Continued from April 18 .
"Working with words to create art
and working with your hands to create art
seem like two separate activities to me."
— Cover artist, The New Yorker , on April 17
See also Alphabet Blocks in this journal
as well as Escher's Verbum.
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A New Yorker writer on the new parent corporation of
Google, named Alphabet:
"In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us, Alphabet
is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks.
Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."
— Sarah Larson
Building blocks, Sarah, are not the same thing
as alphabet blocks. For the distinction, see a
Log24 post of August 14, 2015, "Being Interpreted."
The New Yorker apparently also has another fact wrong.
The official version of Page's letter is not "illustrated."
Perhaps, Sarah, you mistook the new Alphabet website
abc.xyz, which did show alphabet blocks and quoted
Page's letter, for the letter itself.
In memory of two figures from tonight's NY Times obituaries index
(not Nora Ephron and Anthony J. Wiener)—
Tower Envy
Erin Burnett and Jenga blocks yesterday
Related material—
and the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain
The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.
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Non-Euclidean
Blocks
Passages from a classic story:
… he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads….  Tesseract
"Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid," Holloway said. "So this– thing– bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn't impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees."
"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth dimensional extension?" Paradine demanded. "Hardening of the thought-arteries," Jane interjected. Paradine was not convinced. "Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don't mean that. I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only–" "Well, look. Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry– we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid–" "Poor kid," Jane said. Holloway shot her a quick glance. "The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra– they come much later. We're familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic–" "Blocks? What kind?" Holloway looked at the abacus. "It wouldn't make much sense to us. But we've been conditioned to Euclid." — "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," Lewis Padgett, 1943 |
For the intuitive basis of one type of non-Euclidean* geometry– finite geometry over the two-element Galois field– see the work of…
Friedrich Froebel
(1782-1852), who
invented kindergarten.
His "third gift" —
© 2005 The Institute for FiguringFrom other posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square —
A Scholium for Chomsky —
The ABC of words —
A nutshell —
Cartoon from the current (Sept. 7, 2015) New Yorker , p. 25 —
See as well searches in this journal for Montessori and Machiavelli.
Midrash from Sept. 3 at the online New Yorker —
"We don’t instinctively care about the brand unity
Google wants to achieve with its new mega-company,
Alphabet, of which it is now a part. Especially because
Alphabet takes our most elementally wonderful
general-use word—the name of the components of
language itself—and reassigns it, like the words tweet,
twitter, vine, facebook, friend, and so on, into a branded
realm. In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us,
Alphabet is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks.
Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."
— Sarah Larson
The ABC of things —
The ABC of words —
A nutshell —
Book lessons —
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