Sunday, May 3, 2026
August 22, 2024 — Log24 Meets Code Golf —
Alpha and Omega, Heaven and Earth, Lock and Key
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Alpha and Omega, Heaven and Earth, Lock and Key
Alpha and Omega, Heaven and Earth, Lock and Key
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Locke & Key: Alpha & Omega
A more sophisticated alpha and omega . . .
— R. T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M 24 ,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1976),
A related key . . .
"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."
— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
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Sunday, September 18, 2011
Alpha and Omega
A transcription—
"Now suppose that α is an element of order 23 in M 24 ; we number the points of Ω
as the projective line ∞, 0, 1, 2, … , 22 so that
fact there is a full L 2 (23) acting on this line and preserving the octads…."
— R. T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M 24 ,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1976),
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Monday, January 13, 2025
Alphabet vs. Numbers: 23 and Me
— R. T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M 24 ,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1976),
Related material —
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Monday, September 23, 2024
Point Alpha — “What’s Your Rush, Miss Minutes?”
"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."
— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega
Meanwhile on that YouTube date . . .
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Saturday, March 23, 2024
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Let Us Now Praise Famous Omega*
* The title is of course a reference to the Knoxville of the previous post.
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Tuesday, October 31, 2023
“Omega is as real as we need it to be.”
— “The Osterman Weekend”
For art more closely related to the title "Alpha and Omega,"
see a different view of the above Hoyersten exhibition.
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— “The Osterman Weekend”
— “The Osterman Weekend”
Sunday, January 1, 2023
Alpha
Wallace Stevens —
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
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Monday, September 7, 2015
Alpha Bet
The title pun is from a letter about Google's new parent
company, named "Alphabet" by its founders.
Related material: Alpha and Omega in this journal.
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Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Monday, December 29, 2025
Working for the Weekend
AI giveth, and AI taketh away.
More in the spirit of Alpha than of Omega . . .
Images related to work I began in the 1970s, from
a 1960s design classic by Karl Gerstner.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Tales in the Key of 23
"Now he believed that where there was a key,
there must also be a lock…."
|
From The Golden Key by George MacDonald "We must find the country from which the shadows come," said Mossy. "We must, dear Mossy," responded Tangle. "What if your golden key should be the key to it?" "Ah! that would be grand," returned Mossy. |
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Thursday, January 2, 2025
An Ominous Note
The "Bronze Age" reference in the previous post suggests . . .
"… another way of making the point that this aging Omega
of a culture cannot recognize or accommodate the Alpha
that is something importantly new and vital."
— HELGESON, KAREN. “‘Fully Apparent’: The Center in Stevens’
‘Credences of Summer.’” The Wallace Stevens Journal,
vol. 32, no. 1, 2008, pp. 32–54. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/44885050. Accessed 2 Jan. 2025.
See as well . . .
HELGESON, KAREN. “Place and Poetry in Stevens’ ‘The Rock.’”
The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 2003, pp. 116–31.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44884834. Accessed 2 Jan. 2025.
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Saturday, November 23, 2024
The Dreidel Metadata
Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων·
παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη
The Dreidel Metadata —
Also on the above Brumleve Dreidel YouTube date, in this journal —
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Friday, February 23, 2024
North by Northwest: The Local Edge
"Looking for what was, where it used to be" — Wallace Stevens
— "Is this your business?"
— "No, but this is."
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Sunday, November 5, 2023
Old-Guy Aesthetics
For Guy Fawkes Day, images from first and last posts —
an alpha and an omega of sorts —
from this journal in the month of December 2021 . . .
Some remarks on an artist who reportedly died
on the second day of that month —
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Saturday, November 4, 2023
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Seeking Limits
"Even though he’s not currently part of a Star Wars movie,
Lindelof seems open to working on the franchise down the line.
'Will I get back in line outside the club and try to get back in again?
Of course,' he added. '[Star Wars ] was the alpha and the omega.
It’s the first movie I saw in a movie theater. I love all of the storytelling
in that world. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Or again, again,
try, as Yoda would say.' ” — Jay Peters, The Verge , April 28, 2023
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Sunday, November 14, 2021
Greek-Letter Structures
Α, ϴ, Ω
Related line:
Also from a Culture Desk of sorts:
Related art — Background colors for the letters in the NPR logo —
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Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Philosophical Infanticide
From Wallace Stevens —
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
From The Point magazine yesterday, October 8, 2019 —
Parricide: On Irad Kimhi's Thinking and Being .
Book review by Steven Methven.
The conclusion:
"Parricide is nothing that the philosopher need fear . . . .
What sustains can be no threat. Perhaps what the
unique genesis of this extraordinary work suggests is that
the true threat to philosophy is infanticide."
This remark suggests revisiting a post from Monday —
|
Monday, October 7, 2019
Berlekamp Garden vs. Kinder Garten
|
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Monday, October 7, 2019
Berlekamp Garden vs. Kinder Garten
Stevens's Omega and Alpha (see previous post) suggest a review.
Omega — The Berlekamp Garden. See Misère Play (April 8, 2019).
Alpha — The Kinder Garten. See Eighfold Cube.
Illustrations —
The sculpture above illustrates Klein's order-168 simple group.
So does the sculpture below.
Cube Bricks 1984 —
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Lenz
Or: Je repars .
From Wallace Stevens —
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
Mathematician Hanfried Lenz reportedly died in Berlin on June 1, 2013.
This journal that weekend —
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Thursday, December 27, 2018
A Candle for Lily
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Sunday, March 12, 2017
Raise High the Ridgepole, Architects*
A post suggested by remarks of J. D. Salinger in
The New Yorker of November 19, 1955 —
|
Wikipedia: Taiji (philosophy) Etymology The word 太極 comes from I Ching : "易有太極，是生兩儀，兩儀生四象，四象生八卦，八卦定吉凶，吉凶生大業。" Taiji (太極) is a compound of tai 太 "great; grand; supreme; extreme; very; too" (a superlative variant of da 大 "big; large; great; very") and ji 極 "pole; roof ridge; highest/utmost point; extreme; earth's pole; reach the end; attain; exhaust". In analogy with the figurative meanings of English pole, Chinese ji 極 "ridgepole" can mean "geographical pole; direction" (e.g., siji 四極 "four corners of the earth; world's end"), "magnetic pole" (Beiji 北極 "North Pole" or yinji 陰極 "negative pole; cathode"), or "celestial pole" (baji 八極 "farthest points of the universe; remotest place"). Combining the two words, 太極 means "the source, the beginning of the world". Common English translations of the cosmological Taiji are the "Supreme Ultimate" (Le Blanc 1985, Zhang and Ryden 2002) or "Great Ultimate" (Chen 1989, Robinet 2008); but other versions are the "Supreme Pole" (Needham and Ronan 1978), "Great Absolute", or "Supreme Polarity" (Adler 1999). |
See also Polarity in this journal.
* A phrase adapted, via Salinger,
from a poem by Sappho—
Ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον,
Υ᾽μήναον
ἀέρρετε τέκτονεσ ἄνδρεσ,
Υ᾽μήναον
γάμβροσ ἔρχεται ἶσοσ Ά᾽ρευϊ,
[Υ᾽μήναον]
ανδροσ μεγάλο πόλυ μείζων
[Υ᾽μήναον]
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Saturday, February 11, 2017
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Polytropos
Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ Θεὸς λαλήσας . . . .
( Long Day's Journey into Nighttown continues. )
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Monday, January 18, 2016
First and Last
"First and last, he was a skeptic …."
— Home page of Martin-Gardner.org
See also, in this journal, Alpha and Omega.
Related material from the last full day of Gardner's life —
See as well Symplectic in this journal.
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Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Class of 64
The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic
The I Ching .
For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical symbols …
A lyric by Ira Gershwin —
A cinematic "T" —
See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega:
From a post of May 13, 2015 —
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Friday, January 16, 2015
A versus PA
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
From the series of posts tagged "Defining Form" —
The 4-point affine plane A and
the 7-point projective plane PA —
The circle-in-triangle of Yale's Figure 30b (PA ) may,
if one likes, be seen as having an occult meaning.
For the mathematical meaning of the circle in PA
see a search for "line at infinity."
A different, cubic, model of PA is perhaps more perspicuous.
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