Log24

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Matrix Rotator

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

This post was suggested by a "matrix rotator" photo dated 1953-03-02.

Some context — Kracauer's notion of "mass ornament."

Dies Natalis: The Frame

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:49 am

From this journal on Candlemas 2018

Also on Candlemas 2018 —

Friday, December 30, 2022

Bullshit Studies: The View from East Lansing

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:40 pm

Detail of the above screen (click to enlarge) —

See also this  journal on the above date  — June 10, 2021.

From this journal on May 6, 2009

A related picture of images that "reappear metamorphosed
in the coordinate system of the high region" —

(For the backstory, see Geometry of the I Ching
and the history of Chinese philosophy.)

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

“The ‘Dim Void’: Beckett’s Worstward Ho!

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:53 am

The title is from . . .

https://booksonthewall.com/blog/samuel-beckett-quote-fail-better/ .

This post was suggested by yesterday's Feast of St. Thomas Becket

A Beckett-related flashback linked to here yesterday

Rosalind Krauss in 1978 —

"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity." 

Thursday, December 29, 2022

In memory of . . .

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:35 pm

Vivienne Westwood

See also this  journal on December 11.

Bullshit Studies: “Foundations of Modern Consciousness”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:57 am

The first Romantics

"How a close group of brilliant friends,
in a tiny German university town, laid
the foundations of modern consciousness"

Headline for the article whose URL is . . .

https://aeon.co/essays/
english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania

The article was published by Aeon  on December 20, 2022,
and is featured in today's Arts & Letters Daily . On the author:

"Andrea Wulf is a historian and the award-winning author
of several books, including the bestselling 
The Invention of Nature  (2015) and, most recently, 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and
the Invention of the Self
  (2022). She is a Miller Scholar

at the Santa Fe Institute

and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature."

Related material — "The Eight" According to Coleridge.

Art Theory: What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:57 am

Literary Metadata: A Canterbary Tale

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:58 am

Two items from the same date in 2014 —

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Santa Fe Institute as Magisterium Wannabe

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:23 am

"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship

Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —

"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."

A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
 

COIN
 

https://www.armstrong.edu/history-journal/history-journal-myth-ritual-and-the-labyrinth-of-king-minos
 

RING


"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an 
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
 

KEY


"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in 
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference 
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
 

For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Rave Review . . .

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:27 pm

The Forms of Being

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:25 pm

"If the window is this matrix of ambi- or multivalence,
and the bars of the windows-the grid-are what help us
to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are themselves 
the symbol of the symbolist work of art. They function as
the multilevel representation through which the work of art
can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."

Page 59, Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," MIT Press,
October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64

Related material —

Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.

A related literary remark —

"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark  set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."

— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book review, not  of Dark Materials.

Monday, December 26, 2022

The Halo

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

Super-8 Box

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

For the title, see other posts tagged Super-8.

Box containing Froebel's Third Gift-- The Eightfold Cube

Click image for some background.

Related material —

Sunday, December 25, 2022

Happy Holidays to Christopher Nolan.

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

Merry Xmas, Enola.

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:48 am

Published on Sept. 15, 2022.  See as well this journal on that date.

The WTF Detective

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:59 am

Saturday, December 24, 2022

Window as Matrix

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:57 am

Grids

Author: Rosalind Krauss
Source: October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778321

From page 59:

"Flowing and freezing; glace  in French means glass, mirror, and ice;
transparency, opacity, and water. In the associative system
of symbolist thought this liquidity points in two directions.
First, towards the flow of birth-the amniotic fluid, the 'source'-
but then, towards the freezing into stasis or death-
the unfecund immobility of the mirror. For Mallarmé, particularly,
the window functioned as this complex, polysemic sign by which
he could also project the 'crystallization  of reality into art.' 5
Mallarmé's Les Fenêtres  dates from 1863;
Redon's most evocative window, Le Jour , appeared in 1891
in the volume Songes . If the window is this matrix of
ambi- or multivalence, and the bars of the windows-the grid-
are what help us to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are
themselves the symbol of the symbolist work of art.
They function as the multilevel representation through which
the work of art can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."

5 Robert G. Cohn, "Mallarmé's Windows," Yale French Studies ,
no. 54 (1977), 23-31.

Another evocative example — See Galois Window in this  journal.

Xmas with Moriarty:  Big Little Ideas

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:01 am

For the Harvard Psychedelics Club

Friday, December 23, 2022

Scope and Depth

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:28 pm

"The book I came back to
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I couldn’t cope with it
as a student; it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married,
and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised
its majestic scope and depth." — Philip Pullman in
The GuardianFri 23 Dec 2022 05.00 EST

Another instance of scope  and depth  — 
"The Amber Spyglass" Log24 post of Wednesday.

See also other references here  to Middlemarch.

Was ist Raum?” — Bauhaus Founder Walter Gropius

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:43 am

"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
 erfassen und gestalten?"

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus
  (1923)

A relevant illustration:

At math.stackexchange.com on March 1-12, 2013:

Is there a geometric realization of the Quaternion group?” —

The above illustration, though neatly drawn, appeared under the
cloak of anonymity.  No source was given for the illustrated group actions.
Possibly they stem from my Log24 posts or notes such as the Jan. 4, 2012,
note on quaternion actions at finitegeometry.org/sc (hence ultimately
from my note “GL(2,3) actions on a cube” of April 5, 1985).

These references will not appeal to those who enjoy modernism as a religion.
(For such a view, see Rosalind Krauss on grids and another writer's remarks
on the religion's 100th anniversary this year.)

Some related nihilist philosophy from Cormac McCarthy —

"Forms turning in a nameless void."

Thursday, December 22, 2022

GSD is “Graduate School of Design.”

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

The 'harvard gsd' in the link button below is the Graduate School of Design.

'square harvard model' Google search result

Related material — "News of the World" in this journal.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:58 am

IMAGE- Aug. 5, 2005- Galois tesseract, Shakespeherian Rag, Sir Alec Guinness

For Harlan Kane: The Canetti Maxim

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:14 am

"Most important for Canetti are certain events
that he calls 'illuminations,' such as his witnessing
of striking workers being mowed down by Viennese
police on July 15, 1927, which was the germ of both
Auto-da-Fé and Crowds and Power. For Canetti,
these epiphanies are moments of metamorphosis,
which he prizes above all in art as well as in life.
Canetti aspired to be a 20th-century Ovid, but
precisely because he was modern, this ambition
landed him, again and again, in paradox, such as
the one expressed in the aphorism that gives this
compilation its title, or in this characteristic maxim:
'It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves .'"

— Hal Foster in The Chronicle of Higher Education ,
"The Best Scholarly Books of 2022," Dec. 21, 2022.

See also this  journal on Nov, 25, 2022 —

“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

For “Dark Materials” Fans: The Monkey Trial

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:35 am

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

The Unmagic Square

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:45 pm

Last year on this date:

A Riddler Wannabe —

Related material — The Krauss passage quoted as above
by Shechtman in The New Yorker  in December 2021 appears
also in a Log24 post of October 18, 2017:  "Three Small Grids."

Digitally Assisted Fiction . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:16 am


The Amber Spyglass :


Click for a related story.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

The Puzzle

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:25 pm

Today's previous post "The Urn" suggests a look at . . .

How to Solve The New York Times Crossword

By Deb Amlen. Illustrations by Elena Xausa.
Animations by Lorenzo Fonda.

That web page is undated, but its HTML source contains
43 instances of the date 2017-10-18.

See as well "Three Small Grids," a post from this  journal on 2017-10-18.

Related material — Today's 3:05 PM ET New York Times  obituary
for the above crossword guide illustrator, Elena Xausa —

The Urn

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:18 pm

Chris Ware, visual crossword puzzle clue, New Yorker issue dated Dec. 26, 2022.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/26/the-cover-crossword

"The two cover characters, who I’ve been thinking of as and . . ."

— Chris Ware on his New Yorker  cover for the issue dated Dec. 26, 2022.

For Fans of “The Story Theory of Truth” . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:28 am

(See earlier posts referring to that theory.)

Catching up to Pullman's Oct. 3 remark . . .

See Log24 posts now tagged October 1-2-3.

Monday, December 19, 2022

Mathematics and Narrative, Continued . . .
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 3:50 am

   Midrash from Philip Pullman . . .

"The 1929 Einstein-Carmichael Expedition"

    I prefer the 1929 Emch-Carmichael expedition —

This is from . . .

“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”

— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
(Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics,
Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham,
Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))

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