Log24

Friday, May 31, 2019

Bulk Apperception

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:38 pm

(Continued)

De Niro’s Gallerist

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

A phrase from Wikipedia

"De Niro's gallerist, Virginia Zabriskie."

Zabriskie reportedly died on May 7.

In memoriam — Jar Story.

Working Sketch of Aitchison’s Mathieu Cuboctahedron

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:33 am

Cuboctahedron with its 24 edges labeled by the 24 permutations of a 4-set. By Cullinane on 5/31/19.

The above sketch indicates one way to apply the elements of S4
to the Aitchison cuboctahedron . It is a rough sketch illustrating a
correspondence between four edge-hexagons and four label-sets.
The labeling is not as neat as that of a permutahedron  by S4
shown below, but can perhaps be improved.

Permutahedron labeled by S4 .

 

Update of 9 PM EDT June 1, 2019 —

. . . And then of course  there is the obvious  labeling derived from 
the above permutahedron —

 
 

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Dabbling

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:02 pm

Jeff Nichols, director of Midnight Special  (2016) —

"When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney
movie Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world
that exists in an alternative dimension, Nichols sighed.
'I was a little bummed, I guess,' he said of when he first
learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast.
Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that
we're all dabbling in, sometimes you're not the first one
out of the gate.' "

See also Jung's four-diamond figure and the previous post.

Stiff

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:05 pm

"The stiffest material around is diamond.
The strength and lightness of a material
depends on the number and strength of
the bonds that hold its atoms together,
and on the lightness of the atoms.
The element that best fits both criteria
is carbon, which is lightweight and forms
stronger bonds than any other atom.
The carbon-carbon bond is especially
strong; each carbon atom can bond to
four neighboring atoms. In diamond,
then, a dense network of strong bonds
creates a strong, light, and stiff material.
Indeed, just as we named the Stone Age,
the Bronze Age, and the Steel Age after
the materials that humans could make,
we might call the new technological epoch
we are entering the Diamond Age."
[Link added.]

— "It's a Small, Small, Small, Small World,"
by Ralph C. Merkle, 
MIT Technology Review , Feb./Mar. 1997

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Hogwash for Brattlefilm

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:54 pm

Related material — Khurana in this journal and
in The Harvard Crimson .

“Simplification in Its Purest Form”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:08 pm

For students of the Hogwash School of Witchcraft and Wizardry —

"Elementary particles are the most fundamental
building blocks of nature, and their study
would seem to be an expression of simplification
in its purest form." 

— Sean Carroll in The New York Times  today 
in an opinion piece titled "The Physicist Who
Made Sense of the Universe"

Related remarks:  See a Log24 search for "Simpli".

The Khurana Embarrassment

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:36 pm

(A title for Harlan Kane)

Quaternion at Candlebrow

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

From a Groundhog Day post in 2009 —

The Candlebrow Conference
in Pynchon's Against the Day:

The conferees had gathered here from all around the world…. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.

"Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon– the earth's own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything–"

Quaternion in finite geometry
Quaternion  by  S. H. Cullinane

"Um, Professor–"….

… Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie "twister"….

… In the storm cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions….

"Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions."

"Build a time machine."

"Not the way I would have put it, but if you like, fine."

Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up….

"We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long 'passes,' with a linear velocity, but 'returns,' with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly."

"Born again!" exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.

Above, the devastation had begun.

"As if the professor had lectured it into being . . . ."

See other posts now tagged McLuhan Time.

Monday, May 27, 2019

But Seriously . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:32 pm

McLuhan on Analogy.

I prefer the simple "four dots" figure
of the double colon:

For those who prefer stranger analogies . . .

Actors from "The Eiger Sanction" —

Doctor Strange on Mount Everest —

Dr. Strange at beyondtheopposites.com on 2016/12/02

See as well this  journal on the above Strange date, 2016/12/02,
in posts tagged Lumber Room.

Misery Emissary: A Thurston Memorial

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:19 pm

The Broom Bridge Eight

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:12 pm

"In this way the eight quaternions came into being."

— Legend adapted from Richard Wilhelm.

See as well The Bond with Reality (20th of May, 2019).

Sunday, May 26, 2019

Nine-Dot Patterns

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

Some nine-dot patterns of greater interest:

IMAGE- Actions of the unit quaternions in finite geometry, on a ninefold square and on an eightfold cube

Sunday Shul: Connecting the Dots

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

"It's very easy to say, 'Well, Jeff couldn't quite connect these dots,'"
director Jeff Nichols told BuzzFeed News. "Well, I wasn't actually
looking at the dots you were looking at."

— Posted on March 21, 2016, at 1:11 p.m,
Adam B. Vary, BuzzFeed News Reporter

"Magical arrays of numbers have been the talismans of mathematicians and mystics since the time of Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. And in the 16th century, Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria devised a cosmological world view that seems to have prefigured superstring theory, at least superficially. Rabbi Luria was a sage of the Jewish cabalist movement — a school of mystics that drew inspiration from the arcane oral tradition of the Torah.

According to Rabbi Luria's cosmology, the soul and inner life of the hidden God were expressed by 10 primordial numbers [sic ], known as the sefirot. [Link added.]"

— "Things Are Stranger Than We Can Imagine,"
by Malcolm W. BrowneNew York Times Book Review ,
Sunday, March 20, 1994

Burning Bright

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

Gell-Mann's 'eightfold way' as 'a mosaic of simple triangular building blocks' — George Johnson, 1999

Compare and contrast with . . .

The Brightburn Logo:

Related material from the May 12 post

"The Collective Unconscious
in a Cartoon Graveyard
" —

"When they all finally reach their destination —
a deserted field in the Florida Panhandle…." 

" When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney movie Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world that exists in an alternative dimension, Nichols sighed. 'I was a little bummed, I guess,' he said of when he first learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast. Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that we're all dabbling in, sometimes you're not the first one out of the gate.' "

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Brand On Breyer

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:37 pm

Or:  One Quark for Muster Mark​

"In this way the eight trigrams came into being." — Richard Wilhelm

Detail:

Midrash:

Friday, May 24, 2019

Mystery at Santa Fe

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm


A mysterious Google Search result from this evening —

A check of Marshall's announcement reveals an apparent
contradiction to the reported May 24 date of death. Although the
announcement says  that Gell-Mann died on May 24, the announcement
itself is timestamped midnight (00:00) at the beginning  of May 24 
according to Greenwich Mean Time, i.e., at 6 pm May 23 in Santa Fe —


This may or may not help to illustrate the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Hidden Eightfold Patterns

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:23 pm

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:47 am

Stevens and the Hoary Sages

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:05 am

See also other posts now tagged The Reality Blocks.

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Unix Time

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:51 pm

"Mirror,  Mirror . . ."

The Unix timestamp above is from the HarperCollins piece below.

Fire on the Water

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:13 pm

Related literary remarks from The Crimson Abyss 
(a Log24 post of March 29, 2017) —

Prospero's Children  was first published by HarperCollins,
London, in 1999. A statement by the publisher provides
an instance of the famous "much-needed gap." —

"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children 
steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
  and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld , and
is destined to become a modern classic."

Related imagery from The Crimson Abyss —

See as well posts of June 6, 2004, and May 22, 2004.

May the Fourth for Spaceheads

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:06 pm

An image posted here two years earlier, on May the Fourth, 2017 —

From Betty and Veronica Double Digest #229

           You are not alone.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

The Toronto Plot*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

* A title for Harlan Kane, suggested by obituaries
from The New York Times  (this afternoon) and from
CBC News (on May 14, below) . . .

. . . as well as by illustrations shown here on May 13 and by
a screenwriter quoted here on May 12 —

“When I die,” he liked to say, “I’m going to have written
on my tombstone, ‘Finally, a plot!’”

— Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times

Another quote that seems relevant —

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

Cube Geometry Continues.

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

An illustration from the April 20, 2016, post

Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group

IMAGE- Bester,'The Stars My Destination' (with cover slightly changed)


"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
 of several different subjects in mathematics."
 — Chuanming ZongBulletin of the American
Mathematical Society 
, January 2005

Iain Aitchison on symmetric generation of M24

Inside the White Cube

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

(Continued)

Monday, May 20, 2019

The Bond with Reality

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


"The bond with reality is cut."

— Hans Freudenthal, 1962

Indeed it is.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

The Building Blocks of Geometry

From "On the life and scientific work of Gino Fano
by Alberto Collino, Alberto Conte, and Alessandro Verra,
ICCM Notices , July 2014, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 43-57 —

" Indeed, about the Italian debate on foundations of Geometry, it is not rare to read comments in the same spirit of the following one, due to Jeremy Gray13. He is essentially reporting Hans Freudenthal’s point of view:

' When the distinguished mathematician and historian of mathematics Hans Freudenthal analysed Hilbert’s  Grundlagen he argued that the link between reality and geometry appears to be severed for the first time in Hilbert’s work. However, he discovered that Hilbert had been preceded by the Italian mathematician Gino Fano in 1892. . . .' "

13 J. Gray, "The Foundations of Projective Geometry in Italy," Chapter 24 (pp. 269–279) in his book Worlds Out of Nothing , Springer (2010).


Restoring the severed link —

Structure of the eightfold cube

See also Espacement  and The Thing and I.
 

Related material —

 
 

Rural Relativity

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:03 pm

Poem

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

"The technical aspects
Were carefully planned,
And the social aspect
Just happened."

Robert Fano

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Cave Shadows

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:22 pm

Brighton Rock: Emerging from Plato's Cave

Plan 9

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:36 am
 

NEWSWEEK

AT 95, HERMAN WOUK
​PLANS HIS NEXT CHAPTER

BY LOUISA THOMAS ON 4/8/10 AT 8:00 PM EDT
. . . .

Still, Wouk, a month away from his 95th birthday, knows he cannot write forever. He has described The Language God Talks  as a "summing up," even if he is toying with the idea of writing a sequel. Earnestly written and very brief, it is an unusual work—partly a quick trip through developments in cosmology, partly an episodic memoir, partly an essay on faith and science. At the end, it portrays an imagined conversation between Wouk and the scientist Richard Feynman: historical fiction about the drama of the believer and the skeptic. In real life, Wouk met Feynman while researching the atom bomb for War and Remembrance . Feynman wasn't interested in fiction; he called calculus "the language God talks." But during a summer at the Aspen Institute, the two men spent hours talking, and Wouk has been thinking about his exchanges with Feynman and other scientists ever since. He even tried to learn calculus.

Feynman was a secular Jew, and yet something about the way he saw the world resonated with the observantly religious novelist. One day Wouk came across an interview in which Feynman said, "It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe … can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama." The huge stage and the human drama: "This is the subject I've been thinking about my whole life," Wouk says.

. . . .

 

Related remarks on language —

Friday, May 17, 2019

A Shot at Redemption

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 pm

"I need a photo opportunity . . . ." — Paul Simon

Themenkreis

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Mathematische Appetithäppchen:
Faszinierende Bilder. Packende Formeln. Reizvolle Sätze

Autor: Erickson, Martin —

"Weitere Informationen zu diesem Themenkreis finden sich
unter http://​www.​encyclopediaofma​th.​org/​index.​php/​
Cullinane_​diamond_​theorem

und http://​finitegeometry.​org/​sc/​gen/​coord.​html ."

Lines from the 2013 Jim Jarmusch film
"Only Lovers Left Alive" —

Eve:  “… So what is this then? Can’t you tell your wife
what your problem is?”

Adam:  “It’s the zombies and the way they treat the world.
I just feel like all the sand's at the bottom of the hourglass
or something.”

Eve:  “Time to turn it over then.”

Related entertainment  —

and . . .

Groundhog Day

An Imaginary Square

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:06 pm

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Tombstone by Springer

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:52 pm

A Pure Geometry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:41 pm

From a post (“Waugh, Orwell.  Orwell, Waugh.”)
linked to here earlier today

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180825-Ballard-on-Modernism.gif

That One Time

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

The title refers to an Instagram picture posted today.

Some background . . .


"It was a bright cold day in April . . . ." — George Orwell

The Hourglass Axe

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:45 am

The Endgame Credits

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

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Facets

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 pm

". . . the most magnificent 'object' in all of mathematics . . . .
is like a diamond with thousands of facets . . . ."

— MIT professor emeritus quoted here on Aug. 19, 2008

Also on that date —

Hunger Games

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:26 pm

Two items from November 24, 2015 —

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Tools

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:11 PM 

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.

Related material —

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

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

Vampira and Loki at Cannes

Decorations

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:15 pm

The previous post suggests a review:

See as well . . .

A Wrinkle in Time and Space

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:32 am

Or:  Tom Wolfe in the Quantum Realm

Related posts: Search Log24 for Bubble.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Change

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:02 pm

"Is there no change of death in paradise?" — Wallace Stevens 

From a New Yorker  book review dated May 13 —

"In 'Field Flowers,' Glück’s flower scoffs that 'absence of change' 
is humanity’s 'poor idea of heaven.' But the religious believer
might object that Hägglund’s idea of eternity is equally poor." 

Here James Wood is reviewing Martin Hägglund’s
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom 
(Pantheon, March 5, 2019).

See also posts tagged Change Arises in this  journal.

Hägglund himself appeared here on June 21, 2014.

The Nothing That Is

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

Philosophy professor Agnes Callard on giving advice:

"It’s as though right before I give the advice,
I push a button that sucks all the informational
content out of what I’m about to say, and
I end up saying basically nothing at all."

— https://thepointmag.com/2019/
examined-life/against-advice-agnes-callard

From a University of Chicago description of Callard —

See as well posts before and after the above date, Jan. 3, 2018,
that are now tagged "Lost Horizon."

More generally, see a Log24 search  for "Lost Horizon."

Surrealistic Pillow Talk

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

   "Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead.

IMAGE- Bill Murray explains Ed Wood's 'Plan 9 from Outer Space'- 'Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead.'


"When the men on the chessboard
get up and tell you where to go . . ."

Monday, May 13, 2019

“The Eyes of Orson Welles”…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:49 pm

is a TCM special at 8 PM ET this evening.

A snow-globe phrase from April 28 —

Bauble, Babel . . . Bubble —

Images including Plato's diamond on a tombstone

The "bubble" cited above —

For more metaphysical accounting, see
The Church of Synchronology.

Star Cube

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

"Before time began . . . ." — Optimus Prime

Doris Day at the Hudson Rock

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

" 'My public image is unshakably that of
America’s wholesome virgin, the girl next door,
carefree and brimming with happiness,' 
she said in Doris Day: Her Own Story
a 1976 book . . . ."

From "Angels & Demons Meet Hudson Hawk" (March 19, 2013) —

From the March 1 post "Solomon and the Image," a related figure —

Sunday, May 12, 2019

The Collective Unconscious in a Cartoon Graveyard

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst
in "Spider-Man 2" (2004) —

Spoilers for another Kirsten Dunst film,
"Midnight Special" (2016) —

"When they all finally reach their destination —
a deserted field in the Florida Panhandle…." 

" When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney movie 
Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world that exists in an
alternative dimension
, Nichols sighed. 'I was a little bummed, I guess,'
he said of when he first learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast.
Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that we're all dabbling in,
sometimes you're not the first one out of the gate.' "

From another obituary for
the "Spider-Man" screenwriter —

“When I die,” he liked to say, “I’m going to have written
on my tombstone, ‘Finally, a plot!’”

— Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times

Saturday, May 11, 2019

Stage Direction: “Comments Off.”

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

The Babel Gift

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:17 pm

"In the story 'Guy de Maupassant' (completed 1922, published 1932) Babel, or at least a narrator we are led to suppose is Babel, pronounces: 'A phrase is born into the world good and bad at the same time. The secret rests in a barely perceptible turn. The lever must lie in one's hand and get warm. It must be turned once, and no more.' To him words are an army, 'an army in which all kinds of weapons are on the move. No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.' This iron, an aggressive partner to Kafka's 'axe for the frozen sea within us', is something Babel learned to wield with recurring, unerring accuracy."

Chris Power in The Guardian , 10 February 2012

See as well "Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday"
and some historical background.

Friday, May 10, 2019

Walpurgisnacht Riddle

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:04 pm

From a search for Absolut Riddle in this  journal —

I Ching g6

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

For fans of Resonance Science

When the men on the chessboard
get up and tell you where to go ….”

Desperately Seeking Resonance

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:46 am

Continues

Also from Fall Equinox 2018 — Looney Tune for Physicists

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Blade and Chalice at the Museum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:24 pm

(For other posts on the continuing triumph of entertainment
over truth, see a Log24 search for "Night at the Museum.")

See also yesterday's post When the Men and today's previous post.

Defense Against the Dark Arts

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:00 pm

F. Lanier Graham chess set (king-queen arrangement by the Wachowskis)

Wolf Shadow at Red Fleece

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:55 am

For a New York photographer . . .

See also Schattenspiel  and You Got Game.

Counter Culture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

" Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture 
in the San Francisco Chronicle  in 1969, 'If you want to
know what is happening among your intelligent and
mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. . . .' "

— The University of California Press

" 'I count a lot of things that there’s no need to count,'
Cameron said. 'Just because that’s the way I am.
But I count all the things that need to be counted.' "

— Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western ,
Simon & Schuster, 1974

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050109-Hawkline.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See as well Hawkline in this  journal.

The Birdseye Requiem

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:10 am

From The Boston Globe  yesterday evening —

" Ms. Adams 'had this quiet intelligence that made you feel like
she understood you and she loved you. She was a true friend —
a true generous, generous friend. This is the kind of person
you keep in your life,' Birdseye added.

'And she had such a great sense of humor,' Birdseye said.
“She would always have the last laugh. She wasn’t always
the loudest, but she was always the funniest, and in the
smartest way.' "

"Ms. Adams, who lived in Waltham, was 55 when she died April 9 . . . ."

See as well April 9 in the post Math Death and a post from April 8,
also now tagged "Berlekamp's Game" — Horses of a Dream.

"When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards . . . ."

— Grace Slick in a song from yesterday's post "When the Men"

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

When the Men

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:33 pm

In Memoriam . . .

"When the men on the chessboard
get up and tell you where to go …."

"The I Ching encodes the geometry of the fabric of spacetime."

Sure it does.
 

Shadows: Endgame

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:14 am

IMAGE- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

'You know my methods' image

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Breach

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

"Honored in the Breach:
Graham Bader on Absence as Memorial"

Artforum International , April 2012 

. . . .

"In the wake of a century marked by inconceivable atrocity, the use of emptiness as a commemorative trope has arguably become a standard tactic, a default style of public memory. The power of the voids at and around Ground Zero is generated by their origin in real historical circumstance rather than such purely commemorative intent: They are indices as well as icons of the losses they mark.

Nowhere is the negotiation between these two possibilities–on the one hand, the co-optation of absence as tasteful mnemonic trope; on the other, absence's disruptive potential as brute historical scar–more evident than in Berlin, a city whose history, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, can be seen as a 'narrative of voids.' Writing in 1997, Huyssen saw this tale culminating in Berlin's post-wall development, defined equally by an obsessive covering-over of the city's lacunae–above all in the elaborate commercial projects then proliferating in the miles-long stretch occupied until 1989 by the Berlin Wall–and a carefully orchestrated deployment of absence as memorial device, particularly in the 'voids' integrated by architect Daniel Libeskind into his addition to the Berlin Museum, now known as the Jewish Museum Berlin."
. . . .

See also Breach  in this  journal. 

Symbols and Mysteries

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:21 am

IMAGE- Like motions of a pattern's parts can induce motions of the whole. Escher-'Fishes and Scales,' Cullinane-'Invariance'

Monday, May 6, 2019

In Memoriam Goro Shimura (d. May 3, 2019)

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:33 pm

From Richard Taylor, "Modular arithmetic:  driven by inherent beauty
and human curiosity
," The Letter of the Institute for Advanced Study  [IAS],
Summer 2012, pp. 6– 8 (links added) :

"Stunningly, in 1954, Martin Eichler (former IAS Member)
found a totally new reciprocity law . . . .

Within less than three years, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura
(former IAS Member) proposed a daring generalization of Eichler’s
reciprocity law to all cubic equations in two variables. A decade later,
André Weil (former IAS Professor) added precision to this conjecture,
and found strong heuristic evidence supporting the Shimura-Taniyama
reciprocity law. This conjecture completely changed the development of
number theory."

One Stuff

Building blocks?

From a post of May 4

Structure of the eightfold cube

See also Espacement  and The Thing and I.

Possibilities

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

Related material — The last three posts —

The Crimson Abyss,
Transgressive Politics at Harvard, and
"Thousand" Rhetoric

— as well as Saturday's The Chinese Jars of Shing-Tung Yau.

Sunday, May 5, 2019

“Thousand” Rhetoric

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:28 pm

Compare and contrast —

"A Thousand Possibilities"
— Title of a Harvard Crimson  May 3 column

See also The Thousand  in this  journal.

Transgressive Politics at Harvard

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:02 pm

Related material —

See also the previous post.

The Crimson Abyss

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

Continues.

The following conference has just ended.

Yau's actual 70th birthday was April 4.

Saturday, May 4, 2019

The Long Strange Trip of Abstract Art

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:23 pm

In memory of an art collector's April 24 death —

See also Log24 on April 24

Inside the White Cube

Structure of the eightfold cube

See also Espacement  and The Thing and I.

The Chinese Jars of Shing-Tung Yau

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

The title refers to Calabi-Yau spaces.

T. S. Eliot —

Four Quartets

. . . Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

A less "cosmic" but still noteworthy code — The Golay code.

This resides in a 12-dimensional space over GF(2).

Related material from Plato and R. T. Curtis

Counting symmetries with the orbit-stabilizer theorem

A related Calabi-Yau "Chinese jar" first described in detail in 1905

Illustration of K3 surface related to Mathieu moonshine

A figure that may or may not be related to the 4x4x4 cube that
holds the classical  Chinese "cosmic code" — the I Ching

ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/hanson/forSha/AK3/old/K3-pix.pdf

Friday, May 3, 2019

“As a Chinese jar” — T. S. Eliot

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 1:06 pm

 

The Structure of Story Space

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

T. S. Eliot

Four Quartets

. . . Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Lévi-Strauss

A Permanent Order of Wondertale Elements

In Vol. I of Structural Anthropology , p. 209, I have shown that this analysis alone can account for the double aspect of time representation in all mythical systems: the narrative is both “in time” (it consists of a succession of events) and “beyond” (its value is permanent). With regard to Propp’s theories my analysis offers another advantage: I can reconcile much better than Propp himself  his principle of a permanent order of wondertale elements with the fact that certain functions or groups of functions are shifted from one tale to the next (pp. 97-98. p. 108). If my view is accepted, the chronological succession will come to be absorbed into an atemporal matrix structure whose form is indeed constant. The shifting of functions is then no more than a mode of permutation (by vertical columns or fractions of columns).

Or by congruent quarter-sections.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Story Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:27 pm

"Let the Wookiee win." — C-3PO

See as well the April 8, 2019, post

Misère Play.

New Year’s Eve

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:30 pm

The previous post suggests a search for Buber in this journal
that yields a passage from New Year's Eve 2017

" As for 'that you in which the lines of relation, though parallel,
intersect,' and 'intimations of eternity,' see Log24 posts on
the concept 'line at infinity' as well as 'Lost Horizon.' "

Related illustrations — 

From Pi Day 2017

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard."

From April 20, 2019 

From "A History of Violence" —

Sloth and Awe

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:38 pm

"The style of Ich und Du  is anything but sparse and unpretentious,
lean or economical. It represents a late flowering of romanticism
and tends to blur all contours in the twilight of suggestive but
extremely unclear language. Most of Buber’s German readers
would be quite incapable of saying what any number of passages
probably mean. 

The obscurity of the book does not seem objectionable to them:
it seems palpable proof of profundity. Sloth meets with awe
in the refusal to unravel mysteries."

— Walter Kaufmann, 1970 prologue to I and Thou

Squaring the Triangle

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:45 am

"Having squared the circle is a famous crank assertion." — Wikipedia

Squaring the circle was proved impossible by Lindemann in 1882.

Squaring the triangle  is, however, possible — indeed, trivial
and is more closely related to the saying quoted by Jung —

"All things do live in the three
But in the four they merry be."

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The Medium and the Message

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

In memory of Quentin Fiore — from a Log24 search for McLuhan,
an item related to today's previous post . . .

Related material from Log24 on the above-reported date of death —

See also, from a search for Analogy in this journal . . .

 .

For the First of May

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

"The purpose of mathematics cannot be derived from an activity 
inferior to it but from a higher sphere of human activity, namely,
religion."

 Igor Shafarevitch in 1973

"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

See also Ultron Cube.

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