* The title refers to a recent Sunday Doonesbury cartoon.
Monday, September 30, 2019
September Singularity
(A sequel to the previous post, Multiplicity on Michaelmas.)
"Tony is on the couch . . ." Cf. The Analyst , Michaelmas evening.
"Tony Stark: That's how I wished it happened.
Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, or BARF.
God, I gotta work on that acronym.
An extremely costly method of hijacking the
hippocampus to . . . clear traumatic memories. Huh."
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Multiplicity on Michaelmas
"We need a multiplicity of viewpoints."
— Philip Pullman in a New Yorker interview
published yesterday
See as well Pullman's "Golden Compass"
in posts tagged
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Sunday, September 29, 2019
The Analyst
"The analyst, by freeing himself from the 'enchainment to past and future',
casts off the arbitrary pattern and waits for new aesthetic form to emerge,
which will (it is hoped) transform the content of the analytic encounter."
— From Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School ,
by Nicola Glover, Chapter 4
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Spiritual Kin
"The 15 Puzzle and the Magic Cube
are spiritual kin …."
— "Metamagical Themas" column,
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Scientific American ,
Vol. 244, No. 3 (March 1981), pp. 20-39
As are the 15 Schoolgirls and the Eightfold Cube.
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Stage Direction: “Comments Off.”
The previous post dealt with "magic" cubes, so called because of the
analogous "magic" squares. Douglas Hofstadter has written about a
different, physical , object, promoted as "the Magic Cube," that Hofstadter
felt embodied "a deep invariant":
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Dominus Illuminatio (from the Oxford motto)
Related literary remarks — Raiders of the Lost Birthday.
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Saturday, September 28, 2019
Annals of Misleading Titles
For Dan Brown fans — See posts now tagged Masonic Bricks.
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Friday, September 27, 2019
Country Matters or: Ventrickolist
Richard Sandomir in this evening's online New York Times —
|
On Sept. 24, 1950, Jimmy Nelson, a skinny 21-year-old ventriloquist, was introduced by Ed Sullivan on his Sunday night variety show, “Toast of the Town,” as “the greatest I’ve ever seen in his field.” Mr. Nelson was clean-cut and genial, with an air of boyish mischief. His dummy was a smart aleck in a suit and bow tie. “My name is Danny O’Day,” the dummy said to the audience. “This schnookle standing next to me is Jimmy Nelson. The kid thinks he’s a ventrickolist.” “That’s ventriloquist,” Mr. Nelson said, starting a rapid-fire exchange with his dummy. “Ventrickolist,” Danny said. “Ventriloquist,” Mr. Nelson said. It was an auspicious national debut…. |
Nelson reportedly died at 90 on Tuesday, September 24, 2019.
The remarks on Harvard existential nihilism posted here on that date
suggest a graphic illustration …
Venn trick o'list —
Nothing Galore
See as well a post from the preceding day,
Rabbit Hole Meets Memory Hole.
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The Black List
"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out
how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with
algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have
been any algebra' …."
— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962,
page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by
Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
Metaphor —
Algebra —
|
The 16 Dirac matrices form six anticommuting sets of five matrices each (Arfken 1985, p. 214):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. SEE ALSO: Pauli Matrices REFERENCES: Arfken, G. Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 3rd ed. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 211-217, 1985. Berestetskii, V. B.; Lifshitz, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. "Algebra of Dirac Matrices." §22 in Quantum Electrodynamics, 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, pp. 80-84, 1982. Bethe, H. A. and Salpeter, E. Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms. New York: Plenum, pp. 47-48, 1977. Bjorken, J. D. and Drell, S. D. Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Dirac, P. A. M. Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982. Goldstein, H. Classical Mechanics, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 580, 1980. Good, R. H. Jr. "Properties of Dirac Matrices." Rev. Mod. Phys. 27, 187-211, 1955. Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha: Dirac Matrices CITE THIS AS: Weisstein, Eric W. "Dirac Matrices."
From MathWorld— A Wolfram Web Resource. |
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Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
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.
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Algebra for Schoolgirls
The 15 points of the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2)
arranged in tetrahedral form:
The letter labels, but not the tetrahedral form,
are from The Axioms of Projective Geometry , by
Alfred North Whitehead (Cambridge U. Press, 1906).
The above space PG(3,2), because of its close association with
Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, might be called "schoolgirl space."
Screen Rant on July 31, 2019:
A Google Search sidebar this morning:
Apocalypse Soon! —
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Thursday, September 26, 2019
Personalities …
For Dan Brown
“It’s a combination of elation and fear, a certain kind of terror,”
Dr. Scott-Warren, a lecturer at Cambridge University, said
Thursday [Sept. 19] in an interview, describing his feelings.
“As a scholar, you get a sense of the fixed landmarks,” he said.
“Suddenly to have a new landmark to come right up through
the ground is quite disconcerting; there’s something alarming
about that.”
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Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Connecting the Dots
"A scholar in England suspected annotations in a First Folio
at the Free Library of Philadelphia were John Milton’s, so he
connected the dots . . . ." — The New York Times last Thursday
“It’s a combination of elation and fear, a certain kind of terror,”
Dr. Scott-Warren, a lecturer at Cambridge University, said
Thursday in an interview, describing his feelings.
“As a scholar, you get a sense of the fixed landmarks,” he said.
“Suddenly to have a new landmark to come right up through
the ground is quite disconcerting; there’s something alarming
about that.”
. . . .
"Dr. Scott-Warren … studies the history of books as material objects …."
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Halloween Global Joy
"The sad truth is that, by and large, mathematics is feared
and perhaps even openly disliked in the popular culture of
the majority of countries across the globe. At the very least,
math is often perceived as 'hard' and 'sterile,' pehaps even
remote, and unforgiving."
— James Tanton, Halloween 2018
Related material —
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Language Game
Previous posts now tagged Pyramid Game suggest …
A possible New Yorker caption: " e . . . (ab) . . . (cd) . "
Caption Origins —
Playing with shapes related to some 1906 work of Whitehead:
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Tuesday, September 24, 2019
In Memoriam
"Robert Hunter, the man behind the poetic and mystical
words for many of the Grateful Dead’s finest songs, died
Sept. 23 at at his home in San Rafael, Calif. He was 78."
— By John Rogers in The Washington Post ,
September 24, 2019, at 5:58 p.m. EDT
In memoriam: The Annotated "Ripple."
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Emissary
|
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Tetrahedral Structures
|
Playing with shapes related to some 1906 work of Whitehead:
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Russianization
From a Log24 search for Dolgachev —
"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, 1973 remark published in 1982.
"Perhaps."
— Steven H. Cullinane, February 13, 2019
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American Mathematical Society News
"Specifically, on May 6 of this year …." …
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Fire and Ice: Dom vs. DOM
The "Dom" of the title is the cathedral of Cologne.
The DOM is the Document Object Model of HTML:
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Existential Lust
For more-recent existential vibrations, see yesterday morning's post
on a Crimson philosopher's "Finding Purpose Through Nihilism."
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Monday, September 23, 2019
First and Last Things
|
“We shall now give a brief summary of the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game…. The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. And as we have said, it was played both in England and Germany before it was ‘invented’ here in the Musical Academy of Cologne, and was given the name it bears to this day, after so many generations, although it has long ceased to have anything to do with glass beads." |
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Reflections in a Cartoon Graveyard
Images from this journal related to the above cartoon —
(Click images for related posts.)
A sketch adapted from Girl Scouts of Palo Alto —
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Finding Purpose
There is also finding purpose through dating —
(from the source code for the above Crimson article)
Related material — D8ing.
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