Now added to a Likewise.com list —

The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.

Related reading —
On a letter from Hebrew, the fentanyl of languages —

Coxeter's Aleph.

See as well Pale Fire in this journal and . . .

Place-name from the Ojibwe language . . . Mackinac —

Ojibwa art — From a Dreamcatcher Log 24 search —

Related metadata —

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/
how-maga-world-is-taking-on-its-new-opponent —

From a search in this  journal for "Second Billing" —

    Click Nina for the above film from Good Friday, 2019.

Continued from Zen and Language Games
(a post of May 2, 2003, written on March 1, 2002)

From The Harvard Crimson  on St. Andrew's Day 2017 —

See also a larger, clearer view of the titles in the above file photo.

Dialogue suggested by the above Harvard Crimson  line
"I am a book today . . . . I know it all." —

A problem child* of sorts in the 2017 film "Gifted" —

Mary- "Maybe this school isn't as great as you think it is."

Mary is returned to the place of her examination.

Professor- "Mary, you knew that the problem was incorrect, 
            why didn't you say anything?"

Mary- "Frank says I'm not supposed to correct older people. 
       Nobody likes a smart-ass."

* "Problem Child" was a working title related to a novel
    Heinlein wrote in 1941, Beyond This Horizon —

The previous post was about the death of a figure
from the world of entertainment.

I prefer the work of a figure with the same last name
but from a different world —

"Spiel ist nicht Spielerei." — Friedrich Fröbel

After Menand

This subtitle refers to the previous post, Game Theory for Steiner.
That post suggested a search that led to a New Yorker  piece
by Louis Menand, "Game Theory," excerpted below.

"Then, on move 21, came Black's crusher: a6!"

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams." — Hamlet

The New York Review of Books , in a review
of two books on video games today, quotes an author
who says that the Vikings believed the sky to be 
“the blue skull of a giant.”

See as well posts tagged The Nutshell.

See Nine-Headed Dragon in this journal.

Shema, JC.

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 —

Note the mace.

Mystic Pizza:  See Ellen and Pizza.

Related material—

Yesterday, 3:33 PM, in this journal— "Time for you to see the field"— and…

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury , opening paragraph of part two, "June Second, 1910"—

"When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly, and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

See also Willard Van Orman Quine in this journal on August 15, 2009—

"A tale told by an idiot"— and such a tale—

c6 d0 x2 y5 p5 d3 x4 y3 p5

Related material— yesterday's Programmers' Day note and 2009's Symbol Story.

In the Details

This afternoon's post, Point Omega continued, concerned the New York Lottery numbers for yesterday evening and midday today.

A footnote to that post—

Today's evening New York Lottery number was 664.

In the spirit of the theological content of this afternoon's post—

Today's evening NY number 664 may or may not refer to the year of the Synod of Whitby.

That Synod was about reconciling the customs of Rome with the customs of Iona.

A somewhat relevant link from the Language Game post referred to in this afternoon's post was on the word "selving." This link, now broken, referred to a paper hosted by, as it happens, Iona College. The following is a link to a cached copy of that paper—

"The Story of the Self: The Self of the Story," by James E. Giles (Religion and Intellectual Life, Fall 1986— Volume 4, Number 1, pages 105-112)

From yesterday morning’s post “An Object Lesson” —

A search for the origin of a photo in yesterday’s New York Times
obituary of linguist Geoffrey Nunberg yields . . .

“Words are not things, but activities,” observed Dwight Bolinger,
a revered linguist who taught at Harvard before retiring to Palo Alto,
and he might have been describing Nunberg. Early this morning—
about 2:30 a.m.—he called Bolinger’s words “my favorite linguistic
epigram” in his posting on the Language Log, where blogging linguists
“chew the electronic fat,” as Nunberg puts it.

— Ann Hurst, undated article in Stanford Magazine , March/April 2005

In reality, Nunberg said something slightly different —

Meanwhile, elsewhere . . .

Scholium —

From Log24’s Language Game,  Jan. 14, 2004 —

“Ludwig Wittgenstein,  Philosophical Investigations :
373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”

In memory of a game inventor who reportedly died on
Dec. 6, the feast of St. Nicholas, a link: Game Box.

Update of 12 AM Dec. 8 — See also "How to watch The Game
Awards 2014," from December 5, the date of the Game Awards
and also the date of the Log24 post Language Game.

in Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar"

See also Blue Guitar
and Cubist Language Game
as well as Dali Cube.

From a mathematical review:

"The book ends with eye-opening explorations….
If pressed for an extra rubric, I would consider
a separate section on "Engaging Games," as
this is something that mathematicians are
preoccupied with— literally and metaphorically."

— Alexander Bogomolny

See in this journal Language Game,  Nexus, and
posts of May 12, 2013.

For a pundit of pugilism:  Plan 9 continues.

"She was a panelist on many game shows, including
'What’s My Line?' and 'The Hollywood Squares.'*
These appearances had a fitting symmetry:
It was as a game-show contestant that Dr. Brothers
had received her first television exposure."

— Margalit Fox in this evening's online New York Times

* A language game for Hofstadter: click on "Seeing As"
   in today's noon post.

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."

"Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations  (1953),  Section 109

"When the battle's lost and won" — The Scottish play

Related material— Monday's Language Game.

"We tried to create new realities overnight…."
— Point Omega, quoted here in the post
Devising Entities (July 3, 2010)

See also last night's Meditation as well as the earlier posts
Language Game and The Subject Par Excellence.

"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.

'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'

He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street– that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.

'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves– like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'

Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"

From The New York Times
on the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:

Recommended reading in the afterlife
for Rabbi Shapira:
“The Man as Pure as Lucifer,”
by Graham Greene

Recommended viewing in the afterlife
for Dr. Panofsky, son of Erwin Panofsky:

“Pray for the grace of accuracy.”
— Robert Lowell, quoted in
a web page titled
“Is Nothing Sacred?“

“The page numbers are
generally reliable.”
— Steven H. Cullinane,
“Zen and Language Games“

Related material:
Sacred Passion:
The Art of William Schickel,
U. of Notre Dame Press, 1998

Click on the fingerpost
for further details.

See the Dickinson poem quoted here on May 15 (the date, as it happens, of Dickinson’s death) in the entry “A Flag for Sunrise.”  See also Zen and Language Games and a discussion of a detail in a Robert Stone novel.

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“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.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“

Language Games:

Feel lucky?
Well, do you?

  This entry was inspired by the following…
1.  A British blogger’s comment today.  This man, feeling like a miserable failure himself, was cheered up by the following practical joke: “If really fed up you could try putting in, miserable failure, (no quote marks) into Google and pressing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.”

2. The page, excerpts from which are shown  above, that you get if you put lucky (no quote marks) into Google and press the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

3. My own entries of May 31 on Language Games and of June 1 on language and history,  Seize the Day and One Brief  Shining Moment.

4.  The related June 1 entry of Loren Webster, Carpe Diem, on the Marilyn Monroe rose.  Images from Carpe and Shining are combined below:

5.  The fact that the “day” to be seized in Language Games is numbered 22, and that on day 22 of November 1963,  the  following died:

C. S. Lewis
John F. Kennedy
  Aldous Huxley.

6. The fact that November 22 is the feast of  Cecilia, patron saint of music.

7. Yesterday’s entry about the alignment of stars, combined with the alignment of Venus with Apollo (i. e., the sun) scheduled for June 8.

All of the above suggest the following readings from unholy scripture:

A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.”

— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it.  Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

Language Games:

Now You’re Playing
with Power

My latest preoccupation…

Using search-and-replace programs to reformat earlier Xanga entries.  This involves the use of “regular expressions,” which lead to the following thoughts….

Notes on
Formal Language Theory
and Parsing

James Power

Department of Computer Science
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.

Click on picture
for details.

Here’s more on
language games and robot wisdom
from an authority on James Joyce,

Language Game

In memory of
Samuel Iwry, Hebrew scholar,
who died on May 8, 2004:

From a log24 entry of May 8, 2004,
on Wittgenstein’s “language games” —

    “Let us imagine a language …”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
    Philosophical Investigations

Okay…

Moral of the story:
If you must have a
religious language,
Elvish may,
in some situations,
do as well as Hebrew.

See also

The Unity of Mathematics,
or Shema, Israel.