A more impressive Lucifer —
The late theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler,
author of the phrase "it from bit."
Related material —
"The Thing and I" (April 17, 2016) and an essay by
Julian Barbour, "Bit from It."
Saturday, April 30, 2016
A Lucifer for Walpurgisnacht
Comments Off on A Lucifer for Walpurgisnacht
Bit by Bit
In memory of Claude Shannon, who would have turned 100 today.
See "The Matthias Defense" and citations of that page in this journal.
Comments Off on Bit by Bit
Friday, April 29, 2016
At the Still Point …
… Continues.
"OK Baby, let's go dancing."
— Amy Adams in "American Hustle"
Click image below for some backstory.
Happy birthday to Uma Thurman.
Comments Off on At the Still Point …
Blackboard Jungle…
Comments Off on Blackboard Jungle…
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Kubrick’s Rube
Comments Off on Kubrick’s Rube
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Rhyme
For those who prefer "Hamilton" to Hamilton
"You've got the look
You've got the hook
You sho' nuf do be cookin' in my book
Your face is jammin' …."
Comments Off on Rhyme
Kubrick’s Rube
In memory of a culture jammer *—
* "Mr. Lyons … made a living partly by buying,
reconditioning and selling used cars." —
— Ben Ratliff in The New York Times this evening.
See also the previous post and, from Feb. 14 in
this journal, the phrase "more global than local."
Comments Off on Kubrick’s Rube
Local and Global
Three notes on local symmetries
that induce global symmetries
From July 1, 2011 —
From November 5, 1981 —
From December 24, 1981 —
Comments Off on Local and Global
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
A Sense of Identity
Peter Schjeldahl on Wallace Stevens in the current New Yorker —
"Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania,
the second of five children. His father, from humble
beginnings, was a successful lawyer, his mother a
former schoolteacher. Each night, she read a chapter
of the Bible to the children, who attended schools
attached to both Presbyterian and Lutheran churches,
where the music left an indelible impression on Stevens.
Both sides of the family were Pennsylvania Dutch,
an identity that meant little to him when he was young
but a great deal later on, perhaps to shore up a precarious
sense of identity."
See also this journal on Christmas Day, 2010 —
It's a start. For more advanced remarks from the same date, see Mere Geometry.
Comments Off on A Sense of Identity
Interacting
"… I would drop the keystone into my arch …."
— Charles Sanders Peirce, "On Phenomenology"
" 'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks."
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, as quoted by B. Elan Dresher.
(B. Elan Dresher. Nordlyd 41.2 (2014): 165-181,
special issue on Features edited by Martin Krämer,
Sandra Ronai and Peter Svenonius. University of Tromsø –
The Arctic University of Norway.
http://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/nordlyd)
Peter Svenonius and Martin Krämer, introduction to the
Nordlyd double issue on Features —
"Interacting with these questions about the 'geometric'
relations among features is the algebraic structure
of the features."
For another such interaction, see the previous post.
This post may be viewed as a commentary on a remark in Wikipedia —
"All of these ideas speak to the crux of Plato's Problem…."
See also The Diamond Theorem at Tromsø and Mere Geometry.
Comments Off on Interacting
Monday, April 25, 2016
Seven Seals
An old version of the Wikipedia article "Group theory"
(pictured in the previous post) —
"More poetically …"
From Hermann Weyl's 1952 classic Symmetry —
"Galois' ideas, which for several decades remained
a book with seven seals but later exerted a more
and more profound influence upon the whole
development of mathematics, are contained in
a farewell letter written to a friend on the eve of
his death, which he met in a silly duel at the age of
twenty-one. This letter, if judged by the novelty and
profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most
substantial piece of writing in the whole literature
of mankind."
The seven seals from the previous post, with some context —
These models of projective points are drawn from the underlying
structure described (in the 4×4 case) as part of the proof of the
Cullinane diamond theorem .
Comments Off on Seven Seals
Peirce’s Accounts of the Universe
Compare and contrast Peirce's seven systems of metaphysics with
the seven projective points in a post of March 1, 2010 —
From my commentary on Carter's question —
Comments Off on Peirce’s Accounts of the Universe
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Saturday, April 23, 2016
What Mad Pursuit
Quine, Pursuit of Truth , Harvard
University Press, 1990, epigraphs:
For another quote from Sherwin-Williams,
see the April 21 post Purple Requiem.
Comments Off on What Mad Pursuit
Friday, April 22, 2016
Elixir
The prominent display of an ad for Elixir Vitae in
today's 11:02 AM post suggests a review of that concept.
See also Raiders of the Lost Crucible in this journal.
Comments Off on Elixir
In Memoriam
Guy Hamilton, director of "Diamonds are Forever"
and "Goldfinger," reportedly died at 93 on Wednesday,
April 20, 2016. In his memory, here is a link to the
posts of All Souls' Day, 2015.
Comments Off on In Memoriam
Vanity Fair Continues
Detail of illustration by Frederick Alfred Rhead of Vanity Fair,
page 96 in the John Bunyan classic Pilgrim's Progress
(New York, The Century Co., 1912)
Yesterday's posts Legend and Purple Requiem suggest a review
of John Bunyan. A search for "Vanity Fair" + "Temple of Art" yields…
The above Vanity Fair article was linked to here previously.
Comments Off on Vanity Fair Continues
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Purple Requiem
See as well "The Stars My Destination" in this journal.
Comments Off on Purple Requiem
The Alchemist’s Chessboard
Material related to the previous post and to Alfred Bester's
1981 followup to The Stars My Destination titled The Deceivers —
|
The Lapis Philosophorum :
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe." And from Bester's The Deceivers : Meta Physics "'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.' 'I don't know it.' 'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.' 'That doesn't sound like much.'" Related material : |
Comments Off on The Alchemist’s Chessboard
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group
The reference in the previous post to the work of Guitart and
The Road to Universal Logic suggests a fiction involving
the symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168.
See The Diamond Archetype and a fictional account of the road to Hell …
The cover illustration below has been adapted to
replace the flames of PyrE with the eightfold cube.
For related symmetric generation of a much larger group, see Solomon's Cube.
Comments Off on Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
It’s 10 PM …
From a Washington Post book review this evening —
"… some people find an almost spiritual, liminal state
called the Bright…."
And some people may see as an illustration of that fictional state
this scene from a video —
For more on the word "liminal," see October 20, 2015.
For a tale related to the above image, see Floating Dragon .
Comments Off on It’s 10 PM …
The Folding
A recent post about the eightfold cube suggests a review of two
April 8, 2015, posts on what Northrop Frye called the ogdoad :
As noted on April 8, each 2×4 "brick" in the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis may be constructed by folding a 1×8 array from Turyn's
1967 construction of the Golay code.
Folding a 2×4 Curtis array yet again yields the 2x2x2 eightfold cube .
Those who prefer an entertainment approach to concepts of space
may enjoy a video (embedded yesterday in a story on theverge.com) —
"Ghost in the Shell: Identity in Space."
Comments Off on The Folding
Monday, April 18, 2016
Talented but Modest
"When Death tells a story…"
— Cover of The Book Thief
Comments Off on Talented but Modest
Toy
"Finnegan's waterlogged epiphany"
— Phrase by John Lancaster in a Washington Post review of an
autobiography by William Finnegan, a book that today won a Pulitzer Prize.
The review is dated August 7, 2015. This journal on that date —
Comments Off on Toy
The Philosopher’s Apprentice…
… is a novel by James Morrow reviewed in The New York Times
on March 23, 2008:
"Morrow’s inventiveness is beguiling, as are his delight
in Western philosophy and his concern for the sorry state
of the world. Yet there’s also something comic-bookish
about his novel…."
"Something comic-bookish"
in memory of Albert Einstein,
who reportedly died on this date
in 1955 —
Comments Off on The Philosopher’s Apprentice…
A Problem
(Continued, in memory of the late meteorologist William Gray,
from August 10, 2010, and from April 16, 2016.)
For some backstory, see Huàn, the Flood and Impact Award.
"… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public
it is a black art, more akin to magic and mystery."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
in the AMS Notices , January 2010, quoted in
Log24 on April 4, 2016.
Related material: Gray Space and …
Comments Off on A Problem