Monday, December 7, 2020
Saturday, December 23, 2017
The Right Stuff
A figure related to the general connecting theorem of Koen Thas —
See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry in this journal.
Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may, if they so fancy, call
the above Thas connecting theorem a "quantum tesseract theorem ."
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Monday, November 15, 2021
Dating
From a search in this journal for the right stuff —
A date which will live in _________________ . . .
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Friday, April 16, 2021
Schoolgirl Problem (Kirkman’s, not Epstein’s)
As for Epstein’s problem . . .
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Saturday, December 23, 2017
Friday, June 12, 2015
Song
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Soul
The online Los Angeles Times yesterday —
June 11, 2015
Robert Chartoff, an Oscar-winning Hollywood producer
who got a tantalizing peek into show business in the Catskills
and went on to make six "Rocky" films, "Raging Bull,"
"The Right Stuff" and nearly two dozen other movies,
has died at his home in Santa Monica. He was 81.
Chartoff, who died Wednesday, had been diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer two years ago, his son William said.
— Steve Chawkins
A fiction quoted here on the reported date of Chartoff's death —
“What… what happened?” you asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
— Andy Weir, "The Egg"
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Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Wednesday August 5, 2009
Word and Image
"Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist
who pioneered the study of nonverbal
communication and interactions between
members of different ethnic groups,
died July 20 at his home in
Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95."
NY Times piece quoted here on
the date of Hall's death:
|
"July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA's engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars." Commentary —
The Word according to St. John:
|
From Hall's obituary:
"Mr. Hall first became interested in
space and time as forms of cultural
expression while working on
Navajo and Hopi reservations
in the 1930s."
Log24, July 29:
|
"Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within |
"We are the key."
— Eye of Cat
Update of about 4:45 PM 8/5:
Paul Newall, "Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy"—
"Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that 'different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.' With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed."
The above photo of Juliette Binoche in Blue accompanying the quotations from Zelazny illustrates Kieślowski's concept, with graphic designs instead of musical notes. Some of the same designs are discussed in Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007). (See the Log24 entries of June 11, 2009.)
Related material:
"Jeffrey Overstreet, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, comments extensively on Blue. He says these stones 'are like strands of suspended crystalline tears, pieces of sharp-edged grief that Julie has not been able to express.'….
Throughout the film the color blue crops up, highlighting the mood of Julie's grief. A blue light occurs frequently, when Julie is caught by some fleeting memory. Accompanied by strains of an orchestral composition, possibly her husband's, these blue screen shots hold for several seconds while Julie is clearly processing something. The meaning of this blue light is unexplained. For Overstreet, it is the spirit of reunification of broken things."
— Martin Baggs at Mosaic Movie Connect Group on Sunday, March 15, 2009. (Cf. Log24 on that date.)
For such a spirit, compare Binoche's blue mobile in Blue with Binoche's gathered shards in Bee Season.
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Monday, July 20, 2009
Monday July 20, 2009
The First Post
in this weblog:
in this weblog:
From Sunday’s New York Times, Tom Wolfe on the moon landing forty years ago:
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.
Tom Wolfe is the author of “The Right Stuff,” an account of the Mercury Seven astronauts.
Commentary
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