Friday, December 11, 2020
After Valentine’s
Thursday, December 10, 2020
Popular Mechanics Continues
From a review of the new game Cyberpunk 2077 —
“Oh, you also find out the chip has meshed with
your nervous system, so you can’t take it out, and
that Silverhand’s consciousness will eventually
overtake yours, meaning your body will live on
but not your mind, soul or spirit.
Damn computers.”
— Daniel Van Boom at cnet.com,
Dec. 7, 2020 4:19 p.m. PT
(and under a different title later)
See also the similar plot of “Upgrade” (2018) , a film featured in the
Log24 post Popular Mechanics: Midnight Upgrade (Oct. 26, 2019).
STEM Education —
For an earlier form of the plot,
see “Go Chip” in this journal.
New Light on the Redactedentity Mystery
See a Log24 search that includes earlier posts on “Redactedentity.”
Recent activity by that entity at the Encyclopedia of Mathematics:
As the above “recent changes” list notes, Redactedentity added
a new favicon section to Talk:EoM on December 7, 2020. Details —
The new section as it appeared later, with “Redactedentity”
replaced by “Mihir Narayanan” —
Update at 5:35 PM ET on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020 —
User “Redactedentity” at Wikipedia is now user “Mihir Narayanan.”
A Date Which
From the Net on December 7, 2020 —
Some background for academics:
“The Self Regained”: Cyberpunk’s Retreat
to the Imperium by Sharon Stockton (1995)
A review dated December 7:
Crimson Peak*
See the previous post and Butcher’s Clay (March 29, 2014).
* The title refers to a film starring Jessica Chastain.
See also Chastain in Annals of Subliminal Typography.
Wednesday, December 9, 2020
Word
“Rosenbaum has a fluent style that can
pivot and change direction on a single word ….”
The above quotation results from a search
in this journal for golem.
That search resulted from today’s previous post,
Clay Risen.
Related conceptual art —
“You’ve got to be carefully taught . . . .” — Oscar Hammerstein II.
See as well the word undoing in a post of December 6.
Clay Risen
The title, which suggests a combination of musings by James Joyce
and Gerard Manley Hopkins, is actually a person’s name. See below.
Programming with Windows
“Program or be programmed.” — Douglas Rushkoff
Detail —
The part of today’s online Crimson front page relevant to my own
identity work (see previous post) is the size, 4 columns by 6 rows,
of the pane arrays in the windows of Massachusetts Hall.
See the related array of 6 columns by 4 rows in the Log24 post
Dramarama from August 6 (Feast of the Transfiguration), 2020.
“Identity Work”
The title is a phrase I encountered today in a search for background
on the anonymous Wikipedia user whose first “user talk” page is as
follows —
See also CrazyMinecart88 at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CrazyMinecart88 .
“… the disclosure of knowledge as it is
intimately bound up with identity work”
— “Awarding the self in Wikipedia : Identity work
and the disclosure of knowledge,” by Daniel Ashton.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 1 – 3 January 2011.
Some mine cart “identity work” of my own —
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Another Damned Dyslexic
The Importance of Being Ernst —
In the above Wikipedia revision today, the anonymous user “Redactedentity”
found that the article Kummer surface omitted Kummer’s first name
and so changed “authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Kummer” to
“authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Ernst Kummer.” This fixed the
omission but makes no sense as a statement of parameters.
“Redactedentity” was apparently unable to read the following page,
which explains that “last=” is for the author’s last name —
Of course, this revision may be merely an instance of trolling or of
the sort of humor sometimes found among people with the following
interests:
See also Pazouzou.
Best Meets Bester
The New York Times online today —
Menu bar above a book review: “The Best of 2020.”
Alfred Bester —
Related search results —
Monday, December 7, 2020
Sunday, December 6, 2020
The Undoing
Today’s earlier post “Binary Coordinates” discussed a Dec. 6
revision to the Wikipedia article on PG(3,2), the projective
geometry of 3 dimensions over the 2-element field GF(2).
The revision, which improved the article, was undone later today
by a clueless retired academic, one William “Bill” Cherowitzo,
a professor emeritus of mathematics at U. of Colorado at Denver.
(See his article “Adventures of a Mathematician in Wikipedia-land,”
MAA Focus , December 2014/January 2015.)
See my earlier remarks on this topic . . . specifically, on this passage —
“A 3-(16,4,1) block design has 140 blocks
of size 4 on 16 points, such that each triplet
of points is covered exactly once. Pick any
single point, take only the 35 blocks
containing that point, and delete that point.
The 35 blocks of size 3 that remain comprise
a PG(3,2) on the 15 remaining points.”
As I noted on November 17, this is bullshit. Apparently Cherowitzo
never bothered to find out that an arbitrary “3-(16,4,1) block design”
(an example of a Steiner quadruple system ) does not yield a PG(3,2).
PG(3,2) is derived from the classical 3-(16,4,1) block design formed by the affine
space of 4 dimensions over GF(2). That design has 322,560 automorphisms.
In contrast, see a 3-(16,4,1) block design that is automorphism-free.
“Binary Coordinates”
The title phrase is ambiguous and should be avoided.
It is used indiscriminately to denote any system of coordinates
written with 0 ‘s and 1 ‘s, whether these two symbols refer to
the Boolean-algebra truth values false and true , to the absence
or presence of elements in a subset , to the elements of the smallest
Galois field, GF(2) , or to the digits of a binary number .
Related material from the Web —
Some related remarks from “Geometry of the 4×4 Square:
Notes by Steven H. Cullinane” (webpage created March 18, 2004) —
A related anonymous change to Wikipedia today —
The deprecated “binary coordinates” phrase occurs in both
old and new versions of the “Square representation” section
on PG(3,2), but at least the misleading remark about Steiner
quadruple systems has been removed.
Saturday, December 5, 2020
At the Still Point
The photo of Lauren German from “Standing Still” (2005) in the
previous post suggests some related material for comedians:
The above character-creator name “Neil Gaiman” occurs here
in a post from June 2013 —
The above footnote refers to . . .
More merriment: Lauren German in a video of the related song
“Another One Bites the Dust.”
Friday, December 4, 2020
German Lesson: Untergang
The recent posts "Bunker Bingo" and "Here's to Efficient Packing!"
suggest a review.
Alex Ross in The New Yorker on Dec. 2, 2020, on the German
word "Untergang " —
"The usual translation is 'downfall,' although
the various implications of the word—
literally, “going-under”—are difficult to capture
in English. In some contexts, Untergang simply
means descent: a sunset is a Sonnenuntergang .
Lauren German in a 2005 film —
See as well . . .
Here’s to Efficient Packing!
Devil Music … Now in Infernovision!
“DEVIL – MUSIC
20 pages of incidental music written at school
for G. K. Chesterton’s play MAGIC
by D. Coxeter.”
See also other posts now tagged Infernovision.
Thursday, December 3, 2020
A Veritable Frame
A search in this journal for “Jean Brodie” suggests a review —
“A professor is all-powerful, Gareth liked to tell his daughter, he puts
‘a veritable frame around life,’ and ‘organizes the unorganizable.
Nimbly partitions it . . . .'”
— Review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics , Aug. 13, 2006
For Alison Lurie (Sept. 3, 1926 — December 3, 2020)
“Once upon a time there was a classroom.”
— Zenna Henderson, “Loo Ree”
See as well other posts now tagged Lurie.
Pilgrim’s Progress
Bunker Bingo
See as well 5×5, The Matrix of Abraham, and Deutsche Schule Montevideo .
“If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Brick Joke
The "bricks" in posts tagged Octad Group suggest some remarks
from last year's HBO "Watchmen" series —
Related material — The two bricks constituting a 4×4 array, and . . .
"(this is the famous Kummer abstract configuration )"
— Igor Dolgachev, ArXiv, 16 October 2019.
As is this —
.
The phrase "octad group" does not, as one might reasonably
suppose, refer to symmetries of an octad (a "brick"), but
instead to symmetries of the above 4×4 array.
A related Broomsday event for the Church of Synchronology —
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Beach Rocks
"The Beach is a 1996 novel by English author Alex Garland." — Wikipedia
Windows lockscreen today —
Another part of the lockscreen, later . . .
Related* mystical remark on a legendary artifact —
Animation adapted from a legendary diagram —
* The "9" and "16" may be viewed as referring to areas —
both above and below the hypotenuse — bordering a
3-4-5 triangle illustrating Euclid's proposition I.47.
Annals of Subliminal Typography
Projects
The tinfoil link in the previous post suggests a review.
The Wikipedia article on the Harvard Psilocybin Project links to . . .
Beach Tips from Microsoft
Related security tips. . . See tinfoil. “We all know the song.”
Image related to last night’s post “Time Class” —
Monday, November 30, 2020
Space Exploration
A sequel suggested by Jaime King’s Instagram yesterday —
Sunday, November 29, 2020
De Gustibus
” . . . one person’s favorite comedy might be a wrenching drama to someone else.”
— The Atlantic promotional email by film critic David Sims on Saturday,
November 28, 2020, 11:37 AM ET.
See as well “Star Quality: Mirror Guy” (this journal, 12:30 PM ET on Saturday,
November 28, 2020, the reported date of death for Darth Vader actor
David Prowse).
Sunday Morning in a Cartoon Graveyard
For the Dr. Seuss School of
Neuropsychopharmacology —
From the school itself —
Related material — Pilgrim's Progress in this journal and . . .
an image from Log24 on December 8, 2012 —
See as well "To Think That It Happened on Prescott Street"
and related posts.
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Coordinates of the Damned
Star Quality: “Mirror Guy”
Related material from pure mathematics — M. J. T. Guy —
A Poster for Doctor Manhattan
A nostalgia pill for Watchmen fans.
For Harvard Watchmen fans, a link to 2346:
To Thine Own Self Be Trieu
Friday, November 27, 2020
Unreality in Oz
Rebecca Harkins-Cross in Sydney Review of Books on Nov. 25, 2020 —
Reality at Northfield
See also, in memory of a Northfield, Minnesota, professor
of mathematics who reportedly died on October 28 —
Posts tagged Olaf Gate.
Latinx Critique
Perhaps Affleck's rendition of "Aquellos Ojos Verdes " will help.
See Hollywood Moment (January 22, 2018).
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Harvard Psychedelic Club vs. Harvard Alcoholic Club
For the title, see the previous post as well as Prescott Street
and Psychedelic Club in this journal.
Some related art —
“Standing in the Way” — NBC News Today
“This man may turn you green with envy” — TIME cover, 1/16/1989.
See as well the previous post, with some art
from earlier in January 1989.
Epiphany Search
Related material — The “box” version of I Ching hexagram 46,
“pushing upward,” in the lower right corner of the following art,
dated 1/6/89 (Epiphany 1989) —
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Requiem for a Jewel
See this evening’s New York Times obituary for the figure below,
who reportedly died today.
IAS is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ.
For more IAS rhetoric, see yesterday evening’s post on
The Building-Block Metaphor.
Between Passion and Obsession, There Is . . .
Related material — See Cleavage .
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Monday, November 23, 2020
In the Garden of Adding
“In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….”
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God , by E. L. Doctorow
Related material — Schoolgirls and Six-Set Geometry.
Bonding
See also another item from the above phosphodiester bond date —
September 21, 2015 —
A song for King's band, The Rock Bottom Remainders —
"Hey, good-lookin', whatcha got cookin'?"
Director’s Cut: The 6 and the 9
The previous post, “A Fine Knife Edge,” suggests . . .
A Fine Knife Edge
“Any theory or finding, especially if controversial,
always rests on a fine knife edge….”
“It is a truism that nothing is sadder than
the murder of a beautiful theory by a nasty little fact.”
— Statements by one Irving Rothchild in his article
“Induction, Deduction and the Scientific Method”
See as well this journal on the above Nasty Little Man date —
“compelling formula” vs. “intricate complexity.”
Sunday, November 22, 2020
The Galois-Fano Plane
A figure adapted from “Magic Fano Planes,” by
Ben Miesner and David Nash, Pi Mu Epsilon Journal
Vol. 14, No. 1, 1914, CENTENNIAL ISSUE 3 2014
(Fall 2014), pp. 23-29 (7 pages) —
Related material — The Eightfold Cube.
Update at 10:51 PM ET the same day —
Essentially the same figure as above appears also in
the second arXiv version (11 Jan. 2016) of . . .
DAVID A. NASH, and JONATHAN NEEDLEMAN.
“When Are Finite Projective Planes Magic?”
Mathematics Magazine, vol. 89, no. 2, 2016, pp. 83–91.
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.4169/math.mag.89.2.83.
In Memory of . . .
An Orison for Anthony
Conceptual Art
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Vulture Culture
An image from this journal on August 26, 2020 —
From a related article —
“Cohen, of course, was unavailable for comment,
having died the day before the 2016 election….”
— Chris Willman in Variety , Aug. 27, 2020
Various sources say Cohen died in his sleep after
“a fall in the middle of the night on November 7 (2016).”
A related Log24 post —
A Fork for Yogi
Note for the Church of Synchronology —
See also this journal on the “Songs for the Deaf” release date:
August 27, 2002.
Friday, November 20, 2020
Breadcrumb from Leni for The Club Dumas
Thursday, November 19, 2020
“A Word, a Corpse”
The title is from the previous post.
Related material —
Alex Garland’s grandfather, P. B. Medawar, on Bullshit
From a review of Teilhard de Chardin’s
The Phenomenon of Man:
“It would have been a great disappointment to me if Vibration did not somewhere make itself felt, for all scientific mystics either vibrate in person or find themselves resonant with cosmic vibrations….” |
See as well . . .
Breadcrumbs from a Cartoon Graveyard
Breadcrumbs for a Cartoon Graveyard
Spears reportedly died on Nov. 6. See this journal on that date.
Set Design and the Schoolgirl Problem
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
La Chanson Fatale
Harold Edwards, a founding co-editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer ,
reportedly died at 84 on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020.
Images from this journal on that date —
"Surprise Party" revisited —
A Philippine meditation by Alex Garland quoted here on May 6, 2010 —
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
“To Illustrate My Last Remark . . .”
The previous post contrasted recent bullshit of Louis Menand
with some non-bullshit at Wikipedia.
But Wikipedia is hardly blameless —
The text on the left is bullshit. The illustration on the right is not.
Field Guides
Monday, November 16, 2020
Social Icons
A death from Thursday, November 12, 2020 —
Other physics-related remarks from November 12
appear in this evening’s previous post.
The Garland Modelling
Sunday, November 15, 2020
In Memoriam
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/
ntuc-learninghub-ceo-kwek-kok-kwong-dies-aged-53
“Mountain, not fountain.” — Nabokov
Checkout at 11:23
Related material for comedians — last year’s 11/23
and Perlis in this journal.
Saturday, November 14, 2020
The Grossinger Interview
The following image was suggested by today’s
New York Times obituary of Joanna Harcourt-Smith
and by earlier Log24 posts now also tagged Grossinger.
For some background, see a book that reportedly
was published on Devil’s Night (October 30) 1997 —
The interview date above suggests some related material
for students of bullshit and for the Church of Synchronology —
Leary-Related Death
To Think That It Happened on Prescott Street
Or: Geometric Logic Continued
Part I: Mystic Twaddle —
Part II: Meanwhile, on that same date —
Part III: Back at Harvard —
A link from the above post, infra —
“Some Harvard-related material — See Leary and 6 Prescott .”
Friday, November 13, 2020
A Dyad for Ariana
From The New Yorker yesterday —
“The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth.”
Deep State, Deep Mind, Deep Structure
. . . .
“In Weber’s hands, the professor and the politician
are not figures to be joined. Each remains a lonely hero
of heavy burden, sent to ride against his particular foe:
the overly structured institution of the modern mind,
the overly structured institution of the modern state.”
See also Chomsky in this journal.
Raiders of the Lost Dorm Room
“That really is, really, I think, the Island of the Misfit Toys at that point.
You have crossed the Rubicon, you jumped on the crazy train and
you’re headed into the cliffs that guard the flat earth at that time, brother,”
said Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican congressman from Virginia,
in an interview."
— Jon Ward, political correspondent, Yahoo News , Nov. 12, 2020
The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world
In which he is and as and is are one.
— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
Related material for comedians —
See as well Sallows in this journal.
“There exists a considerable literature
devoted to the Lo shu , much of it infected
with the kind of crypto-mystic twaddle
met with in Feng Shui.”
— Lee C. F. Sallows, Geometric Magic Squares ,
Dover Publications, 2013, page 121
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Storylines
Related material for comedians —
Thursday, August 21, 2014
NoxFiled under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:00 AM ( A sequel to Lux ) “By groping toward the light we are made to realize — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy , Robin Williams and the Stages of Math i) shock & denial A related description of the process — “You know how sometimes someone tells you a theorem, — Tom Leinster yesterday at The n-Category Café |
See as well . . .
Damonizing Your Opponent
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Prof. Coleman Silk introducing freshmen to academic values
“The communication
of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Qube
The new domain qube.link forwards to . . .
http://finitegeometry.org/sc/64/solcube.html .
More generally, qubes.link forwards to this post,
which defines qubes .
Definition: A qube is a positive integer that is
a prime-power cube , i.e. a cube that is the order
of a Galois field. (Galois-field orders in general are
customarily denoted by the letter q .)
Examples: 8, 27, 64. See qubes.site.
Update on Nov. 18, 2020, at about 9:40 PM ET —
Problem:
For which qubes, visualized as n×n×n arrays,
is it it true that the actions of the two-dimensional
galois-geometry affine group on each n×n face, extended
throughout the whole array, generate the affine group
on the whole array? (For the cases 8 and 64, see Binary
Coordinate Systems and Affine Groups on Small
Binary Spaces.)
The Work of a Comedian
Flashback to Sept. 7, 2008 —
Change for Washington:
For the details, see yale.edu/lawweb:
“As important to Chinese civilization as the Bible is to Western culture,
the I Ching or Book of Changes is one of the oldest treasures of
world literature. Yet despite many commentaries written over the years,
it is still not well understood in the English-speaking world. In this
masterful [sic ] new interpretation, Jack Balkin returns the I Ching to
its rightful place….
Jack M. Balkin
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law
and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and
the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project.
His books and articles range over many different fields….”
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
To the Lighthouse
Windows lockscreen, 9:05 PM ET Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Monday, November 9, 2020
Gospel Thriller
” He say ‘One and one and one is three’ ” — Song lyric
Related theology in memory of the late Paul Shanley —
“Q is for Quelle.” (November 7, 2020)
“Big Media, Big Money, Big Tech”
Related material —
See as well the recent post Annals of Artspeak and the related
Microsoft lockscreen photo credit —
Geometric Logic
“Strawberry Fields Forever” — Song title
“Let me take you down
’Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about… ” More
“Ah, but the strawberries, that’s, that’s where I had them,
they laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved
beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic,
that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist,
and I’ve had produced that key if they hadn’t pulled
the Caine out of action. I, I know now they were only
trying to protect some fellow officer. … Naturally, I can
only cover these things from memory. If I left anything out,
why, just ask me specific questions and I’ll be glad to
answer them, one by one.” — monologuedb.com
See also The Solomon Key .
Who Was . . . Alex Trebek?
From David Corfield today at The n-Category Café —
“Collingwood writes in his Autobiography :
… a logic in which
the answers are attended
and the questions neglected
is a false logic.”
(An Autobiography , 1939, p. 31)
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Furious Fancies
An image from “Force Field of Dreams” (Sept. 4, 2020)
Local
Midrash for leftists —
The time of this journal’s previous post was 9:56
(AM, ET, Sunday, Nov. 8, 2020).
“All time is local time” — Richard Grossinger,
The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos
“You can’t fool me, i’m stickin’ to the union”
— Adapted song lyric
“On second thought, maybe you can fool me.”
See Richard Grossinger in Wikipedia.
Local
“All politics is local.”
— Saying attributed to the late Tip O’Neill
“All time is local.”
— Concept attributed to the late Albert Einstein
Related material —
See also Timequake in this journal.