Tuesday, July 5, 2022
For Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and Dan Brown — Symbology!
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Monday, September 20, 2021
Saturday, September 4, 2021
Number, Time, and Dan Brown*
The title is a nod to the book Number and Time ( not by Dan Brown ).
An illustration —
This journal 10 years ago today —
"Dan Brown certainly packed a lot into
the 500-plus pages of The Lost Symbol ."
That sentence suggests a review of Efficient Packing .
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Friday, November 6, 2020
Thursday, June 7, 2018
Thursday, May 3, 2018
A Walpurgisnacht Death for Dan Brown
In memory of Anatole Katok, who reportedly died on Walpurgisnacht,
two readings from a source cited by Dan Brown in his recent novel
Origin —
Brown is reportedly a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and
of Amherst College.
Those associated with institutions that are more respectable
may prefer Katok on entropy.
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Saturday, January 20, 2018
The Chaos Symbol of Dan Brown
In the following passage, Dan Brown claims that an eight-ray star
with arrowheads at the rays’ ends is “the mathematical symbol for
entropy.” Brown may have first encountered this symbol at a
questionable “Sacred Science” website. Wikipedia discusses
some even less respectable uses of the symbol.
Related news —
Related symbolism —
A star figure and the Galois quaternion.
The square root of the former is the latter.
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Monday, October 30, 2017
The Lore and Language of Dan Brown
In memory of two beloved folklorists —
"Iona Opie, a British folklorist who worked with her husband,
Peter, to produce major studies of nursery rhymes as well as
the oral traditions of games, jokes, nicknames, taunts and
pranks among schoolchildren, died on Oct. 23 in the town of
Petersfield, in Hampshire, England. She was 94."
— The New York Times this evening
Scholium on this journal's remarks of October 23 —
"Hello there, Dapper Dan, where were you when …."
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Monday, December 12, 2016
Symbology for Dan Brown and Stephen King
Thirty-year medallion from
Alcoholics Anonymous —
Error Icon —
Context —
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Sunday, October 25, 2009
For Dan Brown Fans
Midrash:
"The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago — first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone. That is why those who studied the occult arts were either fools or doomed. Fools if they were wrong, and most were; doomed if right. The forerunners know, and stay away."
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Sunday, October 6, 2024
Old Schools
From Dan Brown —
From one of my old schools —
From Milton —
Before thir eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, And time and place are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise Of endless warrs and by confusion stand. For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise Thir embryon Atoms.... ... Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, Pondering his Voyage.... -- John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II
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Saturday, April 29, 2023
Toying
From this journal on 4/01, 2009:
The Cruelest Month —
"Langdon sensed she was toying with him…." — Dan Brown
Less playfully . . .
See also the show tune from the end of "Second Tree from the Corner,"
a classic New Yorker short story by E. B. White. (And related posts.)
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Saturday, March 12, 2022
Obi-Wan* Enters Narnia: Wardrobe Malfunction**
* Recent role of Ewan McGregor, the camerlengo of Dan Brown.
** Mashup of the C. S. Lewis wardrobe and the previous post.
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Logos and Branding
The "branding" part of this post's title and tag —
|
The scene went from bad to worse. The camerlengo’s torn cassock, having been only laid over his chest by Chartrand, began to slip lower. For a moment, Langdon thought the garment might hold, but that moment passed. The cassock let go, sliding off his shoulders down around his waist. The gasp that went up from the crowd seemed to travel around the globe and back in an instant. Cameras rolled, flashbulbs exploded. On media screens everywhere, the image of the camerlengo’s branded chest was projected, towering and in grisly detail. Some screens were even freezing the image and rotating it 180 degrees. The ultimate Illuminati victory. Langdon stared at the brand on the screens. Although it was the imprint of the square brand he had held earlier, the symbol now made sense. Perfect sense. The marking’s awesome power hit Langdon like a train. Orientation. Langdon had forgotten the first rule of symbology. When is a square not a square? He had also forgotten that iron brands, just like rubber stamps, never looked like their imprints. They were in reverse. Langdon had been looking at the brand’s negative ! As the chaos grew, an old Illuminati quote echoed with new meaning: ‘A flawless diamond, born of the ancient elements with such perfection that all those who saw it could only stare in wonder.’ Langdon knew now the myth was true. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The Illuminati Diamond. — Dan Brown, Angels & Demons |
I prefer Modal Nietzsche.
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Tuesday, September 28, 2021
In Search of Hauora
Compare and contrast with —
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Related material: Bochner and Carnegie-Mellon.
Alfred Bester fans may also enjoy more
damned confusion from Dan Brown —
(Not to be confused with Gully Foyle .)
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Friday, December 18, 2020
Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture
In the altered headline above, " Q******* " may, if you like,
be interpreted as " Quellers ," an invented term for scholars
who investigate the origins of Christianity.
See the Log24 post "Q is for Quelle " (November 7, 2020).
Dan Brown, like the earlier novelist who wrote The Source ,
is such an investigator (of sorts), though not a scholar .
(For an example of actual scholarship , see the webpage
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/
middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED35525.
That page may be interpreted as putting the "hit" in "s***.")
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Monday, December 14, 2020
Espace Carré
"Leave a space." — Tom Stoppard, "Jumpers."
Obituary of a novelist in The Washington Post yesterday —
"He gave various explanations for how he chose his nom de plume —
le Carré means 'the square' in French —
before ultimately admitting he didn’t really know."
Related material for Dan Brown — Imperial Symbology and . . .
"Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms
the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature. . . .
They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories,
and follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out
for fairy-stories: ‘one thing must not be made fun of,
the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously,
neither laughed at nor explained away.’ "
— A leftist academic's essay at aeon.co, "Empire of Fantasy,"
on St. Andrew's Day, 2020.
A more respectable writer on literature and magic —
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Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Space Wars: Sith Pyramid vs. Jedi Cube
For the Sith Pyramid, see posts tagged Pyramid Game.
For the Jedi Cube, see posts tagged Enigma Cube
and cube-related remarks by Aitchison at Hiroshima.
This post was suggested by two events of May 16, 2019 —
A weblog post by Frans Marcelis on the Miracle Octad
Generator of R. T. Curtis (illustrated with a pyramid),
and the death of I. M. Pei, architect of the Louvre pyramid.
That these events occurred on the same date is, of course,
completely coincidental.
Perhaps Dan Brown can write a tune to commemorate
the coincidence.
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Saturday, September 28, 2019
Annals of Misleading Titles
For Dan Brown fans — See posts now tagged Masonic Bricks.
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Thursday, September 26, 2019
Personalities …
For Dan Brown
“It’s a combination of elation and fear, a certain kind of terror,”
Dr. Scott-Warren, a lecturer at Cambridge University, said
Thursday [Sept. 19] in an interview, describing his feelings.
“As a scholar, you get a sense of the fixed landmarks,” he said.
“Suddenly to have a new landmark to come right up through
the ground is quite disconcerting; there’s something alarming
about that.”
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Saturday, September 21, 2019
Annals of Random Fandom
For Dan Brown fans …
… and, for fans of The Matrix, another tale
from the above death date: May 16, 2019 —
An illustration from the above
Miracle Octad Generator post:
Related mathematics — Tetrahedron vs. Square.
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Monday, July 15, 2019
Arche’s Schoolgirl Space
From Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons (2000)—
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Friday, December 7, 2018
The Angel Particle
|
https://newatlas.com/angel-particle-own-antiparticle/50579/
Scientists discover "angel particle"
Michael Irving . . . . "Our team predicted exactly where to find the Majorana fermion and what to look for as its 'smoking gun' experimental signature," says Shoucheng Zhang, one of the senior authors of the research paper. "This discovery concludes one of the most intensive searches in fundamental physics, which spanned exactly 80 years." . . . . Zhang proposes that the team's discovery be named the "angel particle" after the Dan Brown novel Angels and Demons , which features a bomb powered by the meeting of matter and antimatter. In the long run, Majoranas could find practical application in making quantum computers more secure. The research was published in the journal Science . . . . |
See as well Stanford News yesterday —
Shoucheng Zhang … died on Dec. 1. He was 55.
Zhang’s death was unexpected and followed
a “battle with depression,” according to his family.
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Sunday, October 21, 2018
For Connoisseurs of Bad Art
Yesterday afternoon's post "Study in Blue and Pink" featured
an image related to the "Blade and Chalice" of Dan Brown …
Requiem for a comics character known as "The Blue Blade" —
"We all float down here."
About the corresponding "Pink Chalice," the less said the better.
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Thursday, June 7, 2018
Paved with Good Intentions
See also David Brooks on logic in today’s online New York Times —
“…the necessary skill of public life, the ability to
see two contradictory truths at the same time.”
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Saturday, May 19, 2018
Flux Capacitor
For Tom Hanks and Dan Brown —
From "Raiders of the Lost Images" —
"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 as well a Google search for flux philosophy —
https://www.google.com/search?q=flux+philosophy.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2018
A Girl’s Guide to Chaos
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 —
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Friday, February 23, 2018
The Dark, Seductive Art of Phillips Exeter
From two pedagogues in Montana —
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 —
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.
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Snow Games
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Tuesday, January 16, 2018
An Orison for Ha-Why
Lines from characters played in the film by Tom Hanks and Halle Berry —
— Cloud Atlas , by David Mitchell (2004).
An orison of sorts from a post on Martin Scorsese's
birthday, Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 —
Displayed on the BlackBerry are parts
of Log24 posts from October 25, 2007,
and October 24, 2007.
Related pattern geometry
From a Log24 search for Angleton + Brotherhood:
A photo of Angleton in a post from 12/9/5 —
From a post of 11/7/8 —
A cryptic note for Dan Brown:
The above dates 11/7/8 and 12/9/5 correspond to the corner-labels
(read clockwise and counter-clockwise) of the two large triangles
in the Finkelstein Talisman —
Above: More symbology for Tom Hanks from
this morning's post The Pentagram Papers.
The above symbology is perhaps better suited to Hanks in his
role as Forrest Gump than in his current role as Ben Bradlee.
For Hanks as Dan Brown's Harvard symbologist
Robert Langdon, see the interpretation 12/5/9, rather
than 12/9/5, of the above triangle/cube-corner label.
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Monday, October 23, 2017
Plan 9 Continues
Click for some background —
Another approach, for Dan Brown fans —
In the following passage, Brown claims that an eight-ray star
with arrowheads at the rays' ends is "the mathematical symbol for
entropy." Brown may have first encountered this symbol at a
questionable "Sacred Science" website. Wikipedia discusses
some even less respectable uses of the symbol.
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Friday, October 20, 2017
Punch Lines
From a post last month —
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
— Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water."
— "Season of the Witch"
… and for Tom Hanks, Dan Brown, and Francine Prose —
"You're gonna need more typewriters!"
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Thursday, October 19, 2017
Prose (continued from yesterday)
"While Prose's adult works have touched on various subjects,
her fiction for children, which she began writing in earnest
in the mid-1990s, all has a basis in Jewish folklore."
» Read more.
Aficionados of what Dan Brown has called "symbology"
can read about the above right-chevrons symbol in
Fast Forward, a post of November 21, 2010.
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Friday, October 13, 2017
Sicut Erat
Smith College in 2011 on some music by Dan Brown's brother —
"Using the conventions of a traditional five-movement
Roman Catholic Mass to revere Darwin’s body of work,
Gregory Brown, Smith’s assistant director of choral
activities and a composer of choral music, is
collaborating with Craig Phillips, an early music specialist
and member of the classical a cappella male quartet
New York Polyphony, to create the piece Missa Charles Darwin .
Brown is building the work in three large-scale sections and
scoring it for a male vocal quartet, which will be performed by
New York Polyphony."
— https://www.smith.edu/insight/stories/darwin.php
Dan Brown has said his brother's Missa helped suggest his new novel Origin .
Material from Smith College related to a performance of
Missa Charles Darwin at the college on Feb. 4, 2011 —
Dan Brown, in the following passage, claims that an eight-ray star with arrowheads
at the rays' ends is "the mathematical symbol for entropy." Brown may have first
encountered this symbol at a questionable "Sacred Science" website. Wikipedia
discusses some even less respectable uses of the symbol.
My own version of the above symbol (from the pure mathematics of group actions
on a 3×3 square) appeared here the day before the Friday, Feb. 4, 2011,
Smith College Darwin Mass . . .
See posts now tagged The Next Thing.
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Sunday, October 8, 2017
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Where Angels Fear to Tread
From the online New York Times this morning —
"Origin is Mr. Brown’s eighth novel. It finds his familiar protagonist,
the brilliant Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconography
Robert Langdon, embroiled once more in an intellectually challenging,
life-threatening adventure involving murderous zealots, shadowy fringe
organizations, paradigm-shifting secrets with implications for the future
of humanity, symbols within puzzles and puzzles within symbols and
a female companion who is super-smart and super-hot.
As do all of Mr. Brown’s works, the new novel does not shy away from
the big questions, but rather rushes headlong into them."
— Profile of Dan Brown by Sarah Lyall
See also yesterday's Log24 post on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.
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Monday, July 24, 2017
Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
The above title was suggested by a film trailer quoted here Saturday —
" Jeremy Irons' dry Alfred Pennyworth:
'One misses the days when one's biggest concerns
were exploding wind-up penguins.' "
"Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition" describes, among other books,
an edition of the I Ching published on December 1, 2015.
Excerpt from this journal on that date —
|
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Verhexung
|
Related material —
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Wednesday, February 22, 2017
A Dead Ringer
"According to Thelemic legend, in 1918 Aleister Crowley
came into contact with a interdimensional entity
named Lam, who by the way is a dead ringer for
the popular conception of the 'alien grey '
depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber's Communion ."
Related material —
"Robert Langdon stood mesmerized at the glass portal,
absorbing the power of the landscape below him."
Also …
"Ting-a-ling." — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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Sunday, February 21, 2016
The Masonic Mandorla
A post for Tom Hanks and Dan Brown
Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer delivers a keynote
during the Yahoo Mobile Developers Conference on February 18,
2016, at Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco, California.
Credit: Stephen Lam
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Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Verhexung*
"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from
its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt,
whose elements acquire their significance from the
system as a whole."
— Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols , Ithaca, NY,
Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 51, quoted by
Beth Barrie in "Victor Turner."
(Turner pioneered the use of the term "symbology,"
a term later applied by Dan Brown to a fictional
scholarly pursuit at Harvard.)
* A scholarly pursuit at Hogwarts.
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Wednesday, October 14, 2015
The Tombstone Code
For Dan Brown enthusiasts, a sequel to the previous post, "The Tombstone Source."
As that post notes, the following symbol is now used as a story-end "tombstone" at
T: The New York Times Style Magazine. The Times uses style-sheet code, not
the rarely used unicode character below, to produce the tombstone.
Related material — The novel The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
that was reviewed in January 2012 by Commentary magazine :
Fiction, Fiction, Burning Bright
D. G. MYERS / JAN. 19, 2012
Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
304 pp. $25.95.
According to the Jews, the world begins
with speech. God says, “There is light,”
and so there is light. But what if something
happened — it doesn’t really matter what —
and speech turned lethal?
That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet ,
the third novel by Ben Marcus,
a creative writing professor at Columbia
University….
A much better novel along these lines is Lexicon (2013) by Max Barry.
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Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Quotes for Michaelmas
A search in this journal for material related to the previous post
on theta characteristics yields…
"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased
novel in progress by American author Dan Brown.
The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the
character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon,
of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and
The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia
"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."
— "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups,"
by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen,
May 5, 2008, preprint.
"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."
— Review of
Faust in Copenhagen
"The page numbers
are generally reliable."
For further backstory, click the above link "May 5, 2008,"
which now leads to all posts tagged on080505.
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Wednesday, January 21, 2015
High Concept:
The Dark Fields Meet The Big Seal .
Recall the punchline of Tuesday afternoon's post
on the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman" —
"What am I, the farmer's daughter?"
For background from the dark fields of the republic,
see a speech last night by Iowa Senator Joni Ernst.
Related material:
At the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman,"
the main character holds up to the light a letter that has
at the top the presidential seal of the United States:
The camera pans down, and the character then
sees a watermark that echoes another famous seal,
from the U.S. one-dollar bill:
For related paranoia, see the novels of Dan Brown
as well as…
See also Shema and Clocks Striking 13.
Comments Off on High Concept:
Monday, December 8, 2014
Language Game
Continued from December 5 .
The previous post dealt with video game pioneer Ralph Baer.
Here is a link in honor of mathematician Reinhold Baer
(see Baer in Zero System , a post from the feast of St. Ignatius
Loyola in 2014.)
The posts in Reinhold 's link (those tagged "Yankee Puzzle")
include a reference to the Zero System post. The link tag was
suggested in part by the devil's claws in yesterday morning's post
The Kernel Conundrum and in part by last night's
Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Tom Hanks.
Hanks as the Harvard "symbologist" from the
novels of Dan Brown —
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Friday, December 5, 2014
Wittgenstein’s Picture
From Zettel (repunctuated for clarity):
249. « Nichts leichter, als sich einen 4-dimensionalen Würfel
vorstellen! Er schaut so aus… »
"Nothing easier than to imagine a 4-dimensional cube!
It looks like this…
[Here the editor supplied a picture of a 4-dimensional cube
that was omitted by Wittgenstein in the original.]
« Aber das meine ich nicht, ich meine etwas wie…
"But I don't mean that, I mean something like…
…nur mit 4 Ausdehnungen! »
but with four dimensions!
« Aber das ist nicht, was ich dir gezeigt habe,
eben etwas wie…
"But isn't what I showed you like…
…nur mit 4 Ausdehnungen? »
…only with four dimensions?"
« Nein; das meine ich nicht! »
"No, I don't mean that!"
« Was aber meine ich? Was ist mein Bild?
Nun der 4-dimensionale Würfel, wie du ihn gezeichnet hast,
ist es nicht ! Ich habe jetzt als Bild nur die Worte und
die Ablehnung alles dessen, was du mir zeigen kanst. »
"But what do I mean? What is my picture?
Well, it is not the four-dimensional cube
as you drew it. I have now for a picture only
the words and my rejection of anything
you can show me."
"Here's your damn Bild , Ludwig —"
Context: The Galois Tesseract.
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Tuesday, September 9, 2014
In Memoriam
For Loren D. Olson, Harvard '64:
"Even 50 years later, I remember his enthusiasm for a very young
and very gifted Harvard professor named Shlomo Sternberg, one
of whose special areas of interest was Lie groups. I still have no real
understanding of what a Lie group is, but not for want of trying on
Loren’s part. Loren was also quite interested in the thinking of the
theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, who were then at
Harvard. He attended some of their lectures, read several of their
books, and enjoyed discussing their ideas."
— Harvard classmate David Jackson
See also today's previous post.
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Saturday, July 12, 2014
Mars Package
“For me it is a sign that we have fundamentally different
conceptions of the work of the intelligence services.”
— Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in
theguardian.com, Saturday, 12 July 2014, 14.32 EDT
Another sort of service, thanks to Dan Brown and Tom Hanks:
Friday, July 11, 2014 |
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Sunday, June 23, 2013
Fork
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Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Mathematics and Narrative (continued)
Angels & Demons meet Hudson Hawk
Dan Brown's four-elements diamond in Angels & Demons :
The Leonardo Crystal from Hudson Hawk :
Mathematics may be used to relate (very loosely)
Dan Brown's fanciful diamond figure to the fanciful
Leonardo Crystal from Hudson Hawk …
-
Compare Brown's fictional Illuminati Diamond to the
nonfictional figures in The Diamond Theorem and
Theme and Variations. -
Compare the fictional Leonardo Crystal to Hudson's
nonfictional desmic system of tetrahedra (above), and
see, in Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2), how
the diamond theorem is related to Hudson's work.
For the tetrads ' relationship to tetrahedra , see
Hudson's own book.
"Giving himself a head rub, Hawk bears down on
the three oddly malleable objects. He TANGLES
and BENDS and with a loud SNAP, puts them together,
forming the Crystal from the opening scene."
— A screenplay of Hudson Hawk
Happy birthday to Bruce Willis.
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Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Arsenal
The previous post discussed some fundamentals of logic.
The name “Boole” in that post naturally suggests the
concept of Boolean algebra . This is not the algebra
needed for Galois geometry . See below.
Some, like Dan Brown, prefer to interpret symbols using
religion, not logic. They may consult Diamond Mandorla,
as well as Blade and Chalice, in this journal.
See also yesterday’s Universe of Discourse.
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Saturday, February 2, 2013
Catholic Schools Week
"The theme for the National Catholic Schools Week 2013
is 'Catholic Schools Raise the Standards.' The annual
observance starts the last Sunday in January and runs
all week, which in 2013 is January 27 to February 2."
"After all, tomorrow is another day." —Scarlett O'Hara,
quoted here in a post of May 9, 2005.
"Dr. Tomorrow is another guy ." —A comment on that post.
The Dr. Tomorrow link leads to a page promoting something
called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. This in turn leads to
the 2009 Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol .
For related material in this journal, see
Raiders of the Lost Dingbat.
As for raising the standards, see the conclusion of
Adolf Holl's The Left Hand of God —
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Monday, January 28, 2013
Encounter
"Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, 'Paradise Lost,' all lay before him….
Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter— it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman— there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
— Jonathan Rosen, The New Yorker , June 2, 2008, "Return to Paradise"
More in the spirit of Superman and Batman:
"Huh. You know what? Galileo didn't even write this."
"What!"
"The poem is signed John Milton."
"John Milton ?" The influential English poet who wrote
Paradise Lost was a contemporary of Galileo's and a
savant who conspiracy buffs put at the top of their list
of Illuminati suspects. Milton's alleged affiliation with
Galileo's Illuminati was one legend Langdon
suspected was true. Not only had Milton made a
well documented 1638 pilgrimage to Rome to
"commune with enlightened men," but he had held
meetings with Galileo during the scientist's house
arrest, meetings portrayed in many Renaissance
paintings….
"Milton knew Galileo, didn't he?" Vittoria said, finally
pushing the folio over to Langdon. "Maybe he wrote
the poem as a favor?"
— Angels & Demons , by Dan Brown
(first published in 2000)
See also this journal on August 16, 2009.
Addendum for Aaron Swartz (see today's previous post)—
"The Vatican, it seemed, took their archives
a bit more seriously than most." — Dan Brown
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
24 Hour DeLillo
Review of DeLillo's novel Point Omega—
"One difference between art and entertainment has to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so that you’re challenged to re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so that you don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all except, perhaps, the adrenalin rush before dazzling spectacle. Although, of course, there can be myriad gradations between the former and latter, in their starkest articulation we’re talking about the distance between, say, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol…."
— Lance Olsen, March 1, 2010, in The Quarterly Conversation
Robert Hughes on fast and slow art—
"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game."
– Speech of June 1, 2004
Log24 on art speeds—
A Study in Art Education (June 15, 2007)
Twenty-four (March 13, 2011)
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011
The Lost Plot
Daredevil work—
For Dan Brown, author of The Lost Symbol—
Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate
(Syfy channel, 9 PM tonight)
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Monday, September 5, 2011
Illuminata*
At Heaven’s Gate
Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, RSS at 23:59 EDT:
Peter Woit's weblog Not Even Wrong—
"Lisa Randall’s new book is about to come out, it’s entitled
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking
Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World."
Angels & Demons (the film)—
As she enters the lab she reacts in horror
as she sees an eyeball lying on the floor…
Click images for some backstory —
|
|
 |
"She has taken on the role of a public face of physics,
and has written a book which is in part a very general defense
of science and the materialist, rationalist world-view
that modern science is based on."
See also yesterday's "The Stone" column in The New York Times—
I prefer philosophy enacted by Reba.
* A reference to Dan Brown, not Marianne Williamson
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Sunday, September 4, 2011
The Lost Word
In memory of Bible translator Eugene Nida, who died on August 25
An excerpt from Log24 on that date—
Related biblical material from DailyGrail.com—
"Dan Brown certainly packed a lot into the 500-plus pages of The Lost Symbol . But perhaps the key element to the story is the search for the ‘Lost Word,’ and— in the final pages— Robert Langdon’s discovery as to what that actually means. In the early chapters, Langdon explains to Sato that the Lost Word was 'one of Freemasonry’s most enduring symbols'…
…a single word, written in an arcane language that man could no longer decipher. The Word, like the Mysteries themselves, promised to unveil its hidden power only to those enlightened enough to decrypt it. “It is said,” Langdon concluded, “that if you can possess and understand the Lost Word . . . then the Ancient Mysteries will become clear to you.”
— and from Amazon.com.
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Friday, August 19, 2011
Crux
"Francis Bacon used the phrase instantia crucis, 'crucial instance,' to refer to something in an experiment that proves one of two hypotheses and disproves the other. Bacon's phrase was based on a sense of the Latin word crux, 'cross,' which had come to mean 'a guidepost that gives directions at a place where one road becomes two,' and hence was suitable for Bacon's metaphor."
– The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Such a cross: St. Andrew's. Some context—
X Marks the Spot scene, "The Last Crusade"
Related symbology for Dan Brown—
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Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Cover Art
The Misalignment of Mars and Venus
A death in Sarasota on Sunday leads to a weblog post from Tuesday
that suggests a review of Dan Brown's graphic philosophy—
|
From The Da Vinci Code : Langdon pulled a pen from his pocket. “Sophie are you familiar with the modern icons for male and female?” He drew the common male symbol ♂ and female symbol ♀. “Of course,” she said. “These,” he said quietly, are not the original symbols for male and female. Many people incorrectly assume the male symbol is derived from a shield and spear, while the female represents a mirror reflecting beauty. In fact, the symbols originated as ancient astronomical symbols for the planet-god Mars and the planet-goddess Venus. The original symbols are far simpler.” Langdon drew another icon on the paper. ∧
“This symbol is the original icon for male ,” he told her. “A rudimentary phallus.” “Quite to the point,” Sophie said. “As it were,” Teabing added. Langdon went on. “This icon is formally known as the blade , and it represents aggression and manhood. In fact, this exact phallus symbol is still used today on modern military uniforms to denote rank.” “Indeed.” Teabing grinned. “The more penises you have, the higher your rank. Boys will be boys.”
Langdon winced. “Moving on, the female symbol, as you might imagine, is the exact opposite.” He drew another symbol on the page. “This is called the ∨ Sophie glanced up, looking surprised. Langdon could see she had made the connection. “The chalice,” he said, “resembles a cup or vessel, and more important, it resembles the shape of a woman’s womb. This symbol communicates femininity, womanhood, and fertility.” |
Langdon's simplified symbols, in disguised form, illustrate
a musical meditation on the misalignment of Mars and Venus—
This was adapted from an album cover by "Meyers/Monogram"—
See also Secret History and The Story of N.
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Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Sinatra Code
|
From The Da Vinci Code, Chapter 56 Sophie stared at Teabing a long moment and then turned to Langdon. “The Holy Grail is a person?” Langdon nodded. “A woman, in fact.” From the blank look on Sophie’s face, Langdon could tell they had already lost her. He recalled having a similar reaction the first time he heard the statement. It was not until he understood the symbology behind the Grail that the feminine connection became clear. Teabing apparently had a similar thought. “Robert, perhaps this is the moment for the symbologist to clarify?” He went to a nearby end table, found a piece of paper, and laid it in front of Langdon. Langdon pulled a pen from his pocket. “Sophie are you familiar with the modern icons for male and female?” He drew the common male symbol ♂ and female symbol ♀. “Of course,” she said. “These,” he said quietly, are not the original symbols for male and female. Many people incorrectly assume the male symbol is derived from a shield and spear, while the female represents a mirror reflecting beauty. In fact, the symbols originated as ancient astronomical symbols for the planet-god Mars and the planet-goddess Venus. The original symbols are far simpler.” Langdon drew another icon on the paper. ∧
“This symbol is the original icon for male ,” he told her. “A rudimentary phallus.” “Quite to the point,” Sophie said. “As it were,” Teabing added. Langdon went on. “This icon is formally known as the blade , and it represents aggression and manhood. In fact, this exact phallus symbol is still used today on modern military uniforms to denote rank.” “Indeed.” Teabing grinned. “The more penises you have, the higher your rank. Boys will be boys.” Langdon winced. “Moving on, the female symbol, as you might imagine, is the exact opposite.” He drew another symbol on the page. “This is called the ∨ Sophie glanced up, looking surprised. Langdon could see she had made the connection. “The chalice,” he said, “resembles a cup or vessel, and more important, it resembles the shape of a woman’s womb. This symbol communicates femininity, womanhood, and fertility.” Langdon looked directly at her now. “Sophie, legend tells us the Holy Grail is a chalice—a cup. But the Grail’s description as a chalice is actually an allegory to protect the true nature of the Holy Grail. That is to say, the legend uses the chalice as a metaphor for something far more important.” “A woman,” Sophie said. “Exactly.” Langdon smiled. “The Grail is literally the ancient symbol for womankind, and the Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church. The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean. It was man , not God, who created the concept of ‘original sin,’ whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy.” “I should add,” Teabing chimed, “that this concept of woman as life-bringer was the foundation of ancient religion. Childbirth was mystical and powerful. Sadly, Christian philosophy decided to embezzle the female’s creative power by ignoring biological truth and making man the Creator. Genesis tells us that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Woman became an offshoot of man. And a sinful one at that. Genesis was the beginning of the end for the goddess.” “The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the lost Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in codes as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbidden pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” |
Happy birthday to Harrison Ford.
One for my baby…
∧
One more for the road.
∨
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Friday, July 1, 2011
Symmetry Review
Popular novelist Dan Brown is to speak at Chautauqua Institution on August 1.
This suggests a review of some figures discussed here in a note on Brown from February 20, 2004—
Related material: Notes from Nov. 5, 1981, and from Dec. 24, 1981.
For the lower figure in context, see the diamond theorem.
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Sunday, April 17, 2011
Sunday School
Apollo and the Tricksters
From The Story of N (Oct. 15, 2010)—
Roberta Smith on what she calls "endgame art"—
"Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
Margaret Atwood on tricksters and art—
"If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo."
Here is some related material In memory of CIA officer Clare Edward Petty, who died at 90 on March 18—
A review of a sort of storyteller's MacGuffin — the 3×3 grid. This is, in Smith's terms, an "artistic focus" that appears to be visually comprehensible but is not as simple as it seems.
- The Pope in Plato's Cave (Sept. 16, 2006)
- A search for "einsatz" in this journal
- True Grid (Jan. 8, 2011)
- The Hesse configuration revisited (a post initially from the date of Petty's death, but later much reworked)
The Hesse configuration can serve as more than a sort of Dan Brown MacGuffin. As a post of January 14th notes, it can (rather fancifullly) illustrate the soul—
" … I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight…."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
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Thursday, February 3, 2011
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
The Tiffany Puzzle
Suggested by Dan Brown's remarks in today's Science Times special section on puzzles—
|
For a fanciful linkage of the dreidel 's concept of chance
to The Stone 's concept of invariant law, note that the New York Lottery evening number on Dec. 1 (the beginning of Hanukkah) was 840. See also the number 840 in the final post (July 20, 2002) of a search for Solomon's Cube. |
|
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Cold Comfort
Dan Brown, quoted in today's New York Times—
“The human mind is comforted by the notion that a greater power has all the answers. A world in which secret messages swirl around us is exciting because it helps reinforce our belief that true enlightenment is within our reach.”
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Sunday, December 5, 2010
Hanukkah Continues —
Dan Brown Meets
The Exorcist
in…
The 973 Code
Baphomet with Ouroboros Pendant
$140 Code: 973
____________________________________
Meanwhile, our hero…
In this production, Jeff Goldblum is played by
David Ben-Zvi of the University of Texas at Austin
Geometry Research Group —
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Sunday, November 21, 2010
Heaven’s Waiting Room
For Dan Brown fans—
Today's midday New York Lottery number was 438.
See page 438 of Heinlein's The Number of the Beast (Fawcett paperback, 1980),
on "ultimate total philosophy."
Other philosophy —
Today's evening New York Lottery number was 772.
See Cheap Diamonds , by Norris Church Mailer, and the symbol
coded (on at least some keyboards) by "Alt 772"—
Alt 772 = ♦
See also Wallace Stevens's "Crude Foyer" in this journal on June 24, 2008 —
the day Cheap Diamonds was published in paperback.
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Fast Forward
Dan Brown, a sculpture at CIA headquarters, and secret codes are discussed at the bottom of today's New York Times front page.
In this vein, here is a meditation on Religion and Time (continued from Kurt Vonnegut's birthday)—
At the end of "Three Days of the Condor," Cliff Robertson asks Robert Redford, "How do you know they'll print it?"
One possible answer: "They always print… the lottery."
The New York Lottery on Saturday, November 20, 2010: Midday 704, Evening 687.
Here 704 suggests 7/04, the Fourth of July, which in turn suggests this journal's post on that date about random numbers and universal wisdom.
Moving further up on the front page of today's New York Times—
"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing…. The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”— A worried professor at Harvard Medical School
For that new generation… Live from New York, it's Universal Wisdom! — In other words, 687!
Returning to the lottery hermeneutics (look it up, dudes) of July 4th, we note that a rather arcane and archaic procedure on a Windows PC keyboard— "Num Lock + Alt + 687"— produces the symbol known as a right guillemet — ». This mark, which can stand for "fast forward," may symbolize to the old Slow-Forward Generation the fears of the Harvard professor for the new Differently-Wired Generation.
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Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Savage Logic…
and the New York Lottery
A search in this journal for yesterday's evening number in the New York Lottery, 359, leads to…
The Cerebral Savage:
On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss
by Clifford Geertz
Shown below is 359, the final page of Chapter 13 in
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz,
New York, 1973: Basic Books, pp. 345-359 —
This page number 359 also appears in this journal in an excerpt from Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons—
See this journal's entries for March 1-15, 2009, especially…
| Sunday, March 15, 2009 5:24 PM
Philosophy and Poetry: The Origin of Change A note on the figure
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come." -- Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Canto IV of "It Must Change" Sunday, March 15, 2009 11:00 AM Ides of March Sermon: Angels, Demons,
"Symbology" "On Monday morning, 9 March, after visiting the Mayor of Rome and the Municipal Council on the Capitoline Hill, the Holy Father spoke to the Romans who gathered in the square outside the Senatorial Palace…
'… a verse by Ovid, the great Latin poet, springs to mind. In one of his elegies he encouraged the Romans of his time with these words: "Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti." "Hold out and persist: (Tristia, Liber V, Elegia XI, verse 7).'" This journal
on 9 March:
Note the color-interchange Related material: |
The symmetry of the yin-yang symbol, of the diamond-theorem symbol, and of Brown's Illuminati Diamond is also apparent in yesterday's midday New York lottery number (see above).
"Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope…." — Clifford Geertz on Lévi-Strauss
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Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Burning Patrick —
Notes on Mathematics and Narrative
Background—
- The Burning Man in Bester's classic The Stars My Destination,
- The not-so-classic Hitler Plans Burning Man, and
- The cult film The Wicker Man
Commentary on The Wicker Man—
Originally The Wicker Man was not well-received by critics in the UK. It was considered
to be bizarre, disturbing, and uncomfortable, with the hasty editing making the story confusing
and out of order…. Today this movie is considered a cult classic and has been called
the “Citizen Kane of horror films” by some reviewers. How did this film become a cult classic?
Real estate motto— Location, Location, Location.
Illustration— The fire leap scene from Wicker Man, filmed at Castle Kennedy—
In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller
by Kevin Guilfoile. The Thousand is in the manner of Dan Brown's
2003 The Da Vinci Code or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .
From the review—
What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization
called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician
and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with
the triangle theorem that we learned in school).
As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones,
part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….
The plot involves, in part,
… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of
individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….
Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post)
or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.
A brief prequel to the above dialogue—
In lieu of songs, here is a passage by Patrick Blackburn
more relevant to the art of The Thousand—
See also the pagan fire leaping in Dancing at Lughnasa.
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Friday, August 27, 2010
Mathematics and Narrative continued…
Narrative Sequence
In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller by Kevin Guilfoile. The Thousand is in the manner of Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .
From the review—
What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with the triangle theorem that we learned in school).
As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones, part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….
The plot involves, in part,
… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….
Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post) or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Dream Names continued
From the 7/20 Harvard Crimson—
"The scholarly expeditions undertaken by modern-day explorer and Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter will be featured in a biopic produced by actor Will Smith.
…. Debbie Allen is also producing the film, and Farhad Safinia will be penning the script, Variety magazine reported.
…. Counter said that Debbie Allen described his character as 'a mixture of Indiana Jones and Robert Langdon,' the fictional Harvard professor of symbology in Dan Brown’s novels."
Farhad Safinia is co-writer and co-producer, with Mel Gibson, of "Apocalypto."
From "The Envelope: The Awards Insider" at the LA Times, a review of the film based on Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons"—
"The script tips its hand too early, and can't quite turn Langdon into Indiana Langdon on his Last Crusade."
— , Orlando Sentinel movie critic, May 15, 2009
Related material:
The Robert Jones Code—
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Thursday, July 1, 2010
Plato’s Code
John Allen Paulos yesterday at Twitter—
"Plato's code cracked? http://bit.ly/ad6k1S
Fascinating if not a hoax or hype."
The story that Paulos linked to is about a British
academic who claims to have found some
symbolism hidden in Plato's writings by
splitting each into 12 parts and correlating
the 12 parts with semitones of a musical scale.
I prefer a different approach to Plato that is
related to the following hoax and hype—
HOAX:
From Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons (2000)—
HYPE:
This four-elements diamond summarizes the classical
four elements and four qualities neatly, but some scholars
might call the figure "hype" since it deals with an academically
disreputable subject, alchemy, and since its origin is unclear.
For the four elements' role in some literature more respectable
than Dan Brown's, see Poetry's Bones.
Although an author like Brown might spin the remarks
below into a narrative— The Plato Code — they are
neither hoax nor hype.
NOT HOAX:
NOT HYPE:
For related non-hoax, non-hype remarks, see
The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato's Theaetetus,
by Rosemary Desjardins.
Those who prefer hoax and hype in their philosophy may consult
the writings of, say, Barbara Johnson, Rosalind Krauss, and—
in yesterday's NY Times's "The Stone" column— Nancy Bauer.
— The New York Times
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Hermeneutics for Bernstein
J. M. Bernstein (previous post) has written of moving toward "a Marxist hermeneutic."
I prefer lottery hermeneutics.
Some background from Bernstein—
I would argue that at least sometimes, lottery numbers may be regarded, according to Bernstein's definition, as story statements. For instance—
Today's New York State Lottery— Midday 389, Evening 828.
For the significance of 389, see
“A Mad Day’s Work: From Grothendieck to Connes and Kontsevich.
The Evolution of Concepts of Space and Symmetry,”
by Pierre Cartier, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
Vol. 38 (2001) No. 4, beginning on page 389.
The philosophical import of page 389 is perhaps merely in Cartier's title (see previous post).
For the significance of 828, see 8/28, the feast of St. Augustine, in 2006.
See also Halloween 2007. (Happy birthday, Dan Brown.)
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Friday, March 19, 2010
Garden of Forking Paths
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Saturday, March 6, 2010
Symbology continued
The Magic Lyre
The front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review is devoted to a new novel titled Angelology.
Detail of the front page, top right corner–
"…this will be popular for fans of such historical thrillers as… Katherine Neville's The Eight." —Library Journal
The New York Times review is more flattering– "a terrifically clever thriller– more Eco than Brown…."
Related historical remarks–
the symbology novels of Dan Brown and…
TIME magazine cover, issue
dated March 15, 2010–
"History Maker: How Tom Hanks is
redefining America's past"
For some theological background to
this post and today's noon post,
see the use of the word "harrowing"
in this journal — particularly on
April 19, 2003– Holy Saturday.
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Saturday, December 5, 2009
Holiday Book
Time and Chance, continued…
NY Lottery numbers today–
Midday 401, Evening 717
_________________________________________________
From this journal on 4/01, 2009:
The Cruelest Month
"Langdon sensed she was
toying with him…."
___________________________________________
From this journal on 7/17, 2008:
Jung’s four-diamond figure from
Aion — a symbol of the self –
Jung’s Map of the Soul,
by Murray Stein:
“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”
For related dynamic movements,
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle
and the diamond theorem.
______________________________________________
A piece related to both of the above posts–
"The Symbologist," a review, respectful despite the editor's sarcastic title, of Jung's Red Book in the December 6th New York Times Book Review.
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Friday, September 18, 2009
Friday September 18, 2009
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Tuesday July 14, 2009
For Galois on Bastille Day
Elements
of Finite Geometry
Some fans of the alchemy in
Katherine Neville’s novel
The Eight and in Dan Brown’s
novel Angels & Demons may
enjoy the following analogy–
Elements
of Finite Geometry
Some fans of the alchemy in
Katherine Neville’s novel
The Eight and in Dan Brown’s
novel Angels & Demons may
enjoy the following analogy–
Note that the alchemical structure
at left, suited more to narrative
than to mathematics, nevertheless
is mirrored within the pure
mathematics at right.
Related material
on Galois and geometry:
| Geometries of the group PSL(2, 11) by Francis Buekenhout, Philippe Cara, and Koen Vanmeerbeek. Geom. Dedicata, 83 (1-3): 169–206, 2000–
|
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Wednesday April 1, 2009
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Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sunday March 15, 2009
Angels, Demons,
"Symbology"
"On Monday morning, 9 March, after visiting the Mayor of Rome and the Municipal Council on the Capitoline Hill, the Holy Father spoke to the Romans who gathered in the square outside the Senatorial Palace…
'… a verse by Ovid, the great Latin poet, springs to mind. In one of his elegies he encouraged the Romans of his time with these words:
"Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti."
"Hold out and persist:
you have got through
far more difficult situations."
(Tristia, Liber V, Elegia XI, verse 7).'"
This journal
on 9 March:
on 9 March:
Note the color-interchange
symmetry of each symbol
under 180-degree rotation.
Related material:
The Illuminati Diamond:
Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons introduced in the year 2000 the fictional academic discipline of "symbology" and a fictional Harvard professor of that discipline, Robert Langdon (named after ambigram* artist John Langdon).
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon
A possible source for Brown's term "symbology" is a 1995 web page, "The Rotation of the Elements," by one "John Opsopaus." (Cf. Art History Club.)
"The four qualities are the key to understanding the rotation of the elements and many other applications of the symbology of the four elements." –John Opsopaus
* "…ambigrams were common in symbology…." —Angels & Demons
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Monday, March 9, 2009
Monday March 9, 2009
Humorism
"Always with a
little humor."
— Dr. Yen Lo
From Temperament: A Brief Survey
For other interpretations
of the above shape, see
The Illuminati Diamond.
from Jung's Aion:
"From the circle and quaternity motif is derived the symbol of the geometrically formed crystal and the wonder-working stone. From here analogy formation leads on to the city, castle, church, house, room, and vessel. Another variant is the wheel. The former motif emphasizes the ego’s containment in the greater dimension of the self; the latter emphasizes the rotation which also appears as a ritual circumambulation. Psychologically, it denotes concentration on and preoccupation with a centre…." –Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II, paragraph 352
Click on image
for a related puzzle.
For a solution, see
The Diamond Theorem.
As for rotation, see the ambigrams in Dan Brown's Angels & Demons (to appear as a film May 15) and the following figures:
Click on image
for a related puzzle.
For a solution, see
The Diamond Theorem.
A related note on
"Angels & Demons"
director Ron Howard:
Click image for details.
Comments Off on Monday March 9, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Sunday March 1, 2009
Solomon's Cube
continued
"There is a book… called A Fellow of Trinity, one of series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life…. There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficulty in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room."
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia
"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."
— "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.
"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
Comments Off on Sunday March 1, 2009
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Sunday February 18, 2007
Lady of Situations
| “Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep They just lie there and they die there Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?” |
For the source of the above illustration, see “Dear Dan Brown, All Eyes Are on You,” a New York Times piece linked to in a Log24 entry from the day after Evans died. That entry concludes as follows:
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Comments Off on Sunday February 18, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Friday February 16, 2007
“The much-borrowed Brown formula involves some very specific things. The name of a great artist, artifact or historical figure must be in the book’s story, not to mention on its cover. The narrative must start in the present day with a bizarre killing, then use that killing as a reason to investigate the past. And the past must yield a secret so big, so stunning, so saber-rattling that all of civilization may be changed by it. Probably not for the better.
This formula is neatly summarized….”
Cover illustration
for
The Judas Seat:
for
The Judas Seat:
The Narrative:
The Secret:
Part I
“Little ‘Jack’ Horner was actually Thomas Horner, steward to the Abbot of Glastonbury during the reign of King Henry VIII…. Always keen to raise fresh funds, Henry had shown a interest in Glastonbury (and other abbeys). Hoping to appease the royal appetite, the nervous Abbot, Richard Whiting, allegedly sent Thomas Horner to the King with a special gift. This was a pie containing the title deeds to twelve manor houses in the hope that these would deflect the King from acquiring Glastonbury Abbey. On his way to London, the not so loyal courier Horner apparently stuck his thumb into the pie and extracted the deeds for Mells Manor, a plum piece of real estate. The attempted bribe failed and the dissolution of the monasteries (including Glastonbury) went ahead from 1536 to 1540. Richard Whiting was subsequently executed, but the Horner family kept the house, so the moral of this one is: treachery and greed pay off, but bribery is a bad idea.” –Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme
Part II
“The Grail Table has thirteen seats, one of which is kept vacant in memory of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ.” —Symbolism of King Arthur’s Round Table
“In medieval romance, the grail was said to have been brought to Glastonbury in Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and his followers. In the time of Arthur, the quest for the Grail was the highest spiritual pursuit.” —The Camelot Project
and the three entries preceding it:
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
they can tell you, being dead:
the communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
they can tell you, being dead:
the communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Comments Off on Friday February 16, 2007
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Sunday January 7, 2007
Thursday, April 7, 2005 7:26 PM
In the Details
Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:
XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for God." It is the philosopher's search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet's search for the same exterior made
Interior….
… Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.
Julie Taymor, "Skewed Mirrors" interview:
"… they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail….
They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced."
"Skewed Mirrors"
illustrated:
|
Click on the above to enlarge.
Details:
The above may be of interest to students
of iconology — what Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code calls "symbology" —
and of redheads.
The artist of Details,
"Brenda Starr" creator
Dale Messick, died on Tuesday,
April 5, 2005, at 98.
AP Photo
Dale Messick in 1982
For further details on
April 5, see
Art History:
The Pope of Hope
Comments Off on Sunday January 7, 2007
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Sunday May 21, 2006
“Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.”
Zieht uns hinan.”
(“The Eternal-Feminine
Draws us on.”)
— Conclusion of Goethe’s Faust
At Amazon.com, a search inside
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown,
shows 34 pages with references
to the word “feminine.”
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown,
shows 34 pages with references
to the word “feminine.”
Draws us, indeed.
Comments Off on Sunday May 21, 2006
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Wednesday February 8, 2006
Iconography
(continued)
“… iconography,
the concept and image
of the bride of Christ–
the sponsa Christi—
assumed particular relevance in
the definition of women’s identity.”
(continued)
“… iconography,
the concept and image
of the bride of Christ–
the sponsa Christi—
assumed particular relevance in
the definition of women’s identity.”
— Silvia Evangelisti in
Historiographical Reviews
Related material:
|
Arts & Letters Daily
(Feb. 8, 2006) annotated: Dan Brown is not the first to have suggested that Jesus had a sex life– even Martin Luther said it. So what about the lady, Mary Magdalene?… more
For literature profs of today, Theory is what the Dialectic was to Marxist intellectuals of the past: the key to almost everything… more
The idea that anyone, regardless of learning or class, could “come to Christ” went along with the idea of equal rights in America. William Jennings Bryan… more
|
And from non-Protestantism, for the birthday of
Sanctus from Missa “Veni Sponsa Christi” (pdf), by Manuel Cardoso (1566-1650).
Related material: Catholic Tastes and
A Mass for Lucero.
Comments Off on Wednesday February 8, 2006
Thursday, April 7, 2005
Thursday April 7, 2005
In the Details
Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:
XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for God." It is the philosopher's search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet's search for the same exterior made
Interior….
… Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.
Julie Taymor, "Skewed Mirrors" interview:
"… they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail….
They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced."
"Skewed Mirrors"
illustrated:
|
Click on the above to enlarge.
Details:
The above may be of interest to students
of iconology — what Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code calls "symbology" —
and of redheads.
The artist of Details,
"Brenda Starr" creator
Dale Messick, died on Tuesday,
April 5, 2005, at 98.
AP Photo
Dale Messick in 1982
For further details on
April 5, see
Art History:
The Pope of Hope
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Tuesday April 5, 2005
Art History:
The Pope of Hope
The Pope of Hope
At the Vatican on
Shakespeare's Birthday
(See Log24.net,
Oct. 4, 2002)
Oct. 4, 2002)
See also the iconology —
what Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code
calls "symbology" —
of Pandora's Box
at Log24.net,
March 10, 2005:
"Man and woman are a pair of locked caskets,
each containing the key to the other."
each containing the key to the other."
"Karol Wojtyla had looked into
the heart of darkness–
and at the heart of darkness
discovered reason
for an indomitable hope.
He lived on the far side of
the greatest catastrophe
in human history,
the death of the Son of God,
and knew that evil
did not have the last word.
This is the key…."
— Richard John Neuhaus,
April 4, 2005
Finnegans Wake, p. 293,
"the lazily eye of his lapis"
"Notice how the Pope turns out to be
at the center of the breaking and
redefining of the Classical system."
at the center of the breaking and
redefining of the Classical system."
"Derrida on Plato on writing says 'In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply EXTERNAL to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.' "
Skewed Mirrors,
Sept. 14, 2003
"Evil did not have the last word."
— Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005
| Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the PARIS, |
"There is never any ending to Paris."
— Ernest Hemingway
For the first word, see Louis Armand on
Lethe, erinnerung, and riverrun.
See also the following passage,
linked to on the Easter Vigil, 2005:
You will find to the left of the House of Hades
a spring,
And by the side thereof standing
a white cypress.
To this spring approach not near.
But you shall find another,
from the lake of Memory
Cold water flowing forth, and there are
guardians before it.
Say, "I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven alone.
This you know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish.
Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth
from the lake of Memory."
a spring,
And by the side thereof standing
a white cypress.
To this spring approach not near.
But you shall find another,
from the lake of Memory
Cold water flowing forth, and there are
guardians before it.
Say, "I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven alone.
This you know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish.
Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth
from the lake of Memory."
Comments Off on Tuesday April 5, 2005
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Tuesday February 8, 2005
New from the
Oscar-winning producer,
director, and screenwriter
of “A Beautiful Mind” –
Oscar-winning producer,
director, and screenwriter
of “A Beautiful Mind” –
“The Divine Proportion…
is an irrational number and
the positive solution
of the quadratic equation
x2 – x – 1 = 0,
which is (1+Sqrt(5))/2,
about 1.618034.
about 1.618034.
The Greek letter ‘phi’
(see below for the symbol)
is sometimes used
to represent this number.”
For another approach to
the divine proportion, see
“The rogue’s yarn that will run through much of the material is the algebraic symmetry to which the name of Galois is attached and which I wanted to introduce in as concrete and appealing a way as possible….
Apart from its intrinsic appeal, that is the reason for treating the construction of the pentagon, and our task today will be to acquire some feel for this construction. It is not easy.”
— R. P. Langlands, 1999 lecture (pdf) at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in the spirit of Hermann Weyl
Comments Off on Tuesday February 8, 2005