Friday, December 16, 2016
Friday, October 11, 2024
Letter Man: “T is for Tablet”
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Thursday, April 11, 2024
Devs: Hollywood Development Hell
From The Man Who Knew Infinity to The Man Who Knew Zero.
Related mathematics: The Diamond Theorem Correlation, which
results from interchanging infinity and zero in the figure below.
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker ad
.
Click image for
related posts.
Background — Relativity Problem in Log24.
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Saturday, October 14, 2023
Review
|
Robert Stone " 'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.' 'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.' Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion. 'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don't it?'
'I have heard it,' Egan said. 'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "
"We symbolize logical necessity — Keith Allen Korcz |
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Saturday, September 30, 2023
The Algorithm and Mrs. Davis
On the recent Peacock series "Mrs. Davis" —
"The algorithm is known as Mrs. Davis … and is
the all-seeing, all-knowing, not-quite-all-merciful
manifestation of artificial intelligence to whom
humanity has plighted its troth in this eight-part
manifestation of real intelligence from creators
Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof."
— John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal ,
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
For The Algorithm , see last evening's Michaelmas post and . . .
For a different Mrs. Davis, see . . .
|
From Tom McCarthy's review yesterday of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
Martin Davis reportedly died this year on New Year's Day.
This journal on that date —
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Wednesday, January 11, 2023
How the Darkness Gets In
|
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUDOLF CARNAP
EDITED BY PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP
. . . . |
See also . . .
The extraordinary consequences of Einstein’s universe:
Relativity shatters our experience of time
9th January 2023
By Michael David Silberstein
"Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College
and co-athor [sic] of Emergence in Context:
A treatise of twentry [sic] first-century natural philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 2022)."
"… the experience that there is something special about
the character of the present moment. This is what presumably
lead [sic] Einstein to say that
'there is something essential about the Now
which is just outside the realm of science.' "
Silberstein does not give any source for his quotation.
But see the passage from Carnap above.
I do not recommend taking Carnap's — or Silberstein's —
word for anything.
The source of Silberstein's remarks is a publication of an
organization called "Institute of Art and Ideas," or IAI.
Wikipedia on that organization:
"The IAI is responsible for organising the bi-annual festival
HowTheLightGetsIn, the biggest philosophy and music
festival in the world* aimed at 'tackling the dearth of philosophy
in daily life,' in addition to monthly IAI Live events."
* Maya Oppenheim (7 September 2021):
"HowTheLightGetsIn: The world's largest philosophy
and music festival to ask life's big questions."
The Independent.
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Sunday, January 16, 2022
Space
"Leave a space." — Stoppard, "Jumpers."
"Read something that means something." — The New Yorker
Related material — Bialystock Configurations :
Malgorzata Prazmowska and Krzysztof Prazmowski,
University of Bialystok, Bialystok, Poland
malgpraz@math.uwb.edu.pl and krzypraz@math.uwb.edu.pl
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Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Inside the Fire Temple
(The title refers to Log24 posts now tagged Fire Temple.)
In memory of a New Yorker cartoonist who
reportedly died at 97 on October 3, 2019 …
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker advertising slogan
From posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square —
This journal on October 3 —
"There is such a thing as a 4-set."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.
Illustration (central detail a from the above tetrahedral figure) —
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Monday, February 25, 2019
The Sartwell Illusion
See Sartwell in this journal and . . .
"Read something that means something." — New Yorker motto.
From a search for Alperin in this journal —
.gif)
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Thursday, February 21, 2019
Frenkel on “the Rashomon Effect”
Earlier in Frenkel's above opinion piece —
"What this research implies is that we are not just hearing
different 'stories' about the electron, one of which may be
true. Rather, there is one true story, but it has many facets,
seemingly in contradiction, just like in 'Rashomon.'
There is really no escape from the mysterious — some
might say, mystical — nature of the quantum world."
See also a recent New Yorker version of the fashionable cocktail-party
phrase "the Rashomon effect."
For a different approach to the dictum "there is one true story, but
it has many facets," see . . .
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker motto
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Wednesday, August 8, 2018
8/8
From mathoverflow.net on Dec. 7, 2016 —
The exceptional isomorphism between
PGL(3,2) and PSL(2,7): geometric origin?
Essentially the same question was asked earlier at
math.stackexchange.com on Aug. 2, 2010.
See also this journal in November 2017 —
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker ad
.
Background — Relativity Problem in Log24.
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Friday, July 6, 2018
Something
"… Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," 1936
"Read something that means something."
— Advertising slogan for The New Yorker
The previous post quoted some mystic meditations of Octavio Paz
from 1974. I prefer some less mystic remarks of Eddington from
1938 (the Tanner Lectures) published by Cambridge U. Press in 1939 —
"… we have sixteen elements with which to form a group-structure" —
See as well posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
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Friday, November 24, 2017
The Matrix Meets the Grid
The Matrix —
The Grid —
Picturing the Witt Construction —
"Read something that means something." — New Yorker ad
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Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker ad
.
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Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Diamond Bits
Or: Putting the Pinter in Pinterest
|
From "A Poem for Pinter" Log24 on Oct. 13, 2005 The Guardian on Harold Pinter, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature: "Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry," Michael Muskal in today's Los Angeles Times: "Pinter, 75, is known for his sparse and thin style as well as his etched characters whose crystal patter cuts through the mood like diamond drill bits." Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (See Jan. 25): "'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond…. 'It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.' 'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal….'" |
See as well an image in a link target from today's noon post —
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Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Grids
For those who think "right-brain" means something—
- Josefine Lyche's new "Grids, You Say?,"
- an image search on Argyle, and
- the Hollywood Argyles.
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Saturday, May 1, 2010
An Education
天鈞
Made famous by Ursula K. Le Guin
as the book title "Lathe of Heaven,"
this Chinese phrase, tianjun, apparently
means something more like "Scales of Heaven"–
an appropriate image for Law Day 2010.
An anonymous forum user says that
"…if you switch the two characters around,
you get: 鈞天, which is one of
the nine heavens, more specifically,
the middle heaven."
This is supported by a
non-anonymous source:
"I follow A.C. Graham’s translation of
Juntian as 'Level Heaven (the innermost
of the nine divisions of heaven)';
he renders Juntian guangyue as
'the mighty music of the innermost heaven.'"
— "Music in the World of Su Shi (1037-1101):
Terminology," by Stuart H. Sargent,
Colorado State University,
Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 32 (2002), 39-81
The Nine Divisions of Heaven–
Some context–
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Monday December 29, 2008
The Gift
Robert Stone,
"'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.' Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion." For further details, click on the diamond. |
Related narratives:
Today's online Times on
the Saturday, Dec. 27,
death of an artist:
"Dale Wasserman… the playwright responsible for two Broadway hits of the 1960s, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest' and 'Man of La Mancha,' died on Sunday [December 21, 2008] at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., near Phoenix….
Mr. Wasserman wrote more than 75 scripts for television, the stage and the movies, including screenplays for 'The Vikings' (1958), a seafaring epic with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and 'A Walk With Love and Death' (1969), a John Huston film set in 14th-century Europe….
He feuded with… John Huston, who gave the lead female role in 'Walk' to his teenage daughter, Anjelica, against Mr. Wasserman's wishes. And he never attended ceremonies to receive the awards he won."
Accepting for Mr. Wasserman:
Mr. Graham's widow,
Anjelica Huston —
"Well…"
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Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Tuesday October 10, 2006
Mate in
Two Seconds
From Oct. 13 last year
(Yom Kippur):
Two Seconds
From Oct. 13 last year
(Yom Kippur):
|
A Poem for Pinter
Oct. 13, 2005 The Guardian on Harold Pinter, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature: "Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry," Michael Muskal in today's Los Angeles Times: "Pinter, 75, is known for his sparse and thin style as well as his etched characters whose crystal patter cuts through the mood like diamond drill bits." Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (See Jan. 25): "'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond…. 'It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal….'"
"Modal logic was originally developed to investigate logic under the modes of necessary and possible truth. The words 'necessary' and 'possible' are called modal connectives, or modalities. A modality is a word that when applied to a statement indicates when, where, how, or under what circumstances the statement may be true. In terms of notation, it is common to use a box [] for the modality 'necessary' and a diamond <> for the modality 'possible.'"
Commentary:
"Waka" also means Japanese poem or Maori canoe. (For instance, this Japanese poem and this Maori canoe.)
For a meditation on "bang splat," see Sept. 25-29. For the meaning of "tick tick," see Emily Dickinson on "degreeless noon." "Hash," of course, signifies "checkmate." (See previous three entries.) |
For language more suited to
the year's most holy day, see
this year's Yom Kippur entry,
from October 2.
That was also the day of the
Amish school killings in
Pennsylvania and the day that
mathematician Paul Halmos died.
For more on the former, see
Death in Two Seconds.
For more on the latter, see
The Halmos Tombstone.
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Thursday, October 13, 2005
Thursday October 13, 2005
A Poem for Pinter
The Guardian on Harold Pinter, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature:
"Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry,"
Michael Muskal in today's Los Angeles Times:
"Pinter, 75, is known for his sparse and thin style as well as his etched characters whose crystal patter cuts through the mood like diamond drill bits."
Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (See Jan. 25):
"'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond…. 'It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal….'"
"Modal logic was originally developed to investigate logic under the modes of necessary and possible truth. The words 'necessary' and 'possible' are called modal connectives , or modalities . A modality is a word that when applied to a statement indicates when, where, how, or under what circumstances the statement may be true. In terms of notation, it is common to use a box [] for the modality 'necessary' and a diamond <> for the modality 'possible.'"
|
A Poem for Pinter
|
Commentary:
"Waka" also means Japanese poem or Maori canoe.
(For instance, this Japanese poem and this Maori canoe.)
For a meditation on "bang splat," see Sept. 25-29.
For the meaning of "tick tick," see Emily Dickinson on "degreeless noon."
"Hash," of course, signifies "checkmate." (See previous three entries.)
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Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Tuesday January 25, 2005
Diamonds Are Forever
" 'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.'
Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.
'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don't it?'
'I have heard it,' Egan said. 'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "
"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box 
)
and logical possibility
with the diamond 
).
From
DIALECTIC AND EXISTENCE
IN KIERKEGAARD AND KANT
Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira
Pontifical Catholic University
at Porto Alegre, Brazil
"Such is the paradoxical 'encounter' of the eternal with the temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant (Danish Ojeblikket, 'a glance of the eye, eyeblink,' German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:
If the instant is posited, so is the eternal –but also the future, which comes again like the past … The concept around which everything turns in Christianity, the concept which makes all things new, is the fullness of time, is the instant as eternity, and yet this eternity is at once the future and the past.
Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the opposition between 'eternity' and 'temporality': the instant, as 'an atom of eternity,' serves to restructure the whole synthesis of selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s 'ascent' toward its Other and the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness, preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore, that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),
The possibility of the good is more than possibility, for it is the eternal. This is the basis of the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived, for to hope is to expect the possibility of the good; but the possibility of the good is eternal. …But if there is less love in him, there is also less of the eternal in him; but if there is less of the eternal in him, there is also less possibility, less awareness of possibility (for possibility appears through the temporal movement of the eternal within the eternal in a human being)."
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Tuesday August 17, 2004
The Zen of Abraham
Today’s Zen Chautauqua, prompted by the fact that this is Abrahamic week at the real Chautauqua, consists of links to
Happy Birthday, Kate and Kevin.
The real Chautauqua’s program this week is, of course, Christian rather than Zen. Its theme is “Building a Global Neighborhood: The Abrahamic Vision 2004.” One of the featured performers is Loretta Lynn; in her honor (and, of course, that of Sissy Spacek), I will try to overcome the fear and loathing that the Semitic (i. e., “Abrahamic”) religions usually inspire in me.
To a mathematician, the phrase “global neighborhood” sounds like meaningless politico-religious bullshit — a phrase I am sure accurately characterizes most of the discourse at Chautauqua this week. But a Google search reveals an area of
This article includes the following:
Given the sophistication of his writing, I am surprised at Schlansker’s Christian background:
A good omen for the future is the fact that Schlansker balances the looney Semitic (or “Abrahamic”) teachings of Christianity with good sound Aryan religion, in the form of the goddess Themis.
Themis, often depicted as “Justice”
For those who must have an Abraham, Schlansker’s paper includes the following:
A Themis figure I prefer to the above:
For more on religious justice
at midnight in the garden of
good and evil, see the Log24
entries of Oct. 1-15, 2002.
For material on Aryan religion that is far superior to the damned nonsense at Chautauqua, New York, this week, see
Jane Ellen Harrison’s Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, with an excursus on the ritual forms preserved in Greek tragedy by Gilbert Murray and a chapter on the origin of the Olympic games by F. M. Cornford. Rev. 2nd ed., Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1927.
Those who prefer the modern religion of Scientism will of course believe that Themis is purely imaginary, and that truth is to be found in modern myths like that of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, illustrated below.
Jodie Foster (an admirer of
Leni Riefenstahl) and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics
“Heraclitus…. says: ‘The ruler whose prophecy occurs at Delphi oute legei oute kryptei, neither gathers nor hides, alla semainei, but gives hints.'”
— An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press paperback, 1959, p. 170
“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God, Doubleday, 1998, p. 50
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Friday, July 4, 2003
Friday July 4, 2003
Self-Evident
Today many Americans celebrate a declaration of certain “self-evident” truths. Others feel that these alleged “truths” are misleading. Seeking a worthy opponent for the authors of the Declaration on this secular holy day, I settled on the following recently published book, a sort of Declaration of Dependence of government on God (an imaginary entity who speaks only through politicians, clergymen, and other liars):
Christian Faith
and Modern Democracy:
God and Politics in the Fallen World
By Robert P. Kraynak
Univ. of Notre Dame Press. 304p
$49.95 (cloth) $24.95 (paper)
From a review in the Dec. 24, 2001, issue of America, a Jesuit publication:
“The author, who identifies himself as a practicing Catholic, asserts that Christianity is weakened by its close alliance with the contemporary version of democracy and human rights….
The author states that ‘modern liberal democracy…subverts in practice the dignity of man.’ He defends his thesis relentlessly and persuasively….
Some readers of this well-organized volume will be disappointed that the author makes no mention of the four billion non-Christians among the world’s 6.1 billion inhabitants. The four billion Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists must be included in any attempt to make the modern state responsive to traditional and generally accepted norms of morality.”
— Robert F. Drinan, S.J.
Jefferson would probably appreciate Drinan’s remark on catholic (i.e., universal, or “generally accepted”) norms.
The “traditional and generally accepted norms of morality” Drinan mentions are discussed ably by Christian apologist C. S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man, which argues for the existence of a universal moral code that I am pleased to note he calls, rightly, the Tao. As an Amazon.com reviewer notes, Lewis uses this term in the manner of Confucius rather than that of Lao Tsu. I prefer the latter.
For details, see the Tao Te Ching, (The Way and Its Power). This is a far more holy scripture than the collections of lies called sacred by most other religions. Both the leftist Jefferson and the rightist Kraynak wrongly assume that talk of a “Creator” means something. It does not. Classical Chinese thought is free from this absurd Western error. Lewis at least had the grace to acknowledge the importance of non-Western thought, though he himself was unable to escape the lies of Christianity.
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