Log24

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Tuesday May 13, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am
Only the Dead
Know Brooklyn

(continued from April 2004)

David Brooks in
today’s New York Times:

“The mind seems to have
the ability to transcend itself
and merge with a larger
presence that feels more real.”

Sometimes in rather strange ways… An example–

Sunday morning’s entry Annals of Poetry was linked, via the word “tesseract,” to an entry of May 12, 2006, which in turn had a link to the Log24 entries of February 1-15, 2003. From those entries:

Monday, Feb. 10, 2003

Singing-Masters

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
— William Butler Yeats

Jimmy Durante

Durante

Shari Lewis on cover of 'Party in Shariland'

Shari Lewis

Last Sunday night (May 11),
Turner Classic Movies
showed a film featuring
Jimmy Durante as a
singing-master of
Frank Sinatra:

Movie poster for 'It Happened in Brooklyn'

From earlier this month,
an entry featuring Sinatra and a
different singing-master — not from
Brooklyn but from Tidioute —

Sunday, May 4, 2008

A Diploma for Frank from…

The Old School
Sinatra on cover of USA Weekend, Sunday, May 4, 2008

 
The Old School
at Tidioute:

The old Tidioute High School, now Tidioute Community Charter School

A product of
the old school
:

Tidioute girl

These little town blues…

“… all good things — trout as well as
  eternal salvation — come by grace
and grace comes by art
  and art does not come easy.”

A River Runs Through It

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Sunday May 11, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
May and Zan

May Swenson, left, and Zan Knudson, right

May Swenson (left)
and Zan Knudson (right)

In memory of poet May Swenson and sports novelist Rozanne Ruth “Zan” Knudson:

Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times:

“It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in ‘Pat and Mike.’

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, ‘You are the wrong jockey for this chick.’

‘You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,’ he says, later adding, ‘When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?'”

Girl in tesseract on cover of  'The Gameplayers of Zan'

Summary of M. A. Foster’s
The Gameplayers of Zan:

“Then she has a vision of herself,
enclosed by an unfolded hypercube,
and then an immense screen
behind it covered by complex,
     ever-shifting patterns….”

“Christ! What are
 patterns for?”
Amy Lowell   

Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?

— Robert A. Heinlein

Monday, May 5, 2008

Monday May 5, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:07 am
Lottery Sermon

"And take upon's
the mystery of things
 as if we were God's spies"
King Lear  

PA Lottery Sunday, May 4, 2008: mid-day 170, evening 144

From Log24 on Aug. 19, 2003
and on Ash Wednesday, 2004:
a reviewer on
An Instance of the Fingerpost::

"Perhaps we are meant to
see the story as a cubist
   retelling of the crucifixion."

From Log24 on
Michaelmas 2007:

Kate Beckinsale (in 'Pearl Harbor') pointing to an instance of the number 144

Google searches suggested by
Sunday's PA lottery numbers
(mid-day 170, evening 144)
and by the above
figure of Kate Beckinsale
pointing to an instance of
the number 144 —

Click to enlarge:

Search for the meaning of 170 and 144, the PA lottery numbers of Sunday, May 4, 2008

Related material:

Beckinsale in another film
(See At the Crossroads,
Log24, Dec. 8, 2006):

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow  
 
Kate Beckinsale in Underworld: Evolution

 

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)
 
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.

"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."

— Review of  
Faust in Copenhagen

From the conclusion of
Joan Didion's 1970 novel
  Play It As It Lays

Cover of 'Play It As It Lays'

"I know what 'nothing' means,
and keep on playing."

From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) —

Page 170:

"By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for

170  

even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."

"The page numbers
are generally reliable."

Michaelmas 2007   

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Tuesday March 4, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
… And for a
    Swiftly Tilting
       Shadowed Planet …

Wm. F. Buckley as Archimedes, moving the world with a giant pen as lever. The pen's point is applied to southern South America.
John Trever, Albuquerque Journal, 2/29/08

The pen's point:

Log24, Dec. 11, 2006

SINGER, ISAAC:
"Are Children the
Ultimate Literary Critics?"
— Top of the News 29
(Nov. 1972): 32-36.

"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children and laments 'slice of life' and chaos in children's literature. Maintains that children like good plots, logic, and clarity, and that they have a concern for 'so-called eternal questions.'"

An Annotated Listing
of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

"She returned the smile, then looked across the room to her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and to their father, who were deep in concentration, bent over the model they were building of a tesseract: the square squared, and squared again: a construction of the dimension of time."

A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L'Engle

 

Cover of 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet' and picture of tesseract

For "the dimension of time,"
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937
 
A Swiftly Tilting Planet  is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Sunday March 2, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Practical Magic

Halloween 2005:

“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

Margaret Wertheim with fellow tesseract authors

Several voices:

Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
,

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and

Madeleine L’Engle and husband.

From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:

Wertheim's 'Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,' page 200
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”

Madeleine L’Engle   

Friday, September 21, 2007

Friday September 21, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:28 am
Word and Object

"We may recall the ideal of 'dryness' which we associate with the symbolist movement, with writers such as T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot, with Paul Valery, with Wittgenstein. This 'dryness' (smallness, clearness, self-containedness) is a nemesis of Romanticism…. The temptation of art… is to console. The modern writer… attempts to console us by myths or by stories."

— Iris Murdoch  

"The consolations of form,
the clean crystalline work"

— Iris Murdoch, 
"Against Dryness"

"As a teacher Quine
was carefully organized,
precise, and conscientious,
but somewhat dry
in his classroom style."

Harvard Gazette 

Word:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070921-Connectives.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Object:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070921-Lindenbaum-Tarski.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Myth and Story:

The five entries ending
on Jan. 27, 2007

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
Madeleine L'Engle  
 

Friday, September 7, 2007

Friday September 7, 2007

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

The New York Times online,
Friday, Sept. 7, 2007:

Madeleine L’Engle,
Children’s Writer,
Is Dead

"Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday [Sept. 6, 2007] in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux."

More >>

Related material:

Log24 entries of
August 31

"That is how we travel."

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070831-Ant2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A Wrinkle in Time,
Chapter 5,
"The Tesseract"

— and of 
September 2
(with update of
 September 5)–

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time  

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Sunday September 2, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:11 pm

Comment at the
n-Category Cafe

Re: This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 251)

On Spekkens’ toy system and finite geometry

Background–

  • In “Week 251” (May 5, 2007), John wrote:
    “Since Spekkens’ toy system resembles a qubit, he calls it a “toy bit”. He goes on to study systems of several toy bits – and the charming combinatorial geometry I just described gets even more interesting. Alas, I don’t really understand it well: I feel there must be some mathematically elegant way to describe it all, but I don’t know what it is…. All this is fascinating. It would be nice to find the mathematical structure that underlies this toy theory, much as the category of Hilbert spaces underlies honest quantum mechanics.”
  • In the n-Category Cafe ( May 12, 2007, 12:26 AM, ) Matt Leifer wrote:
    “It’s crucial to Spekkens’ constructions, and particularly to the analog of superposition, that the state-space is discrete. Finding a good mathematical formalism for his theory (I suspect finite fields may be the way to go) and placing it within a comprehensive framework for generalized theories would be very interesting.”
  • In the n-category Cafe ( May 12, 2007, 6:25 AM) John Baez wrote:
    “Spekkens and I spent an afternoon trying to think about his theory as quantum mechanics over some finite field, but failed — we almost came close to proving it couldnt’ work.”

On finite geometry:

The actions of permutations on a 4 × 4 square in Spekkens’ paper (quant-ph/0401052), and Leifer’s suggestion of the need for a “generalized framework,” suggest that finite geometry might supply such a framework. The geometry in the webpage John cited is that of the affine 4-space over the two-element field.

Related material:

Update of
Sept. 5, 2007

See also arXiv:0707.0074v1 [quant-ph], June 30, 2007:

A fully epistemic model for a local hidden variable emulation of quantum dynamics,

by Michael Skotiniotis, Aidan Roy, and Barry C. Sanders, Institute for Quantum Information Science, University of Calgary. Abstract: "In this article we consider an augmentation of Spekkens’ toy model for the epistemic view of quantum states [1]…."
 

Skotiniotis et al. note that the group actions on the 4×4 square described in Spekkens' paper [1] may be viewed (as in Geometry of the 4×4 Square and Geometry of Logic) in the context of a hypercube, or tesseract, a structure in which adjacency is isomorphic to adjacency in the 4 × 4 square (on a torus).

Hypercube from the Skotiniotis paper:

Hypercube

Reference:

[1] Robert W. Spekkens, Phys. Rev. A 75, 032110 (2007),

Evidence for the epistemic view of quantum states: A toy theory
,

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 2Y5 (Received 11 October 2005; revised 2 November 2006; published 19 March 2007.)

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time  
 

Friday, August 31, 2007

Friday August 31, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:10 pm
Being There

"…it would be quite
a long walk
for him if he had to
walk straight across."

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070831-Ant1.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Swiftly Mrs. Who brought
her hands… together.

"Now, you see,"
Mrs. Whatsit said,
"he would be there,
without that long trip.
That is how we travel."

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070831-Ant2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A Wrinkle in Time,
Chapter 5,
"The Tesseract"

Related material:


To Measure the Changes
,

Serious Numbers,

and…

 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061017-Gump2A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Balls of Fury
 

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
Pulp Fiction

“There is a body on the cross in my church. (Which made me think at first that the people worshipped the suffering, till my teenage son told me one day at Mass: ‘What else would get everybody’s attention but something really grisly? It’s like Pulp Fiction.’ In other words, we wouldn’t have it any other way.)” —Mary Karr

Corpus Hypercubus,
by Dali.

Pulp fiction:

“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?”
— Robert A. Heinlein

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Let No Man
Write My Epigraph

(See entries of June 19th.)

"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality."

Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction…. the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005

"… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"

— Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)

"… donc Dieu existe, réponse!"

— Attributed, some say falsely,
to Leonhard Euler
 
"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

"Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen.
The drawing is one of
many by George Gamow
illustrating the script."
Physics Today

 

"Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'"

The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)


"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."

The Innermost Kernel
 (previous entry)

And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry
"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the
International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have

The Epigraph–

Weyl on automorphisms
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")

Also from the
Cameron paper:

Local or global?

Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?  A structure M is homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global."

Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)–

Global and Local:
One Small Step

and mathematically–

Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic
(4/30/07):

This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels–

Alice Devillers

"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is which have
  as many symmetries as possible."

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

Madeleine L'Engle 

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Thursday May 31, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:06 pm

Blitz by anonymous
New Delhi user

From Wikipedia on 31 May, 2007:

Shown below is a list of 25 alterations to Wikipedia math articles made today by user 122.163.102.246.

All of the alterations involve removal of links placed by user Cullinane (myself).

The 122.163… IP address is from an internet service provider in New Delhi, India.

The New Delhi anonymous user was apparently inspired by an earlier blitz by Wikipedia administrator Charles Matthews. (See User talk: Cullinane.)

Related material:

Ashay Dharwadker and Usenet Postings
and Talk: Four color theorem/Archive 2.
See also some recent comments from 122.163…
at Talk: Four color theorem.

May 31, 2007, alterations by
user 122.163.102.246:

  1. 17:17 Orthogonality (rm spam)
  2. 17:16 Symmetry group (rm spam)
  3. 17:14 Boolean algebra (rm spam)
  4. 17:12 Permutation (rm spam)
  5. 17:10 Boolean logic (rm spam)
  6. 17:08 Gestalt psychology (rm spam)
  7. 17:05 Tesseract (rm spam)
  8. 17:02 Square (geometry) (rm spam)
  9. 17:00 Fano plane (rm spam)
  10. 16:55 Binary Golay code (rm spam)
  11. 16:53 Finite group (rm spam)
  12. 16:52 Quaternion group (rm spam)
  13. 16:50 Logical connective (rm spam)
  14. 16:48 Mathieu group (rm spam)
  15. 16:45 Tutte–Coxeter graph (rm spam)
  16. 16:42 Steiner system (rm spam)
  17. 16:40 Kaleidoscope (rm spam)
  18. 16:38 Efforts to Create A Glass Bead Game (rm spam)
  19. 16:36 Block design (rm spam)
  20. 16:35 Walsh function (rm spam)
  21. 16:24 Latin square (rm spam)
  22. 16:21 Finite geometry (rm spam)
  23. 16:17 PSL(2,7) (rm spam)
  24. 16:14 Translation plane (rm spam)
  25. 16:13 Block design test (rm spam)

The deletions should please Charles Matthews and fans of Ashay Dharwadker’s work as a four-color theorem enthusiast and as editor of the Open Directory sections on combinatorics and on graph theory.

There seems little point in protesting the deletions while Wikipedia still allows any anonymous user to change their articles.

Cullinane 23:28, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Monday, May 21, 2007

Monday May 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm
No Royal Roads
Illustration from a
1980 article at JSTOR:

Coxeter as King of Geometry

A more recent royal reference:

"'Yau wants to be the king of geometry,' Michael Anderson, a geometer at Stony Brook, said. 'He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn't like people encroaching on his territory.'" –Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber in The New Yorker, issue dated Aug. 28, 2006

Wikipedia, Cultural references to the Royal Road:

"Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry.' Charles S. Peirce, in his 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878), says 'There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention.'"

Related material:

Day Without Logic
(March 8, 2007)

and
The Geometry of Logic
(March 10, 2007)
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070521-Tesseract.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

There may be
no royal roads to
geometry or logic,
but…

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— Madeleine L'Engle, 
A Wrinkle in Time

Monday, May 14, 2007

Monday May 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 am

Crossing Point

From Log24's
"Footprints for Baudrillard"–

"Was there really a cherubim
waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973,
conclusion of Chapter Three,
"The Man in the Night"

"Oh, Euclid, I suppose."

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962,
conclusion of Chapter Five,

"The Tesseract"

From Log24's
Xanga footprints,
3:00 AM today:

 

Texas /431103703/item.html 5/14/2007 3:00 AM

The link leads to a Jan. 23, 2006 entry
on what one philosopher has claimed is
"exactly that crossing point
of constraint and freedom
which is the very essence
of man's nature."

Friday, May 11, 2007

Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm
Today’s Lottery Commentary:

Lonesome No More!

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 384
Evening 952

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games
and “Is Nothing Sacred?

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Thursday May 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
Thanks to Xangan JadedFey
for the following

Commentary

on the previous entry:

Wikipedia entry - Green

Related material:

All Hallows’ Eve, 2005

Tesseract on the cover of The Gameplayers of Zan

— as well as
Balanchine’s Birthday
and the color worn by
Jean Butler in
Women of the Sidhe
(Wednesday’s entry).

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Thursday May 3, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm
A Web
of Links

"Some postmodern theorists like to talk about the relationship between 'intertextuality' and 'hypertextuality'; intertextuality makes each text a 'mosaic of quotations' [Kristeva, Desire in Language, Columbia U. Pr., 1980, 66] and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web." —Wikipedia
 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070503-Tiffany.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material

Day Without Logic,
Introduction to Logic,
The Geometry of Logic,
Structure and Logic,
Spider-Man and Fan:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070503-Devillers.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time  
 

Friday, April 20, 2007

Friday April 20, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Speech

In Grand Rapids today

"… Bush spoke and answered audience questions for nearly 90 minutes inside East Grand Rapids High School in suburban Grand Rapids….

After leaving the school, Bush's motorcade stopped at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, where he stood silently for a few moments after placing a bouquet of white roses at Ford's burial site on the museum grounds. The 38th president, who grew up in Grand Rapids, died Dec. 26 at age 93."

Multispeech

Mich. Lottery Apr. 20, 2007: Day 019, Night 001

 

For the meaning of the lottery icons
above, see this morning's entry and
an entry that it links to —
Time's Labyrinth continued
of March 8, 2007.

For the meaning of multispeech,
see the entries of
All Hallows' Eve, 2005:

Tesseract on the cover of The Gameplayers of Zan
 
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time 
 

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Tuesday April 3, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 am

Mathematics Awareness Month

Related material:

“But what is it?”
Calvin demanded.
“We know that it’s evil,
but what is it?”

“Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!”
Mrs. Which’s voice rang out.
“Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee
Ppowers of Ddarrkknesss!”

A Wrinkle in Time

AMS Notices cover, April 2007

“After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked disembodied brain, was called ‘It’ because It stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth which involves the whole of us, heart as well as mind.  That acronym had never occurred to me.  I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT does not have a heart or soul.  And I did not understand consciously at the time of writing that the intellect, when it is not informed by the heart, is evil.”

See also
“Darkness Visible”
in ART WARS.

“When all is said and done,
science is about things and
theology is about words.”

— Freeman Dyson,
New York Review of Books,
issue dated May 28, 1998

Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Saturday March 10, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:00 am
Tesseract

A new page at finitegeometry.org,
The Geometry of Logic,
includes the following figure:

The 16 binary connectives arranged in a tesseract

There is such a thing
as a tesseract.

— Madeleine L’Engle
 

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Wednesday March 7, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:35 am
Footprints for
Baudrillard

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070307-Baudrillard.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Was there really a cherubim
waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?

 

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973,
conclusion of Chapter Three,
"The Man in the Night"

 

"Oh, Euclid, I suppose."

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962,
conclusion of Chapter Five,
"The Tesseract"

In memory of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who died yesterday, Tuesday, March 6, 2007. 

The following Xanga footprints may be regarded as illustrating Log24 remarks of Dec. 10, 2006 on the Library of Congress, geometry, and bullshit, as well as remarks of Aug. 28, 2006 on the temporal, the eternal, and St. Augustine.

From the District of Columbia–
Xanga footprints in reverse
chronological order from
the noon hour on Tuesday,
March 6, 2007, the date
of Baudrillard's death:

District of Columbia
/499111929/item.html
Beijing String
3/6/2007
12:04 PM
District of Columbia
/497993036/item.html
Spellbound
3/6/2007
12:03 PM
District of Columbia
/443606342/item.html
About God, Life, Death
3/6/2007
12:03 PM
District of Columbia
/494421586/item.html
A Library of Congress Reading
3/6/2007
12:03 PM
District of Columbia
/500434851/item.html
Binary Geometry
3/6/2007
12:03 PM
District of Columbia
/404038913/item.html
Prequel on St. Cecelia's Day
3/6/2007
12:03 PM

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Thursday March 1, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:29 am

Senior Honors

Notes in Memory of
a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost

From the obituary in today's New York Times of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.–

"Mr. Schlesinger, partly through his appreciation of history, fully realized his good fortune. 'I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people,' he wrote.

A huge part of his luck was his father, who guided much of his early research, and even suggested the topic for his [Harvard] senior honors: Orestes A. Brownson, a 19th-century journalist, novelist and theologian. It was published by Little, Brown in 1938 as 'Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress.'"

Douglas Martin

From The Catholic Encyclopedia:

"It is sufficient for true knowledge that it affirm as real that which is truly real."

Article on Ontologism

From The Diamond Theory of Truth:

"Was there really a cherubim waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, conclusion of Chapter Three, "The Man in the Night"

"Oh, Euclid, I suppose."

— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962, conclusion of Chapter Five, "The Tesseract"

Related material: Yesterday's first annual "Tell Your Story Day" at Harvard and yesterday's entry on Euclid.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Monday December 11, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am
Geometry and Death

J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:

“… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”

The Guardian, March 20, 2006

Edward Hirsch on Lorca:

“For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”

— “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999

“Rosenblum writes with
absolute intellectual honesty,
and the effect is sheer liberation….
The disposition of the material is
a model of logic and clarity.”

Harper’s Magazine review
quoted on back cover of
Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,
by Robert Rosenblum
(Abrams paperback, 2001)

SINGER, ISAAC:
“Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
 — Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
“Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
 and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
children’s literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
‘so-called eternal questions.'”

An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

“She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time.”

A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L’Engle

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061211-Swiftly2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For “the dimension of time,”
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

For a more adult audience —

In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):

“… Philip of Austria… longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.”


Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, “the lonely
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.

Friday, December 8, 2006

Friday December 8, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am
An Instance
of the Fingerpost
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061208-Date.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
"CRUCIAL (from Lat. crux, a cross),
that which has the form of a cross…
 From Francis Bacon's expression
instantia crucis (taken, as he says, from
the finger-post or crux at cross-roads)"
 
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the classic 11th edition (1911)
 
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow  
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-EvolutionBegins2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)

 
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.
A Wrinkle in Time  
 
Related material:
 
The tesseract on the cover of
The Gameplayers of Zan
(All Hallows' Eve, 2005), and
 
A Last Stitch in Time…or
A Map of the Map
of Kierkegaard's World:

"Appropriating the Button-molder's
words to Peer Gynt, he would say,
'We'll meet at the next crossroads…
and then we'll see–
I won't say more.'"

Monday, November 13, 2006

Monday November 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:23 pm
Cognitive Blend:

Casino Royale
and
Time in the Rock

PA lottery Nov. 13, 2006: Mid-day 726, Evening 329
 
In today’s cognitive blend,
the role of Casino Royale
is played by the
Pennsylvania Lottery,
which points to 7/26,
Venus at St. Anne’s
(title of the closing chapter
of That Hideous Strength).

The role of
Time in the Rock
is played by a
Log24 entry of 3/29,
Diamond Theory in 1937.

There is such a thing
as a tesseract.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Tuesday October 31, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm
To Announce a Faith

From 7/07, an art review from The New York Times:

Endgame Art?
It's Borrow, Sample and Multiply
in an Exhibition at Bard College

"The show has an endgame, end-time mood….

I would call all these strategies fear of form…. the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.

Fear of form above all means fear of compression– of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."

— Roberta Smith

It is doubtful that Smith
 would consider the
following "found" art an
example of originality.

It nevertheless does
"announce a faith."


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061031-PAlottery2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


"First for yourself"

Today's mid-day
Pennsylvania number:
707

See Log24 on 7/07
and the above review.
 

"Second, perhaps,
for the rest of us"

Today's evening
Pennsylvania number:
384

This number is an
example of what the
reviewer calls "compression"–

"an artistic focus that condenses
 experiences, ideas and feelings
into something
whole, committed
 and visually comprehensible."

"Experiences"

See (for instance)

Joan Didion's writings
(1160 pages, 2.35 pounds)
on "the shifting phantasmagoria
which is our actual experience."

"Ideas"

See Plato.

"Feelings"

See A Wrinkle in Time.

"Whole"

The automorphisms
of the tesseract
form a group
of order 384.

"Committed"

See the discussions of
groups of degree 16 in
R. D. Carmichael's classic
Introduction to the Theory
of Groups of Finite Order
.

"Visually comprehensible"

See "Diamond Theory in 1937,"
an excerpt from which
is shown below.

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Carmichael440abbrev.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The "faith" announced by
the above lottery numbers
on All Hallows' Eve is
perhaps that of the artist
Madeleine L'Engle:

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract.
"

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Tuesday October 3, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:26 am

Serious

"I don't think the 'diamond theorem' is anything serious, so I started with blitzing that."

Charles Matthews at Wikipedia, Oct. 2, 2006

"The 'seriousness' of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas."

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

Matthews yesterday deleted references to the diamond theorem and related material in the following Wikipedia articles:

Affine group‎
Reflection group‎
Symmetry in mathematics‎
Incidence structure‎
Invariant (mathematics)‎
Symmetry‎
Finite geometry‎
Group action‎
History of geometry‎

This would appear to be a fairly large complex of mathematical ideas.

See also the following "large complex" cited, following the above words of Hardy, in Diamond Theory:

Affine geometry, affine planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary codes, block designs, classical groups, codes, coding theory, collineations, combinatorial, combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell correspondence, correlations, design theory, duads, duality, error correcting codes, exceptional groups, finite fields, finite geometry, finite groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2), GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions, group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube, hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures, invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear groups, linear spaces, linear transformations, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno, Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive groups, octads, the octahedral group, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms, parallelisms, partial geometries, permutation groups, PG(3,2), polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective geometry, projective planes, projective spaces, projectivities, Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem, Singer cycle, skew lines,  sporadic simple groups, Steiner systems, symmetric, symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic, tesseract, transvections, Walsh functions, Witt designs.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Wednesday June 14, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am
For a
Dark Lady
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-Beckinsale.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-HypercubeAndCube.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Hypercube and Cube

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-Unfolding.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Hypercube and Cube
Unfolding

For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.
Gravity’s Rainbow

The above crosses are from an animation that “illustrates… unfolding of the nets of a hypercube (left) and cube (right).” — Christopher Thomas

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-EvolutionBegins2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Kate Beckinsale, poster for
Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)

evolve:
1641, “to unfold, open out, expand,”
from L. evolvere “unroll,” from ex- “out”
+ volvere “to roll” (see vulva).
Online Eymology Dictionary 

Related material:

Introduction to Multispeech,
All Hallows’ Eve, 2005

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Saturday May 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

ART WARS continued…

A Fold in Time

From May 13, Braque’s birthday, 2003:


Braque


Above: Braque and tesseract

“The senses deform, the mind forms.  Work to perfect the mind.  There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.”

— Georges Braque, Reflections on Painting, 1917

Those who wish to follow Braque’s advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Carmichael440ex.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Hint: See the above picture of
Braque and the construction of
a tesseract.

Related material:

Storyline and Time Fold
(both of Oct. 10, 2003),
and the following–

“Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, ‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t exist until it’s folded– or it’s a story without a book.'”

Cynthia Zarin on Madeleine L’Engle,
“The Storyteller,” in The New Yorker,
issue dated April 12, 2004

Friday, May 12, 2006

Friday May 12, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 am
Tesseract

"Does the word 'tesseract'
mean anything to you?"
— Robert A. Heinlein in
The Number of the Beast
(1980)

My reply–

Part I:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/WrinkleInTime1A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A Wrinkle in Time, by
Madeleine L'Engle
(first published in 1962)

Part II:

Diamond Theory in 1937
and
Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Part III:

Catholic Schools Sermon

Conclusion:
 

"Wells and trees were dedicated to saints.  But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden.  Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy."

— Charles Williams, Witchcraft, Faber and Faber, London, 1941

Related material:

A New Yorker profile of Madeleine L'Engle from April 2004, which I found tonight online for the first time.  For a related reflection on truth, stories, and values, see Saint's Day.  For a wider context, see the Log24 entries of February 1-15, 2003 and February 1-15, 2006.
 

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Wednesday March 29, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:00 pm

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Carmichael440.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Note: Carmichael's reference is to
A. Emch, "Triple and multiple systems, their geometric configurations and groups," Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 31 (1929), 25–42.

"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time

Friday, January 20, 2006

Friday January 20, 2006

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

"Wherefore let it hardly… be… thought that the prisoner… was at his best a onestone parable
for… pathetically few… cared… to doubt… the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."

Finnegans Wake, page 100, abridged

"… we have forgotten that we were angels and painted ourselves into a corner
of resource extraction and commodification of ourselves."

— A discussion, in a draft of a paper (rtf) attributed to Josh Schultz, 
of the poem "Diamond" by Attila Jozsef

Commodification of
the name Cullinane:

See the logos at
cullinane.com,
a design firm with
the motto

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060120-Motto.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(Note the 4Cs theme.)

To adapt a phrase from
Finnegans Wake, the
"fourstone parable" below
is an attempt to
decommodify my name.

Fourstone Parable:

(See also yesterday's "Logos."
The "communicate" logo is taken from
an online library at Calvin College;
the "connect" logo is a commonly
available picture of a tesseract
(Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, p. 123),
and the other two logos
are more or less original.)

For a more elegant
four-diamond figure, see
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Thursday January 19, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

Logos
 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060119-BibleLogoSmall.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060119-AlvinPlantinga2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Alvin Plantinga

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Modal-diamondinbox.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Philosophy
logo

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060119-HarryPlantinga2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Harry Plantinga

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060119-CCEL.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

CCEL
logo

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060119-LEngle2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Madeleine
L'Engle

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060119-Tesseract2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Tesseract
logo

Friday, November 18, 2005

Friday November 18, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 am
It’s still the same old story,
a fight for love and…

Glory

Wikipedia on the tesseract:

Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox, a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside.”

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:

    “Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.
    And opened it again.
    And kept on opening it– And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed….
    … Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory….  Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.”

Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”

On The Last Battle
, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:

“… there is much glory in this wonderfully written apocalypse.  Tirian, looking into the stable through the hole in the door, says, ‘The stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.’ Digory answers, ‘Its inside is bigger than its outside.’  It is the perceptive Lucy who voices the hope that is in us, ‘In our world, too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'”


Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”

 

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”

On enchantments that need to be broken:

See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in

Friday, March 19, 2004

Friday March 19, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:35 pm

Geometry of the 4×4 Square:

http://log24.com/theory/geometry.html

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”
A Wrinkle in Time

Monday, May 12, 2003

Monday May 12, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:10 pm

The Tony Nominations

Dannie Abse quoting Robert Penn Warren:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

 Dannie Abse

Abse deserves a Tony Smith award¹ for his play Pythagoras.

Frank Rich on Bush’s Top Gun speech:

“Only hours before President Bush’s prime-time speech came news of what Variety headlined on Page 1 as ‘Regime Change’ in Hollywood — the departure of the [West Wing] creator, the writer Aaron Sorkin.”

 George W. Bush

President Bush deserves a Tony Smith award² for his performance aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

 Madeleine L’Engle on the religion of Cubism:

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”

 Madeleine L’Engle

L’Engle, former librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, deserves a Tony Smith award³ for insisting on the existence of the tesseract, or 4-dimensional cube, as an object of conceptual art.

L’Engle is perhaps the best defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, as opposed to the “diamond” theory of truth. (See my earlier May 12 entry, “Death and Truth,” which deals with the bishop of L’Engle’s cathedral.)

¹ See Tony Smith on mathematics.

² See Tony Smith on foreign policy.

³ See Tony Smith on conceptual art.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Wednesday March 19, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:04 am


Aptheker

  A Look at the Rat

In memory of Herbert Aptheker, theoretician of the American Communist Party, who died on St. Patrick’s Day, 2003 —

From The New Yorker, issue dated March 24, 2003, Louis Menand on Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station:

“Wilson did know what was going on in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties, as his pages on Stalin in To the Finland Station make clear. The problem wasn’t with Stalin; the problem was with Lenin, the book’s ideal type of the intellectual as man of action. Wilson admitted that he had relied on publications controlled by the Party for his portrait of Lenin. (Critical accounts were available; for example, the English translation of the émigré Mark Landau-Aldanov’s Lenin was published, by Dutton, in 1922.) Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician—a ‘pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it to Wilson in 1940, after reading To the Finland Station.  In the introduction to the 1972 edition, Wilson provided a look at the rat. He did not go on to explain in that introduction that the most notorious features of Stalin’s regime—the use of terror, the show trials, and the concentration camps—had all been inaugurated by Lenin. To the Finland Station begins with Napoleon’s betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution; it should have ended with Lenin’s betrayal of European socialism.” 

From Herbert Aptheker, “More Comments on Howard Fast“:

“We observe that in the list of teachers whom Howard Fast names as most influential in his own life there occur the names of fourteen individuals from Jefferson to Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair to Marx, Douglass to Engels, but there is no room for Lenin.
   He is, I think, an important teacher, too; indeed, in my view, Lenin is the greatest figure in the whole galaxy of world revolutionary leaders. He is, certainly, the greatest analyzer of and fighter against imperialism.”

For more on Howard Fast, see my entry
“Death Knell” of March 13, 2003

For a look at the pail of milk, see
the New Yorker cover in Geometry for Jews.

For a more cheerful look at geometry
on this St. Joseph’s Day, see
Harry J. Smith’s

Tesseract Site.

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”
A Wrinkle in Time

Friday, November 29, 2002

Friday November 29, 2002

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

A Logocentric Archetype

Today we examine the relativist, nominalist, leftist, nihilist, despairing, depressing, absurd, and abominable work of Samuel Beckett, darling of the postmodernists.

One lens through which to view Beckett is an essay by Jennifer Martin, "Beckettian Drama as Protest: A Postmodern Examination of the 'Delogocentering' of Language." Martin begins her essay with two quotations: one from the contemptible French twerp Jacques Derrida, and one from Beckett's masterpiece of stupidity, Molloy. For a logocentric deconstruction of Derrida, see my note, "The Shining of May 29," which demonstrates how Derrida attempts to convert a rather important mathematical result to his brand of nauseating and pretentious nonsense, and of course gets it wrong. For a logocentric deconstruction of Molloy, consider the following passage:

"I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones…. I distributed them equally among my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones….But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four."

Beckett is describing, in great detail, how a damned moron might approach the extraordinarily beautiful mathematical discipline known as group theory, founded by the French anticleric and leftist Evariste Galois. Disciples of Derrida may play at mimicking the politics of Galois, but will never come close to imitating his genius. For a worthwhile discussion of permutation groups acting on a set of 16 elements, see R. D. Carmichael's masterly work, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937, reprinted by Dover, New York, 1956.

There are at least two ways of approaching permutations on 16 elements in what Pascal calls "l'esprit géométrique." My website Diamond Theory discusses the action of the affine group in a four-dimensional finite geometry of 16 points. For a four-dimensional euclidean hypercube, or tesseract, with 16 vertices, see the highly logocentric movable illustration by Harry J. Smith. The concept of a tesseract was made famous, though seen through a glass darkly, by the Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle in her novel for children and young adults, A Wrinkle in Tme.

This tesseract may serve as an archetype for what Pascal, Simone Weil (see my earlier notes), Harry J. Smith, and Madeleine L'Engle might, borrowing their enemies' language, call their "logocentric" philosophy.

For a more literary antidote to postmodernist nihilism, see Archetypal Theory and Criticism, by Glen R. Gill.

For a discussion of the full range of meaning of the word "logos," which has rational as well as religious connotations, click here.

Friday November 29, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 am

On Madeleine L’Engle’s birthday:

There is such a thing as a tesseract.

Friday, August 30, 2002

Friday August 30, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:30 am

For Mary Shelley, on her birthday: A Chain of Links The creator of Frankenstein might appreciate the following chain of thought. Lucifer.com Lucifer Media Corporation Lucifer Media Sites The Extropy Institute: International Transhumanist Solutions Why Super-Human Intelligence Would Be Equivalent To Precognition, by Marc Geddes:

"Consider the geometry of multiple dimensions as an analogy for mental abilities… …if there is a 4th dimension of intelligence, to us ordinary humans stuck with 3 dimensional reasoning, this 4th dimension would be indistinguishable from precognition. Post-humans would appear to us ordinary humans as beings which could predict the future in ways which would be inexplicable to us. We should label post-humans as 'Pre-Cogs.'

In the Steven Speilberg [sic]  film Minority Report, we encounter genetically engineered humans with precisely the abilities described above."

Internet Movie Database page on "Minority Report"

IMDb page on "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick

IMDb biography of Philip K. Dick, where our chain of links ends.  Here Dick says that

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

On the other hand, Dick also says here that

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

These two quotations summarize, on the one hand, the cynical, relativistic nominalism of the postmodernists and, on the other hand, the hard-nosed realism of the Platonists.

What does all this have to do with "the geometry of multiple dimensions"?

Consider the famous story for adolescents, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle.   The author, a well-meaning Christian, tries, like all storytellers,  to control her readers by controlling the meaning of words.   The key word in this book is "tesseract," a term from multi-dimensional geometry.   She insists that a tesseract has mystic properties and cannot be visualized.  She is wrong (at least about the visualizing).

See The Tesseract: A look into 4-dimensional space, by Harry J. Smith.

See also the many revealing comments in Harry J. Smith's Guestbook.

One of Smith's guests remarks, apropos of Smith's comments on St. Joseph, that he has his own connection with St. Augustine.

For a adult-level discussion of Augustine, time, eternity, and Platonism, see the website Time as a Psalm in St. Augustine, by A. M. Johnston.

See also the remark headlining Maureen Dowd's New York Times column of August 28, 2002, Saint Augustine's Day:

"I'm with Dick."

Whether the realist Dick or the nominalist Dick, she does not say.

As for precognition, see my series of journal notes below, which leads up to two intriguing errors in an Amazon.com site on the "Forbidden Planet" soundtrack.   The first two audio samples from this soundtrack are (wrongly) entitled "Birdland" and "Flamingo."  See also the West Wing episode rebroadcast on Wednesday, August 28, 2002,

The Black Vera Wang

C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney), who models a black Vera Wang dress in that episode, has the Secret Service codename Flamingo.

"…that woman in black She's a mystery She's everything a woman should be Woman in black got a hold on me"

(Foreigner 4 in my August 28 note below)

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