Log24

The concluding instance of a search for "the room"
in this journal (from Mike Nichols's birthday, 2002) —

"His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence,
acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked."

— Recreation by Sylvia Nasar of a scene starring
mathematicians George Mackey and John Nash.

The reviews are in!

See also today's previous post, Perhaps Not Strange Enough.

Season 1 of "The Resort" will end as "The Lord of the Rings:
The Rings of Power" begins.

For seekers of the Pasaje — "The Room Outside of Time" —

"The Vision is of what the transliteration of their collaborative
Great Music into a material reality would be like. They are
shown that the Music has a point, has a result and effect
beyond its composition and singing: it amounts to no less
than a highly detailed template commensurate with the entire
history – beginning to end – of a material, 'physical' Universe
that could exist inside 'time'." 

— https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Ainulindal%C3%AB

The above title is that of a facetious British essay linked to in the previous post.
It suggests a review . . .

“. . . some point in a high corner of the room . . . .”

     — Point Omega

A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:

The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.

The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).

The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—

Then silence sank. And slowly
      Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
      Unhooked his heavy sword.

— G. K. Chesterton,
   The Ballad of the White Horse

This, together with some Log24 remarks 
from 2004, suggests two images—

Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.

The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:

The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from 
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.

Related material from a year later:

See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.

(The final quote above is bogus. Stevens did write "Death is the mother 
of beauty," but the "perishable" part is from a lesser poet, Billy Collins.)

For the duende  of this post's title, see a dance.

The dance suggests a 1956 passage by Robert Silverberg—

"There was something in the heart of the diamond—
not the familiar brown flaw of the others, but something
of a different color, something moving and flickering.
Before my eyes, it changed and grew.

And I saw what it was. It was the form of a girl—
a woman, rather, a voluptuous, writhing nude form
in the center of the gem. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black,
her eyes a piercing ebony. She was gesturing to me,
holding out her hands, incredibly beckoning from within
the heart of the diamond.

I felt my legs go limp. She was growing larger, coming closer,
holding out her arms, beckoning, calling—

She seemed to fill the room. The diamond grew to gigantic size,
and my brain whirled and bobbed in dizzy circles.
I sensed the overpowering, wordless call."

— "Guardian of the Crystal Gate," August 1956

For similar gestures, see Nicole Kidman's dance in "The Human Stain."

For young Andrew Cusack, should he ever care to read this journal.

Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot: their dialogue—

"The window of the room in which Eeldrop and Appleplex talk opens to a view which includes a police station. Again Eliot delineates the two men on the basis of thought– the divided mind. Eeldrop is entranced by 'the smoky smell of lilac, the gramophones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.'"

The story from which this is taken is "Eeldrop and Appleplex," by T.S. Eliot.

The "three small girls playing cards" suggest the three Fates. For a less subtle illustration, see William Blake's "Hecate, or the Three Fates"–

For a more cheerful (and Catholic)
Hecate figure, see the oeuvre  of
Alyssa Milano.

Culture War

The New York Times, August 6, 2003,
on its executive editor Bill Keller:

“‘It is past time for our magnificent coverage of culture and lifestyles, so essential to our present allure and to our future growth, to get the kind of attention we routinely bestow on hard news,’ Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail message to the staff.”

The New York Times, June 25, 2006,
on art in Mexico:

“At the Hilario Galguera gallery, newly opened in a fortresslike, century-old building, was Damien Hirst’s gory new series ‘The Death of God– Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools.’  He conceived the work at his part-time home in the Mexican surf town Troncones.”

Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep:

   “I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover.  I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems.  I reached down and moved a knight, then pulled my hat and coat off and threw them somewhere.  All this time the soft giggling went on from the bed, that sound that made me think of rats behind a wainscoting in an old house.

…………

    I looked down at the chessboard.  The move with the knight was wrong.  I put it back where I had moved it from.  Knights had no meaning in this game.  It wasn’t a game for knights.”

“Perhaps people will revert to private social networks–ones they manage locally….

Perhaps the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links–would become more apparent, and perhaps that would be a good thing.

I’m not sure how good that is as a business model, but it works as a social model.”

The beautiful, brilliant, and charming Esther Dyson seems to have suffered a temporary lapse in brilliance with the above remark on the strength of ties in social networks….

“the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links….”

Here are some useful references encountered while fact-checking Ms. Dyson’s assertion about the “law of networks” —

Links on Graph Theory and Network Analysis

The Navigability of Strong Ties:
Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology (pdf)

Modeling Coleman’s Friendly Association Networks (pdf)

The Strength of Weak Ties:
A Network Theory Revisited (pdf)

Scientific Collaboration Networks, II (pdf)
(Deals specifically with tie-strength computation.) 

Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks

and, finally, a diagram of social networks in Shakespeare that conclusively demonstrates that there is no simple relationship between strength of ties and number of ties:

Cleopatra’s Social Ties (png)

Perhaps what Ms. Dyson had in mind was the following (courtesy of The Motley Fool):

“Metcalfe’s Law of Networks states that the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network. Translated, this means that a network that is twice as large as another network will actually be at least four times as valuable. Why? Because four times as many interconnections are possible between participants in the larger network.

When you add a fourth person to a group of three, you don’t add just one more networked relationship. You add several. The new individual can network with all three of the existing persons, and vice versa. The Internet is no different. It became more and more valuable as the numbers of computers using it grew.”

For another perspective on this alleged law, from science fiction author Orson Scott Card, see The Group, a Log24 entry of Sept. 24, 2002.

Elsewhere, in a discussion of social-networking software:

“Esther Dyson starts with a request that people turn to their left and ask the person next to them, ‘Will you be my friend?’ The room erupts in chatter, but, of course, the problem is we don’t have enough information about one another to make a snap decision about that question.”

Obviously, ties resulting from such a request will be weak, rather than strong.  However, as study of the above network-theory links will reveal, weak ties can sometimes be more useful than strong ties.  An example:

Passing the Peace at Mass.

Compare and contrast with
Ms. Dyson’s request to turn and
ask the Mr. Rogers question,
“Will you be my friend?”

The best response to this question
that I know of was contained in
a good-bye letter from a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:

“Si me deveras quieres,
deja me en paz.”

(See Shining Forth.)

The Fog and the Fury

Headline and opening sentence of a column in the Washington Times:

“Job creation fog . . . and fury

Something must be done [to] restore jobs in U.S. manufacturing….”

So far, so good.  But the columnist goes on to explain the recent loss of manufacturing jobs:

“Let’s be honest. Some of these manufacturing jobs will not be coming back because of structural changes in our economy. Manufacturers have been reducing payrolls, in middle management and on the production line, because they have found ways to produce more goods at far less cost, boosting profits for further expansion and fatter investor and worker pension dividends.”

Uh-huh.

Here is a different explanation (the “fury,” as opposed to “the fog”), from a March 10 column:

“Last week’s jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on?

They’re calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They’re just not being created here in the United States.

The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary….

For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost….

At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans.”

— Pat Buchanan, author of
A Republic, Not an Empire

Happy Ides, Caesar.

Two More Skewed Mirrors

Background: Previous three entries and
The Crucifixion of John O’Hara.

1. From The New Yorker,
   issue dated Sept. 22, 2003…

   John Updike on John O’Hara —

   And yet the ultimate units of society, the human individuals lost within the crushing agglomeration of hostility, rivalry, snobbery, exclusion, and defeat that O’Hara felt in his bones, have aspirations and hopes and passions, and can be regarded with tenderness by a writer whose bleak and swift style seems at first not to care. A small story from “Files on Parade” (1939) titled “By Way of Yonkers” sticks in my mind as especially moving. Its two principals, the young woman unnamed and the man named only in the last sentence, exist on the lower levels of Depression survival. She, with her gunmetal stockings and Cossack hat and “neat, short nose with jigsaw nostrils,” seems to be a hooker. She arrives at the man’s shabby apartment so late that he tells her she must have come by way of Yonkers, and when he asks “How’d you do?” of the engagement that delayed her she not quite evades the question:

   “Oh—” she said it very high. Then: “All right. Financially. But do we have to talk about it? You and me?”

   She talks instead about her fading appetite for liquor, and the expense of dental care. He, lying inert and fully dressed on his bed, talks of being broke, of not wanting to take money from her, of how he can’t seem “to make a connection in this town.” The town is New York, and he is a minor gangster thrown out of work by the repeal of Prohibition. But he has met a man who offered him a connection in Milwaukee, and he is going to go there for a long time. The concluding words are unspectacular and unexpectedly sweeping:

   [She asks,] “Any chance you being back in town soon?”
   “Well, not right away, honey. First I have to build up my connection again.”
   “Well, I don’t have to tell you, I’m glad for you. It’s about time you got a good break.” She resumed rubbing his ankle. He put his hand on the top of her head.
   “Yeah? You’re as good a break as I ever got.”
   “Ah, Christ, Bill,” she said, and fell face down in tears.

   One is moved not only by their plight of presumably eternal separation but by the dignity that O’Hara, in a literary time of programmatic pro-proletarian advocacy (Odets and Steinbeck and Mike Gold), instinctively brings to his two specimens of lowlife. He does not view them politically, from above; he is there in the room with them, and one is moved by the unspoken presence of an author so knowing, so unjudgmental, so nearly an outcast himself.

2. Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” —
   
   The video can be seen here.

Ah, Christ, Johnny.

Today's birthdays: Mike Nichols and Sally Field.

From A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar:

Prologue

Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

John Forbes Nash, Jr. — mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational behavior, visionary of the thinking machine — had been sitting with his visitor, also a mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959, and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was slumped in an armchair in one corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a rag doll's, his finely molded features expressionless. He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot of Harvard professor George Mackey, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away from his forehead in a fitful, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence, acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no longer. His voice was slightly querulous, but he strained to be gentle. "How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you…?"

Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."

What I  take seriously:

Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis, by George F. Simmons, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963 

An Introduction to Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Lynn H. Loomis, Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1953

"Harmonic Analysis as the Exploitation of Symmetry — A Historical Survey," by George W. Mackey, pp. 543-698, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, July 1980

Walsh Functions and Their Applications, by K. G. Beauchamp, Academic Press, New York, 1975

Walsh Series: An Introduction to Dyadic Harmonic Analysis, by F. Schipp, P. Simon, W. R. Wade, and J. Pal, Adam Hilger Ltd., 1990

The review, by W. R. Wade, of Walsh Series and Transforms (Golubov, Efimov, and Skvortsov, publ. by Kluwer, Netherlands, 1991) in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, April 1992, pp. 348-359

Music courtesy of Franz Schubert.