And then there is non-bullshit about a
four-by-six frame —
Bullshit addicts pondering the meaning of the letter "Q" may consult
"Q is for Quelle ," "Q is for Quality," and this journal on the above American Scholar date — March 2, 2020.
We represent things in the world with words, and once you know that words represent concrete things, it's a short jump to realizing that words can represent abstract things, too.
Symbolic representation isn't necessarily straightforward, either. "A philosopher named Quine had this notion," she said. "If you're out in the field with somebody, and they point and say 'Gavagai!' and you look and you see a rabbit running through the field, you assume that gavagai in their language means rabbit . But how do you know it doesn't mean 'brown,' or 'tail,' or 'leg,' or 'fur'—"
"Or, 'Look at that!'" I said.
"Yeah, all of this other stuff is present, but we have this whole object notion," she said. "We have a notion of what constitutes a distinct object, and we assume that the word corresponds to that whole object as a default. Would the alien have that notion?"
"A debonair Virginian, Mr. Warner was sometimes called
the senator from central casting; his ramrod military posture,
distinguished gray hair and occasionally overblown
speaking style fit the Hollywood model." — Carl Hulse
"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?'
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."
"Art Gensler, an architect and entrepreneur who
turned a small San Francisco architecture firm
into one of the largest in the world, with projects
spanning the globe, died on May 10 at his home
in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 85."
Gensler: "The book I have written, Art’s Principles , is oriented
toward those leading and running a professional practice.
I hope it finds a home in the Cornell library."
The proper context for some diamond figures that I am interested in
is the 4×4 array that appears, notably, in Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface . Hence this post's "Kummerhenge" tag,
suggested also by some monumental stonework at Tufte's site.
* The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes the online Arts & Letters Daily ,
from which the above citation of a book review is taken. The review itself is from
the leftist Los Angeles Review of Books . The review quotes a book by Deborah
Harkness, The Jewel House , published by Yale University Press on Oct. 28, 2008.
Yale University Press on Harkness:
"Deborah E. Harkness is professor of history,
University of Southern California.
She is the author of John Dee’s Conversations with Angels :
Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature and of
the New York Times bestseller A Discovery of Witches . http://deborahharkness.com ."
See also this journal in late October, 2008.
Comments Off on Snark from CHE (Chronicle of Higher Education)*
Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldn't even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People don't pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?
— McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men
(Vintage International) (p. 57).
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Keith A. Gessen (born January 9, 1975) is a Russian-born
American novelist, journalist, and literary translator.
He is co-founder and co-editor of American literary magazine
and an assistant professor of journalism at the Columbia University
Graduate School of Journalism. Early life and education
Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen into a Jewish family in Moscow….
Some related images —
The logo of a news site that yesterday
covered a Colorado Springs story:
Comments Off on The Triangle Induction (Attn: Harlan Kane)
“The following is an excerpt from Joshua Cohen’s
new novel, The Netanyahus, out next week
in the UK from Fitzcarraldo Editions, and on June 22
in the US from New York Review Books.”
” After half a century in the professorate,
I was recently retired from my post as the
Andrew William Mellon Memorial Professor
of American Economic History at Corbin University
in Corbindale, New York, in the occasionally rural,
occasionally wild heart of Chautauqua County,
just inland from Lake Erie among the apple orchards
and apiaries and dairies—or, as dismissive, geographically
illiterate New York City–folk insist on calling it, ‘Upstate.’ ”
Though the n+1 piece was published April 27, I have only now noticed it.
Perhaps some quicker picker-upper in Chautauqua County has already
written about the novel’s local color.
A post from this journal on that date, April 27, was related to my own non-fictional college experience in Fredonia, NY (Chautauqua County) —
Some other quanta-related material appearedhere
on that same date — March 24, 2020.
Update of 11:22 AM ET the same day, May 8, 2021 —
The above book title, “We Know It When We See It,” suggests
a different date: September 27, 2007. See remarks from that
date in The Wall Street Journal and in this journal.
The Greek capital letter Omega, Ω, is customarily
used to denote a set that is acted upon by a group.
If the group is the affine group of 322,560
transformations of the four-dimensional
affine space over the two-element Galois field,
the appropriate Ω is the 4×4 grid above.
“It’s not just about depth.
You need the simplest version of the idea,
the one that will grow naturally
in the subject’s mind.
It’s a very subtle art.”
The title, by Stendhal, is that of a novel which, according to Wikipedia,
“chronicles the attempts of a provincial young man to rise socially
beyond his modest upbringing through a combination of talent,
hard work, deception, and hypocrisy.”
Another chronicler of deception, the author of Red Sparrow ,
reportedly died on Wednesday, April 28.
In Search of Time (on view through February 10, 2013).
In celebrating the opening of this iconic building at Michigan State University, In Search of Time seeks to explore
the longing artists have held for hundreds of years to express
their relationship to time and memory.”
