See Anonymous in this journal.
* For the origin of the title, see the previous post.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Monday, March 16, 2026
An Oscar Winner’s Unchained Song
https://www.instagram.com/p/DVZXiuyEgBn/?hl=en
"Lonely rivers flow
To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea, yeah
Lonely rivers sigh
'Wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home, wait for me"
Related images . . .
Photo source: Anonymous (for now).
Comments Off on An Oscar Winner’s Unchained Song
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Vegas Love Games
Some prefer "Spin the Bottles."
Hotel bedroom in Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
SCHOLIUM —
Photo credit . . . Anonymous (for the time being)
Comments Off on Vegas Love Games
Friday, March 6, 2026
For Word Collectors: Halma
Photo source: Anonymous (for now).
Comments Off on For Word Collectors: Halma
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
For the Hotel California
Photo source: Anonymous (for now).
Comments Off on For the Hotel California
Friday, July 4, 2025
Burying the Lede
Midrash by an anonymous drama critic —
"There's enough of that in real life."
Comments Off on Burying the Lede
Sunday, June 22, 2025
For The Hawkline Girls:
Annals of Altered Reality
For Patrick Schwarzenegger —
Update of 9:34 AM EDT Sunday Morning —
"Actually, it's not a dance contest."
Or maybe it is . . .
Comments Off on For The Hawkline Girls:
Annals of Altered Reality
Annals of Altered Reality
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Case Study Film for W* — Egyptian Algebra
* For W herself, see . . .
Model who may prefer to remain anonymous.
Comments Off on Case Study Film for W* — Egyptian Algebra
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
A Miller’s Tale… and a Belated Counter-Tale
Comments Off on A Miller’s Tale… and a Belated Counter-Tale
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Diagrams
"The most powerful diagram in mathematics" —
The YouTube lecturer is not referring to the Fano plane diagram cited
in the AI Overview below, but to a much more sophisticated figure,
the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis.
Some context —
A rearrangement of the Miracle Octad Generator —
The diagram below may be less powerful , but it illustrates a result that,
although less miraculous , is perhaps more historically significant —
Comments Off on Diagrams
Monday, November 25, 2024
Longfellow vs. Snark
"Such were the plans I'd made" — 1974 song lyric
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow —
"Life is real! Life is earnest!"
"New horizons open up!"
— Anonymous NY Times wit, 1924
Gatsby-Era Times Snark —
Comments Off on Longfellow vs. Snark
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Blue Review
From this journal on September 24, 2012—
|
"A single self-transcendence" — Aldous Huxley
From an anonymous author at the website
"This little story… has that climactic moment of Kill Devil Hills also appears in a 1983 film—
"Suppose it were possible to transfer
— Trailer for "Brainstorm" (1983), |
"… that 'good' threshold . . . ." — See Threshold in this journal.
Comments Off on Blue Review
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Seattle Jam
|
CBS Sunday Morning today suggests a review of an old post featuring Pearl Jam. From that post . . . Mathematics and Narrative, continued… Out of What Chaos, a novel by Lee Oser— "This book is more or less what one would expect if Walker Percy wrote about a cynical rock musician who converts to Catholicism, and then Nabokov added some of his verbal pyrotechnics, and then Buster Keaton and the Marquis de Sade and Lionel Trilling inserted a few extra passages. It is a loving and yet appalled description of the underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest. And it is a convincing representation of someone very, very smart." "If Evelyn Waugh had lived amid the American Northwest rock music scene, he might have written a book like this." –Anonymous Amazon.com reviewer A possible source for Oser's title– "…Lytton Strachey described Pope's theme as 'civilization illumined by animosity; such was the passionate and complicated material from which he wove his patterns of balanced precision and polished clarity.' But out of what chaos did that clarity and precision come!" —Authors at Work, by Herman W. Liebert and Robert H. Taylor, New York, Grolier Club, 1957, p. 16 |
Comments Off on Seattle Jam
Thursday, June 20, 2024
Midnight Rhyme
Comments Off on Midnight Rhyme
Thursday, October 12, 2023
“Another Opening, Another Show”
"Romy and Michele's High School Reunion opens with an aerial shot
of Venice Beach, CA, zooming (east) into the girls' apartment window."
Other views —
"Fake it until you make it." — AA saying.
Comments Off on “Another Opening, Another Show”
Monday, November 7, 2022
Prescott Street Revisited: The Boys in the Kitchen
Or: MDT-48 Meets COMP360.
‘It doesn’t have a street-name and that’s because, as yet,
it doesn’t have any street profile – which is incidentally
the way we want it to stay. The boys in the kitchen are
keeping it low-key and anonymous. They’re calling it MDT-48.’
The boys in the kitchen?
— Glynn, Alan. Limitless: A Novel (p. 40).
Picador. Kindle Edition.
(Originally published by Little, Brown
in Great Britain in 2001 as The Dark Fields .)
From Log24 on Nov. 29, 2020 —
CNN story from All Souls' Day 2022 —
“This drug can be extracted from magic mushrooms,
but that is not the way our compound is generated.
It’s synthesized in a purely chemical process
to produce a crystalline form,” said Goodwin, who is
the chief medical officer of COMPASS Pathways,
the company that manufactures COMP360 and
conducted the study."
See as well "To Think That It Happened on Prescott Street"
and related posts.
Comments Off on Prescott Street Revisited: The Boys in the Kitchen
Sunday, April 24, 2022
The Well and the Stone
From a post of October 25, 2002 —
"A work of art has an author and yet,
when it is perfect, it has something
which is essentially anonymous about it."
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
This flashback was suggested by a quotation
in today's previous post —
"Go back to the darkest roots of civilisation
and you will find them knotted round
some sacred stone or encircling
some sacred well."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy , Ch. 5 —
"The Flag of the World."
Comments Off on The Well and the Stone
Sunday, May 2, 2021
Weimar 360
“… an internal ‘360’ review — in which staff members
offer anonymous feedback — revealed negative evaluations….”
— The New York Times today on MOCA, the
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
History of the “360 review” —
“The origins are with the German Reichswehr around 1930,
when the military psychologist Johann Baptist Rieffert
developed a methodology to select officer candidates.”
Related material suggested by a Harvardwood email today
reporting a recent alumni death —
See also CV Books.
Comments Off on Weimar 360
Saturday, December 19, 2020
Quackers
An Internet search for the anonymous author Quack5quack yields . . .
Comments Off on Quackers
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Square Space at Wikipedia
The State of Square-Space Art at Wikipedia as of December 16, 2020,
after a revision by an anonymous user on that date:
See also Square Space at Squarespace.
Comments Off on Square Space at Wikipedia
Wednesday, December 9, 2020
“Identity Work”
The title is a phrase I encountered today in a search for background
on the anonymous Wikipedia user whose first “user talk” page is as
follows —
See also CrazyMinecart88 at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CrazyMinecart88 .
“… the disclosure of knowledge as it is
intimately bound up with identity work”
— “Awarding the self in Wikipedia : Identity work
and the disclosure of knowledge,” by Daniel Ashton.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 1 – 3 January 2011.
Some mine cart “identity work” of my own —
Comments Off on “Identity Work”
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Another Damned Dyslexic
The Importance of Being Ernst —
In the above Wikipedia revision today, the anonymous user “Redactedentity”
found that the article Kummer surface omitted Kummer’s first name
and so changed “authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Kummer” to
“authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Ernst Kummer.” This fixed the
omission but makes no sense as a statement of parameters.
“Redactedentity” was apparently unable to read the following page,
which explains that “last=” is for the author’s last name —
Of course, this revision may be merely an instance of trolling or of
the sort of humor sometimes found among people with the following
interests:
See also Pazouzou.
Comments Off on Another Damned Dyslexic
Sunday, December 6, 2020
“Binary Coordinates”
The title phrase is ambiguous and should be avoided.
It is used indiscriminately to denote any system of coordinates
written with 0 ‘s and 1 ‘s, whether these two symbols refer to
the Boolean-algebra truth values false and true , to the absence
or presence of elements in a subset , to the elements of the smallest
Galois field, GF(2) , or to the digits of a binary number .
Related material from the Web —
Some related remarks from “Geometry of the 4×4 Square:
Notes by Steven H. Cullinane” (webpage created March 18, 2004) —
A related anonymous change to Wikipedia today —
The deprecated “binary coordinates” phrase occurs in both
old and new versions of the “Square representation” section
on PG(3,2), but at least the misleading remark about Steiner
quadruple systems has been removed.
Comments Off on “Binary Coordinates”
Monday, July 6, 2020
Caliber
| Lines from “Impulse,” a 1990 Sondra Locke film —
He died by two contact Definitely small caliber. There’s almost no rigor, so time of death an anonymous woman If a broad did it, she sure knew |
“Bing bang . . . .” — Song lyric quoted here on 7/01.
Comments Off on Caliber
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Spacek’s File*
From a search in this journal for Spacek —
"Honesty's the best policy."
— Miguel de Cervantes
"Liars prosper."
— Anonymous
— Epigraphs to On Writing:
A Memoir of the Craft,
by Stephen King
|
Lavender Blue, Dilly, Dilly, Lavender Green… |
|
* A title suggested by the previous post.
Comments Off on Spacek’s File*
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Night at the Museum of Unnatural History
“When men and women pour so much alcohol into themselves
that they destroy their lives, they commit a most unnatural act.”
— Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions , Step Six
Comments Off on Night at the Museum of Unnatural History
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Schoolgirl Space — Tetrahedron or Square?
The exercise in the previous post was suggested by a passage
purporting to "use standard block design theory" that was written
by some anonymous author at Wikipedia on March 1, 2019:
Here "rm OR" apparently means "remove original research."
Before the March 1 revision . . .
The "original research" objected to and removed was the paragraph
beginning "To explain this further." That paragraph was put into the
article earlier on Feb. 28 by yet another anonymous author (not by me).
An account of my own (1976 and later) original research on this subject
is pictured below, in a note from Feb. 20, 1986 —
Comments Off on Schoolgirl Space — Tetrahedron or Square?
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Schoolgirl Problem
Anonymous remarks on the schoolgirl problem at Wikipedia —
"This solution has a geometric interpretation in connection with
Galois geometry and PG(3,2). Take a tetrahedron and label its
vertices as 0001, 0010, 0100 and 1000. Label its six edge centers
as the XOR of the vertices of that edge. Label the four face centers
as the XOR of the three vertices of that face, and the body center
gets the label 1111. Then the 35 triads of the XOR solution correspond
exactly to the 35 lines of PG(3,2). Each day corresponds to a spread
and each week to a packing."
See also Polster + Tetrahedron in this journal.
There is a different "geometric interpretation in connection with
Galois geometry and PG(3,2)" that uses a square model rather
than a tetrahedral model. The square model of PG(3,2) last
appeared in the schoolgirl-problem article on Feb. 11, 2017, just
before a revision that removed it.
Comments Off on Schoolgirl Problem
Battlefield Geometry
Mind game on the birthday of Évariste Galois:
Comments Off on Battlefield Geometry
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
The Relativity Problem and Burkard Polster
|
From some 1949 remarks of Weyl— "The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time." — Hermann Weyl, "Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Vol. 93, No. 7, Theory of Relativity in Contemporary Science: Papers Read at the Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Albert Einstein in Princeton, March 19, 1949 (Dec. 30, 1949), pp. 535-541 Weyl in 1946—: "This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them." — Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups , Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16 |
For some context, see Relativity Problem in this journal.
In the case of PG(3,2), there is a choice of geometric models
to be coordinatized: two such models are the traditional
tetrahedral model long promoted by Burkard Polster, and
the square model of Steven H. Cullinane.
The above Wikipedia section tacitly (and unfairly) assumes that
the model being coordinatized is the tetrahedral model. For
coordinatization of the square model, see (for instance) the webpage
Finite Relativity.
For comparison of the two models, see a figure posted here on
May 21, 2014 —
Labeling the Tetrahedral Model (Click to enlarge) —
"Citation needed" —
The anonymous characters who often update the PG(3,2) Wikipedia article
probably would not consider my post of 2014, titled "The Tetrahedral
Model of PG(3,2)," a "reliable source."
Comments Off on The Relativity Problem and Burkard Polster