Thursday, August 24, 2023
Colorful Tale
Saturday, December 14, 2019
Colorful Tale
The above image is from
"A Four-Color Theorem:
Function Decomposition Over a Finite Field,"
http://finitegeometry.org/sc/gen/mapsys.html.
These partitions of an 8-set into four 2-sets
occur also in Wednesday night's post
Miracle Octad Generator Structure.
This post was suggested by a Daily News
story from August 8, 2011, and by a Log24
post from that same date, "Organizing the
Mine Workers" —
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Colorful Tale
“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science
is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core
of objectivity behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale of
the subjective storyteller mind.”
— Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and
Natural Science , Princeton, 1949, p. 237
"The bond with reality is cut."
— Hans Freudenthal, 1962
From page 180, Logicomix — It was a dark and stormy night …
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Colorful Tales
“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science
is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core
of objectivity behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale of
the subjective storyteller mind.”
— Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and
Natural Science , Princeton, 1949, p. 237
Harvard University Press on the late Angus Fletcher, author of
The Topological Imagination and Colors of the Mind —
From the Harvard webpage for Colors of the Mind —
Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts,
the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye.
This… book… aims to open another field of study:
how thought— the act, the experience of thinking—
is represented in literature.
. . . .
Fletcher’s resources are large, and his step is sure.
The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton’s
Satan, the original Thinker,
leaving the pain of thinking
as his legacy for mankind.
A 1992 review by Vinay Dharwadker of Colors of the Mind —
See also the above word "dianoia" in The Echo in Plato's Cave.
Some context …
This post was suggested by a memorial piece today in
the Los Angeles Review of Books —
A Florilegium for Angus Fletcher
By Kenneth Gross, Lindsay Waters, V. N. Alexander,
Paul Auster, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, K. J. Knoespel,
Mitchell Meltzer, Victoria Nelson, Joan Richardson,
Dorian Sagan, Susan Stewart, Eric Wilson, Michael Wood
Fletcher reportedly died on November 28, 2016.
"I learned from Fletcher how to apprehend
the daemonic element in poetic imagination."
— Harold Bloom in today's Los Angeles florilegium
For more on Bloom and the daemonic, see a Log24 post,
"Interpenetration," from the date of Fletcher's death.
Some backstory: Dharwadker in this journal.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Colorful Tales
See also the Log24 post from May 18,
the date of Eric Caidin's reported death,
as well as Hexagram 50 and May 14, 2014—
Death in Mathmagic Land.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Colorful Tale
See a post of Nov. 17, 2011 — Void.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
— Joan Didion, The White Album
See also John Gregory Dunne.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Colorful Tale
(A sequel to yesterday's ART WARS and this
morning's De Colores )
“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature
of modern science is the emergence of abstract
symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity
behind– as Eddington puts it– the colorful tale
of the subjective storyteller mind.” — Hermann Weyl
(Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science ,
Princeton, 1949, p. 237)
See also Deathly Hallows.
Friday, December 19, 2014
Colorful Tale
Wikipedia on a tale about one Hippasus of Metapontum,
who supposedly was drowned by Pythagoreans for his
discovery of irrational numbers and/or of the dodecahedron —
"In the hands of modern writers this combination of vague
ancient reports and modern guesswork has sometimes
evolved into a much more emphatic and colourful tale."
See, for instance, a tale told by the late Carl Sagan,
who was bitterly anti-Pythagorean (and anti-Platonic):
For a related colorful tale, see "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Colorful Tale
"Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature
of modern science is the emergence of abstract
symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity
behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale
of the subjective storyteller mind."
— Hermann Weyl in Philosophy of Mathematics
and Natural Science , Princeton, 1949, p. 237
Tom Wolfe on art theorists in The Painted Word (1975) :
"It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene."
The Weyl quote is a continuing theme in this journal.
The Wolfe quote appeared here on Nov. 18, 2014,
the reported date of death of Yale graduate student
Natasha Chichilnisky-Heal.
Directions to her burial (see yesterday evening) include
a mention of "Paul Robson Street" (actually Paul
Robeson Place) near "the historic Princeton Cemetery."
This, together with the remarks by Tom Wolfe posted
here on the reported day of her death, suggests a search
for "red green black" —
The late Chichilnisky-Heal was a student of political economy.
The search colors may be interpreted, if one likes, as referring
to politics (red), economics (green), and Robeson (black).
See also Robeson in this journal.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Colorful Tale (continued)
In memory of ad writer Julian Koenig, who apparently
coined the phrase “Earth Day” for April 22 (his birthday):
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:00 PM |
See also all instances of the phrase “colorful tale” in this journal.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Friday, November 1, 2013
Colorful Tale
See the title phrase in this journal.
See also posts from last August tagged Storyville.
Friday, August 24, 2012
A Colorful Tale
(Continued from July 19, 2008)
From the Diamond 16 Puzzle —
The resemblance between the "quadrants" part of
the above picture and the new Microsoft symbol—
— is of course purely coincidental, as is the fact
that the new symbol illustrates four colors.
Thursday, October 14, 2021
Adventures in Story Space* . . .
In memory of an editor/author who reportedly died on September 12 . . .
Vide an anthology he edited that was published on November 1, 2013,
and two Log24 posts from that date —
Colorful Tale (11/1/2013)
See the title phrase in this journal.
See also posts from last August tagged Storyville.
Orange and Black at the White House (11/1/2013)
See Josh Lederman's AP story on this year's
colorful White House Halloween decorations.
Orange and black are also the Princeton colors.
See as well The Crosswicks Curse.
* "Story space" is a phrase from Log24 on September 12.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Monday, February 13, 2017
“The Echo in Plato’s Cave” Continues.
The previous post, "Colorful Tales," on the Nov. 28, 2016, death
of one Angus Fletcher, together with the remarks indexed above,
suggest a review from …
The archives of The New York Times —
"THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE
Literature as a Way of Life
By Harold Bloom
357 pp. Yale University Press. $32.50.
Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.
A version of this review appeared in print
on May 22, 2011, on Page BR1 of the
Sunday Book Review with the headline:
'An Uncommon Reader.'"
"By this time, Bloom had burrowed into a cave,
its lamplit forms and shapes merging into
an occult mythos scarcely intelligible
even to other scholars. 'Bloom had an idea,'
Christopher Ricks said; 'now the idea has him.'
Cynthia Ozick, meanwhile, called him an 'idol-maker.'
In contrast to Cleanth Brooks . . . ."
An illustration from "The Echo in Plato's Cave" linked to
in the previous post —
Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves
Cynthia Ozick on Bloom —
See also Dharwadker in the previous post and on the Higgs boson.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Colorful Story
"The office of color in the color line
is a very plain and subordinate one.
It simply advertises the objects of
oppression, insult, and persecution.
It is not the maddening liquor, but
the black letters on the sign
telling the world where it may be had."
— Frederick Douglass, "The Color Line,"
The North American Review , Vol. 132,
No. 295, June 1881, page 575
Or gold letters.
From a search for Seagram in this journal —
"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
— Martin Gardner on the death of Évariste Galois
Monday, April 27, 2015
Cross of Five Ninths
See Five Ninths in this journal and Colorful Tale.
Cross of Black and Gray
See also "Why do Muslims pray five times daily?".
Friday, March 6, 2015
Cinéma Vérité
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Gullible’s Travels
The President of the United States
on the Sony hacking
in his Dec. 19 press conference:
"But let’s talk of the specifics of what we now know.
The FBI announced today and we can confirm that
North Korea engaged in this attack. I think it says
something interesting about North Korea that they
decided to have the state mount an all-out assault
on a movie studio because of a satirical movie…."
This post was suggested in part by the contemptibly
misleading remarks of Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos"
TV series (see yesterday's Colorful Tale) and by the
following remarks in a Presentation Zen piece dated
March 11, 2014, "More Storytelling Lessons from 'Cosmos',"
praising Sagan's vulgarizations —
"Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions
as your narrative progresses. As the storyteller you can
ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach
is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience
to come up with the questions themselves. And yet we must
not be afraid to leave some (many?) questions unanswered.
When we think of a story we may think of clear conclusions
and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more
complicated than that."
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Bing Bang Theory
Microsoft in 2009 on its new search engine name—
"We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads
when we think about that moment of discovery
and decision making— when you resolve those
important tasks."
A search on Bing today —
A colorful tale —
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Blackboard Jungle
Harrowing of Hell (Catholic Encyclopedia )
"This is the Old English and Middle English term
for the triumphant descent of Christ into hell (or Hades)
between the time of His Crucifixion and His Resurrection,
when, according to Christian belief, He brought salvation
to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world."
Through the Blackboard (Feb. 25, 2010)—
See also The Dreaming Jewels and Colorful Tale.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Formal Pattern
(Continued from In Memoriam (Aug. 22), Chapman's Homer (Aug. 23),
and this morning's Colorful Tale)
An informative, but undated, critique of the late Marvin W. Meyer
by April D. DeConick at the website of the Society of Biblical Literature
appeared in more popular form in an earlier New York Times
op-ed piece, "Gospel Truth," dated Dec. 1, 2007.
A check, in accord with Jungian synchronicity, of this journal
on that date yields a quotation from Plato's Phaedrus —
"The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate."
Related verses from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets —
"The detail of the pattern is movement."
"So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern."
Some background from pure mathematics (what the late
William P. Thurston called "the theory of formal patterns")—
Saturday, September 17, 2011
The Uploading
(Continued from March 9.)
A detail from "Feist Sings 1, 2, 3, 4"—
"Uploaded by Jul 18, 2008"
on
Those who prefer, as Weyl put it,
"the hard core of objectivity"
to, as Eddington put it,
"the colorful tale of the subjective storyteller mind"
may consult this journal on the same day… July 18, 2008.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Saturday July 19, 2008
Bertram Kostant, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at MIT, on an object discussed in this week's New Yorker:
Hermann Weyl on the hard core of objectivity:
Steven H. Cullinane on the symmetries of a 4×4 array of points:
A Structure-Endowed Entity
"A guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity S, try to determine its group of automorphisms, the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed. You can expect to gain a deep insight into the constitution of S in this way." — Hermann Weyl in Symmetry Let us apply Weyl's lesson to the following "structure-endowed entity."
What is the order of the resulting group of automorphisms? |
The above group of
automorphisms plays
a role in what Weyl,
following Eddington,
called a "colorful tale"–
This puzzle shows
that the 4×4 array can
also be viewed in
thousands of ways.
"You can make 322,560
pairs of patterns. Each
pair pictures a different
symmetry of the underlying
16-point space."
— Steven H. Cullinane,
July 17, 2008
For other parts of the tale,
see Ashay Dharwadker,
the Four-Color Theorem,
and Usenet Postings.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Friday July 18, 2008
Hard Core
David Corfield quotes Weyl in a weblog entry, "Hierarchy and Emergence," at the n-Category Cafe this morning:
"Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity behind– as Eddington puts it– the colorful tale of the subjective storyteller mind." (Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science [Princeton, 1949], p. 237)
For the same quotation in a combinatorial context, see the foreword by A. W. Tucker, "Combinatorial Problems," to a special issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, November 1960 (1-page pdf).
See also yesterday's Log24 entry.