Log24

Some context:  A search in this journal for Lovelace.

Thanks to David Lavery for the following:

http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/articles/issue-18/mariani-essays

From the Guardian  yesterday—

Sunday 15 May 2011 22.00 BST

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares
his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”

— A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”

“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!'”

— A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.

“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”

— A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.

“Do you like apples?“

— Good Will Hunting

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?“

“Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.

In Mahlburg’s work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.

Mahlburg’s work ‘has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,’ Ono says.

‘Each step in the story is a work of art,’ Dyson says, ‘and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'”

— Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005

This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for “a story that works.” (See previous entry.)  Whether the muse of dance (played in “Xanadu” by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born– see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.

Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany. Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen, West Germany.

Max Born

Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.

Related material:

“The valley spirit never dies. It’s named the mystic woman.”

— Tao Te Ching

For an image of a particular
incarnation of the mystic woman
(whether as muse, as goddess,
or as the White Witch of Narnia,
I do not know) see Julie Taymor.

“Down in the valley,
 valley so low,
 hang your head over,
 hear the wind blow.”

— Folk song

“Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in
    the same bare place

For the listener,
    who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there
    and the nothing that is.”

— Wallace Stevens