The title is adapted from a novel by Philip K. Dick
that was turned into a classic 1982 film.
Monday, January 18, 2021
Sunday, January 17, 2021
“Signs and Symbols”
The title is from Nabokov.
Related: A sign or symbol known to
techies as “the hamburger.”
See also “White Palace” earlier tonight.
The above image appeared earlier in posts
now tagged “Darkinbad the Brightdayler.”
Point of View
Susan Sarandon in “White Palace” (1990, based on a 1987 novel).
Sarandon also starred in “The Hunger” (1983), along with David Bowie
and Catherine Deneuve (above).
Entertainment News
The Janine Corner
The Miscast Spell
See Spectre and Spectral in this journal.
Details — “California Health Care Facility inmate Phillip Spector, 80,
was pronounced deceased of natural causes at 6:35 p.m. [California time]
on Saturday, January 16, 2021, at an outside hospital. His official cause of
death will be determined by the medical examiner in the San Joaquin
County Sheriff’s Office.”
— California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Looking for a Point of View*
Related post from New Year’s Day —
“Mission Possible: KenKen Meets BarbieBarbie.”
* See “Lars and the Code Girl.”
Saturday, January 16, 2021
Nashville Death
” ‘Across the street was the New York Doll Hospital,
a toy repair shop,’ he told Lenny Kaye in an interview
for the Bob Gruen photo book New York Dolls (2008).”
See as well other posts now tagged Smiley’s Neighborhood
in honor of the novelist known as John le Carré.
The novelist’s nom de plume suggests another tourist’s tale —
“Before 1788, the French Quarter encompassed the entirety
of New Orleans. Today the ‘old square’ (Vieux Carré ), a
six by twelve block parcel of land set on the inside of a bend
in the Mississippi River, remains New Orleans’ most definitive
area.” — https://www.frenchquarter.com/sightseeing-in-the-old-square/
Dark City . . .
“Dark City is an action movie — and like all good sci-fi movies,
it has aliens in it, too. The aliens have the problem that they
do not possess individual identities or souls, and for that reason,
their race is on the brink of extinction. To prevent this from
happening they perform experiments on the inhabitants of the
city to learn the secret of individuality and to eventually acquire it.
The key ingredient is memory.”
— Chapter 13 of SHELL BEACH: The search for the final theory,
by Jesper Møller Grimstrup, published on January 10, 2021.
“She did not ask herself if the Shorter Way was really there,
did not wonder if she was easing into a delusion.
The issue was settled. Here it was.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2 (p. 680). William Morrow, April 30, 2013.
A different “shorter way” —
Friday, January 15, 2021
Theater News
See as well Laughing Academy in this journal.
More specifically, see “Both Hands and an Ass Map”
in posts tagged “Academy Map.”
Reflection for a Forked Tongue
Reflection in the door of 794 Lexington Avenue,
New York City, November 2019 —
The object reflected —
To enlarge the image, click the above view of Lexington Ave. traffic.
Related narratives —
The life stories of “Germany’s oldest bookseller,” who reportedly died
around New Year’s 2021, and of her uncle, who had an art-book store
and gallery at 794 Lexington Avenue starting in 1923.
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Redemptive Ephiphanic Impression
“ Harry decides his chief peacetime duty is to use his
gift for gab to further his ‘overriding purpose,’ namely:
‘By recalling the past and freezing the present he could
open the gates of time and through them see all
allegedly sequential things as a single masterwork
with neither boundaries nor divisions.’ Once he opens
these gates, Harry will flood his audience with his
redemptive epiphanic impression that ‘the world was
saturated with love.’ ”
— Liesl Schillinger, review of Mark Helprin’s novel
In Sunlight and in Shadow in The New York Times ,
Oct. 5, 2012
"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard."
— Rhymin' Simon
See as well Kristen Stewart in the
film version of . . .
ABC Art: A Portcullis for Mondrian
Dial 6 for MNO
Image from a post of January 2, 2009
A sentence by Walter Tevis in his 1983 novel
The Queen's Gambit —
"She picked up the phone and dialed six."
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Solid
“None of the memories and identities of the people in the city are solid.”
— Grimstrup, Jesper Møller. SHELL BEACH:
The search for the final theory . Kindle Edition.
See also Peter Woit’s “Various Links” post today and Shell Beach in this journal.
For another approach to solidity (from pure mathematics, not physics), see
a Log24 search for Solid Symmetry.
Link Target
Revision
From a post of January 8, 2021 —
“Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act .
The elements of a group do not have to just sit there,
abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can
‘produce changes.’ In particular, groups arise
naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure.”
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon’s Groups and Geometry
in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4
(April 1987), pp. 392-394.
Note:
The phrase “the subgroup V” here refers, confusingly, to the translation
subgroup derived from a vector space V.
Foundational Securities
“… I’m reverting to the foundational securities of childhood . . . .”
— University Diaries weblog this morning
Among my foundational securities is an image that might be titled . . .
The Truman Show —
Related literary remarks — Moss on the Wall.
What’s in a name?
” ‘The Maori named him Rog,’ Yael continued,
‘because those were the only I.D. letters that could
be made out on the wreck.’ ”
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers
Hint
From The Queen's Gambit , by Walter Tevis (1983) —
"She stopped and turned to Beth. 'There is no hint of a
Protestant ethic in Mexico. They are all Latin Catholics,
and they all live in the here and now.' Mrs. Wheatley
had been reading Alan Watts. 'I think I’ll have just one
margarita before I go out. Would you call for one, honey?'
Back in Lexington, Mrs. Wheatley’s voice would sometimes
have a distance to it, as though she were speaking from
some lonely reach of an interior childhood. Here in Mexico City
the voice was distant but the tone was theatrically gay, as though
Alma Wheatley were savoring an incommunicable private mirth.
It made Beth uneasy. For a moment she wanted to say something
about the expensiveness of room service, even measured in pesos,
but she didn’t. She picked up the phone and dialed six. The man
answered in English. She told him to send a margarita and a large
Coke to 713."
Mirror, Mirror
Working Backwards: 13 in the 11th
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Silence, Exile, and . . .
In honor of the Auckland opening of the opera
“The Cunning Little Vixen” on January 27, 2010 —
Monday, January 11, 2021
News: Fake and Not-So-Fake
Sein Feld Continues.
Dialogue from the recent Netflix series “Queen’s Gambit” —
Miss Jean Blake, interviewer from LIFE — “The board?”
Beth Harmon — “Yes. It’s an entire world
of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it.
I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt,
I only have myself to blame.”
This passage, and other psychological claptrap in the Netflix version,
does not occur in the original 1983 novel by Walter Tevis.
Related material — Sein Feld in this journal.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
“Glasgow, 1937”
The location in the title is the opening scene of the new version
of "All Creatures Great and Small." The year in the title suggests
a look at (for instance) The Pentagram Papers.
A "support provided by" credit suggests some related images —
A Scotland-related post: The Blue Path and the Red Path
(Log24, Aug. 24, 2014).
Wendelboe's games included chess sets.
See as well a related purchase from further north on the same block.
From Fly-Bottle
Illustrations from posts now tagged Ved Mehta in this journal —
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.”
Saturday, January 9, 2021
Kierkegaard Revisited
“Kierkegaard is imagining a society where
people’s identities are robbed
under the disguise of modern liberation.”
The Jewel and the Stone
A Sense
“In a sense, we would see that change arises from
the structure of the object.”
— Nima Arkani-Hamed, quoted in
“A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics,”
by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine , Sept. 17, 2013.
For those who prefer less barbaric entertainment —
Friday, January 8, 2021
Welcome to Zombieland
“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical. Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”
—Many Dimensions (1931), by Charles Williams
“Don’t give a damn ’cause I done that already.” — Zombie Jamboree
Groups Act
"Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act .
The elements of a group do not have to just sit there,
abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can
'produce changes.' In particular, groups arise
naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure."
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon's Groups and Geometry
in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4
(April 1987), pp. 392-394.
"The concept of group actions is very useful in the study of
isomorphisms of combinatorial structures."
— Olli Pottonen, "Classification of Steiner Quadruple Systems"
(Master's thesis, Helsinki, 2005, p. 48).
“In a sense, we would see that change arises from
the structure of the object.”
— Nima Arkani-Hamed, quoted in "A Jewel at the Heart of
Quantum Physics," by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine ,
Sept. 17, 2013.
See as well "Change Arises" in this journal.
From the Finland Station
The title refers to the Steiner quadruple systems in a 2005 thesis by
a Helsinki mathematician. See . . .
http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=helsinki-math.
See as well “a million diamonds” and . . .
Thursday, January 7, 2021
The Primes of Miss Jean Valentine
Valentine reportedly died on December 29, 2020.
Related dialogue from "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996) —
– It's interesting how coupling appears in nature and mathematics.
– You were talking about pairs …
– Oh, the twin-prime conjecture. It explores pairs of prime numbers.
Those only divisible by themselves. Three-five. Five-seven.
Not seven-nine …
– Nine can be divided by three.
– That's right. And … and so on. It was discovered that pairs were
often separated by …
– One number in between.
– Exactly. Did you read my book?
– No, I'm sorry.
– That's okay. This is marvellous.
– A first date like a game show.
– I didn't mean to lecture.
– I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call it a date.
Twin-Prime Dates —
December 31 and December 29, 2020.
"Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still
which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn
of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the
stillness and the darkness before Time dawned…she would have known
that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed
in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start
working backwards."
– C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , as quoted at
https://apologyanalogy.com/death-working-backwards/ .
The Purloined* Void
From a post of Tuesday, May 7, 2019 —
“Honored in the Breach:
Graham Bader on Absence as Memorial”
Artforum International , April 2012
. . . .
“In the wake of a century marked by inconceivable atrocity, the use of emptiness as a commemorative trope has arguably become a standard tactic, a default style of public memory. The power of the voids at and around Ground Zero is generated by their origin in real historical circumstance rather than such purely commemorative intent: They are indices as well as icons of the losses they mark. Nowhere is the negotiation between these two possibilities–on the one hand, the co-optation of absence as tasteful mnemonic trope; on the other, absence’s disruptive potential as brute historical scar–more evident than in Berlin, a city whose history, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, can be seen as a ‘narrative of voids.’ Writing in 1997, Huyssen saw this tale culminating in Berlin’s post-wall development, defined equally by an obsessive covering-over of the city’s lacunae–above all in the elaborate commercial projects then proliferating in the miles-long stretch occupied until 1989 by the Berlin Wall–and a carefully orchestrated deployment of absence as memorial device, particularly in the ‘voids’ integrated by architect Daniel Libeskind into his addition to the Berlin Museum, now known as the Jewish Museum Berlin.” |
See also Breach in this journal, as well as Void.
* Literary background — The word “Purloined” in this journal.
Breach Statement – Thoughts and Prayers
Related background on Pearson —
Related background on Roberts —
Related material from a Log24 search for “Holy Cross” —
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
Linker
For Bird Day . . .
A tweet from Scott Edelman on November 12, 2020 —
This journal on the above tweet date —
Damonizing Your Opponent
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber’s “Damnation Morning,” 1959:
“Time traveling . . . is not quite the good clean boyish fun
it’s cracked up to be . . . ."
Ellery Queen’s Gambit
In memory of a mystery writer who reportedly died on Dec. 27, 2020 —
Posts tagged "Logo Animation" from around that date in this journal,
along with yesterday's post "Enchantments," suggest… a link.
Epigraphy
The professor, Joshua Whatmough, in the previous post
taught, I later learned, something called epigraphy at Harvard.
An instance of the derived term "epigraph" —
The Shop on the Corner
George Steiner on chess —
"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."
— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.
In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .
At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —
… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and Newsweek :
he was running for President . . . .
. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…
She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do. The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had.
Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.
***
Monday, January 4, 2021
Enchantments
“Mr. Breuer’s audiences had to be willing to embrace,
or at least shrug off, some quantity of abstruseness
in his productions. Yet there was often a rapturous,
cacophonous beauty to them. At their best … they
worked on spectators like enchantments.
You can sense that effect in Margo Jefferson’s
New York Times review of “Red Beads” (2005) …
that she called ‘theater as sorcery; it is a crossroads
where artistic traditions meet to invent a marvelous
common language.’ “
— Laura Collins-Hughes, Jan. 4, 2021
I prefer . . .
Annals of Philosophy
The Purloined Joke
The Purloined Title
"When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead . . . ."
See as well "Symmetric Generation" in this journal.
"Feed your head." — Grace Slick
Sunday, January 3, 2021
Ken: Keeping Still
Grey Advertising
Clay Risen memorializes an advertising executive —
“Ms. Young rose to prominence as an executive with Grey Advertising,
where she began in 1959, standing out as one of the few women and
one of the few Asian-Americans at the firm, which was then a power
in its field.”
Related art from Log24 on the date of Ms. Young’s death —
“A colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Joke
George Clooney to Matt Damon —
“There’s a Michelangelo joke to be made.”
A search in this journal for Michelangelo suggests . . .
How about “Bach meets Bochner“?
The Ice Stone* Meditation
A quote from the novel on which George Clooney's new Netflix film,
"The Midnight Sky," is based —
"Yet here he was, seventy-eight years old …
and, having come to the terminus of his life’s work,
all he could do was stare into the bleak face of
his own ignorance."
— Brooks-Dalton, Lily. Good Morning, Midnight (p. 5).
Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Related material —
For more ignorance, see part of the current New Yorker home page —
Click image for the magazine's animated gif .
— and other recent posts tagged "Sixteenth."
* The "Ice Stone" is in the New Year's Eve post tagged "Sixteenth."
Space fans may think of that tag as representing the empty space
(a sort of black hole ) in the classic "15 Puzzle."
Saturday, January 2, 2021
St. Brendan’s Seminar
St. Brendan’s Day is May 16. Three Log24 posts from
that date in 2020 are now tagged St. Brendan’s Seminar.
Onward and Upward with the Arts
An older “Methodist hymnbook” apparently had 1026 hymns —
The Methodist Hymn Book,
Illustrated with Biography, History,
Incident, and Anecdote ,
by George John Stevenson.
Second edition, London, Charles H. Kelly, 1894 —
Hymn 834 — I seek Thy kingdom first
Hymn 625 — Out of the depth of self-despair
Hymn 910 — God of truth, and power, and grace
Hymn 842 — Father, I know that all my life
Hymn 366 — I soon shall hear thy quick’ning voice
The 1933 Methodist Hymn Book has the above-mentioned 984 hymns.
In that book, the above numbers refer to . . .
834 — Above the clear blue sky
625 — I to the hills will lift mine eyes
910 — These things shall be: a loftier race
842 — Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild
366 — Jesus! Redeemer, Saviour, Lord
I prefer the list from the older book.
Friday, January 1, 2021
Mission Possible: KenKen Meets BarbieBarbie
Wikipedia on the late Hugh Hefner —
“Through his father’s line, Hefner was a descendant of
Plymouth governor William Bradford. He described
his family as ‘conservative, Midwestern, [and] Methodist’.
His mother had wanted him to become a missionary.”
A quote from Story Space —
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it . . . .” —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Annie_Fanny .
Hefner’s parents might prefer the region of Story Space
proper to Dreamboat Annie.
Geometry for Child Buyers
Yesterday’s flashback to the “Square Ice” post of
St. Francis’s Day, 2016 —
This suggests a review of the July 16, 2013, post “Child Buyers.”
Related images from “Tomorrowland” (2015) —
An ignorant, but hopeful, space fan —
The space fan knocks on one door-panel of a 3×3 array —
Related image from “Hereafter” (2010) —
Thursday, December 31, 2020
The Dreaming Jewels . . .
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Space Force
New Yorker video today, at 14:00-14:25 —
“What’s good about KenKen, and Sudoku, and crosswords,
all of those puzzles like that, is that they have grids to be filled in,
empty squares. I think there is something about human nature
that we want to fill up spaces. And if you’re a puzzle person,
or almost anybody, and you see an empty grid, you want to
put something in those spaces. It gives a feeling of satisfaction
that you don’t get often in life and that really feels good.”
— Will Shortz, New York Times puzzle editor
“I can’t get no… satisfaction….” — The Rolling Stones
The New Yorker recently restarted the Weiner story,
which includes —
“… the fall of 2017, when he began a twenty-one-month
prison sentence for sexting with a minor.”
“You want to put something in those spaces.”
— Will Shortz, New York Times puzzle editor
Yes, you do.
Weiner is now with a Brooklyn countertops company called IceStone.
The Whiteboard Jungle
Detail:
A story in numbers:
It is what it is.
See also the phrase “Beautiful Mathematics” in this journal.
The Sixteenth Subset
A four-set has sixteen subsets. Fifteen of these symbolize the points
of “the smallest perfect universe,”* PG(3,2). The sixteenth is empty.
In memory of . . .
Polish this — “The Nothing That Is.”
* Phrase by Burkard Polster.
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Raiders of the Lost Coordinates
Memorial by Kinbote for Cardin: WWW
A Harvard student* attempts to summarize Nabokov’s aesthetics —
“Take ‘Pale Fire,’ his 1962 poem-as-novel
bursting with butterfly as theme:
‘I can do what only a true artist can do —
pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation …
see the web of the world,
and the warp and the weft of that web.’ “
“True artist” here refers to Kinbote, not Nabokov.
* Tessa K.J. Haining, Harvard Crimson Contributing Opinion Writer.
Tessa K.J. Haining ’23 lives in Adams House. Her column appears on
alternate Fridays. December 11, 2020.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Theology for the Wiener Kreis
The previous post suggests a look at The New Yorker today —
Another “core claim” —
“Change arises from the structure of the object.“
See also Wiener Kreis and Schlick.
Childermas
Related material for innocents — Siobhan Roberts
on Conway’s Game of Life in today’s New York Times .
Those desiring greater literary depth may consult
this journal’s Gameplayers.
Sunday, December 27, 2020
Knight Move for Trevanian
“Knight move” remark from The Eiger Sanction —
“I like to put people on myself by skipping logical steps
in the conversation until they’re dizzy.”
The following logical step — a check of the date Nov. 18, 2017 —
was omitted in the post Futon Dream on this year’s St. Stephen’s Day.
For further context, see James Propp in this journal.
V
From today’s post “Logo Animation” —
Related material from the art world —
Related entertainment —
“V. is whatever lights you to the end of the street: she is also the dark annihilation waiting at the end of the street.” (Tony Tanner, page 36, "V. and V-2," in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson. Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55). |
Midrash — Other posts tagged Annihilation.
Logo Animation
Related material from Log24 yesterday —
Click the Aquarius symbol for a puzzle.
A related animation —
Box
“… a revisionist account of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz…
portrays the Wicked Witch of the West ….”
Note the ambiguity of the initials “WW” in the above passage,
mirrored in the current film title “WW84.”
Saturday, December 26, 2020
Memorial
For Children of the Labyrinth
Futon Dream
” There’s a line from the movie ‘The Paper Chase’, in which
the fearsome Professor Kingsfield tells a room of first-year
law-school students ‘You come in here with a skull full of mush …
and you leave thinking like a lawyer.’ “
— James Propp on December 14, 2020, in . . .
Related material — Japanese Bed.
Friday, December 25, 2020
Design Theory
Mathematics
The Fano plane block design |
Magic
The Deathly Hallows symbol— |
Another name for the Fano plane design — The Ghostly Hallows.
From a search in this journal for Ghostly —
Ghosts of Christmas Present
Related material — Digital Theology in a search for Dyson Bits.
Circle of Positivity
“A quick note on terminology. Members of the Circle
were logical empiricists, sometimes called logical positivists.
Positivism is the view that our knowledge derives from
the natural world and includes the idea that we can have
positive knowledge of it. The Circle combined this position
with the use of modern logic; the aim was to build a new
philosophy.”
— Edmonds, David. The Murder of Professor Schlick (p. vii).
Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
For aficionados of associative logic —
See Triple Cross in this journal and the Fano-plane circle
in the illustration below.
Change Arises: Mathematical Examples
From old posts tagged Change Arises —
From Christmas 2005:
For the eightfold cube
For an rather more Click on image for details. |
The phrase "change arises" is from Arkani-Hamed in 2013, describing
calculations in physics related to properties of the positive Grassmannian —
A related recent illustration from Quanta Magazine —
The above illustration of seven cells is not unrelated to
the eightfold-cube model of the seven projective points in
the Fano plane.
Thursday, December 24, 2020
Change Arises: A Literary Example
The “Change Arises” part of the title refers to the previous post.
The 1905 “geometric object” there, a 4×4 square, appeared earlier,
in 1869, in a paper by Camille Jordan. For that paper, and the
“literary example” of the title, see “Ici vient M. Jordan .”
This post was suggested by the appearance of Jordan in today’s
memorial post for Peter M. Neumann by Peter J. Cameron.
Related remarks on Jordan and “geometrical objects” from 2016 —
These reflections are available from their author as a postprint.
Change Arises
See posts so tagged.
"Change arises from the structure of the object." — Arkani-Hamed
Related material from 1936 —
Related material from 1905, with the "object" a 4×4 array —
Related material from 1976, with the "object"
a 4×6 array — See Curtis.
Related material from 2018, with the "object"
a cuboctahedron — See Aitchison.
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Facets . . .
“The book by Hesse has many facets ….” (Link added.)
— V. V. Nalimov, In the Labyrinths of Language ,
Ch. 1, “What Language Is,” p. 22.
Related philosophical speculation —
Kind of a Drag
See also remarks from Berlin on the 6×6 square and . . .
a Harvard illustration from Linden Street —
Associative Logic
“The bureaucratic innovations of the New Deal
fed into the powerful associative logic
of commonsense reasoning,
leading a number of Americans to equate science
with the technocratic, managerial liberalism
of Roosevelt and his allies.”
— http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/
andrew-jewett-how-americans-came-distrust-science
From a Log24 search for “Notes Toward” —
“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word….” — Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction“ |
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
Small Venues
“… her art was rarely exhibited until the 1970s,
and then only sporadically and in small venues . . . .”
— New York Times obituary suggested by
today’s review,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/
arts/artists-who-died-2020.html
“No ordinary venue.” — Song lyric
Related material now linked to in the previous post —
Monday, December 21, 2020
Re Volvo
“The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass,
vastly enlarging the things inside the block.
Strange things they were, too.”
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Principles Before Personalities
“I Know Him So Well” — The Beckinsale Version —
Facets
Note for Technicians and Theorists
See as well Simple Tune and Variation.
Looking Firmly
“… and the song of love’s recision is the music of the spheres.”
— E. L. Doctorow, City of God
Doctorow’s remark was quoted here earlier, on February 5, 2009 —
The central aim of Western religion–
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy– Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle: Limited Unlimited Odd Even Male Female Light Dark Straight Curved ... and so on .... “Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.” — Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) “In the garden of Adding — The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded: “Art inherited from the old religion — Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52 From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space: “We have now reached “Space: what you — James Joyce, Ulysses |
Saturday, December 19, 2020
Classic Romantic
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ,
Ch. 6 (italics are mine):
“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself.
A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance .”
Quackers
Friday, December 18, 2020
Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture
In the altered headline above, " Q******* " may, if you like,
be interpreted as " Quellers ," an invented term for scholars
who investigate the origins of Christianity.
See the Log24 post "Q is for Quelle " (November 7, 2020).
Dan Brown, like the earlier novelist who wrote The Source ,
is such an investigator (of sorts), though not a scholar .
(For an example of actual scholarship , see the webpage
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/
middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED35525.
That page may be interpreted as putting the "hit" in "s***.")
De Corpore*
* De Corpore had a negative effect on Hobbes’s scholarly reputation.
The inclusion of a claimed solution for squaring the circle, an apparent
afterthought rather than a systematic development, led to an extended
pamphlet war in the Hobbes-Wallis controversy. — Wikipedia
Another afterthought, in the style of Kinbote —
A search in this journal for Peter M. Neumann
yields a link to Transformations over a bridge (1983 Aug. 16).
Body Space — Annals of Corporate Law
In memory of Ralph Winter and Barbara Windsor.
See also . . .
Personally, I prefer To Catch a Thief —
“Breast or Thigh”?
Square Space at Athens
(A sequel to the previous post, Square Space at Wikipedia)
Related remarks: A Dec. 16 Wikipedia revision by Quack5quack,
and posts in this journal tagged Helsinki Math.
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Square Space at Wikipedia
The State of Square-Space Art at Wikipedia as of December 16, 2020,
after a revision by an anonymous user on that date:
See also Square Space at Squarespace.
In Memoriam
Composer Harold Budd reportedly died at 84 on December 8
in Arcadia, California.
"The way I work is that
I focus entirely on a small thing
and try to milk that for all it's worth,
to find everything in it
that makes musical sense,"
Budd explained in a 1997 interview….
See related remarks in posts now tagged Quartet,
as well as posts now tagged Galois Window.
Just 17
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
Christmas Carol Carré
At the Intersection…
Continues. The Chanel mandorla in the previous post
suggests a review of a more complex figure — The Venn Lotus.
Politically correct leftists may be reminded of Intersectionality.
Connection
Hurt’s dies natalis (date of death, in the saints’ sense) was,
it now seems, 25 January 2017, not 27.
A connection, for fantasy fans, between the Philosopher’s Stone
(represented by the eightfold cube) and the Deathly Hallows
(represented by the usual Fano-plane figure) —
Images from a Log24 search for “Holocron.”
Chess Tenet
“Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms
the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature. . . .
They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories,
and follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out
for fairy-stories: ‘one thing must not be made fun of,
the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously,
neither laughed at nor explained away.’ “
— A leftist academic’s essay at aeon.co, “Empire of Fantasy,”
on St. Andrew’s Day, 2020.
Monday, December 14, 2020
Espace Carré
"Leave a space." — Tom Stoppard, "Jumpers."
Obituary of a novelist in The Washington Post yesterday —
"He gave various explanations for how he chose his nom de plume —
le Carré means 'the square' in French —
before ultimately admitting he didn’t really know."
Related material for Dan Brown — Imperial Symbology and . . .
"Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms
the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature. . . .
They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories,
and follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out
for fairy-stories: ‘one thing must not be made fun of,
the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously,
neither laughed at nor explained away.’ "
— A leftist academic's essay at aeon.co, "Empire of Fantasy,"
on St. Andrew's Day, 2020.
A more respectable writer on literature and magic —
Sunday, December 13, 2020
The Alcott Gesture, from the author of Little Women
A speaker in Washington, D.C., yesterday —
“We are in a crucible moment in the history
of the United States of America,” he said at
the “Let the Church Roar” rally at the National Mall.
In other drama —
“It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe.”
— Peggy (Vanessa Redgrave) in a 1987 film.
The above Emma Watson date — Oct. 28, 2014 — suggests
some DC-related remarks in a Log24 search for “The Lost Symbol.”
Puer Viri Pater Est*
* “Suck any sense from that who can” — Gerard Manley Hopkins
Saturday, December 12, 2020
“Opus Esse Uno”
“He said, ‘It’s no coincidence that I study narcissistic leaders,
because it takes one to know one’”
— Obituary for a CIA psychologist
“Opus esse uno, unum cognoscendi,” the arch-narcissist Veidt
haughtily declares before he does this, which he translates to mean,
“It takes one to know one.”
— https://www.salon.com/2019/12/16/
watchmen-finale-one-last-reveal-explains-all-those-eggs-
and-the-crushing-weight-of-legacy/
Dr. Post reportedly died on November 22.
The Craft
From The New York Times on October 29 —
Zoe Lister-Jones on ‘The Craft’ and Women’s Power
by Melena Ryzik
See as well Ryzik in yesterday’s post “After Valentine’s” —
Related material —
The Wrong Stuff
Globe Services
“Perhaps only Shakespeare manages to create at the highest level
both images and people; and even Hamlet looks second-rate
compared with Lear .”
— Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” 1961
Byline from a 2019 post — ‘GLOBE STAFF AND NEW SERVICES’ —
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry,
demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
“block design” subtest.
— From a Log24 search for “Harrison Pope.”
Related drama — Other posts tagged Plastic Elements.