Wednesday, April 11, 2018
I just came across the 2010 web page
https://pantone.ccnsite.com/gallery/HELDER-visual-identity/603956,
associated with the Adobe site "Behance.net." That page suggested
I too should have a Behance web presence.
And so the diamond theorem now appears at . . .
https://www.behance.net/gallery/64334249/The-Diamond-Theorem.
Comments Off on Behance Post
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Arts & Letters Daily today links to a piece on critic James Wood —
“More than anything else, for Wood, Updike failed in
the novelistic duty of helping readers to appreciate
the arc of their own lives and, just a little bit, their own
deaths.”
See also, in this journal, Dimensión de Arco .
Comments Off on Problems
Monday, April 9, 2018
Comments Off on The Long Hello
This journal on the above date of death, March 30, had a quote from
the author of the graphic novel Aleister & Adolf —
"Program or be programmed."
I prefer Barbra to Aleister —
"Spirits rise and their dance is unrehearsed."
See as well spirits in the previous post.
Comments Off on Dance
… Continued (for Lev Grossman fans)
From the above Wikipedia article —
-
In the Robert Frost poem, "The Witch of Coos," the game
is referenced in lines 7-8:
"Summoning spirits isn't 'Button, button,
who's got the button,' I would have them know."
Fact check: From the Frost poem at Bartleby.com —
-
"Summoning spirits isn’t 'Button, button,
Who’s got the button,' you’re to understand."
Comments Off on Nicht Spielerei…
Sunday, April 8, 2018
From a Log24 post of Feb. 5, 2009 —
An online logo today —
See also Harry Potter and the Lightning Bolt.
Comments Off on Design
See also Chess War posts.
Comments Off on OK Movie
Today is Orthodox Easter.
From a search in this journal for "Magic Circle" —
Comments Off on Raiders of the Lost Circle
Saturday, April 7, 2018
The late Philip J. Davis in his 2004 essay
"A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology,"
Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal ,
Issue 27, Article 14. Available at:
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmnj/vol1/iss27/14/
"In my childhood, the circle persisted as a potent magic figure
in the playtime doggerel 'Make a magic circle and sign it with a dot.'
The interested reader will find thousands of allusions to the phrase
'magic circle' on the Web."
There are fewer allusions to "magic circle" + "sign it with a dot."
One such allusion (click to enlarge) is . . .
Davis died on Pi Day .
Comments Off on Dot
Actor James Spader in a 2014 interview —
". . . my father taught English. My mother taught art . . . ."
Detail of part of a text by Magritte (1929) that appeared
without attribution in the online New York Times today —
See also, from a search for the phrase "Word and Image"
in this journal —
The Philosophers' Stone as originally
illustrated in The New York Times —
.
Related images —
See as well a Log24 search for "Philosophers' Stone"
and remarks related to the Magritte pictures above
in the post Story of March 13, 2014.
Comments Off on Word and Image: Backstory for James Spader
The FBI holding cube in "The Blacklist" —
" 'The Front' is not the whole story . . . ."
— Vincent Canby, New York Times film review, 1976,
as quoted in Wikipedia.
See also Solomon's Cube in this journal.
Some may view the above web page as illustrating the
Glasperlenspiel passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica —
“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”
A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —
"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."
See also a related remark by Lévi-Strauss in 1955:
"…three different readings become possible:
left to right, top to bottom, front to back."
Comments Off on Sides
Friday, April 6, 2018
From "The Blacklist" Season 5, Episode 11 —
– Remind me again what it is that we think we're doing here.
– The phone acts as a passive packet sniffer.
It's a trick Tom taught me.
– Packet sniffer? Ugh.
– The FBI uses them.
I'm sure your tech people know all about them.
It can intercept and log traffic that passes over a digital network.
– It is an absolute mystery to me how these gadgets work —
the Dick Tracy phones, these blueteeth connections.
Quite frankly, I miss the rotary phone.
Except for that zero.
Watching that zero crawl back.
Oh, my God.
It was painful.
– We have the code.
– Great.
Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/
view_episode_scripts.php?
tv-show=the-blacklist&episode=s05e11
And more:
Philip J. Davis reportedly turned 86 on January 2, 2009.
An image from this journal on that date —
“You have the incorrect number.
I will tell you what you are doing:
you are turning the letter O
instead of the zero.”
— "Symbols and Signs,"
Vladimir Nabokov, 1948
Comments Off on Watching the Zero
The American Mathematical Society on April 4 posted a story
about a death that they said occurred on March 14 (Pi Day):
* Notes on the Title —
The Thread Part
The Phantom Part
"What a yarn!" — Raymond Reddington in "The Blacklist"
Fact check on the death date reported by the AMS —
But Davis's funeral-home obituary agrees with the Pi Day date.
Comments Off on The Thread Phantom: A Death on Pi Day*
From a Boston Globe obituary for Andrew Lewis, an Oscar-nominated
screenwriter who reportedly died at 92 on Feb. 28, 2018 —
"A service has been held for Mr. Lewis . . . ."
— Bryan Marquard, Globe staff, April 5, 2018
From this journal on the reported date of his death —
The Globe reports that Lewis's father was Clarence Irving Lewis,
a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.
Fact check: See page 246 of C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist ,
by Murray G. Murphey (SUNY Press, 2005).
Figure (a) above is not unrelated to philosophy. See Plato 's Meno dialogue.
See also a different diamond — a symbol devised by C. I. Lewis for use in
modal logic — in the post Wittgenstein's Diamond (July 10, 2011).
Comments Off on A Service
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Comments Off on Structure
The above title may be regarded as a poetic variant
of the title of Katherine Neville's 1988 novel The Eight .
Related material —
See also The Black Queen, a note from 2001.
Comments Off on D8
From this journal at midnight (12 AM ET) on April 4 —
Related material —
From the weblog of Ready Player One author Ernest Cline —
"Recently, a lot of people have asked me if a real person
inspired the character of James Halliday, the eccentric
billionaire video game designer in my book. Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak are both mentioned in the text,
because their world changing partnership inspired the
relationship between James Halliday and Ogden Morrow,
with Morrow being a charismatic tech industry leader like
Jobs, and Halliday being the computer geek genius of the
duo like Woz. But the character of James Halliday was
inspired by two other very different people.
As I told Wired magazine earlier this year, from the
beginning, I envisioned James Halliday’s personality as
a cross between Howard Hughes and Richard Garriott.
If I had to break it down mathematically, I’d estimate that
about 15% of Halliday’s character was inspired by
Howard Hughes (the crazy reclusive millionaire part), with
most of the other 85% being inspired by Richard Garriott."
Mrs. Garriott —
See as well Log24 posts tagged "Space Writer"
and the classic tune "Midnight at the Oasis."
Comments Off on Easter Fantasy
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Or: "Show me all the blueprints!"
— A saying attributed to Howard Hughes.
From the Blacklist episode in the previous post, "Date," blueprints
allegedly describing the boiler room in the Denver Mint —
Note the Thrust/Translation Controller Assembly (TTCA) at upper left
and the Attitude Controller Assembly (ACA) at lower right.
A NASA publication dated April 1, 1971, illustrates the Attitude Controller —
Krysten Ritter was born more than ten years later, in 1981.
For more on Attitude Control, see Boiler Room in this journal.
Comments Off on D8ing the Joystick
See as well a search for "Gold Bug" in this journal.
From that search —
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations , first published in 1991—
Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old
as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age,
Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math
into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy
potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid
does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding
any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes
him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign.
He has the sub, Lovering the congealed mac and cheese.
Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins
sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an
algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness
Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code
can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick
in the head?"
Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy.
But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar
ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the
mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us.
Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too
complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox
is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to
demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes
up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded
in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more.
He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking
Lovering politely for the insight.
"The key is to find some formal symmetry…."
Comments Off on Gold Bug Variations (Continued)
"The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the
[projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! ….
To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds
a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are
determined 8 sets of 7 points each, 'heptads' …."
— George M. Conwell, "The 3-space PG (3, 2) and Its Group,"
The Annals of Mathematics , Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910),
pp. 60-76.
"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."
— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
For those who, like the author of The Eight (a novel in which today's
date figures prominently), prefer fiction —
See as well . . .
Literary theorists may, if they wish, connect
cabalistically the Insidious address "414"
with the date 4/14 of the above post, and
the word Appletree with the biblical Garden.
Comments Off on The Key
Comments Off on Easter Entertainment Fix
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Three geometric readings, in chronological order —
Comments Off on Easter at Cambridge
Comments Off on Easter at Harvard
"On Tralfamadore, Billy is put in a transparent geodesic dome
exhibit in a zoo; the dome represents a house on Earth.
The Tralfamadorians later abduct a movie star named
Montana Wildhack, who had disappeared and was believed to
have drowned herself in the Pacific Ocean. They intend to
have her mate with Billy." — Wikipedia on Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five .
See also the previous post and (from Log24 on Jan. 22) "Hollywood Moment" …
Comments Off on Montana Wildhack
See also "Black Mountain Meets Blue Ridge" (Log24, Feb. 22, 2018).
Comments Off on The Cage Country
From a May 13, 2010, New York Times theater review —
From a link in a post from yesterday evening —
"Why don't you come with me, little girl,
on a magic carpet ride?" — Steppenwolf lyrics
These lyrics are heard in Star Trek: First Contact (1996).
Related entertainment —
The production of "Passion Play" reviewed above opened May 12, 2010.
See also this journal on that date.
Comments Off on Entertainment Overload
Monday, April 2, 2018
Comments Off on A Puzzle for the Clueless
See posts tagged Steppenwolf Carpet in this journal.
Related fiction: Weaveworld .
Comments Off on The Steppenwolf Carpet
From a Toronto Star video pictured here on April 1 three years ago:
The three connected cubes are labeled "Harmonic Analysis," 'Number Theory,"
and "Geometry."
Related cultural commentary from a review of the recent film "Justice League" —
"Now all they need is to resurrect Superman (Henry Cavill),
stop Steppenwolf from reuniting his three Mother Cubes
(sure, whatever) and wrap things up in under two cinematic
hours (God bless)."
The nineteenth-century German mathematician Felix Christian Klein
as Steppenwolf —
Volume I of a treatise by Klein is subtitled
"Arithmetic, Algebra, Analysis." This covers
two of the above three Toronto Star cubes.
Klein's Volume II is subtitled "Geometry."
An excerpt from that volume —
Further cultural commentary: "Glitch" in this journal.
Comments Off on Three Mother Cubes
See the posts of April 1 three years ago.
Some context from a personal Kindle library —
"Elementary Mathematics from an Ad" suggests . . .
Comments Off on Review
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Or: Hector and the Horse
"How many roads . . . . ?" — Bob Dylan
Comments Off on The Truth Cube
Saturday, March 31, 2018
"Those seeking an understanding of the historical elements
of Jesus’ saga might find it profitable to engage the vast work
of David Friedrich Strauss, the German intellectual, whose
monumental 'The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined' was
translated into English in the 19th century by George Eliot.
(At times, the translation reads like a scholarly 'Middlemarch,'
much to its credit.)"
— Jon Meacham in the Easter Sunday print edition of
The New York Times. The above passage is
paragraph 10 of Meacham's article.
See also "Over the Mountains" (Log24, Feb. 21, 2018).
Comments Off on Burying the Lede
For Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan —
See also a Log24 post from the above Cube Theory date —
April 12, 2016 — Lyrics for a Cartoon Graveyard — as well as . . .
Comments Off on Cube Theory
“The greatest obstacle to discovery
is not ignorance —
it is the illusion of knowledge.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin,
Librarian of Congress,
quoted here in 2006.
Related material —
Remarks on Rubik's Cube from June 13, 2014 and . . .
See as well a different Gresham, author of Nightmare Alley ,
and Log24 posts on that book and the film of the same name .
Comments Off on Illusion
From a post of April 15, 2006 —
From elsewhere —
Comments Off on Notes for the Harrowing of Hell
Friday, March 30, 2018
The online New York Times this evening has an obituary
for "an unorthodox … drama scholar" who reportedly died
on Thursday, March 22, 2018.
Some drama in this journal from around that date — in posts
tagged "The Cubes" — includes the following excerpt from
a graphic novel:
"Program or be programmed."
— A saying by the author of the above graphic novel.
Comments Off on Unorthodox Drama
Thursday, March 29, 2018
The title reverses a phrase of Fano —
“costruire (o, dirò meglio immaginare).”
Illustrations of imagining (the Fano plane) and of constructing (the eightfold cube) —
The Fano plane and the eightfold cube
Comments Off on To Imagine (or, Better, to Construct)
From the Diamond Theorem Facebook page —
A question three hours ago at that page —
"Is this Time Cube?"
Notes toward an answer —
And from Six-Set Geometry in this journal . . .
Comments Off on “Before Creation Itself . . .”
Or: The Discreet Charm of Stéphane
For Lisa Halliday
Supplementary images —
Comments Off on Asymmetry: An Historical YA Fantasy
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
A comment on the the Diamond Theorem Facebook page —
Those who enjoy asymmetry may consult the "Expert's Cube" —
For further details see the previous post.
Comments Off on On Unfairly Excluding Asymmetry
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Related material on automorphism groups —
The "Eightfold Cube" structure shown above with Weyl
competes rather directly with the "Eightfold Way" sculpture
shown above with Bryant. The structure and the sculpture
each illustrate Klein's order-168 simple group.
Perhaps in part because of this competition, fans of the Mathematical
Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, pronounced "Misery') are less likely
to enjoy, and discuss, the eight-cube mathematical structure above
than they are an eight-cube mechanical puzzle like the one below.
Note also the earlier (2006) "Design Cube 2x2x2" webpage
illustrating graphic designs on the eightfold cube. This is visually,
if not mathematically, related to the (2010) "Expert's Cube."
Comments Off on Compare and Contrast
Monday, March 26, 2018
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Comments Off on Musical Midrash
Saturday, March 24, 2018
From a personal Kindle library —
From the world of mass entertainment —
Comments Off on Soul Notes
See also a search in this journal for Compulsion.
Comments Off on Poster Boys
The search for Langlands in the previous post
yields the following Toronto Star illustration —
From a review of the recent film "Justice League" —
"Now all they need is to resurrect Superman (Henry Cavill),
stop Steppenwolf from reuniting his three Mother Cubes
(sure, whatever) and wrap things up in under two cinematic
hours (God bless)."
For other cubic adventures, see yesterday's post on A Piece of Justice
and the block patterns in posts tagged Design Cube.
Comments Off on Sure, Whatever.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Copy editing — From Wikipedia
"Copy editing (also copy-editing or copyediting, sometimes abbreviated ce)
is the process of reviewing and correcting written material to improve accuracy,
readability, and fitness for its purpose, and to ensure that it is free of error,
omission, inconsistency, and repetition. . . ."
An example of the need for copy editing:
Related material: Langlands and Reciprocity in this journal.
Comments Off on Reciprocity
Comments Off on Piece Prize
On the Oslo artist Josefine Lyche —
"Josefine has taken me through beautiful stories,
ranging from the personal to the platonic
explaining the extensive use of geometry in her art.
I now know that she bursts into laughter when reading
Dostoyevsky, and that she has a weird connection
with a retired mathematician."
— Ann Cathrin Andersen,
http://bryggmagasin.no/2017/behind-the-glitter/
Personal —
The Rushkoff Logo
— From a 2016 graphic novel by Douglas Rushkoff.
See also Rushkoff and Talisman in this journal.
Platonic —
The Diamond Cube.
Compare and contrast the shifting hexagon logo in the Rushkoff novel above
with the hexagon-inside-a-cube in my "Diamonds and Whirls" note (1984).
Comments Off on From the Personal to the Platonic
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Also on March 18, 2015 . . .
Comments Off on In Memoriam
The Java applets at the webpage "Diamonds and Whirls"
that illustrate Cullinane cubes may be difficult to display.
Here instead is an animated GIF that shows the basic unit
for the "design cube" pages at finitegeometry.org.
Comments Off on The Diamond Cube
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
MIPS Illustrated — (The above computing meaning from Wiktionary,
"millions of instructions per second") —
Comments Off on The Social Network: At RISC for MIPS
WISC = Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer or
Rust Inventory of Schizotypal Cognitions
See related material in earlier WISC RISC posts.
See also . . .
"Many parents ask us about the Block Design section
on the WISC and hope to purchase blocks and exercises
like those used on the WISC test. We explain that doing that
has the potential to invalidate their child's test results.
These Froebel Color Cubes will give you a tool to work with
your child on the skills tested for in the Block Design section
of the WISC in an ethical and appropriate way. These same
skills are applicable to any test of non-verbal reasoning like
the NNAT, Raven's or non-verbal sections of the CogAT or OLSAT. "
— An online marketing webpage
For a webpage that is perhaps un ethical and in appropriate,
see Block Designs in Art and Mathematics.
Comments Off on WISC RISC
The title is from the URL of a paper discussed here yesterday
in the post "Mad Men vs. Math Men" —
https://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/
uploads/documents/docs2016/RISC/RISCSects .
Abstract (See also a webpage on this and related publications.) —
Related material from today's news —
Update: For further background, see a WIRED article from today.
Comments Off on RISC Sects
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Video starring the CEO of Cambridge Analytica —
Related material from John Rust, now the director of the
Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge —
My own sympathies are with the Mad Men.
See also Rust in the previous post, Cambridge Psychometrics.
He is known for the UK version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale
for Children.
Comments Off on Mad Men vs. Math Men
* Not to be confused with Cambridge Analytica.
See also Wechsler in this journal.
Comments Off on Cambridge Psychometrics*
Comments Off on Springtime for Bavaria
Monday, March 19, 2018
"Ready for More?" — The Times
Comments Off on Such an Air of Spring About It
Comments Off on Tough Crowd.
Sunday, March 18, 2018
From The Atlantic , September 2017 issue, online —
"How America Lost Its Mind," by former Harvard Lampoon
writer Kurt Andersen —
Related material —
"There is a transformation, a metamorphosis that's going on here."
— Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica
The Lucasian Version —
Comments Off on Draper at the Mother Church
Saturday, March 17, 2018
Detail —
Related material —
See as well a search in this journal for (mixed) Emojis.
Comments Off on A Question for Cambridge Analytica
From "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" —
From elsewhere —
Comments Off on Lucasian
Friday, March 16, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Recent Log24 posts on a mobile phone —
Comments Off on Review
Comments Off on Stephen Hawking, 1942-2018
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
(Motto of Los Amigos High School, Fountain Valley, CA)
Comments Off on Siempre con Dignidad
Monday, March 12, 2018
Stein reportedly died at 100 last Friday (March 9).
Related material —
Textiles by Stein arranged on the six faces of a cube —
Ethel Stein, "Circus & Slapstick," 1996
See also a less amusing approach to
patterns on the faces of a cube.
Comments Off on Stein
Remarks related to a recent film and a not-so-recent film.
For some historical background, see Dirac and Geometry in this journal.
Also (as Thas mentions) after Saniga and Planat —
The Saniga-Planat paper was submitted on December 21, 2006.
Excerpts from this journal on that date —
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
Comments Off on “Quantum Tesseract Theorem?”
Sunday, March 11, 2018
"You know my methods."
— Robert Downey Jr. to Jude Law in
A Game of Shadows (2011)
Comments Off on Methods
. . . With intolerable disrespect for the word …
In particular, the word "theorem."
See also "Quantum Tesseract Theorem" in this journal.
Comments Off on Blackboard Jungle Continues . . .
Saturday, March 10, 2018
See also the undefined phrase "projective model" in a 2012 MIT thesis,
and the following book —
Comments Off on Compulsion
Update of 4:30 AM —
Comments Off on Check and Mate
Friday, March 9, 2018
The New York Times today on a philosopher of
history who reportedly died on Monday, March 5 —
“Perhaps White’s most controversial idea,
and one for which he was so often shunned
by his fellow historians, is that ‘all stories
are fictions,’ ” Robert Doran, a professor at
the University of Rochester … said by email.
"White held that while historical facts are
scientifically verifiable, stories are not.
Stories are made, not found in the historical data;
historical meaning is imposed on historical facts
by means of the choice of plot-type, and this choice
is inevitably ethical and political at bottom.
"This is what White called 'emplotment,' a term
he coined," Dr. Doran continued. "Even the most basic
beginning-middle-end structure of a story represents
an imposition: The historian chooses where to begin,
where to end, and what points are important in the middle.
There is no scientific test for 'historical significance.' "
From this journal on Monday, White's reported date of death —
Plan 9 continues.
Comments Off on The Cemetery Plot
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Comments Off on L’Engle Time Fold
Comments Off on Thanking the Academy…
"At the heart of the trial was the question of
whether the complainant could have agreed
to have sex with the defendant . . .
on Halloween night in 2015 . . . ."
— Vivian Wang in The New York Times this evening
This journal on Halloween night in 2015 —
Comments Off on The Trial
"We tell ourselves stories . . . ." — Joan Didion
New York Times Wire, 6:40 PM ET Thursday, March 8, 2018
3h ago
GRAY MATTER
How Lies Spread Online
They diffuse farther, faster and more broadly than the truth does.
4h ago
It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider.
And Humans Are to Blame.
False claims posted on Twitter were 70 percent more likely
to be shared than the truth, researchers at M.I.T. found.
And people appear to prefer false news.
Comments Off on Stories
— From Katherine Neville's novel The Eight (1988)
Related logic —
Enlarge the above. Detail:
Comments Off on Women’s Day: The Hateful Eight
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
"How do you get young people excited about space?"
— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012
The above quote is from this journal on 9/11, 2014.
Related material —
Synchronology for the above date — 9/11, 2014 —
A BuzzFeed article with that date, and in reply
"A Personal Statement from Michael Shermer" with that date.
Comments Off on Excited
Related material —
The seven points of the Fano plane within
The Eightfold Cube.
"Before time began . . . ."
— Optimus Prime
Comments Off on Unite the Seven.
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Not to mention fish-men.
Comments Off on Define Misconduct.
For "The Shape of Fluids"
Related material — Posts tagged Aqua.
Comments Off on Fields Medal
Monday, March 5, 2018
Comments Off on Sacramento Legend
"What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?"
— The concluding lines of "Sonatina to Hans Christian,"
by Wallace Stevens (in Harmonium (second edition, 1931))
Comments Off on What of the Night?
Sunday, March 4, 2018
1955 ("Blackboard Jungle") —
1976 —
2009 —
2016 —
Comments Off on The Square Inch Space: A Brief History
Saturday, March 3, 2018
Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —
“Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation
of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was,
I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind,
nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery….”
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
“How strange the change from major to minor….”
— Cole Porter, “Every Time We Say Goodbye“
Comments Off on Thanking the Academy
For the Marvel Comics surgeon Dr. Stephen Strange —
For a real-life surgeon who reportedly died on Feb. 24,
a quotation from this journal on that date —
"What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?"
— The concluding lines of "Sonatina to Hans Christian,"
by Wallace Stevens (in Harmonium (second edition, 1931))
Related material —
Comments Off on Space
Friday, March 2, 2018
A scholium on the previous post, "Mother Ship Meets Mother Church" —
"Consider Saint Hedwig of Silesia (1174–1243), for example,
who is elegantly depicted in this catalogue, striking a pose
with her prayer book, rosary, and Virgin and child statue
(a reminder of the legitimacy of her sex), along with boots
slung over her elbow so she could walk barefoot like
the apostles. Between miracles, she was also known to
supervise construction of new convents. Hedwig is but
a snowflake on the iceberg of the extraordinary role of
actual women in the Middle Ages, to which more evidence
is added continually thanks the Feminae database."
— From "Wonder Women," by Matthew J. Milliner
Comments Off on A Snowflake on the Iceberg
Thursday, March 1, 2018
See posts tagged Tsimtsum and, more specifically, Mother Church.
Women and Children First
Comments Off on Mother Ship Meets Mother Church
Comments Off on Identity Icon
Too late .
Time Magazine December 25, 2017 – January 1, 2018 —
The cover features "A Wrinkle in Time," opening March 9, 2018:
Comments Off on Bridge Program
Hume, from posts tagged "four-set" in this journal —
"The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions
successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away,
and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity
in different, whatever natural propension we may have
to imagine that simplicity and identity."
Paz, from a search for Paz + Identity in this journal —
"At the point of convergence
the play of similarities and differences
cancels itself out in order that
identity alone may shine forth.
The illusion of motionlessness,
the play of mirrors of the one:
identity is completely empty;
it is a crystallization and
in its transparent core
the movement of analogy
begins all over once again."
— The Monkey Grammarian
by Octavio Paz, translated by Helen Lane
|
Comments Off on The Movement of Analogy: Hume vs. Paz
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
The title is that of a play mentioned last night in
a New York Times obituary .
Related recent film lines —
-
Thor: How do I escape?
-
Heimdall: You're on a planet surrounded by doorways.
Go through one.
-
Thor: Which one?
-
Heimdall: The big one!
Related material from this journal on Jan. 20, 2018 —
The Chaos Symbol of Dan Brown.
Comments Off on A Girl’s Guide to Chaos
(Continued)
Excerpts from a post of May 25, 2005 —
Above is an example I like of mathematics….
Here is an example I like of narrative:
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that
it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything
shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Image from a different different world —
Hat-tip to a related Feb. 26 weblog post
at the American Mathematical Society.
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
For the former, see the previous post.
For the latter, see yesterday's The Unfolding.
Related material —
(Screenshot at 9:08 PM ET)
Heimel on Dating —
She adapted “Sex Tips” and “But Enough About You,” a 1986 collection, into a play, “A Girl’s Guide to Chaos,” which opened later that year off Broadway at the American Place Theater. The play is largely a conversation among four friends, one of whom, Cynthia (played by Debra Jo Rupp in the original production) realizes to her horror that she will have to start dating again.
“Please, God, no, don’t make me do it!” she says. “I’ll be good from now on, I promise! I’ll stop feeding the dog hashish! I’ll be kind, thoughtful, sober, industrious, anything. But please, God, not the ultimate torture of dating!”
— Richard Sandomir tonight in The New York Times
on an author who reportedly died on Sunday, Feb. 25, 2018
|
<meta property="article:published"
itemprop="datePublished"
content="2018-02-27T19:37:54-05:00" />
Comments Off on Risin’ Meets Oozin’
"Risin' up to the challenge of our rival" — Eye of the Tiger
Comments Off on Die Welt, Die Zeit, and the Frankfurter
On the recent film "Justice League" —
From DC Extended Universe Wiki, "Mother Box" —
"However, during World War I, the British rediscovered
mankind's lost Mother Box. They conducted numerous studies
but were unable to date it due to its age. The Box was then
shelved in an archive, up until the night Superman died,
where it was then sent to Doctor Silas Stone, who
recognized it as a perpetual energy matrix. . . ." [Link added.]
The cube shape of the lost Mother Box, also known as the
Change Engine, is shared by the Stone in a novel by Charles Williams,
Many Dimensions . See the Solomon's Cube webpage.
See too the matrix of Claude Lévi-Strauss in posts tagged
Verwandlungslehre .
Some literary background:
Who speaks in primordial images speaks to us
as with a thousand trumpets, he grips and overpowers,
and at the same time he elevates that which he treats
out of the individual and transitory into the sphere of
the eternal. — C. G. JUNG
"In the conscious use of primordial images—
the archetypes of thought—
one modern novelist stands out as adept and
grand master: Charles Williams.
In The Place of the Lion he incarnates Plato’s
celestial archetypes with hair-raising plausibility.
In Many Dimensions he brings a flock of ordinary
mortals face to face with the stone bearing
the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, the sign of Four.
Whether we understand every line of a Williams novel
or not, we feel something deep inside us quicken
as Williams tells the tale.
Here, in The Greater Trumps , he has turned to
one of the prime mysteries of earth . . . ."
— William Lindsay Gresham, Preface (1950) to
Charles Williams's The Greater Trumps (1932)
For fans of what the recent series Westworld called "bulk apperception" —
Comments Off on Raiders of the Lost Images
Monday, February 26, 2018
From the website of Richard P. Gabriel —
" As part of my studies, I came up with a 'theory of poetry'
based loosely on Christopher Alexander’s 'Nature of Order.' "
[The Alexander link is mine, not Gabriel’s.]
A phrase from this journal a year ago today — "poetic order" —
links to the theory of Gabriel —
From Gabriel's "The Nature of Poetic Order" —
Positive Space
• Positive space is the characteristic of a center
that moves outward from itself, seemingly oozing life
rather than collapsing on itself
• An image that resonates is showing positive space
• A word that has many connotations that fit with the
other centers in the poem is showing positive space
• It is an expansion outward rather than a contraction
inward, and it shows that the poem is unfolding
in front of us and not dying
Related material —
From a post of April 26, 2017 —
Comments Off on The Unfolding
Sunday, February 25, 2018
A sequel to Friday's "The Dark, Seductive Art of Phillips Exeter."
From Twitter today —
Groton School @GrotonSchool Feb 1
Groton School Theater Department Presents: CABARET
Friday, February 23rd at 7:30 pm
Saturday, February 24th at 7:30 pm
Sunday, February 25th at 3 pm
All performances are free to the public. Please make ticket
reservations in advance online: http://bit.ly/CABARET2018.
Comments Off on The Dark, Seductive Art of Groton
Saturday, February 24, 2018
"What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?"
— The concluding lines of
"Sonatina to Hans Christian,"
by Wallace Stevens
(in Harmonium (second edition, 1931))
From "Mathmagic Land" (May 22, 2015)
Donald in Mathmagic Land
From "The Trials of Device" (April 24, 2017)
Comments Off on The Ugly Duck
Friday, February 23, 2018
From two pedagogues in Montana —
https://www.nctm.org/Publications/
Mathematics-Teaching-in-Middle-School/
2016/Vol22/Issue1/Quilt-Block-Symmetries/
Related material from author Dan Brown's father,
a pedagogue who taught at Phillips Exeter Academy :
Click the above image for some background.
Related material from Log24 —
Verwandlungslehre.
Compare and contrast with the above
Transformational Geometry cover:
Related material from Vienna — The previous post and
Wittgenstein on Bewitchment.
See as well . . .
Click to enlarge.
Comments Off on The Dark, Seductive Art of Phillips Exeter
Related material — (Click to enlarge) —
"Risin' up to the challenge of our rival"
— Eye of the Tiger
Detail —
Comments Off on Snow Games
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Click for the source.
Comments Off on The Melody
Comments Off on Ojo de Dios
Click to enlarge —
Related material —
Comments Off on Black Mountain Meets Blue Ridge
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
"He made the Gallup Organization’s list of Ten Most Admired Men
in the World 54 times, a record, and his fame and influence as a
spiritual leader rivaled the pope’s." — Mark Feeney, Globe staff
Comments Off on Crusader’s End
Judith Wilt on the fictional Casaubon of Middlemarch —
Related material from Wikipedia:
The non -fictional Casaubon and Ultramontanism.
From the former:
"Neither side could understand that Casaubon's reading of
the church fathers led him to adopt an intermediate position
between Genevan Calvinism and Ultramontanism."
See as well Wilt on "Storytelling and Catholicism"
(Boston College syllabus, Spring 2016), and Enda's Game
(Log24, April 5, 2016).
Comments Off on Over the Mountains
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Instagram, August 4, 2017 —
See posts on Suppes and Child Buyers.
Bottom line — See also a post from August 4, 2017.
Comments Off on Colloquy
"It's the system that matters.
How the data arrange themselves inside it."
— Gravity's Rainbow
"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge."
— Vladimir Nabokov
Comments Off on The System
Click for some related posts.
Comments Off on A Sharper Image
Sunday, February 18, 2018
"Butt rock is sincere as hell, the place where irony came to die."
— Deborah Kennedy of Portland, Oregon, in an essay,
"How Butt Rock Helped Me Find Love," dated July 25, 2014.
See also July 25, 2014, in Log24 posts tagged April Awareness 2014.
Side ad with an SFGate story this morning —
Comments Off on Dating
"Heuristic evaluation is a well established method for quickly evaluating
the efficacy of new media solutions to interface issues."
— Neil Gordon et al. , University of Hull
Click or touch to enlarge.
Related material:
Comments Off on Heuristic Evaluation: A Major Tool
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Michael Atiyah on the late Ron Shaw —
Phrases by Atiyah related to the importance in mathematics
of the two-element Galois field GF(2) —
- “The digital revolution based on the 2 symbols (0,1)”
- “The algebra of George Boole”
- “Binary codes”
- “Dirac’s spinors, with their up/down dichotomy”
These phrases are from the year-end review of Trinity College,
Cambridge, Trinity Annual Record 2017 .
I prefer other, purely geometric, reasons for the importance of GF(2) —
- The 2×2 square
- The 2x2x2 cube
- The 4×4 square
- The 4x4x4 cube
See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
See also today’s earlier post God’s Dice and Atiyah on the theology of
(Boolean) algebra vs. (Galois) geometry:
Comments Off on The Binary Revolution
« Newer Posts —
Older Posts »