The ABC of things —
The ABC of words —
A nutshell —
Book lessons —
Friday, August 14, 2015
Thursday, February 17, 2022
Space Memorial
"FILE – Retired Sandinista Gen. Hugo Torres poses for portrait
at his home, in Managua, Nicaragua, May 2, 2018."
— Photo caption from a Feb. 12 Washington Post obituary
Also on May 2, 2018 —
Related theology —
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
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Thursday, August 17, 2017
Numbered
This post was suggested by a detail, the number 777, on the cover of the
American edition of the novel discussed in yesterday morning's post Punctum.
Saturday May 3, 2008
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Friday, May 13, 2016
Geometry and Kinematics
"Just as both tragedy and comedy can be written
by using the same letters of the alphabet, the vast
variety of events in this world can be realized by
the same atoms through their different arrangements
and movements. Geometry and kinematics, which
were made possible by the void, proved to be still
more important in some way than pure being."
— Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy
For more about geometry and kinematics, see (for instance)
"An introduction to line geometry with applications,"
by Helmut Pottmann, Martin Peternell, and Bahram Ravani,
Computer-Aided Design 31 (1999), 3-16.
The concepts of line geometry (null point, null plane, null polarity,
linear complex, Klein quadric, etc.) are also of interest in finite geometry.
Some small finite spaces have as their natural models arrays of cubes .
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Friday, February 26, 2016
Literacy Test
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Revolutionary
From a New York Times obituary today —
"The Rev. Fernando Cardenal, a son of privilege
who embraced Latin America’s poor as a revolutionary
priest and brazenly defied Pope John Paul II’s order to
quit Nicaragua’s leftist cabinet in the 1980s, died on
Saturday in Managua. He was 82."
Photo caption from the same obituary —
"Fernando Cardenal in 1990. As education minister of
Nicaragua under the Sandinistas in the 1980s, he
oversaw a sweeping campaign credited with reducing
illiteracy to 13 percent from 51 percent."
This alleged literacy improvement makes him sound like
a Protestant revolutionary.
For a Catholic view of literacy, see The Gutenberg Galaxy .
See also the post Being Interpreted (Aug. 14, 2015) —
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Tuesday, November 17, 2015
The Physics and Theology of Building Blocks
Physics:
Theology:
Neither of the above prose passages inspires confidence, since
building blocks are, by their very nature, not infinitesimal.
See the post Being Interpreted of August 14, 2015 —
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Saturday, September 5, 2015
Operation Blockhead
A New Yorker writer on the new parent corporation of
Google, named Alphabet:
"In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us, Alphabet
is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks.
Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."
— Sarah Larson
Building blocks, Sarah, are not the same thing
as alphabet blocks. For the distinction, see a
Log24 post of August 14, 2015, "Being Interpreted."
The New Yorker apparently also has another fact wrong.
The official version of Page's letter is not "illustrated."
Perhaps, Sarah, you mistook the new Alphabet website
abc.xyz, which did show alphabet blocks and quoted
Page's letter, for the letter itself.
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Sunday, May 29, 2011
Every Picture Tells a Story
Background— Midnight's post.
This journal on the above "Take a Number" Dairy Queen date—
Saturday May 3, 2008“Teach us to
number our days.” The New Yorker,
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007 — “At any time, God can cancel a life. ‘So teach us to number our days,’ as the King James Version has it, ‘that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’….
The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as ‘Hell,’ even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words ‘victory’ and ‘rescue’ as translations of yeshu’ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded ‘salvation.’ And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: ‘So teach us to number our days.’” Today’s numbers from the
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Friday, April 17, 2009
Friday April 17, 2009
Begettings of
the Broken Bold
Thanks for the following
quotation (“Non deve…
nella testa“) go to the
weblog writer who signs
himself “Conrad H. Roth.”
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… Yesterday I took leave of my Captain, with a promise of visiting him at Bologna on my return. He is a true A PAPAL SOLDIER’S IDEAS OF PROTESTANTS 339 representative of the majority of his countrymen. Here, however, I would record a peculiarity which personally distinguished him. As I often sat quiet and lost in thought he once exclaimed “Che pensa? non deve mai pensar l’uomo, pensando s’invecchia;” which being interpreted is as much as to say, “What are you thinking about: a man ought never to think; thinking makes one old.” And now for another apophthegm of his; “Non deve fermarsi l’uomo in una sola cosa, perche allora divien matto; bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa;” in plain English, “A man ought not to rivet his thoughts exclusively on any one thing, otherwise he is sure to go mad; he ought to have in his head a thousand things, a regular medley.” Certainly the good man could not know that the very thing that made me so thoughtful was my having my head mazed by a regular confusion of things, old and new. The following anecdote will serve to elucidate still more clearly the mental character of an Italian of this class. Having soon discovered that I was a Protestant, he observed after some circumlocution, that he hoped I would allow him to ask me a few questions, for he had heard such strange things about us Protestants that he wished to know for a certainty what to think of us. |
Notes for Roth:
The title of this entry,
“Begettings of the Broken Bold,”
is from Wallace Stevens’s
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”–
This was peace after death, the brother of sleep, The inhuman brother so much like, so near, Yet vested in a foreign absolute, Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines, An immaculate personage in nothingness, With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth, Generations of the imagination piled In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread, In the weaving round the wonder of its need, And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet By which to spell out holy doom and end, A bee for the remembering of happiness. Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind, Damasked in the originals of green, A thousand begettings of the broken bold. This is that figure stationed at our end, Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed Out of our lives to keep us in our death.... |
Related material:
- Yesterday’s entry on Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language
- James Joyce and Heraldry
- “One might say that he [Joyce] invented a non-Euclidean geometry of language; and that he worked over it with doggedness and devotion….” —Unsigned notice in The New Republic, 20 January 1941
- Joyce’s “collideorscape” (scroll down for a citation)
- “A Hanukkah Tale” (Log24, Dec. 22, 2008)
- Stevens’s phrase from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (Canto XXV)—
Some further context:
Roth’s entry of Nov. 3, 2006–
“Why blog, sinners?“–
and Log24 on that date:
“First to Illuminate.”
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Saturday, May 3, 2008
Saturday May 3, 2008
“Teach us to
number our days.”
number our days.”
The New Yorker,
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007 —
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007 —
James Wood on Robert Alter’s new translation of the Psalms:
“At any time, God can cancel a life. ‘So teach us to number our days,’ as the King James Version has it, ‘that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’….
The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as ‘Hell,’ even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words ‘victory’ and ‘rescue’ as translations of yeshu’ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded ‘salvation.’ And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: ‘So teach us to number our days.'”
Today’s numbers from the
Pennsylvania Lottery:
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