Log24

See "The Batty Farewell" (yesterday's eulogy for Rutger Hauer) and . . .

Click the above fake seal for a related story.

Harrison Ford in "Blade Runner 2049" —

Click the above quote for a scholium.

See also the previous post and . . .

"Prodigal Son" scene in Blade Runner .

Click for related news.

"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for."

Top of the front page, tonight's online New York Times—

Click the above image for the story of a rather different cyclist.

See also some images from Guy Fawkes Day, 2003—

Related material:

Blade Runner in this journal and posts tagged "Fawkes"—

"Remember, remember the fifth of November."

"Eighteenth century theories of language were often presented as genealogies; instead of looking to the functions or operations of language to describe its 'nature,' they appealed to the story of its origins (with more or less literalist intentions.) The interest in an original 'revealed' language began much earlier, however. Leibniz, for example, searched for a primitive root-language which he felt could be discovered through research into etymology, and asserted that this ur-text, whether its signifiers were natural or conventional, would be composed of rational relations worthy of its original author, or Author, that is, God. He also toyed with the notion that hieroglyphics might be a philosophical language, a kind of meaningful mathematics, whose revelations would be exact and necessary. The debate over the origins of language— and the status of hieroglyphics— as it played out in the eighteenth century was linked to a dispute over metaphor, conceived as a 'primitive' mode of expression which preceded and was less nuanced and precise than the 'arbitrary' modern European languages. What is essential here is not the specifics of the debate on the origins of language (although this would certainly add much to the present inquiry) but rather the link that was thus constituted between hieroglyphics, the primitive ('the savage and the poet speak only in hieroglyphics') and the idea of an archaic language as an original archive of meanings which pre-exists Man and his derivative or arbitrary tongues."

— "This Extreme and Difficult Sense of Spectacular Representation: Antonin Artaud's Ontology of 'Live'," by Deborah Levitt

^

"In several programming languages, such as C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, and Python, a caret (^) is used to denote the bitwise XOR operator. This is not used outside of programming contexts because it is too easily confused with other uses of the caret." —Wikipedia article on Exclusive Or

See also the above date, July 7, 2010, in this journal.

Philip K. Dick, author of the novel
on which the Harrison Ford film
"Blade Runner" (1982) was based.

"You'd never know it, but buddy
          I'm a kind of poet."

On Kirk Varnedoe

"At 42– a professor with no museum experience– he was named curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was, and is, the most influential job in the fluid, insular, fiercely contentious world of modern art. Just two decades past his last Amherst game, the lineman from Savannah was sitting in the chair where the most critical decisions in his profession are made– 'the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,' according to his Olympian predecessor Alfred Barr. The Modern and its chief curator serve the American art establishment as a kind of aesthetic Supreme Court, and most of their rulings are beyond appeal."

— Hal Crowther

On Quality