

See as well last night's post Objective Quality.

Objective Quality

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:26 am

Software writer Richard P. Gabriel describes some work of design
philosopher Christopher Alexander in the 1960's at Harvard:

A more interesting account of these 35 structures:

"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between
the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions
of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2)
such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding
triples have exactly one element in common."
— "Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries,"
by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem,
April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6.

For some context, see Eightfold Geometry by Steven H. Cullinane.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Algebra and Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:59 am

"Perhaps an insane conceit …."    Perhaps.

Related remarks on algebra and space —

"The Quality Without a Name" (Log24, August 26, 2015).

Liminal Figures

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

"On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street…."

On an artist who reportedly died last Thursday, October 15 —

See yesterday's post Liminal for a different sort of figure.

Priest Logic for Frodo

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

Elijah Wood in "The Last Witch Hunter" —

See Graham Priest in this journal.

See also Coxeter + Discursive.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Liminal

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 pm

The New York Times  has a readable, if not informative,
review of a recent controversial account of history —

"For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state,
floating somewhere between fact and mythology."

Jonathan Mahler, online Times  on Oct. 15, 2015

[See Wikipedia on Liminality.]

Mahler begins his review with a statement by the President
on the night of May 1, 2011.

A more easily checked statement quoted here  on that date:

"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from
its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt,
whose elements acquire their significance from the
system as a whole."

— Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols , Ithaca, NY,
Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 51, quoted by
Beth Barrie in "Victor Turner."

A Gestalt  from "Verhexung ," the previous post —

Guitart's statement that the above figure is a "Boolean logical cube"
seems, in the words of the Times , to be "floating somewhere
between fact and mythology."  Discuss.

(My apologies to those who feel that attempting to make sense
of Guitart makes them feel like Vin Diesel in the Dreamworld.)

Verhexung

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:04 am

“Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung
unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.”

— Philosophical Investigations  (1953),  Section 109

An example of Verhexung  from the René Guitart article in the previous post

See also Ein Kampf .

Monday, October 19, 2015

Symmetric Generation of the Simple Order-168 Group

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 8:48 pm

This post continues recent thoughts on the work of René Guitart.
A 2014 article by Guitart gives a great deal of detail on his
approach to symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168 —

“Hexagonal Logic of the Field F8 as a Boolean Logic
with Three Involutive Modalities,” pp. 191-220 in

The Road to Universal Logic:
Festschrift for 50th Birthday of
Jean-Yves Béziau, Volume I,

Editors: Arnold Koslow, Arthur Buchsbaum,
Birkhäuser Studies in Universal Logic, dated 2015
by publisher but Oct. 11, 2014, by Amazon.com.

See also the eightfold cube in this journal.

Now and Zen

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

I found today that the following reference to my work —

Steven H. Cullinane.
Geometry of the I Ching. 2006 [text]

— was placed by Anthony Judge in a draft webpage
dated 24 August 2015.

Today's previous Log24 post, Zen and the Art,
suggests some context I prefer to the colorful
remarks of Judge — namely, a Log24 search for

Quality + Pirsig.

See esp. a post from the date of the Judge webpage,
24 August 2015, titled

Quality Report: The Wrench and the Nut.

Zen and the Art

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:40 am

According to René Guitart in May 2008 —

"In fact, in concrete terms, the Mathematical Pulsation  is
nothing else but the thing that everyone does when doing
mathematics, even the most elementary ones. It is a very
special gesture in understanding ('geste de pensée'), well
known by each mathematician. The mind have to go to
and fro between to antinomical postures: to have the
situation under control, to leave the door open. To master
and to fix (a clear unique meaning) or to neglect and to
change (toward other possible meanings). Because of the
similarity of the pulsation of inspiration and expiration in
breath with the pulsation of closing and opening phases
in mathematical thinking, at the end of [Guitart (2003/a)]
I suggested to consider the famous book 'Zen in the Art
of Archery' [Herrigel (1997)] as a true treatise in didactic
of mathematics: just you have to replace everywhere the
words 'archery' by 'mathematical proof'."

Related material: Heisenberg on Beauty and the previous post.

Update of 6:20 AM Oct. 19, 2015 —

„Ich begriff plötzlich, daß in der Sprache oder doch
mindestens im Geist des Glasperlenspiels tatsächlich
alles allbedeutend sei, daß jedes Symbol und jede
Kombination von Symbolen nicht hierhin oder dorthin,
nicht zu einzelnen Beispielen, Experimenten und
Beweisen führe, sondern ins Zentrum, ins Geheimnis
und Innerste der Welt, in das Urwissen. Jeder Übergang
von Dur zu Moll in einer Sonate, jede Wandlung eines
Mythos oder eines Kultes, jede klassische, künstlerische
Formulierung sei, so erkannte ich im Blitz jenes
Augenblicks, bei echter meditativer Betrachtung,
nichts andres als ein unmittelbarer Weg ins Innere
des Weltgeheimnisses, wo im Hin und Wider zwischen
Ein- und Ausatmen, zwischen Himmel und Erde,
zwischen Yin und Yang sich ewig das Heilige vollzieht.“

— Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel.
Berlin:  Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2012. p. 172,
as quoted in a weblog.

For a version in English, see Summa Mythologica (Nov. 3, 2009).

Borromean Generators

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:10 am

From slides dated June 28, 2008

Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —

It seems that Guitart discovered these "A, B, C" generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube.

Some context: The epigraph to my webpage
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168" —

"Let G  be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D) ,
where  is an n-dimensional vector space over the
division ring D . Assume that G  is generated by 'nice'
transformations. The problem is then to try to determine
(up to GL(V) -conjugacy) all possibilities for G . Of course,
this problem is very vague. But it is a classical one,
going back 150 years, and yet very much alive today."

— William M. Kantor, "Generation of Linear Groups,"
pp. 497-509 in The Geometric Vein: The Coxeter Festschrift ,
published by Springer, 1981 

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Shard Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

Story the First,
Which Describes a Looking-Glass
and the Broken Fragments

"You must attend to the commencement
of this story, for when we get to the end
we shall know more than we do now about
a very wicked hobgoblin; he was one of the
very worst, for he was a real demon." 

Houghton Mifflin edition of 1880, Riverside Press, Cambridge

See as well Shard in this journal.

Sunday School

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:30 am

A Unified Field —

The Galois field GF(3)

Click the above image for further details.

See also a search in this journal for Jorie Graham.

Related dramatic dialogue for Emma Stone and 
Joaquin Phoenix, actors in "Irrational Man" —

"Are you  aware of what's going on at that  table?"

Philosophical backstory by Hans Christian Andersen

"He was quite frightened, and he tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer;
but all he could do, he was only able to remember the multiplication table."

Ballet Blanc

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:09 am

For more about the coordinatization problem
of the previous post, see Ballet Blanc .

Coordinatization Problem

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

There are various ways to coordinatize a 3×3 array
(the Chinese "Holy Field'). Here are some —

See  Cullinane,  Coxeter,  and  Knight tour.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Todayland

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:24 pm

Fair Lady (Continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

From "Class of 64 continues " (March 18, 2014) —

"To see a difficult uncompromising material
take living shape and meaning
is to be Pygmalion…." — Ex-Prodigy

No, you are not the only.

Contrapuntal Interweaving

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:28 am

(Continued from day before yesterday.)

"Sondheim's story is a dense contrapuntal interweaving
of four main fairy-tale stories…."

— Vladimir V. Zelevinsky, 1998 review
     in The Tech  at MIT

Related material: "Weaver's Tale" last Sunday,
and the novel Weaveworld  in this journal.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Mira’s Dance

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

"Only in the dance do I know how to tell
the parable of the highest things."
Nietzsche

Table Talk

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

Wisconsin Death Trip…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:12 pm

Continues.

"Claudia Card, an internationally known UW-Madison professor
and a leading expert in the philosophy of evil, died what she
considered a 'good' death…."

Card, 74, died on Sept. 12."

Samara Kalk Derby in Wisconsin State Journal
     on Columbus Day, 2015

See as well a remark by Lorrie Moore in this  journal
on the above death date.

Death on Columbus Day

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

See as well a meditation by Lorrie Moore quoted here
on the feast of St. Luke in 2003.

Related thoughts:  Log24 on Columbus Day, and Plan 9.

Speaking of Birthdays…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:30 am

Knock, Knock, Knockin'
A Scene from "Tomorrowland" —

See August 30, 2002, the day that "Tomorrowland"
actress Raffey Cassidy was born. On that date, this
journal contained the following quotation —

"He's a Mad Scientist and I'm his Beautiful Daughter."
— Deety in Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.

George Clooney and Raffey Cassidy in "Tomorrowland" —

Happy birthday to John Polkinghorne, an English
theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and Anglican priest.

Spoils for Harvard

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:01 am

Nian Hu in The Harvard Crimson  this morning, Oct. 16:

"Hey Harvard, it’s Friday and it’s the weekend again–
though sadly, not another three-day one. On this day
in 1844, Friedrich Nietzsche was born. Remember
his wise words 'That which does not kill us, makes us
stronger' when prepping for midterms this weekend."

A fact check shows that Nietzsche was born yesterday .

A source check shows that the Nietzsche quote is from a book
with alternative title "How to Philosophize with a Hammer."

Click on the image below for related materal.

Epiphany 2014 piece on TV miniseries 'Spoils of Babylon'

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Contrapuntal Interweaving

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

The title is a phrase from R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience .
(Published in the psychedelic year 1967. The later "contrapuntal interweaving"
below is of a less psychedelic nature.)

An illustration of the "interweaving' part of the title —
The "deep structure" of the diamond theorem:

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

The word "symplectic" from the end of last Sunday's (Oct. 11) sermon
describes the "interwoven" nature of the above illustration.

An illustration of the "contrapuntal" part of the title (click to enlarge):

The diamond-theorem correlation

 

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Grammar of Life

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:04 am

This post was suggested in  part by an illustration from Tuesday's
"The Tombstone Source" —

Politically, if not grammatically, correct Columbus Day history
comes from the Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri —

"But armed with guns, steel, and germs,
and driven by the conquistador’s lust for
gold and slaves, the population of the
Americas was decimated."

Oct. 12 blog post by the church's pastor

The Missouri church should not be confused with other
"Word of Life" churches esp. not any now in the news  for
their activities on Monday, Oct. 12, Columbus Day, 2015.

For a related ungrammatical remark, see Schoolboy Problem.

The Tombstone Code

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 am

For Dan Brown enthusiasts, a sequel to the previous post, "The Tombstone Source."

As that post notes, the following symbol is now used as a story-end "tombstone" at
T : The New York Times Style Magazine.  The Times  uses style-sheet code, not
the rarely used unicode character below, to produce the tombstone.

Related material — The novel The Flame Alphabet  by Ben Marcus
that was reviewed in January 2012 by Commentary  magazine :

Fiction, Fiction, Burning Bright

D. G. MYERS / JAN. 19, 2012

Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet 
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
304 pp. $25.95.

According to the Jews, the world begins
with speech. God says, “There is light,”
and so there is light. But what if something
happened — it doesn’t really matter what —
and speech turned lethal?

That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet ,
the third novel by Ben Marcus,
a creative writing professor at Columbia
University….

A much better novel along these lines is Lexicon  (2013) by Max Barry.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The Tombstone Source

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:34 pm

Readings from this afternoon's online New York Times :

THE SOURCE:

<p class="story-body-text story-content"
data-para-count="605" data-total-count="9704" itemprop="articleBody">

The writer Ari Shavit has written that Ein Harod is ‘‘imprinted on every Israeli’s psyche,’’ a microcosm of the Zionist project itself. ‘‘In a sense it is our Source,’’ he writes, ‘‘our point of departure.’’ And yet the often-overlooked museum at its heart is a different kind of symbol, at once more personal and more universal. God may have been banished from Ein Harod, but there, in a humble building on a kibbutz that has seen better days, you experience the Psalmic ideal of being ‘‘enveloped in light,’’ and with it, a reminder of history’s emotional inner life.

<span class="tombstone"><i class="icon"></i></span></p>

STYLE CODE:

Fiction for Child Sellers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:40 am

A sequel to the previous post, "Math for Child Buyers"

Or out .

Math for Child Buyers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:42 am

See also "Child Buyer" in this journal.

Entertainment at Harvard

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:38 am

(Continued from Monday afternoon's "Con Vocation" link.)

From The Harvard Crimson  this morning

"David Black, author and scholar-in-residence
at Kirkland House, entertained a small group
of attendees with a reading of his latest novel
Fast Shuffle  Monday evening in Kirkland’s
Senior Common Room."

From a  Kirkus Reviews  review of Fast Shuffle  last July —

" 'My heritage is of Jewish socialists on one side,' 
Black explains, 'and of Jewish gangsters on the
other side. My great aunt was Polly Adler [the
(in)famous Manhattan madam of the '20s, '30s
and early '40s whose girls entertained some of
the guys from the Algonquin roundtable]. It's a
mix of idealism and gritty practicality. I delight
in both.' "

Non-entertainment from the publication date of Fast Shuffle :

Escape from Dark City

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

The title refers to the 1998 film "Dark City," whose protagonist
seeks an escape to "Shell Beach."

Shell Beach

Another postcard, in memory of album cover art director
John Berg, who reportedly died at 83 on Sunday —

Click album cover for a background story.

See also the Log24 post "Hits" (January 5, 2014).

"Well, she was blinded by the light…"

Monday, October 12, 2015

Space, Time, Matter (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:08 pm

Cool Mystery:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111005-PlancksCafe-CruzEnters.jpg

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

The above images are from a Log24 post of October 5, 2011.

Related material for fans of recreational math and Manil Suri

A book that Amazon.com says was published on that same date —
October 5, 2011 —

Space, Time and Matter 

by Ashay Dharwadker (Author), Vinay Dharwadker  (Author)

Product Details

  • Paperback: 98 pages
  • Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
                       Platform (October 5, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,605,448 in Books 

See as well

Con Vocation  (Log24, Sept. 2, 2014).

Ex Tenebris

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:40 am
 
“By groping toward the light
 we are made to realize
 how deep the darkness
 is around us.”
 
— Arthur Koestler,
   The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
   Random House, 1973,
   page 118

"The Tesseract is where it belongs: out of our reach."

 — Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury,
      quoted here on Epiphany 2013

Earlier (See Jan. 27, 2012)

"And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert."

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Weavers’ Tale

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

"Andersen's weavers, as one commentator points out,
are merely insisting that 'the value of their labor be
recognized apart from its material embodiment.' The
invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in
material terms, but the description of its beauty
('as light as spiderwebs' and 'exquisite') turns it into
one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen's
fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us
do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful
even when it has no material reality."

The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen ,
     edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

See also Symplectic in this journal.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

The Mirror of Understanding

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

From The Snow Queen , by Hans Christian Andersen —

SEVENTH STORY. What Took Place in the Palace of the Snow Queen, and What Happened Afterward

The walls of the palace were of driving snow, and the windows and doors of cutting winds. There were more than a hundred halls there, according as the snow was driven by the winds. The largest was many miles in extent; all were lighted up by the powerful Aurora Borealis, and all were so large, so empty, so icy cold, and so resplendent! Mirth never reigned there; there was never even a little bear-ball, with the storm for music, while the polar bears went on their hindlegs and showed off their steps. Never a little tea-party of white young lady foxes; vast, cold, and empty were the halls of the Snow Queen. The northern-lights shone with such precision that one could tell exactly when they were at their highest or lowest degree of brightness. In the middle of the empty, endless hall of snow, was a frozen lake; it was cracked in a thousand pieces, but each piece was so like the other, that it seemed the work of a cunning artificer. In the middle of this lake sat the Snow Queen when she was at home; and then she said she was sitting in the Mirror of Understanding, and that this was the only one and the best thing in the world.

Little Kay was quite blue, yes nearly black with cold; but he did not observe it, for she had kissed away all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; for the bit of glass which was in his eye caused this. He found whole figures which represented a written word; but he never could manage to represent just the word he wanted–that word was "eternity"; and the Snow Queen had said, "If you can discover that figure, you shall be your own master, and I will make you a present of the whole world and a pair of new skates." But he could not find it out.

"I am going now to warm lands," said the Snow Queen. "I must have a look down into the black caldrons." It was the volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna that she meant. "I will just give them a coating of white, for that is as it ought to be; besides, it is good for the oranges and the grapes." And then away she flew, and Kay sat quite alone in the empty halls of ice that were miles long, and looked at the blocks of ice, and thought and thought till his skull was almost cracked. There he sat quite benumbed and motionless; one would have imagined he was frozen to death. ….

Related material:

This journal on March 25, 2013:

Images of time and eternity in a 1x4x9 black monolith

Epiphany in Paris

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

It's 10 PM …

    

Related material: Adam Gopnik, The King in the Window.

Nonphysical Entities

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

Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 catalog, p. 70 —

" 'Ambassadørene' er fysiske former som presenterer
ikk-fysiske fenomener. "

Translation by Google —

" 'Ambassadors' physical forms presents
nonphysical phenomena. "

Related definition —

Are the "line diagrams" of the diamond theorem and
the analogous "plane diagrams" of the eightfold cube
nonphysical entities? Discuss.

Friday, October 9, 2015

The Heisenberg Bedeutung

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

"… survival, transmission, association,
a strong indifferent persistent order."

— Henry James in The Ambassadors

"You see, you can't please everyone,
so you've got to please yourself." — Rick Nelson

Garden Party

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 pm

The Ambassadors

"The place itself was a great impression—
a small pavilion, clear-faced and sequestered,
an effect of polished parquet, of fine white panel
and spare sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and
rare, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain
and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached
to old noble houses. Far back from streets and
unsuspected by crowds, reached by a long passage
and a quiet court, it was as striking to the unprepared
mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure dug up;
giving him too, more than anything yet, the note of
the range of the immeasurable town and sweeping
away, as by a last brave brush, his usual landmarks
and terms. It was in the garden, a spacious cherished
remnant, out of which a dozen persons had already
passed, that Chad's host presently met them; while
the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the
spring and the weather, and the high party-walls,
on the other side of which grave hôtels  stood off for
privacy, spoke of survival, transmission, association,
a strong indifferent persistent order. The day was so
soft that the little party had practically adjourned to
the open air, but the open air was in such conditions
all a chamber of state. Strether had presently the
sense of a great convent, a convent of missions,
famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young
priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and
chapel-bells, that spread its mass in one quarter;
he had the sense of names in the air, of ghosts at the
windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of
expression, all about him, too thick for prompt
discrimination."

— Henry James, 1909 edition of the 1903 novel

Eightfold Cube in Oslo

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

An eightfold cube appears in this detail 
of a photo by Josefine Lyche of her
installation "4D Ambassador" at the 
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015

Sculpture by Josefine Lyche of Cullinane's eightfold cube at Vigeland Museum in Oslo

(Detail from private Instagram photo.)

Catalog description of installation —

Google Translate version —

In a small bedroom to Foredragssalen populate
Josefine Lyche exhibition with a group sculptures
that are part of the work group 4D Ambassador
(2014-2015). Together they form an installation
where she uses light to amplify the feeling of
stepping into a new dimension, for which the title
suggests, this "ambassadors" for a dimension we
normally do not have access to. "Ambassadors"
physical forms presents nonphysical phenomena.
Lyches works have in recent years been placed
in something one might call an "esoteric direction"
in contemporary art, and defines itself this
sculpture group humorous as "glam-minimalist."
She has in many of his works returned to basic
geometric shapes, with hints to the occult,
"new space-age", mathematics and where
everything in between.

See also Lyche + "4D Ambassador" in this journal and
her website page with a 2012 version of that title.

Cube Design

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

For Aaron Sorkin and Walter Isaacson

Related material — 
Bauhaus CubeDesign Cube, and
Nabokov's Transparent Things .

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Redemption

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

(Continued)

“I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.
 Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”
 — Paul Simon

A portion of the above photo appeared on the cover of
a German edition of a book by the winner of the 2015 Nobel
Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich. The German title, 
Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht , is closer to the Russian
original than is the title of an English translation, War's Unwomanly Face .  
Further book and photo information —

Nobel Title

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:10 pm

Book by Svetlana Alexievich published in English as 'War's Unwomanly Face' and in German as 'Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht'

Oder nicht.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Line for a Cartoon Graveyard

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:27 pm

Continued from the Oct. 1 post Cartoon Graveyard and from
the Aug. 30 post Lines ("Drop me a line.") —

Charlize Theron in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' says 'Redemption.'

A related song  for Imperator Furiosa
may be found in the previous post.

Volk Song

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:12 pm

This post was suggested by
a news item from this afternoon,
"VW Stops the Music."

Onomastic Humor: Seinfeld to Steinfeld

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:05 pm

From "Pitch Perfect 2," Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Junk-Hardon —

"I know what nothing means." — Joan Didion

Monday, October 5, 2015

Boulevard of Broken Punchlines

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:06 pm

Proginoskes

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:31 pm

Click for related material.

Forms that Rhyme:

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:01 am

The 4×4 Latin-Square Structures 

Click image for background.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Rima

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:29 pm

On a professor of literature who reportedly
died on Michaelmas 2015, a remark by his daughter —

“He was really an artist,” she said.

That’s evident in the 60 years Raffel spent contemplating 
how to translate the terza rima  style of Dante Alighieri’s 
The Divine Comedy — speaking of the three-line rhyme 
scheme first used by the author — before he published
a translation of which he was “most proud” in 2010,
his wife said.

It was his final work.

— Lanie Lee Cook, Baton Rouge Advocate

Nicht Spielerei

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:31 pm

(Continued)

Review of a post from August 29th last year:

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Saturday Evening Post

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Numbers

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:25 pm

(A sequel to Letters)

See Page 181 in Source of the Finite (St. Augustine's Day, 2014)

and Page 305 in Lost in Translation (50th Reunion Day, Harvard '64).

Friday, October 2, 2015

Letters

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:28 pm

"The close of trading today will spell a new era for Google
as the search giant becomes a part of new holding company 
Alphabet Inc." — ABC News, 1:53 PM ET today

From an Aug. 10, 2015, letter by Larry Page announcing the change:

Other business philosophy:

Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from
Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano

On Sale: 04/14/2015

A not-so-timeless lesson: a synchronicity check
(of this journal, not of the oeuvre  of Joseph Jaworski) —

04/14/2015 — Sacramental Geometry.

Source Code

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

See a search for Bogus Source in this journal.

That search yields a quotation from poet Wallace Stevens,
whose birthday is today —

"The poet finds that as between these two sources:
the imagination and reality, the imagination is false,
whatever else may be said of it, and reality is true;
and being concerned that poetry should be a thing
of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to
reality, which then becomes his inescapable and
ever-present difficulty and innamorata."

The Return

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:29 pm

The late Brian Friel on Derry —

"… every going away was a wrench 
and every return a fulfilment."

Related material —

Wrench in this journal
and Circle Unbroken.

See as well Hymn (August 30, 2013).

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Another Bad Song for Dave Barry

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:06 pm

"All work and no play…."

— Stanley Kubrick's film (1980) of The Shining  (1977)

"Each metaphor already modeled the modeler
that pasted it together. It seemed I might have
another fiction in me after all."

— Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2  (1995)

"In the space between what happens
And what gets left behind…."

— "Diamond Space" (2006), song by
      Michael Friedman and Sam Masich

Combining, as in a headline from today's Harvard Crimson ,
"programs and public space," we have

Groundhog Day 2014.

Cartoon Graveyard

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:09 pm

(Continued)

The following horrific images —

— were suggested by two pieces I read yesterday in 
     The Harvard Crimson

"On Belonging and 'Steven Universe'" and
"Wise Words from the King."

See also a more realistic daydream, starring Amy Adams,
in the previous post, Ornamental Language.

Ornamental Language

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:26 pm

See Trevanian's Meadow in this journal as well as

"Off the Florida Keys, there's a place called Kokomo."
The Beach Boys, 1988

Harvard’s Science Complex

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:24 am

Utopia or Dystopia?  Discuss.

Related scenes for storyboarders —
See the city in the Amy Adams film "Her."

Midnight Meditation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

See "Number 23" in this journal.

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