A meditation for Cyber Monday —
Impossible Missions Force
International Monetary Fund
Related image —
Cookies for Santa
Monday, November 30, 2015
Chiaroscuro
An image from Log24 on May 21, 2005 —
An image posted here on Saturday, November 28, 2015 —
http://www.martin-missfeldt.de/kontrast/hell-dunkel-kontrast.php
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Sunday, November 29, 2015
There the Dance Is
In memory of ballet designer
Yolanda Sonnabend, who
reportedly died at 80 on Nov. 9,
see posts on Apollo, Ballet Blanc,
maps of New Haven, etc., etc., etc.
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At the Still Point
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Cartography
Related material — Chemistry 101 (November 18, 2015).
See also the cover article from today's print version of
The New York Times Sunday Book Review —
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Saturday, November 28, 2015
11:30 in Dostoevsky
In memory of acoustic engineer Norman C. Pickering, who reportedly
died at 99 on November 18 —
Two readings from that date …
Another biblical quote relevant to the Nov. 17–18 tab icons above —
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Hell-Dunkel
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Friday, November 27, 2015
Once Upon a Matrix
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Einstein and Geometry
(A Prequel to Dirac and Geometry)
"So Einstein went back to the blackboard.
And on Nov. 25, 1915, he set down
the equation that rules the universe.
As compact and mysterious as a Viking rune,
it describes space-time as a kind of sagging mattress…."
— Dennis Overbye in The New York Times online,
November 24, 2015
Some pure mathematics I prefer to the sagging Viking mattress —
Readings closely related to the above passage —
Thomas Hawkins, "From General Relativity to Group Representations:
the Background to Weyl's Papers of 1925-26," in Matériaux pour
l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle: Actes du colloque
à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné, Nice, 1996 (Soc. Math.
de France, Paris, 1998), pp. 69-100.
The 19th-century algebraic theory of invariants is discussed
as what Weitzenböck called a guide "through the thicket
of formulas of general relativity."
Wallace Givens, "Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces," in
Annals of Mathematics Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 2, April 1937,
pp. 355-385.
Tensors (also used by Einstein in 1915) are related to
the theory of line complexes in three-dimensional
projective space and to the matrices used by Dirac
in his 1928 work on quantum mechanics.
For those who prefer metaphors to mathematics —
Rota fails to cite the source of his metaphor.
|
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Thursday, November 26, 2015
Charm School
"When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997,
it was just a year before the universal search engine
Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger,
that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library
and spends hours and hours working her way through
the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to
make a love potion."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Valentine's Day, 2011
More recently, Gopnik writes that …
"Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this
account, almost the way 'Rock Around the Clock'
displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Andrew's Day, 2015
This journal on Valentine's Day, 2011 —
"One heart will wear a valentine." — Sinatra
"… she has written a love letter to Plato, whom
she regards as having given us philosophy.
He is, in her view, as relevant today as he ever
was — which is to say, very."
— New York Times review of a book by
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, April 18, 2014
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Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Once Upon a Time
This post's title was suggested by the previous post
and by today's news of a notable sale of a one-copy
record album, "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin."
See as well posts from Tuesday, March 11, 2014,
the day Emma Watson unveiled a new trailer —
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Arkie
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Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Tools
In memory of economic historian Douglass C. North,
who reportedly died Monday, Nov. 23, 2015 —
“We needed new tools, but they simply did not exist.”
Related reading and viewing —
Beattyville, Kentucky and Log24 post About the People.
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Monday, November 23, 2015
Dirac and Line Geometry
Some background for my post of Nov. 20,
"Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines" —
His earlier paper that Bruins refers to, "Line Geometry
and Quantum Mechanics," is available in a free PDF.
For a biography of Bruins translated by Google, click here.
For some additional historical background going back to
Eddington, see Gary W. Gibbons, "The Kummer
Configuration and the Geometry of Majorana Spinors,"
pages 39-52 in Oziewicz et al., eds., Spinors, Twistors,
Clifford Algebras, and Quantum Deformations:
Proceedings of the Second Max Born Symposium held
near Wrocław, Poland, September 1992 . (Springer, 2012,
originally published by Kluwer in 1993.)
For more-recent remarks on quantum geometry, see a
paper by Saniga cited in today's update to my Nov. 20 post.
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Sunday, November 22, 2015
The Saint
Edith Stein, doctoral dissertation, 1916 —
"The goal of phenomenology is to clarify and thereby
to find the ultimate basis of all knowledge."*
"Ziel der Phänomenologie ist Klärung und damit
letzte Begründung aller Erkenntnis."
* A phrase echoed by Ong's words in the previous post.
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Overlook Video
CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES – OCTOBER 1962:
People watching President John F. Kennedy’s
TV announcement of Cuban blockade during the
missile crisis in a department store. (Photo by
Ralph Crane/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images)
A Sunday opinion column from 2011,
"The Enduring Cult of Kennedy" —
"In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up
like the Overlook Hotel." — Ross Douthat
on November 27, 2011
From this journal on that date —
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Saturday, November 21, 2015
Visionary
Two figures to whom the word "visionary" has
recently been applied —
Paul Laffoley at news.artnet.com
William P. Thurston at AMS Notices (Dec. 2015)
A more classic example of a visionary is, of course, William Blake.
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The Undertaking
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Brightness at Noon*
A recent not-too-bright book from Princeton —
Some older, brighter books from Tony Zee —
Fearful Symmetry (1986) and
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (2003).
* Continued.
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The Zero System
For the title phrase, see Encyclopedia of Mathematics .
The zero system illustrated in the previous post*
should not be confused with the cinematic Zero Theorem .
* More precisely, in the part showing the 15 lines fixed under
a zero-system polarity in PG(3,2). For the zero system
itself, see diamond-theorem correlation.
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Friday, November 20, 2015
Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines
(Continued from November 13)
The work of Ron Shaw in this area, ca. 1994-1995, does not
display explicitly the correspondence between anticommutativity
in the set of Dirac matrices and skewness in a line complex of
PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the 2-element Galois field.
Here is an explicit picture —
References:
Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214
Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986
Shaw, Ron, "Finite Geometry, Dirac Groups, and the Table of
Real Clifford Algebras," undated article at ResearchGate.net
Update of November 23:
See my post of Nov. 23 on publications by E. M. Bruins
in 1949 and 1959 on Dirac matrices and line geometry,
and on another author who gives some historical background
going back to Eddington.
Some more-recent related material from the Slovak school of
finite geometry and quantum theory —
The matrices underlying the Saniga paper are those of Pauli, not
those of Dirac, but these two sorts of matrices are closely related.
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The Wrench and the Circle*
Two Log24 posts from October 2, 2015 —
Source Code
|
* The title is a reference to Quality Report (Aug. 24, 2015).
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Rhymes with Scary
"Gaitskill isn’t scary because she conjures monsters;
monsters, she points out, are almost always in fashion.
What makes her scary, and what makes her exciting,
is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen,
the life we don’t even know we are living. The critic
Greil Marcus, a champion of her work, calls her a
descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne."
— "Mary Gaitskill and the Life Unseen,"
by Parul Sehgal
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Yogi’s Maxim
"When you come to a nexus in the time flow…."
See as well the recent post Tab Icons from the Clearing —
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Thursday, November 19, 2015
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein to Her Younger Self:
"Remember, Genesis IS Skynet."
Above: New York Times Book Review of Sunday, November 22, 2015.
Perhaps Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex , was
"exposed to a nexus point in the time flow while she was in
a quantum field" ?
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For a Fellow of All Souls*
See posts tagged All Souls 2015.
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Highlights of the Dirac-Mathieu Connection
For the connection of the title, see the post of Friday, November 13th, 2015.
For the essentials of this connection, see the following two documents —
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Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Chemistry 101
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Apocalypse Wow (continued)
For fans of the Holy Bible —
“I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant
little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than
anything else in the English language— and it is not because
I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but
because I love the wild power of the language and the purity
of the madness that governs it and makes it music.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Author’s Note, Generation of Swine
(Requoted from White Stone, a Log24 post of March 2, 2005.)
See also the work of another psychopharmacologist
in today's noon post.
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Looney Tune
For the late psychopharmacologist Joel Elkes and
the late songwriter P. F. Sloan —
" Inspired by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
and other events, he wrote 'Eve of Destruction.'
He later said, 'I was arguing with this voice that seemed to
know the future of the world.' "
— Terence McArdle in last night's online Washington Post
See also Tuesday's posts Tab Icons from the Clearing —
— and, later, Meditation on an Icon:
The above image may be viewed
as a midrash on a picture by
the late Dr. Elkes —
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Midnight in the Garden
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Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Meditation on an Icon
Note the "share icon" at top right of the first image
in the previous post:
This suggests a review of the phrase "Outside the Box"
in this journal. An image from that review:
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The Physics and Theology of Building Blocks
Physics:
Theology:
Neither of the above prose passages inspires confidence, since
building blocks are, by their very nature, not infinitesimal.
See the post Being Interpreted of August 14, 2015 —
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Slouching Towards Christmas
From Google News on 17 Nov. 2015
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Tab Icons from the Clearing
"Bostrom has a reinvented man’s sense of lost time.
An only child, he grew up—as Niklas Boström—in
Helsingborg, on the southern coast of Sweden.
Like many exceptionally bright children, he hated
school, and as a teen-ager he developed a listless,
romantic persona. In 1989, he wandered into a library
and stumbled onto an anthology of nineteenth-century
German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer. He read it in a nearby forest, in
a clearing that he often visited to think and to write
poetry, and experienced a euphoric insight into the
possibilities of learning and achievement. 'It’s hard to
convey in words what that was like,' Bostrom told me…."
— Raffi Khatchadourian
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Monday, November 16, 2015
Good Question.
YouTube —
Uploaded on Sep 17, 2009
Who'll love the devil?…
Who'll sing his song?…
Who will love the devil and his song?…
"The pictures are understood to have been taken
just a few minutes before three gunmen burst into
the venue at 9.40pm (8.40pm GMT) as the
Californian rock band were launching into one of
their favourites, Kiss The Devil."
Read more: DailyMail.com.
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The End of the Tour
From this date four years ago —
Click the following image for other examples of "complex style."
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Sunday, November 15, 2015
The Diamond and the Cube
Anyone who clicked on the Dirac search at the end of
the previous post, "Dirac's Diamond," may wonder why the
"Solomon's Cube" post of 11 AM Sunday, March 1, 2009,
appeared in the Dirac search results, since there is no
apparent mention of Dirac in that Sunday post.
<!– See also "a linear transformation of V6… which preserves
the Klein quadric; in this way we arrive at the isomorphism of
Sym(8) withthe full orthogonal group O+(6; 2)." in "The
Classification of Flats in PG(9,2) which are External to the
Grassmannian G1,4,2 Authors: Shaw, Ron;
 Maks, Johannes; Gordon, Neil; Source: Designs,
Codes and Cryptography, Volume 34, Numbers 2-3, February
2005 , pp. 203-227; Publisher: Springer.  For more details,
see "Finite Geometry, Dirac Groups and the Table of Real
Clifford Algebras," by R. Shaw (U. of Hull), pp. 59-99 in
Clifford Algebras and Spinor Structures, by By Albert
Crumeyrolle, Rafał Abłamowicz, Pertti Lounesto,
published by Springer, 1995. –>
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Dirac’s Diamond
The title refers to a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey —
Detail from the above image —
An alternate version from astrophysicist Peter Coles —
See also Dirac in this journal.
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Transfiguration Attempt
"… a certain subgenre of pop-conscious postmodern
fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has
lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure
a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and
television…."
—David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram:
Television and U.S. Fiction" in
The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993
There was no Log24 post in 2015 on the Feast of
the Transfiguration (August 6). I offer instead some
posts from the preceding day —
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Every Picture Tells a Story*
* As does every release date.
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Saturday, November 14, 2015
Space Program
A quote that appeared here on April 14, 2013 —
"I know what 'nothing' means." — Joan Didion
Dirac on the 4×4 matrices of an underlying nothingness —
"Corresponding to the four rows and columns,
the wave function ψ must contain a variable
that takes on four values, in order that the matrices
shall be capable of being multiplied into it."
— P. A. M. Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics,
Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press, 1958,
page 257
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Show and Tell
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The French Connection
(As opposed to the connection of the previous post)
See also Glucksmann in recent Log24 posts.
"The center cannot hold …."
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Friday, November 13, 2015
A Connection between the 16 Dirac Matrices and the Large Mathieu Group
Note that the six anticommuting sets of Dirac matrices listed by Arfken
correspond exactly to the six spreads in the above complex of 15 projective
lines of PG(3,2) fixed under a symplectic polarity (the diamond theorem
correlation ). As I noted in 1986, this correlation underlies the Miracle
Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, hence also the large Mathieu group.
References:
Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214
Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986
Related material:
The 6-set in my 1986 note above also appears in a 1996 paper on
the sixteen Dirac matrices by David M. Goodmanson —
Background reading:
Ron Shaw on finite geometry, Clifford algebras, and Dirac groups
(undated compilation of publications from roughly 1994-1995)—
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Thursday, November 12, 2015
The Unbaked, the Baked, and the Half-Baked
Consider the trichotomy of the title as applied to the paragraph
by Adam Gopnik in the previous post (The Raw, the Cooked,
and the Spoiled).
The following quotation seems to place Gopnik's words
among the half -baked.
"L'axe qui relie le cru et le cuit est caractéristique du passage
à la culture; celui qui relie le cru et le pourri, du retour à la nature,
puisque la cuisson accomplit la transformation culturelle du cru
comme la putréfaction en achève la transformation naturelle."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paroles données, p.54, Plon, 1984,
as quoted in a weblog.
See also Lévi-Strauss's bizarre triangle culinaire (French Wikipedia) —
The source of this structuralist nonsense —
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. “Le triangle culinaire.”
L’Arc no. 26: 19-29.
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The Raw, the Cooked, and the Spoiled
On the late French philosopher André Glucksmann,
a paragraph from The New Yorker —
The style could be overwhelming at times, and was
often a more effective instrument of intellectual
pleasure than political persuasion. But, in return,
it produced a thousand small epiphanies—
for instance, his lovely mordant point, made at length
in one of his books, that between the “raw” and the
“cooked”—the simple binary beloved of structuralism—
there was always the “pourri,” the rotting, the rotten.
Our refusal to take in the rotting as a category of its own
was, he suggested, with a delighted literary grimace,
a kind of moral blindness, part of a fake dialectic that
blinded us to the muddled, rotting truth of the world.
The real world was not composed of oscillating
dialectical forces; it was composed of actual suffering
people crushed between those forces. — Adam Gopnik
See also …
Click the above image for some backstory.
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Will Success Spoil Jenny Wells?
"… ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns." — Franz Kafka
Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post yesterday on the late actress Betsy Drake —
" She also wrote a novel, Children, You Are Very Little (1971),
about a 10-year-old girl who goes to outrageous comic lengths
to defy the mean adults in her life and unite her broken family.
A Time magazine reviewer praised its 'flair and ferocity.'
'Adults demand that children understand what they’re trying to say,'
Ms. Drake remarked at the time, 'but too often they interpret a child’s
most serious moments as stupid or cute or funny. So children, in
self-defense, learn to play for the laugh. It’s a style of craziness,
a style of survival, a style of distancing. I learned this style as a child
but I’m not really impressed with my comic or ironic side. I’d much
rather write straight out of despair.' "
The New York Times in 2014 on Drake's friend, painter Bernard Perlin —
" His early gallery work reflected the realist influence of Ben Shahn,
who had been a colleague at the United States Office of War Information
in 1942 and 1943. Perhaps Mr. Perlin’s most notable work from this period
is 'Orthodox Boys,' from 1948, which depicts two Jewish boys discussing
a Jewish text in front of a wall covered with graffiti. "
Midrash for Perlin —
See this morning's previous post on two un-orthodox Jewish boys and an
un-orthodox text.
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For Bernstein and Horowitz
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Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Footnote
See a footnote added to a post from yesterday
for some material found today.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2015
The Hookup
"Language is about the world— we use it to communicate
about things. So we must ask what this 'aboutness' is:
what is it and how does it work? That is, how does language
manage to hook up with reality?"
— Colin McGinn in Philosophy of Language :
The Classics Explained , MIT Press, Jan. 16, 2015,
as quoted by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
in The New York Review of Books , Oct. 8, 2015
See also a Harvard Crimson review of another book by McGinn.
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Exit the Chancellor
"The office of Chancellor has a long history…." — Wikipedia
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Princeton Symmetry
From this journal nine years ago today, on the
anniversary of Stanley finding Livingstone —
Click on the image for the Princeton connection.
Related art — Search Log24 for Time + Eternity.
See as well the theater producer pictured in last night's post
and a Princeton-related* review of one of his productions.
Footnote of November 11, 2015:
* Related, that is, only by the "Princeton connection" mentioned above.
For another Princeton connection of interest, see a symposium at
Princeton University on May Day, 2015 —
THE PEDAGOGY OF IMAGES:
DEPICTING COMMUNISM FOR CHILDREN
A sample symposium participant:
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Somewhat Mysterious
This post was suggested by an obituary of a Polish painter from this
morning's online New York Times that mentions Stanislaw Zamecznik.
Zamecznik's granddaughter Marianne Zamecznik discusses
him in a note on an exhibition in Sweden that took place on
Nov. 19, 2012 —
"Since 2009 I have been working with the legacy left behind
by my grandfather, Stanislaw Zamecznik, a Polish exhibition
architect, whom I never met, but that was always present,
that dear ghost, both through my father and grandmother`s
accounts, and by his somewhat mysterious standing in the
Polish avant-garde history."
See also Marianne Zamecznik in this journal and two posts
from the above exhibition date, Nov. 19, 2012.
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Monday, November 9, 2015
The Forever Now
The title is that of a recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition —
The Forever Now :
Contemporary Painting
in an Atemporal World
December 14, 2014 – April 5, 2015
Related art —
Click the above image for its occurrences in this journal.
Whether this image has, in art critic Peter Schjeldahl's words,
"symbolic force and function," the reader may decide.
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A Particular Mind
"The old, slow art of the eye and the hand, united in service
to the imagination, is in crisis. It’s not that painting is 'dead'
again—no other medium can as yet so directly combine
vision and touch to express what it’s like to have a particular
mind, with its singular troubles and glories, in a particular
body. But painting has lost symbolic force and function in a
culture of promiscuous knowledge and glutting information."
— Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker ,
issue dated Jan. 5, 2015
Cover of a 1980 book on computer music that contains a
helpful article on Walsh functions —
See, in this book, "Walsh Functions: A Digital Fourier Series,"
by Benjamin Jacoby (BYTE , September 1977). Some context:
Symmetry of Walsh Functions.
Excerpts from a search for Steve + Jobs in this journal —
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Sunday, November 8, 2015
Sermon
The box at the end of this morning's Sunday School post contains
a footnote by one "Charles Townsend Harrison, art historian and
critic, born 11 February 1942; died 6 August 2009."
For some religious remarks from the reported date of Harrison's
death, see the Log24 posts of 6 August 2009.
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Saturday, November 7, 2015
The Painted Word (Illustrated)
Related material:
- The Painted Word (1975), by Tom Wolfe (a search in this journal)
-
"Big Ideas: A Frank Stella Retrospective," by Peter Schjeldahl
in The New Yorker dated Nov. 9, 2015 (pp. 84-85).
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Clarifying Dyson
The previous post quoted a passage from Turing's Cathedral ,
a 2012 book by George Dyson —
It should be noted that Dyson's remarks on "two species of
bits," space, time, "structure and sequence" and logic gates
are from his own idiosyncratic attempt to create a philosophy
based on the workings of computers. These concepts are not,
so far as I can tell, part of anyone else's approach to the subject.
For a more standard introduction to how computers work, see
(for instance) a book by an author Dyson admires:
The Pattern on the Stone , by W. Daniel Hillis (Basic Books, 1998).
PREFACE: MAGIC IN THE STONE
I etch a pattern of geometric shapes onto a stone.
To the uninitiated, the shapes look mysterious and
complex, but I know that when arranged correctly
they will give the stone a special power, enabling it
to respond to incantations in a language no human
being has ever spoken. I will ask the stone questions
in this language, and it will answer by showing me a
vision: a world created by my spell, a world imagined
within the pattern on the stone.
A few hundred years ago in my native New England,
an accurate description of my occupation would have
gotten me burned at the stake. Yet my work involves
no witchcraft; I design and program computers. The
stone is a wafer of silicon, and the incantations are
software. The patterns etched on the chip and the
programs that instruct the computer may look
complicated and mysterious, but they are generated
according to a few basic principles that are easily
explained. . . . .
Hillis's title suggests some remarks unrelated to computers —
See Philosopher + Stone in this journal.
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Friday, November 6, 2015
Girard’s Transition
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Thursday, November 5, 2015
ABC Art or: Guitart Solo
“… the A B C of being….” — Wallace Stevens
Scholia —
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.” — Borromean Generators (Log24, Oct. 19)
See also Raiders of the Lost Crucible (Halloween 2015)
and “Guitar Solo” from the 2015 CMA Awards on ABC.
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Lyrics
“And I slept in last night’s clothes and tomorrow’s dreams
But they’re not quite what they seem.”
— Lyrics to "Uma Thurman," by Fall Out Boy
(Sung at CMA Awards last night)
"Does an empty vessel stop making most noise
once filled only with hopes and dreams?"
— Comment at Not Even Wrong this morning
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Explicit and Constructive
As opposed to implicit and destructive?
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The Monster
In memory of Princeton mathematician John Nash
"For the past six years all over the world
experts in the branch of abstract algebra
called group theory have been struggling
to capture a group known as the monster."
—Martin Gardner, Scientific American , June 1980
"When the Hawkline Monster moved to get a better view
of what was happening, the shadow, after having checked
all the possibilities of light, had discovered a way that it
could shift itself in front of the monster, so that the monster
at this crucial time would be blinded by darkness for a few
seconds, did so, causing confusion to befall the monster.
This was all that the shadow could do and it hoped that this
would give Greer and Cameron the edge they would need
to destroy the Hawkline Monster using whatever plan they
had come up with, for it seemed that they must have a plan
if they were to have any chance at all with the monster and
they did not seem like fools.
When Cameron yelled at Greer, the shadow interpreted this
as the time to move and did so. It obscured the vision of the
Hawkline Monster for a few seconds, knowing full well that if
the monster were destroyed it would be destroyed, too, but
death was better than going on living like this, being a part of
this evil."
— Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster , 1974
From the post For Scientific Witch Hunters of October 30,
an illustration from The Boston Globe —
From the post Colorful Story (All Souls' Day),
an Illustration from Google Book Search —
Earlier in Brautigan's tale …
" Everybody started to leave the parlor to go downstairs
and pour out the Hawkline Monster but just as
they reached the door and one of the Hawkline women
had her hand on the knob, Cameron said, 'Hold it for a
second. I want to get myself a little whiskey.' "
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Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Group Theory at Princeton
This is from the program of
Finite Simple Groups: Thirty Years of the Atlas and Beyond —
Celebrating the Atlases and Honoring John Conway
November 2-5, 2015 at Princeton University
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Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Philosophy with a Hammer
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation— the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X."
— Wallace Stevens,
"The Motive for Metaphor" (1947)
See also a search in this journal for Philosophy Hammer.
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Logic at Harvard
A review of the Log24 posts on Oct. 29, 2015,
yields the following image relevant to remarks at
the Harvard Graduate School of Design yesterday:
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Branding at Harvard
From the Harvard Graduate School of Design's introduction
to a lecture on All Souls' Day 2015 —
"Calvin Klein is an award-winning fashion icon.
He is recognized globally as a master of minimalism
and has spent his career distilling things to
their very essence. His name ranks among the
best-known brands in the world, with Calvin Klein, Inc.
reaching over seven billion dollars in global retail sales."
A Klein icon I prefer —
Click the above image for some backstory.
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Monday, November 2, 2015
Logic at Noon
Scientific American photo caption —
"Monday, November 2, marks the 200-year anniversary
of the birth of the man who put True/False, 0/1, and
AND/OR and NOT on the map."
See Hardegree's Symbolic Logic on "and/or" and its purported use
"to avoid ambiguity in legal contracts." His book is NOT recommended.
See also Bryan Garner in the ABA Journal on "and/or" in legal usage,
as well as a post in this journal, The Witch of And/Or.
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The Devil’s Offer
This is a sequel to the previous post and to the Oct. 24 post
Two Views of Finite Space. From the latter —
” ‘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!) “
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Colorful Story
"The office of color in the color line
is a very plain and subordinate one.
It simply advertises the objects of
oppression, insult, and persecution.
It is not the maddening liquor, but
the black letters on the sign
telling the world where it may be had."
— Frederick Douglass, "The Color Line,"
The North American Review , Vol. 132,
No. 295, June 1881, page 575
Or gold letters.
From a search for Seagram in this journal —
"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
— Martin Gardner on the death of Évariste Galois
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Sunday, November 1, 2015
Transitions
Two transitions from last Monday, Oct. 26, 2015,
according to the online New York Times today —
|
Leo P. Kadanoff, a physicist who provided critical insights into the transformations of matter from one state to another, died last Monday in Chicago. He was 78. The cause was respiratory failure, said the University of Chicago, where he was a professor from 1978 until his retirement in 2003. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he received the National Medal of Science in 1999. “He won basically every prize except the Nobel Prize, and many people thought he should have won the Nobel,” said Emil Martinec, a physics professor at the University of Chicago who directs the university’s Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics. Dr. Kadanoff’s biggest scientific contribution came in the 1960s as scientists were trying to understand phase transitions, when matter changes from one form to another. A Cornell chemist, Benjamin Widom, had come up with mathematical relationships that described behavior associated with second-order phase transitions, which include the boiling of water to steam at a particular temperature and pressure. But Dr. Widom did not have an underlying physical explanation for why these relationships existed. |
Willis Carto, a reclusive behind-the-scenes wizard of the far-right fringe of American politics who used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust, died last Monday at his home in Virginia. He was 89. His death was announced by The American Free Press, a newspaper he helped found. Mr. Carto raised funds to finance a right-wing military dictatorship in the United States, campaigned to persuade blacks to voluntarily return to Africa and, most influentially, started newsletters, a journal and conferences of academics and others to deny the scale, and even the existence, of the Holocaust. The Anti-Defamation League called him “one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists” and “the mastermind of the hate network.” His associates included neo-Nazis, Christian vigilantes, John Birch Society members and Ku Klux Klansmen, and his extreme views alienated mainstream conservatives. After William F. Buckley sued Mr. Carto for libel and won in 1985, Mr. Buckley said Mr. Carto epitomized “the fever swamps of the crazed right.’’ |
Related remarks:
Posts tagged "Steam," the post "On Ice-Breaking" from Oct. 27,
the post "Expanding the Seagram Spielraum" from Oct. 26, and
a 2008 article on the subject of the obituary at right above.
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Sermon for All Saints’ Day
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Double Consciousness
A check of the New York Times 's version of the
philosophers' stone yields…
"And as Du Bois, a student of Hegel’s, reminds us,
the one who is in the dominated position is aware
of the perspective of the master: She is conscious
of herself as being seen by the other. It is this
double-consciousness that we must learn to understand."
— Seyla Benhabib, quoted by the Times
on Oct. 29, 2015, 3:30 AM ET
A check of Benhabib's words yields…
"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one's self through
the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape
of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
That, for example, looks on Harvard in amused contempt and pity…
See Con Vocation.
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