Log24

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Damnation Morning*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 am

Elemental square by John Opsopaus from 'The Rotation of the Elements'

* See references in this journal to the classic Fritz Leiber story.

Women’s History Month

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:45 am

Devil’s Gate Revisited

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

The revisiting, below, of an image shown here in part
on Spy Wednesday, 2016, was suggested in part by
a New York Times  obituary today for a Nobel-prize
winning Hungarian novelist. 

Note the references on the map to 
"Devil's Gate" and "Pathfinder."

See also the following from a review of The Pathseeker , a novel 
by the Nobel laureate (Imre Kertész), who reportedly died today —

The commissioner is in fact not in search of a path, but rather of traces of the past (more literally the Hungarian title means ‘trace seeker’). His first shock comes at his realization that the site of his sufferings has been converted into a museum, complete with tourists “diligently carrying off the significance of things, crumb by crumb, wearing away a bit of the unspoken importance” (59). He meets not only tourists, however. He also comes across paradoxically “unknown acquaintances who were just as much haunted by a compulsion to revisit,” including a veiled woman who slowly repeats to him the inventory of those she lost: “my father, my younger brother, my fiancé” (79). The commissioner informs her that he has come “to try to redress that injustice” (80). When she asks how, he suddenly finds the words he had sought, “as if he could see them written down: ‘So that I should bear witness to everything I have seen’” (80).

The act of bearing witness, however, proves elusive. In the museum he is compelled to wonder, “What could this collection of junk, so cleverly, indeed all too cleverly disguised as dusty museum material, prove to him, or to anyone else for that matter,” and adds the chilling observation, “Its objects could be brought to life only by being utilized” (71). As he touches the rust-eaten barbed wire fence he thinks, “A person might almost feel in the mood to stop and dutifully muse on this image of decay – were he not aware, of course, that this was precisely the goal; that the play of ephemerality was merely a bait for things” (66). It is this play of ephemerality, the possibility that the past will be consigned to the past, against which the commissioner struggles, yet his struggle is frustrated precisely by the lack of resistance, the indifference of the objects he has come to confront. “What should he cling on to for proof?” he wonders. “What was he to fight with, if they were depriving him of every object of the struggle? Against what was he to try and resist, if nothing was resisting?” (68) He had come with the purpose of “advertis[ing] his superiority, celebrat[ing] the triumph of his existence in front of these mute and powerless things. His groundless disappointment was fed merely by the fact that this festive invitation had received no response. The objects were holding their peace” (109). 

In point of fact The Pathseeker  makes no specific mention either of the Holocaust or of the concentration camps, yet the admittedly cryptic references to places leave no doubt that this is its subject. Above the gate at the camp the commissioner’s wife reads the phrase, “Jedem das Seine,” to each his due, and one recalls the sign above the entrance to the camp at Buchenwald. Further references to Goethe as well as the Brabag factory, where Kertész himself worked as a prisoner, confirm this. Why this subterfuge on the part of the author? Why a third-person narrative with an unnamed protagonist when so many biographical links tie the author to the story? One cannot help but wonder if Kertész sought specifically to avoid binding his story to particulars in order to maintain the ultimately metaphysical nature of the quest. Like many of Kertész’s works,The Pathseeker  is not about the trauma of the Holocaust itself so much as the trauma of survival. The self may survive but the triumph of that survival is chimerical.

Translator Tim Wilkinson made the bold decision, in translating the title of the work, not to resort to the obvious. Rather than simply translate Nyomkereső , an allusion to the Hungarian translation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder , back into English, he preserves an element of the unfamiliar in his title. This tendency marks many of the passages of the English translation, in which Wilkinson has opted to preserve the winding and often frustratingly serpentine nature of many of the sentences of the original instead of rewriting them in sleek, familiar English.  . . .

— Thomas Cooper

"Sleek, familiar English" —

"Those were the good old days!" — Applegate in "Damn Yankees"
(See previous post.)

Applegate

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

For the title, see a post of Dec. 20, 2015.

See also "Damn Yankees."

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

All in the Timing

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 pm

This evening's New York Times Wire  reports a death on Good Friday

Cf.  Yankee Puzzle.

Shell Game

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:11 pm

Continued from August 21, 2007

Romanesque

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:20 pm

From New York Times  obituary
of Ellsworth Kelly by Holland Cotter —

"The anonymous role of
the Romanesque church artist
remained a model."

See as well 

Note the contradiction between the URL date (last Monday's)
and the printed date below it (that of Epiphany 2016).
 

Who's trolling whom?

Hungarian Algorithm

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

“Of all the Hungarian friends I’ve ever had
I can’t remember one who didn’t want me to think of him
as a king of con men.”

” ‘The omelet, you know that, don’t you? Sure. It’s a classic.
An omelet, it’s in our Hungarian cookbook.
“To make an omelet,” it says “first, steal an egg.” ‘ ”

— Orson Welles, in his last completed film.

See also Lovasz in this journal.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Rivalry

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

See also In Memoriam, a post of March 27, 2016.

The Robin Wright at right above is the author, not the actress.

Mr. Amoroso

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 pm

"When Mr. Amoroso made the announcement about Yahoo!’s
new CEO, he said, The Board of Directors unanimously agreed
that Marissa’s unparalleled track record in technology, design,
and product execution makes her the right leader for Yahoo!
at this time of enormous opportunity.” — John Mattone yesterday

See as well Something in the Way She Moves, which links to
Master Class. Another amoroso  story:  Oja Kodar and Picasso
in Orson Welles's last completed film.

The Forest Path to the Spring*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

* Title courtesy of Malcolm Lowry.

The Sudden Inkling

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 pm

In memory of "a cultural icon" —

Walker Percy's chapter on 'The Delta Factor' from 'Message in the Bottle'

Click image to enlarge.

Monday, March 28, 2016

Easter, 2016

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

"Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all."
— "Easter, 1916"

A Philosophers' Stone
St. Patrick's Day, 2016

Legends of the Spring

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

" All changed, changed utterly …." — Yeats, "Easter, 1916"

De Trinitate

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Review

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

Huber-Dyson's Dec. 1981 review of Hofstadter's 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'

See also Krapp in this  journal.

Easter Music

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:27 pm

. . . .

Savagery 101

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:01 pm
From Bloomberg.com

Beyond the First Slide

“It wasn’t unusual for presenters to fail to make it beyond the first slide before having their carefully prepared presentation ripped to shreds. The process was constructive savagery: It helped make Intel the world’s largest chipmaker, a distinction it still holds, a decade after Grove retired. ‘If you were to pick one person who built Silicon Valley, it was Andy,’ said Marc Andreessen, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist, during a 2015 Churchill Club award presentation. ‘Andy kind of set the model for what a high-quality Silicon Valley company should be.'”

See also Two Views of Finite Space.

In Memoriam

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 am

Slavik Jablan, a writer on symmetry.

A post from the date of his death —

See as well a post from yesterday and Fearful Princeton.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Holy Saturday at Princeton

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:37 pm

The Princeton reference in the previous post suggests
a check of today's  online Daily Princetonian. This yields

Related material:  Library of Hell.

Speaking in Tongues

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:35 pm

Two related Log24 posts —

Feynman on Science and Religion

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:21 pm

Or:  "Lunch at the Y."

“Voice of the Shuttle”*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

* For the title, see the "space" link in A Fixed Feast (a post
  from Monday, March 21, the date of Ebeling's death).

Story Idea

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:24 am

From last evening's online New York Times

"Mr. Hamner moved to California in 1962
and got his first break when 'The Twilight Zone'
accepted two of his story ideas. His eight scripts
for the series included 'The Hunt,' about a man
who is dead but does not realize it until his hunting
dog prevents him from wandering into hell . . . ."

— William Grimes

Hamner reportedly died on Thursday, March 24.
See this journal on that date.

Crucible, Cauldron, Whatever

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

Readings for the morning of Holy Saturday —

Crucible,  Cauldron,  Whatever.

Friday, March 25, 2016

Ex Tenebris

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Pleasantly Discursive

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

Toronto geometer H.S.M. Coxeter, introducing a book by Unitarian minister
Richard J. Trudeau —

"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate’s
unanswered question ‘What is truth?’”

— Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Trudeau’s
     The Non-Euclidean Revolution

Another such treatment

"Of course, it will surprise no one to find low standards
of intellectual honesty on the Tonight Show.

But we find a less trivial example if we enter the
hallowed halls of Harvard University. . . ."

— Neal Koblitz, "Mathematics as Propaganda"

Less pleasantly and less discursively —

"Funny how annoying a little prick can be."
— The late Garry Shandling

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Truth in 1984

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:36 pm

"The theory of elliptic curves and modular forms is
one subject where the most diverse branches
of mathematics come together: complex analysis,
algebraic geometry, representation theory, number theory."

— Neal Koblitz, first sentence of 
Introduction to Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms,
First Edition, Springer-Verlag, 1984

Related material —

A quote co-authored by Koblitz appears in today's
earlier post The Wolf Gang.

See also The Proof and the Lie.

Maryna Viazovska's course on elliptic curves and modular forms used the Koblitz text.

Many Dimensions…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

For Women's History Month —

The Nervous Set*

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

The previous post suggests a review of the saying
"There is  such a thing as a 4-set."

* Title of a 1959 musical

The Wolf Gang

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

A tune for Tarantino —

"Spring can really hang you up the most."
— 1955 song lyric by Fran Landesman

Fran Landesman and Larry Hagman atop a piano, with
Tommy Wolf at the piano and Richard Hayes at right. (1959)

Related Tarantino films:  Death Proof and The Hateful Eight.

Log24 on the date of Landesman's death

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Requiem for an Actress

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

The New York Times  this evening on the late Rita Gam:

"After generally being typecast in supporting roles
in two dozen films for what Life described as
'her sultry face and insinuating voice,' she recalled
in 1992, 'I looked into the black pit at 40 and
wondered, what do I do for an encore?' "

See also Sidney Lumet in this journal as well as
"Some cartoon graveyards are better than others."

The Play’s the Thing

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 pm

Meanwhile…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:16 pm

For the Sweet Dave* Chair of Theology

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

From a post of August 3, 2013

Note, on the map of  Wyoming, Devil's Gate.

There are, of course, many such gates.

* A character from the recent film "The Hateful Eight."

Lottery Hermeneutics

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:29 am

(Continued)

The New York Lottery numbers yesterday evening:
897 and 3454. See the corresponding Log24 posts.

Related material: Moloney (op. cit.), pp. 91 and 92.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

The Green Night

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

A search from the previous post (The Zero Obit) yields
two lines from Wallace Stevens that are echoed as follows

"That elemental parent, the green night,
Teaching a fusky alphabet."

See also this journal on St. Patrick's Day 2016.

The Zero Obit

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

From St. Patrick's Day 2016 —

Solomon Marcus obituary

See also posts mentioning
Terry Gilliam's film "The Zero Theorem."

The Barth Spielfeld

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:23 pm

For some backstory, search Log24 for "Wolf Barth."

The Toronto Problem

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

A search in this  journal for "Toronto Star" yields A Problem.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Intel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:16 pm

"Intel announced today that the company’s former CEO
and Chairman Andrew S. Grove, who was born in Hungary
as András István Gróf, died today at age 79."

See also Intel in this journal.

A Fixed Feast

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:08 pm

See as well some posts related in time and in space.

Pitch

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:25 pm

A search for "Wordsworth" in this  journal yields
an image from "The Edge of Eternity," a post of
Sunday, Christmas Eve, 2006 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061224-NYT-Latshaw.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Cut Short: Requiem for a Frankfurter

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:22 pm

Just a lying rhyme for seven!
— Playwright Tom Stoppard on Heaven

" 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy!' wrote William Wordsworth, one of Geoffrey Hartman’s beloved Romantics….

For Hartman, in 2010 proclaimed by his Yale colleague Paul Fry to be 'arguably the finest Wordsworth critic who has ever written,' those lines from 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' must have been especially bittersweet. His own childhood had been cut short; born in Frankfurt in 1929…."

— "Remembering Geoffrey Hartman —
Wordsworthian, Critic and Holocaust Scholar,"
by Talya Zax today at Forward.com

Trophy

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

From the 1984 New Orleans film Tightrope

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110615-EastwoodFootball400w.jpg

This post was suggested by the late Yale literary critic
Geoffrey Hartman, who reportedly died on March 14.

" 'Interpretation is like a football game,' Professor Hartman
wrote in 'The Voice of the Shuttle,' a 1969 essay." 

A 2016 obituary by Margalit Fox

Sunday, March 20, 2016

The Fox Passion

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:21 pm

Where

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

"Where indeed might the literary scholar expect to find, 
if not in literature, the measure  of modern thought?"

— "Ruins of the Ogdoad," by Michael Keefer

"Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate, Nine is a Vine."

— Mnemonic rhyme; author anonymous

Saturday, March 19, 2016

To Sum It

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 pm

"To sum it all up I see mathematical activity as
a jumping ahead and then plodding along
to chart a path by rational toil."

Verena Huber-Dyson, Feb. 15, 1998

"VERENA HUBER-DYSON, mathematician and logician,
died yesterday [March 12, 2016] in Bellingham, Washington,
at the age of 92. She was Emeritus Professor of the 
Philosophy Department, University of Calgary, Alberta."

—   John Brockman at edge.org, March 13, 2016

Some posts from earlier this month are related to mathematical
activity, Bellingham, jumping ahead, and plodding along:

"The process of plodding is being analyzed by proof theory,
a prolific branch of meta mathematics. Still riddled with questions
is the jumping." — Huber-Dyson, loc. cit.

Still riddled — "Why IS a raven like a writing desk?"

The Logorium of Doctor Parnassus*

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

Triple Cross logo

Click image for further details.

* Title adapted from a film released on Jan. 8, 2010.
   See also this journal on that date.

Two-by-Four

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:27 am

For an example of "anonymous content" (the title of the
previous post), see a search for "2×4" in this journal.

A 2x4 array of squares

Anonymous Content*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

See Anonymous in this journal.

* For the origin of the title, see the previous post.

Friday, March 18, 2016

The Stone…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 pm

of  Woody Allen's  philosopher

"Deadline reports that Stone is finalizing a deal
to star in Maniac , a 30-minute television series with
her former Superbad  castmate Jonah Hill.
The project, a dark comedy, will be directed by 
True Detective  alum Cary Fukunaga and is based
on a 2014 Norwegian series about a mental-institution
patient living out a fantasy life in his dreams."

Vanity Fair  today

See as well the previous post and Jews Telling Stories.

Update of 11:07 PM ET —

From Variety  today — "Hill and Stone would also make their
TV producing debut as the two stars are attached to exec produce
with  Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar and Doug Wald …."

"The problem is having a solid business plan and knowing what
you're doing, whether it's a movie, a TV series or a company."
Steve Golin in The Hollywood Reporter , Sept. 4, 2013

On the Way to KUNSTforum…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:48 pm

A Not-So-Funny Thing Happened.

See a post on KUNSTforum from the Ides of March.

Related news from the Ides of March —

… and Chill.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:26 pm

(Continued)

"Look, I come here today not to praise Trump,
but to bury the GOP Establishment."

John Hayward at Breitbart.com today

Southwestern Noir

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Kyle Smith on April 15, 2015, in the New York Post —

"The ludicrous action thriller 'Beyond the Reach'
fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency
of 'No Country for Old Men,' but there’s no denying
it brings to mind another Southwestern classic
about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons."

See also ….

Weimar, Baby!*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:42 pm

Happy birthday to composer John Kander, who turns 89 today.

NPR MUSIC INTERVIEWS

Broadway Composer John Kander Reflects On
A Career Of 'Hidden Treasures'

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, composer John Kander, along with his longtime lyricist, the late Fred Ebb, wrote the songs for the Broadway shows "Cabaret," "Chicago," "Flora The Red Menace," "Kiss Of The Spider Woman" and "The Scottsboro Boys," as well as the songs for Martin Scorsese's 1977 film "New York, New York." The title song was a big hit for Frank Sinatra.

GROSS: …. John Kander, what impact did writing the songs for "Cabaret" have on you as a secular Jew because it's— you know, it's set in Germany as the Nazis are coming to power.

KANDER: I don't think I ever thought about that. I think I thought about it [as] a piece of theater. So

* See Noonan Weimar in this journal.

Blinded by the Light

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 pm

See Asbury Park in this journal.

"Oh, some hazard from Harvard was skunked on beer…."

Thursday, March 17, 2016

The Frankfurter Legacy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:38 pm

Detail of images from this evening's Harvard Crimson
(click for a wider view) —

Click either image below for some backstory.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041215-Frankfort.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen form the Bud Light Party in 2016 Super Bowl commercial

On the Eightfold Cube

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

The following page quotes "Raiders of the Lost Crucible,"
a Log24 post from Halloween 2015.

Discussion of Cullinane's eightfold cube as exhibited by Josefine Lyche at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo

From KUNSTforum.as, a Norwegian art quarterly, issue no. 1 of 2016.

Related posts — See Lyche Eightfold.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

RIP

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

A post at 1 PM last Sunday had a link to the above image.

In Nomine

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:48 pm

Harvey’s Wake

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

See Supercomputer Blood Flow and
an American Physical Society talk.

See also Harvey Court and Adam's Eve.

The Old Philosopher of Cambridge

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 pm

A Log24 post yesterday was titled
"To an Old Philosopher in Cambridge."
This  post is about one such philosopher,
the current president of Harvard University.

From May 2015 —

" 'When I publicly engage on an issue, it elevates it,' 
Faust said in an interview this month. 'So I want to
be very careful of how I use my voice ….'

In 2007, Faust put her philosophy more succinctly.
Referencing Harvard Business School professor
Michael E. Porter, Faust told the New York Times
that she often considers the mantra 'strategy is
what you don’t do.' "

The Harvard Crimson  on May 28, 2015

This  journal on May 28, 2015 —

Tell

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:07 AM 

See as well Jews on Fiction.

Related material —  Michael Porter: The Great and Powerful.

The Crucible Continues

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:12 pm

Related material:  "Crucible" in this  journal.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

15 Projective Points Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:59 pm

A March 10, 2016, Facebook post from KUNSTforum.as,
a Norwegian art quarterly —

Article on Josefine Lyche's Vigeland Museum exhibit, which included Cullinane's eightfold cube

Click image above for a view of pages 50-51 of a new KUNSTforum 
article showing two photos relevant to my own work — those labeled
"after S. H. Cullinane."

(The phrase "den pensjonerte Oxford-professoren Stephen H. Cullinane"
on page 51 is almost completely wrong. I have never been a professor,
I was never at Oxford, and my first name is Steven, not Stephen.)

For some background on the 15 projective points at the lower left of
the above March 10 Facebook post, see "The Smallest Projective Space."

… and Chill

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

(Continued)

On the 2016 film 'Sausage Party'

Related comedy for Saturday Night Live fans,
from a March 12 Washington Post  story

Tweet on 'Sausage Fest' chant'

To an Old Philosopher in Cambridge

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 am

Continued from The New York Times  of Sunday, January 15, 1989

A sequel:  Rapid Transit

Click on the RAPID TRANSIT sign for a post of September 28, 2009.

The Final Word

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

From a review of Romanticism and Its Discontents , 
a book by the late Anita Brookner — 

"Despite a novelist like Zola, who personified
'Romanticism as energy,' the final word is given
to the 'constitutionally depressed' critic Sainte-Beuve."

Brookner reportedly died at 87 on March 10, 2016. 

A passage quoted in this journal on that date —

Sainte-Beuve in 1834:

"Modern society, once it is somewhat more settled . . .
will also have its calm, its corners of cool mystery . . . ."

Context:

"La société moderne, lorsqu'elle sera un peu mieux
assise et débrouillée, devra avoir aussi son calme,
ses coins de fraîcheur et de mystère, ses abris
propices aux sentiments perfectionnés…."

— Portraits de Femmes , Sainte-Beuve, éd. Gallimard,
coll. Folio Classique, 1998 , Madame de Souza, p. 82

Monday, March 14, 2016

Lead Bun

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:40 pm

On the new animated film "Sausage Party" —

" our lead bun is voiced by Kristen Wiig."

Of course.

 

Sausage Party* Humor

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

On Seth Rogen —

"He has described his parents, who met in Israel 
on a kibbutz, as 'radical Jewish socialists.' [a"

Wikipedia

* "The film will have its world premiere at the 
South by Southwest Film Festival on March 14, 2016. [b] "

Wikipedia

Notes from Wikipedia —

a.  Patterson, John (September 14, 2007). "Comedy's new centre of gravity"
    The Guardian  (London: Guardian News and Media Limited).

b.  D'Alessandro, Anthony (March 1, 2016). 
     "Sony Is Throwing A ‘Sausage Party’ At SXSW…". Deadline.com. 

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Sunday Dinner

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

See "Sunday Dinner" in this journal as well as "Standing Still"
(also in this journal) and "Sausage Party" (on the Web).

No Sermon

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:30 pm

Space-Time Sermon

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

Shema.

      "… and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Time Sermon

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:35 pm

"In our time, when day by day mankind is being drawn closer together,
and the ties between different peoples are becoming stronger, the Church
examines more closely her relationship to non-Christian religions."

Nostra Aetate , by Pope Paul VI

For one such examination, see today's noon post.
For another, see a story from yesterday's Washington Post .

Space Sermon

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

In memory of the late architect Patrick Hodgkinson

Harvey Court at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge

For the architect, see yesterday's post "Brick-Perfect."

See as well a meditation on the numbers 9 and 13
in the post "Space" on day 13 of May, 2015.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

For the Church of Synchronology*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:16 pm

From the Wikipedia article Bauhaus (band)

"On 31 October 2013 (Halloween), David J and Jill Tracy released
'Bela Lugosi's Dead (Undead Is Forever),' a cinematic piano-led
rework of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead.'"

Halloween 2013 here  (click to enlarge) —

* See "synchronolog…" in this journal.

Hunger Game

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

See "The Hunger" in this journal.

David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve star in 'The Hunger' (1983).

 David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve star in "The Hunger" (1983).

The Architecture Song

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

"She's a brick house …."

Dancing about Architecture

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

(Continued from November 26, 2002.)

Masonic Melody

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:31 am

"Button your lip baby
Button your coat
Let's go out dancing
Go for the throat"

Read more: Rolling Stones – Mixed Emotions Lyrics | MetroLyrics 

This melody was suggested by a post of February 25, 2016,
by tonight's previous post "Brick-Perfect," and by
the post "Cube Bricks 1984" of March 4, 2016.

"Only connect." — E. M. Forster.

“Brick-Perfect”

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 am

Patrick Hodgkinson, a British architect, reportedly died at 85 on 
February 21, 2016. From his March 4 obituary in the Telegraph

Before Brunswick, came Harvey Court for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Colin St John Wilson, exLCC, his senior in the Martin studio, had done a scheme with four freestanding ranges in concrete. Hodgkinson radically transformed this at short notice into the final version presented to the College, a tight, connected square finished in local brick with a stepped section and impressive close-spaced brick columns on the exterior faces where the section overhung.

Never afflicted by modesty, Hodgkinson called it “designed to a brick-perfect, three-dimensional grid clear of ugly moments: the builders enjoyed making it”. It was attributed to Martin, Wilson and Hodgkinson jointly, but Hodgkinson felt that his contribution was under-appreciated, and again with the Law Library at Oxford, normally credited to Martin and Wilson. The theory of compact medium-rise courtyard forms derived from the Harvey Court design became central to Martin’s research programme at Cambridge in the 1960s; Hodgkinson felt that he deserved more credit for this too.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Spacey

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

"You know that in space you can move in three ways…."

See also Cube Trinity and Many Dimensions.

Adam’s Eve

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:29 am

(Continued)

"We're entering Weimar, baby." — Peggy Noonan

A photo from the eve  of the above exhibition's opening —

A Log24 post from the day  of the above exhibition's opening —

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Cool Mystery (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Sainte-Beuve in 1834

"Modern society, once it is somewhat more settled . . .
will also have its calm, its corners of cool mystery . . . ."

This journal in 2015

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

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

See also Ted  Cruz  last Saturday in Idaho 

Memoir

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:45 am

The Ghost Machine*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:12 am

"I had joined the White House early in 1984, after three years
writing Dan Rather's radio commentaries."

— Peggy Noonan, "Confessions of a White House Speechwriter,"
a 1989 New York Times  excerpt from her book What I Saw
at the Revolution

* See also What IS the frequency, Kenneth?

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Und der Haifisch…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:21 pm

Noonan

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"We’re in a funny moment."

— Peggy Noonan, Feb. 25, 2016

If you say so, dear.

High White*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:19 am

The Hollywood Reporter  last evening

"Michael White, who is best known for producing the movies 
The Rocky Horror Picture Show  and Monty Python and the Holy Grail ,
has died, his ex-girlfriend confirmed to Reuters. He was 80."

* Continued.

What IS the frequency, Kenneth?*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

One possible answer —

BBC "Intruders" transcript

From https://groups.google.com/forum/
#!topic/rec.arts.tv/yAgir2iYpJo%5B76-100%5D

520 
00:40:09,559 –> 00:40:11,845 
What were you working on? 

521 
00:40:13,304 –> 00:40:15,766 
<i>Sound.</i> 

522 
00:40:17,234 –> 00:40:20,420 
– Infrasonics. 
– (Rumbling) 

523 
00:40:20,456 –> 00:40:22,917 
– Very low frequencies. 
– (Rumbling) 

524 
00:40:23,037 –> 00:40:25,672 
– (Cracking) 
– Most people had been looking at 18 hertz, 

525 
00:40:25,699 –> 00:40:27,866 
but I experimented with 19. 

526 
00:40:28,325 –> 00:40:32,356 
There are sounds which 
affect the human being. 

527 
00:40:32,383 –> 00:40:35,120 
The roar of an alligator, 
an earthquake, hurricanes, 

528 
00:40:35,129 –> 00:40:38,820 
all exist within the 19 hertz range, 

529 
00:40:39,362 –> 00:40:42,116 
infrasonics not heard… 

530 
00:40:42,236 –> 00:40:45,357 
– (Rumbling) 
– … but felt. 

531 
00:40:45,642 –> 00:40:49,800 
It may allow us a glimpse into 
natural phenomena that a human being 

532 
00:40:49,801 –> 00:40:52,372 
is not intended to see or hear. 

533 
00:40:52,492 –> 00:40:56,375 
What things? What are you talking 
about? What were you building? 

534 
00:40:57,761 –> 00:41:01,075 
Do you believe in ghosts? 

535 
00:41:08,614 –> 00:41:11,075 
I made a ghost machine. 

536 
00:41:14,233 –> 00:41:18,694 
I know it sounds goofy. 
It needs a better name, 

537 
00:41:19,594 –> 00:41:21,486 
but that's what it is… 

538 
00:41:23,213 –> 00:41:26,729 
a device that sees ghosts. 

539 
00:41:27,840 –> 00:41:30,557 
(Music intensifies) 

     * See Veritas (March 7, 2016).

Requiem for a Producer

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:19 am


                                                               Album cover by Richard Ward

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Hook

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Song lyric

"Like the circles that you find
 in the windmills of your mind"

See also, in this journal, "An Awfully Big Adventure."

Ripples

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

From the New York Times  philosophy column "The Stone"
yesterday morning —

"Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves expands
like a ripple surrounding a pebble dropped in a pool.
As we move away from the center of the spreading circle,
its area, representing our secure knowledge, grows.
But so does its circumference, representing the border
where knowledge blurs into uncertainty and speculation,
and methodological confusion returns. Philosophy patrols
the border, trying to understand how we got there and to
conceptualize our next move.  Its job is unending."

— Scott Soames, "Philosophy's True Home"

Related ripples —

       From the previous Log24 post:

From a passage by Nietzsche quoted here on June 9, 2012:

For Soames's "unending" job of philosophy and Nietzsche's 
"maieutic and educational influences on noble youths," 
consult the lyrics played over the end credits of "Monster" —

"Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on, and on, and on, and on"

Monday, March 7, 2016

This Way to the Ogress

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 pm

See also Trumpery.

Veritas

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:55 pm

For the Church of SynchronologyLog24 on October 29, 2015.

Clue

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:12 pm

Nicole Kidman at the end of
“Hemingway & Gellhorn” (2012)

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Raven Writing

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:45 pm

Continued.

IMAGE- Raven's Progressive Matrices item with symbols from Cullinane's box-style I Ching

Trevanian’s Meadow*

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

* See related posts.

Colada

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:49 am

Some backstory for the previous post, Piña del Monte  —

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Piña del Monte

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:11 pm

New York lottery today —

This evening's NY lottery results, interpreted as a phone number, yield

See also posts tagged The Poet's Pineapple 

"The momentary footings of a climb
Up the pineapple, a table Alp and yet
An Alp…."

— Wallace Stevens, "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together"
    (Lines from p. 252 of Partisan Review  Vol. XIV No. 3,
     May-June 1947)

The Looming

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:14 pm

Material related to the title:

  • From the post Edifice (March 1, 2016) —

"Euclid's edifice loomed in my consciousness
as a marvel among sciences, unique in its clarity
and unquestionable validity."
—Richard J. Trudeau in 
   The Non-Euclidean Revolution  (1986)

Deep Beauty

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:04 pm

(Continued.)  Click each image for its source.

Friday, March 4, 2016

Chess by Other Means

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:22 pm

On film director Stanley Kubrick:

From "Kubrick," by Michael Herr, Vanity Fair , August 1999—

"He disliked the usual references to his having been a 'chess hustler' in his Greenwich Village days, as though this impugned the gravity and beauty of the exercise, the suggestion that his game wasn’t pour le sport  or, more correctly, pour l’art . To win the game was important, to win the money was irresistible, but it was nothing compared with his game, with the searching, endless action of working on his game. But of course he was hustling, he was always hustling; as he grew older and moved beyond still photography, chess became movies, and movies became chess by other means. I doubt that he ever thought of chess as just a game, or even as a game at all. I do imagine that a lot of people sitting across the board from him got melted, fried, and fragmented when Stanley let that cool ray come streaming down out of his eyes— talk about penetrating looks and piercing intelligence; here they’d sat down to a nice game of chess, and all of a sudden he was doing the thinking for both of them."

On physics writer Peter Woit:

From Part II of an interview with Peter Woit by Gerald Alper
in Smashpipe  published March 1, 2016:

"For just a moment, he allows himself to become self reflective: 'I was always a smart kid. A very smart kid. I suppose if I ever took a standardized test I would do very well, especially, in the area of abstract reasoning.'

Peter Woit says this as matter-of-factly as if he said, 'When I was a kid my father drove a Chevrolet.' He says it as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, if asked to describe how he became the person he is, might have said 'I was always a tall kid. A very tall kid. In school, short kids bored me.'

I felt I had to say, 'but there must be a few million people in the United States who would also score very high in abstract thinking in the standardized tests and none of them have your interests.'

'The people around here all do. And there are thousands of us all around the world.'

'But there are 7 billion people in the world.'

Peter Woit had to concede the mathematical point, but I don't think he appreciated the psychological distinction I was alluding to. There is an astonishing divide between the culture of science and the culture of humanities that C.P. Snow famously alluded to. There is even a greater divide between the culture of pure mathematics and the culture of the earthbound evolutionarily programmed biological world into which we are born.

There is a celebrated quip by Dick Cavett that encapsulates this. Reflecting on his famous interview of the then reigning world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, he observed:

'Throughout the interview I could feel the force of his IQ.'

Paraphrasing this I could say that throughout the interview, which was at times exhilarating, at times daunting, I could feel the force of his two hundred QMIQ (quantum mechanics IQ). Norman Mailer once commented that the immediacy of television— the fact that most influential people in the world can be brought into your living room— creates the illusion that you have thereby been included in their inner power circle, and to that extent vicariously empowered. But you are no closer to the corridors of power then you were before. Analogously, you can sit just a few feet away from a world-class expert, close enough to reach out and touch them, but you are no closer to their accumulated wisdom— unless you are willing to go home and put in ten thousand hours of hard work trying to raise the level of your understanding."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091109-Nicole.jpg

Illustration from a post of
Schicksalstag  2009

Cube Bricks 1984

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:06 pm

An Approach to Symmetric Generation of the Simple Group of Order 168

Related aesthetics —

"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts
than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be
ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct
(often mathematical) in the human mind. . . . 

Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to
explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.

In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that
architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics.
The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe
and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar,
in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."

— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
     in the AMS Notices , January 2010

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Metaphors

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:19 pm

A rose on a Harvard University Press book cover (2014) —

A Log24 post's "lotus" (2004) —

A business mandorla (2016) —

Image Search Correction

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:05 am

It turns out the the picture on the office wall from the
recent film "Spotlight" in last Sunday's 3 PM post 
is not of Bellingham, Washington, but rather of La Paz,
Bolivia. See the update at the end of the post.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

A Defense of Meaning

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

"In certain moods the horror of a word is the meaning it defends against all comers; so metaphor is the device by which one undermines that defense. In Stevens’ 'Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,' the someone contemplates 'A wholly artificial nature, in which / The profusion of metaphor has been increased.' If you put a pineapple together and see metaphors becoming more profuse, you release yourself from psychological determinations, you become a performative gesture and are happy to find yourself in that state. But then a scruple may assert itself:

He must say nothing of the fruit that is
Not true, nor think it, less. He must defy
The metaphor that murders metaphor.

Presumably a bad metaphor murders a good one: bad in the sense of telling lies, ignoring the truths that can’t honorably be ignored."

— Denis Donoghue, "The Motive for Metaphor,"
     The Hudson Review , Winter 2013 issue

A Geometric Glitter

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:10 am

"In the planes that tilt hard revelations on
The eye, a geometric glitter, tiltings …."

— Wallace Stevens, "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" (1947)

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Art and Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:20 pm

See "Behind the Glitter" (a recent magazine article
on Oslo artist Josefine Lyche), and the much more
informative web page Contact (from Noplace, Oslo).

From the latter —

"Semiotics is a game of ascribing meaning, or content, to mere surface."

Edifice

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

"Euclid's edifice loomed in my consciousness as a marvel among
sciences, unique in its clarity and unquestionable validity."
—Richard J. Trudeau in The Non-Euclidean Revolution  (1986)

On 'The Public Square,' from 'Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy'

See also Edifice in this journal and last night's architectural post.

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