Log24

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Obit et Orbit

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:23 pm

Continues.

In memoriam —

Flashback

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:39 pm

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.”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110220-relativprob.jpg

Team Dragon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:46 pm

A Stony Brook

Rigged Veda

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:30 pm

The New York Times  reports an April 7 death

Highlanders

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

The Millennium Falcon 9

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:15 am

Saturday, May 30, 2020

New Era of Space Exploration

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

See lowroad62.

“If you are a Scottish lord then I am Mickey Mouse!”
— The butler at Brunwald Castle (below).

The Stars and the Gutter

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

See as well . . .

“X marks the spot” — Indiana Jones, quoted here yesterday afternoon.

MAA News

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:07 am

In other news . . .

Another red book for Stephanie —

GitHub Identity

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Click the image below for some related material.

IMAGE- 'American Hustle' and Art Cube

Friday, May 29, 2020

Scripting

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

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion

Where It Used to Be

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:40 pm

"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

US 62 (Old Route 6) looking west, Warren, PA

Click the above image for a country song.

Noon Palace

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

See a Grateful Dead song.

The May Queens

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:53 am

In remembrance of Else Blangsted and Nancy Stark Smith,
who each reportedly died on May 1, 2020 —

Posts tagged Mayday 2020.

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Unity Game

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

“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.

Finite Geometry at GitHub

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:04 pm

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 .

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

In Search of the Diamond Chariot*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 pm

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

Gimme the beat boys. . . .

Naropa U. and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

* For the chariot, see other posts tagged September Samurai.

Finite Jest

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:17 pm

“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.

Continental Taste-Envy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:35 am

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.

Identity

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 am

Gotta work on that acronym.” — Tony Stark

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Introduction to Cyberspace

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:38 pm

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.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Cyberface

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:45 pm

(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 —

D8ing Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:27 pm

Note the purple mask.

See also a note on the fictional characters Wintermute and Neuromancer.

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:08 am

Mathematics:  This journal on September 1, 2011 —
Posts tagged September Morn.

Narrative:  Also on September 1, 2011 —

See as well  Nabokov’s Magic Carpet.

The Shimada Documents

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:24 am

(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.”

Sunday, May 24, 2020

A Lexicon of Operators

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:11 pm

“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 —

Group Identity Algebras and Transformations over a Bridge.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Deep Dogma

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

“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.

Structure for Linguists

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:34 am

"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 . . .

IMAGE- Redefining the cube's symmetry planes: 13 planes, not 9.

Eightfold Geometry: A Surface Code “Unit Cell”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:50 am

A unit cell in 'a lattice geometry for a surface code'

The resemblance to the eightfold cube  is, of course,
completely coincidental.

Some background from the literature —

Friday, May 22, 2020

Surface Code News

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:50 pm

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.”

Annals of Crystalline Beauty

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:58 pm

The phrase “laborious cerebration” quoted in the previous post,
Sombre Figuration, suggests . . .

For an example of such cerebration, see Aitchison’s Octads.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Sombre Figuration

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:18 pm

Duke University Press states above that …

“You do not currently have access to this content.”

But see…

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/71970/1/_
The_Difficultest_Rigor_Writing_about_Wallace_Stevens.pdf
.

Some less  difficult rigor —

For some less  sombre figurations, see the category in which Google
has placed (as above) a book by the late Harold Bloom —

Click the box to perform the indicated search.

Figuration

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:24 pm

See also Trojan Pony.

The Dead and the Quick

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:59 pm

Pace  Sharon Stone.

(Suggested by the earlier post  A Queen of Fact.)

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Cue the Violins

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:36 pm

In memory of a music editor.

Blangsted reportedly died on May 1.
See also that date in this journal, among
other posts tagged The Next Level.

Scholarly History

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:39 pm

On “emergence, institutionalization and (importantly) legitimation …
(with its resource allocation system and authority structure)” —

“It’s still the same old story.” — Song lyric

See as well other posts now tagged Raiding Minsky’s.

Something to Look At

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:24 pm

Stephen Ornes in Quanta Magazine  today —

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
Symbolic Mathematics Finally Yields to Neural Networks

“Another possible direction for the neural net to explore
is the development of automated theorem generators.
Mathematicians are increasingly investigating ways to
use AI to generate new theorems and proofs, though
‘the state of the art has not made a lot of progress,’
Lample said.  ‘It’s something we’re looking at.’ “

As is Stephanie Dick.

Raiders of the Lost Unity

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:21 pm

Mathematics as a Black Art

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:34 am

Grain of Salt

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

See other Log24 posts now tagged  Grano Salis .

A Queen of Fact*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:03 am

The American Mathematical Society has noted the May 12 death
of Nancy D. Anderson.  According to an unsigned May 14 obituary
in the Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, News-Gazette ,  Anderson was
“at the time of her retirement in 2000… one of the most respected
mathematics librarians of her generation.”

Related material (click to enlarge) —

* Phrase suggested by a Wallace Stevens poem.  See May 12.

Monday, May 18, 2020

This about That…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:02 pm

Lifetime Achievement —

“Eugene Telemachus Rossides (his middle name was for the son of
Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey ) was born in Brooklyn on
Oct. 23, 1927.” —

Trojan Pony

Click the horse to search this journal for Trojan .

Sunday, May 17, 2020

“The Ultimate Epistemological Fact”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:49 pm

"Let me say this about that." — Richard Nixon

Interpenetration in Weyl's epistemology —

Interpenetration in Mazzola's music theory —

Interpenetration in the eightfold cube — the three midplanes —

IMAGE- The Trinity Cube (three interpenetrating planes that split the eightfold cube into its eight subcubes)

A deeper example of interpenetration:

Aitchison has shown that the Mathieu group M24 has a natural
action on the 24 center points of the subsquares on the eightfold
cube's six faces (four such points on each of the six faces). Thus
the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) interpenetrate
on the surface of the cube.

Gran Torino

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:55 pm

Source citation for an article quoted here last night

Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action —

A check of that source yields the seal of the University of Torino —

Related material —

Classics Illustrated

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:32 pm

Related image —

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Bullshit Studies

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

From https://www.mathunion.org/outreach/logos/versions-all-logos

Click the logo for some IMU history.

Related bullshit —

Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action

Click the banner below for the background of the logo

Adventures on Prescott Street…

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:03 pm

Continue.

For a member of a 1960-1961 Harvard Freshman Seminar
at 8 Prescott Street —

Dusenbury’s study of color  was published on June 9, 2015.

This  journal on that date —

Annals of Intellectual History*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:32 pm

The date — Nov. 20, 2011 — of a post cited here last night
was suggested as follows.  It was the opening date of a
Broadway show, “Seminar,” that later starred Jeff Goldblum.

Jeff Goldblum in “Seminar

* See Intellectual History in this journal.

SPACE COMMAND

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

“There was a young artist named Tony….”

Tony Stark in  The Avengers , May the Fourth, 2012

Friday, May 15, 2020

It’s still the same old story…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:46 pm

Review

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 5:24 pm

Charles Taylor,
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —

“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”

See also Talking of Michelangelo.

Related material for comedians —

BOX: Binary Object Extension

Literature ad absurdum

Thursday, May 14, 2020

For Mask Aficionados

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:36 pm

Saturday, September 17, 2016

 

Box of Nothing

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:13 AM

(Continued)

"And six sides to bounce it all off of.

For those who prefer comedy —

Other toys: Archimedes at Hiroshima and related posts.

Tournamonde

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm

In memory of Wallace Stevens, a not-so-gay  tournamonde

Beware, beware, her flashing eyes, her floating hair:

Tony Award

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:15 pm

"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."

Another acronym — AIEEE    !

The Anti-Comedy Corner

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:34 pm

A postcard for yankeegirl60 —

Art Issue*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:25 am

"… the beautiful object
that stood in
for something else.”

— Holland Cotter quoting an art historian
in The New York Times  on May 13

From a post of April 27, 2020 —

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside….”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

The beautiful object —

Something else —

* The title is a reference to other posts now also tagged Art Issue.

Object

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

In memory of an art historian who reportedly died on May 6 —

What he loved about the art of the Baroque,
he told Ms. Soboleva, was that
“it was for a higher purpose.
It wasn’t just about the beautiful object;
it was the beautiful object that stood in
for something else."

— Holland Cotter in The New York Times

Related material:

The  previous post and . . .

As Is

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

"… as and is are one." — Wallace Stevens

See "As Is" Stevens.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Behold a Pale Horse

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:16 pm

A pitch at the Stephen King Ad Agency

The Follower: A Short Story for Stephen King

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:03 pm

“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.”

— Sir Michael Atiyahquoted here on April 4, 2016

What is the vashikaran? – Quora

Mar 17, 2015 – Vashikaran is a well-known term in the field of Tantra and Mantra. It is an ancient legacy Tantra and Mantra used to control someone’s mind. It is a tantrik process …

Adventures in the Book Trade

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

Click the Springer “train of thought” advertisement below to enlarge.

 

A line for Stephen King:

“She gets the locomotive, I get the caboose.”

. . . . . . .

Cover of 'The Institute,' a novel by Stephen King

Cover Design: Will Staehle / Unusual Co.

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Mehta Physics

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:16 pm

Epigraph to Fly and the Fly-Bottle:
Encounters with British Intellectuals ,
by Ved Mehta , remarks first published
in  The New Yorker  in 1961 and 1962 —

See as well the Wallace Stevens phrase “The Ruler of Reality.”

Night at the Museum

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:26 pm

For  Ben and Jerry

Monday, May 11, 2020

Finite Geometry at Harvard

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:34 pm

Now at https://dataverse.harvard.edu

Archived copy of finitegeometry.org/sc .

For some related remarks in a more literary vein,
see posts now tagged Beadgame Space.

Nietzsche for Comedians

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:33 am

See also Shangri-La  and  “At the Back of the North Wind .”

Update from the Times —

Some things that happen for the first time….” — Song lyric

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Plato Again Thanks the Academy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:41 pm

I prefer  The Pride of Lowell —

IMAGE- Scenes from 'The Fighter'- Amy Adams, Christian Bale

Some literary background— Doctor Sax.

Capilla

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:11 pm

In memory of an architect who reportedly died yesterday at 88,
a search in this journal  for capilla  (Spanish for chapel).

Deschooling* M.I.T.

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:29 pm

New York Times  opinion yesterday from a professor at M.I.T.

* For some background on Deschooling, see (for instance) . . .

Film Theory Love Call

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:18 am

From April 2, 2019

For the Garbage Pail Kids:

From this  journal  yesterday afternoon —

“The default sound for any new tweet is a whistle,
somewhere between a neighbourly ‘yoo-hoo’
and a dog-walker’s call to heel.” — The Economist

Saturday, May 9, 2020

Quicksilver* Meditation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:40 pm

Suggested by the previous post

Tom Lamont in The Economist , June/July 2020

Recently, I saw that a person called Celine in San Francisco had tweeted to her 2,500-odd followers about the difficulty of “trying to date SF guys in between their week-long meditation retreats, Tahoe weekends, month-long remote work sessions…” About 4,000 people tapped to endorse the sentiment, launching Celine onto an exponential number of strangers’ screens, including my own. The default sound for any new tweet is a whistle, somewhere between a neighbourly “yoo-hoo” and a dog-walker’s call to heel.

“Everybody, here comes the life of the party
Everybody, here comes the life of the party, yeah, she is.”

Songwriters: Ben Hayslip / Rhett Akins / Jason Sellers

See as well Life of the Party  in this  journal.

Synchronologists  may consult posts of March 2015.

*This was Language herself , as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding
out of the molten quicksilver  of the first star called Mercury on Earth,
but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.” ―  C.S. Lewis,  That Hideous Strength .

 

Comedy Team: Tedious and Rigged

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:15 pm

“Much of ‘Laurel Canyon’ proves tedious and rigged as it moves from Cambridge, where both Sam and Alex have graduated from Harvard Medical School, to California, where Sam will intern as Alex completes her doctoral thesis on the sex lives of fruit flies.

Malcolm Johnson in The Hartford Courant
      on March 28, 2003

See as well this  journal on the above Courant  date — March 28, 2003 —

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like bananas.”
— Saying attributed to Harvard linguist Anthony Oettinger

Shrikhande Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:55 am

See also earlier posts mentioning Shrikhande in this  journal.
He reportedly died on April 21, 2020.
Synchronologists  may consult posts now tagged with that date.

Friday, May 8, 2020

Orthodox

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:08 pm

In memory of a performer and historian of popular music
who reportedly died on April 19, 2020 —

Related material with an Easter theme —

See also posts in this  journal related to March 11.

 

Production Values

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:53 pm

From Log24 on August 30, 2013

Portrait, in the 2013 film Oblivion , of  a 2005 graduate
of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art —

London derrière.

From a 2015 film viewed last night —

Moon Song

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

"Even when some parts of the show don’t feel like they’re working,
the production is always top notch and eye-popping. The score, too,
is top notch here, but it’s the use of Pink Floyd’s 'The Dark Side of
the Moon' that resonates most."

Kevin Lever on the Westworld  May 3 Season 3 finale

Image from Log24 posts tagged Spectral Valhalla

 

Die Einheit

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:35 am

"E "  is for "Einheit."

See also "The Unity."

Thursday, May 7, 2020

Happy Vesak

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:38 pm

“The holiday goes by dozens of names — but many countries unofficially
refer to it as Buddha’s Birthday or Buddha Day. It celebrates three
important events of Buddha’s life: birth, enlightenment, and death —
said to have occurred on the same calendar day, albeit many years apart.”
CNN

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

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

“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.”

— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016

 

Illustrations, from the American Mathematical Society Spring
2020 book sale, of a book scheduled to be published May 28.

Notes on MSRI (Pronounced “Misery”)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Gimme the beat, boys, and free my soul.

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

Kant as Diamond Cutter

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:26 am

“He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it.
That master diamond cutter.”

— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Part III.

Kant’s  “category theory” —

“In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant deduces the table of twelve categories, or pure concepts of the understanding….

The categories must be ‘schematized’ because their non-empirical origin in pure understanding prevents their having the sort of sensible content that would connect them immediately to the objects of experience; transcendental schemata are mediating representations that are meant to establish the connection between pure concepts and appearances in a rule-governed way. Mathematical concepts are discussed in this context since they are unique in being pure but also sensible concepts: they are pure because they are strictly a priori  in origin, and yet they are sensible since they are constructed in concreto . ”

— Shabel, Lisa, “Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/kant-mathematics/>.

See also The Diamond Theorem and Octad.us.

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Identity Problem

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:01 pm

The phrase “problem of identity” in the previous post suggests a search
for other instances of the phrase. That search yields a talk by Andrei Rodin:

A later book by Rodin echoes Vladimir Arnold‘s remark
that “mathematics is a part of physics.” (Rodin is a Russian
who apparently worships at the Church of Scientism.)

The Rodin talk is dated 19 November 2012.

For some very different philosophical remarks, by poet
Wallace Stevens, see the Log24 posts of 19 November 2012.

“The Ship of Theseus”…

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:17 pm

is a philosophical conundrum  discussed this morning  in the weblog of
David Justice.

A related statement of this “problem of identity,” from posts
in this  weblog tagged “For Banff 2009” yesterday afternoon

Remarks related to the ship of Theseus —

Oprah, Uma

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:40 am

See also The H-State.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Raiders of the Lost Horizon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:52 pm

Drama

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:55 pm

H is for Hogwarts.

Appeal

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:19 pm

See as well Exploring Schoolgirl Space.

In Memoriam: Jan Saxl, Mathematician

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:03 pm

For the conference, see
https://www.birs.ca/events/2009/5-day-workshops/09w5030 .

For the Church of Synchronology:
Time for you to see the field.” (Posts now tagged “For Banff 2009”)

Notes for a Wake

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:52 am

If Not Sublime

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:24 am

This is perhaps the same Robert Mezey, poet at Pomona College,
who reportedly died on April 25.

See a Pomona link, the Fano Hallows, from this journal on that date.

Monday, May 4, 2020

Raiders of the Lost Sublime

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 pm

The Man Behind the Counter

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:06 pm

The title is a phrase from the Suzanne Vega song in the previous post.

Always busy counting . . . .” — Tagline at Peter J. Cameron’s weblog.

“This morning brought the news that Jan Saxl died on Saturday.”

Peter J. Cameron today

A search for Saxl in this  weblog yields a post related to a topic in
Wolfram Neutsch’s book Coordinates.  See Saturday’s post
Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level.”

Related narrative from the Saturday post —

Related narrative from Sunday’s Westworld finale —

The Thing and I …

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Continues.

Update at 4 PM —

“It is always
Nice to see you”
Says the man
Behind the counter

— Suzanne Vega. “Tom’s Diner”

Tom Stall’s diner in  “A History of  Violence” (30 September 2005).

This  journal on 30 September 2005 —

“This place ain’t doing me any good.
I’m in the wrong town,
I should be in Hollywood.”

— Dylan, “Things Have Changed

May the Fourth

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:03 pm

“This is not the Hartshorne you’re looking for.”

Reality as a Social Process  (1953) developed the ideas
that becoming, or process, is fundamental throughout
reality, and that all the things that become are interrelated.”

From American National Biography

Related material —

The New York Times  obituary of Madeline Faith Kripke
and Nietzsche on “becoming, or process.”

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Crichton Time

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:37 pm


Into the Westworld

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:03 pm

He beomes aware of something else… some other presence.
“Anybody here?” he says.
I am here.
He almost jumps, it is so loud. Or it seems loud. Then he wonders if
he has heard anything at all.
“Did you speak?”
No.
How are we communicating? he wonders.
The way everything communicates with everything else.
Which way is that?
Why do you ask if you already know the answer?

— Sphere   by Michael Crichton, Harvard ’64

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Beat the Clock

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:27 pm

Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:24 am

From  the obituary of a game inventor  who reportedly died
on Monday, February 25, 2013 —

” ‘He was hired because of the game,’ Richard Turyn,
a mathematician who worked at Sylvania, told
the Washington Post in a 2004 feature on Diplomacy.”

* For the theorem, see Wolfram Neutsch,  Coordinates .
(Published by de Gruyter, 1996. See pp. 761-766.)

Having defined (pp. 751-752) the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
as a 4×6 array to be used with Conway’s “hexacode,” Neutsch says . . .

“Apart from the three constructions of the Golay codes
discussed at length in this book (lexicographic and via
the MOG or the projective line), there are literally
dozens of alternatives. For lack of space, we have to
restrict our attention to a single example. It has been
discovered by Turyn and can be connected in a very
beautiful way with the Miracle Octad Generator….

To this end, we consider the natural splitting of the MOG into
three disjoint octads L, M, R (‘left’, ‘middle’, and ‘right’ octad)….”

— From page 761

“The theorem of Turyn”  is on page 764

Friday, May 1, 2020

The H-State

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

Related pure mathematics —

The Escape from Plato’s Cave to . . .

See also Numberland and Walpurgisnacht Geometry.

Bullshit Studies

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 2:55 pm

The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s  Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn  (Bantam Books, 2014).

“You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”

I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.”

I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. 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.

“If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.”

That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing.

My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s  Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction  (Cornell, 1970)

“There is a point at which

‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’

The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”

Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:

See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.

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