“Chess problems are the
hymn-tunes of mathematics.”
— G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology
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“The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”
– Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves
"I named this script ocode and chmod 755'd it to make it executable…"
— Software forum post on the OCR program Tesseract
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From the author of
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
"Like so many other heroes
who have seen the light
of a higher order…."
"Then it came to him.
In a single stroke he had what might be called
a complete vision of the information age."
— "Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the
Computer Mouse, Dies at 88," by John Markoff
in this afternoon's online New York Times
Related material:
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
in the Dec. 4, 2008, post OCODE.
Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.
The 123 suggests page 123 of DeLillo's Underworld .
(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)
The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.
These two topics—
are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—
Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”
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Modern rendition |
Kenneth |
The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…
The New York Times Book Review for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.
From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…
Making Sense of It
David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.
The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment— condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.
See also Saturday's Edenville.
Virginia Heffernan in Sunday's online New York Times—
"… In the past, information on paper was something to read. Bricks and mortar were a place to be. But, since the first appearance of the Web in 1990, we have come to accept that information in pixels is something to read— and also a place to be . That familiar and yet still jaw-dropping metaphor takes energy to maintain. The odd shared sense that there’s three-dimensionality and immersion and real-world consequences on the Web as in no book or board game— that’s the Web’s sine qua non. Hence, cyberspace . And 'being on' the Internet….
… The dominant social networks are fantasy games built around rigged avatars, outright fictions and a silent— and often unconscious— agreement among players that the game and its somewhat creaky conceits influence the real world…."
— "The Confidence Game at Google+"
"It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my funday"
— The Bangles
"Accentuate the Positive"
— Clint Eastwood, soundtrack album
for "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"
This journal on All Saints' Day, Sunday, November 1, 2009—
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Suggested by the New York State lottery numbers on All Hallows’ Eve [2009]— 430 (mid-day) and 168 (evening)… From 430 as a date, 4/30— Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo , by Joseph Dewey, University of South Carolina Press, 2006, page 123: “It is as if DeLillo himself had moved to an endgame….” For such an endgame, see yesterday’s link to a Mira Sorvino drama. The number 168 suggested by the Halloween lottery deals with the properties of space itself and requires a more detailed exegesis… For the full picture, consider the Log24 entries of Feb. 16-28 this year, esp. the entries of Feb. 27 and the phrase they suggest— Flores, flores para los muertos. |
See also Pearly Gates of Cyberspace in this journal.
For flores para los muertos , see today's Times .
An Indiana Jones Xmas
continues…
Chalice, Grail,
Whatever
Last night on TNT:
The Librarian Part 3:
Curse of the Judas Chalice,
in which The Librarian
encounters the mysterious
Professor Lazlo
Related material:
An Arthur Waite quotation
from the Feast of St. Nicholas:
“It is like the lapis exilis of
the German Graal legend”
as well as
yesterday’s entry
relating Margaret Wertheim’s
“Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
A History of Space from
Dante to the Internet”
to a different sort of space–
that of the I Ching— and to
Professor Laszlo Lovasz’s
“cube space”
“Click on the Yellow Book.”
Happy birthday, David Carradine.
| Abstraction and Faith On Kirk Varnedoe’s National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003): “Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself.”
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et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt
… the mirroring …
is to be conceived of as
a shining forth, a play of mirror flashes,
as it were…. The four “mirrors”
emerge into presence as light
at the same time that they converge….
The above image:
Axes of Reflection
and Annunciation,
the latter being a detail
of a fresco by Giotto
on the cover of
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.
Happy Feast of St. Nicholas.
A Version of
Heaven’s Gate
in memory of
Alexy II, the Russian Orthodox
patriarch who died today in Moscow:
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
From Geoffrey Broadbent,
“Why a Black Square?” in Malevich
(London, Art and Design/
Academy Group, 1989, p. 49):
“Malevich’s Black Square seems to be
nothing more, nor less, than his
‘Non-Objective’ representation
of Bragdon’s (human-being-as) Cube
passing through the ‘Plane of Reality.’!”
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OCODE
"The first credential
— Ezra Pound, "OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine vision." — Wikipedia "I named this script ocode and chmod 755'd it to make it executable…" — Software forum post on the OCR program Tesseract
Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008:
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"Like so many other heroes
who have seen the light
of a higher order…."
For further backstory,
click on the mouse.
— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion
Several voices:
Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and
Madeleine L’Engle and husband.
From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”
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