In memoriam —
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Obit et Orbit …
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Flashback
Related material —
“The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference
creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself
is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real.
There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because
you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears:
the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.”
— Amanda Gefter in 2014, quoted here on Mayday 2020.
See as well, in a post from the date of Hunter Thompson’s death :
“Today, February 20, is the 19th anniversary of my note
The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.”
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Saturday, May 30, 2020
New Era of Space Exploration
See lowroad62.
“If you are a Scottish lord then I am Mickey Mouse!”
— The butler at Brunwald Castle (below).
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The Stars and the Gutter
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Friday, May 29, 2020
Where It Used to Be
"Looking for what was, where it used to be"
— Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," I
"It Must Be Abstract," X
"X marks the spot" — Indiana Jones
Click the above image for a country song.
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The May Queens
In remembrance of Else Blangsted and Nancy Stark Smith,
who each reportedly died on May 1, 2020 —
Posts tagged Mayday 2020.
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Thursday, May 28, 2020
Unity Game
“Old men ought to be explorers.” — T. S. Eliot
“Everybody’s lost but me!” — Young Indiana Jones, quoted
in a book review (“Knox Peden on Martin Hägglund”) in
Sydney Review of Books on May 26 . . .
” Here I am reminded of the words of
the young Indiana Jones alone in the desert,
decades before the Last Crusade:
‘Everybody’s lost but me.’ “
Related remarks — Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
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Finite Geometry at GitHub
My website on finite geometry is now available
on GitHub at http://m759.github.io/ . The part
of greatest interest to coders is also at
https://repl.it/@m759/View-4x4x4#index.html .
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Wednesday, May 27, 2020
In Search of the Diamond Chariot*
From an obituary in The New York Times today —
“After graduating from Oberlin in 1974 with a degree in dance
and writing, she studied meditation and Buddhism at what is
now the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.”
— Gia Kourlas, May 27, 2020, 11:23 a.m. ET
* For the chariot, see other posts tagged September Samurai.
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Finite Jest
“No serious difficulty is encountered as long as one deals
with a domain consisting of a finite number of points only,
which can be ‘called up’ one after the other.” — Weyl
Background — The relativity problem in this journal.
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Continental Taste-Envy
The title is a phrase by Kyle Smith, who writes with
considerable taste and little envy.
Then there is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein . . .
See as well Heidegger at Davos.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Introduction to Cyberspace
Or approaching.
On the Threshold:
Click the search result above for the July 1982 Omni
story that introduced into fiction the term "cyberspace."
Part of a page from the original Omni version —
For some other kinds of space, see my notes from the 1980's.
Some related remarks on space (and illustrated clams) —
— George Steiner, "A Death of Kings," The New Yorker ,
September 7, 1968, pp. 130 ff. The above is from p. 133.
See also Steiner on space, algebra, and Galois.
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Monday, May 25, 2020
Cyberface
(A sequel to D8ing the Joystick)
Adam Gopnik today in The New Yorker —
“In remote therapy sessions, with the loss of familiarly structured
therapeutic spaces, a kind of staring contest takes place.”
This journal on the above YouTube date — May 28, 2011 —
“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”
Canto IV of “It Must Change”
Update of 5:45 PM ET —
The above May 28, 2011, Stevens quotation is from a post
titled “Savage Detectives.” A related image starring Sean Young —
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D8ing Continues.
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Mathematics and Narrative
Mathematics: This journal on September 1, 2011 —
Posts tagged September Morn.
Narrative: Also on September 1, 2011 —
See as well Nabokov’s Magic Carpet.
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The Shimada Documents
(For Harlan Kane)
From Shimada’s notes on computational data at
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shimada/
preprints/Edge/PaperEdge/compdataEdge.pdf —
“C24 is the list of codewords of the extended
binary Golay code C24. Each codeword is expressed
by a subset of the set M of the positions [1, . . . , 24]
of MOG.”
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Sunday, May 24, 2020
A Lexicon of Operators
“If we ended Part 1 proud of our accomplishment—
perhaps even a little smug—then we will get reacquainted
with our humility in this article.” — Robert Jacobson
Related to the grammar of operators —
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Saturday, May 23, 2020
Deep Dogma
“Far from making us revise our fundamentals and reform our thoughts,
major historical crises almost invariably reinforce our previous beliefs,
and make us entrench deeper into our dogma. ”
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , May 1, 2020
See also Geometric Theology.
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Structure for Linguists
"MIT professor of linguistics Wayne O’Neil died on March 22
at his home in Somerville, Massachusetts."
— MIT Linguistics, May 1, 2020
The "deep structure" above is the plane cutting the cube in a hexagon
(as in my note Diamonds and Whirls of September 1984).
See also . . .
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Eightfold Geometry: A Surface Code “Unit Cell”
The resemblance to the eightfold cube is, of course,
completely coincidental.
Some background from the literature —
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Friday, May 22, 2020
Surface Code News
From a paper cited in the above story:
“Fig. 4 A lattice geometry for a surface code.” —
The above figure suggests a search for “surface code” cube :
Related poetic remarks — “Illumination of a surface.”
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