"In computer science, "IO" or "I/O" is commonly used
as an abbreviation for input/output, which makes the
.io domain desirable for services that want to be
associated with technology. .io domains are often used
for open source projects, application programming
interfaces ("APIs"), startup companies, browser games,
and other online services."
“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”
A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —
"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."
"It’s important, as art historian Reinhard Spieler has noted,
that after a brief, unproductive stay in Paris, circa 1907,
Kandinsky chose to paint in Munich. That’s where he formed
the Expressionist art group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) —
and where he avoided having to deal with cubism."
A search in this journal for "world within" yields . . .
"Instead of the 'static spacetime jewel' of blockworld that is often invoked by eternalists to help their readers conceptualize of what a blockworld would 'look like' from the outside, now imagine that a picture on a slide is being projected onto the surface of this space-time jewel.
From the perspective of one inside the jewel, one might ask 'Why is this section blue while this section is black?,' and from within the jewel, one could not formulate an answer since one could not see the entire picture projected on the jewel; however, from outside the jewel, an observer (some analogue of Newton's God, perhaps, looking down on his 'sensorium' from the 5th dimension) could easily see the pattern and understand that all of the 'genuinely fortuitous' events inside the space-time jewel are, in fact, completely determined by the pattern in the projector."
— "Genuine Fortuitousness, Relational Blockworld, Realism, and Time" (pdf), by Daniel J. Peterson, Honors Thesis, Swarthmore College, December 13, 2007, footnote 55, page 114
"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)
An Einheit-Geheimnis that is perhaps* more closely related
to pure mathematics** —
"What is the nature of the original unity
that throws itself apart in this separation,
and in what sense are the separated ones
here as the essence of the abyss?
Here it cannot be a question of any kind of 'dialectic,'
but only of the essence of the ground
(that is, of truth) itself." [Tr. by Google]
" Welcher Art ist die ursprüngliche Einheit,
daß sie sich in diese Scheidung auseinanderwirft,
und in welchem Sinn sind die Geschiedenen
hier als Wesung der Ab-gründigkeit gerade einig?
Hier kann es sich nicht um irgend eine »Dialektik«
handeln, sondern nur um die Wesung des Grundes
(der Wahrheit also) selbst."
The above structure illustrates the affine space of three dimensions
over the three-element finite (i.e., Galois) field, GF(3). Enthusiasts
of Judith Brown's nihilistic philosophy may note the "radiance" of the
13 axes of symmetry within the "central, structuring" subcube.
"… each 2×4 "brick" in the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis may be constructed by folding a 1×8 array
from Turyn's 1967 construction of the Golay code.
Folding a 2×4 Curtis array yet again yields
the 2x2x2eightfold cube ."
— Steven H. Cullinane on April 19, 2016 — The Folding.
"On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis
while on vacation in Venice. The news hit me
like a blow. How many books have we lost,
I thought, that will never get written now?
How many insights, how much wisdom,
will remain forever unexpressed? The appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift
and a reminder of what might have been."
— William Deresiewicz
This is from The Atlantic on St. Luke's Day, 2021.
Note the article's illustration, and related material from this journal on the date of the death described above:
“Art is another way to try to exercise your imagination
at connecting incongruous things,” Anthony Doerr said.
“It’s a way to say, hey, reader, let’s work together and
practice and train our imagination to connect things
that you don’t readily think of as connected.”
Comments Off on Adventures in Mix-and-Match Reality . . .
Towards the end of his career, when it was clear that literary theory had taken hold in the academy, Frye began to reflect on literary theory. In an interview with Deanne Bogdan, Frye laments, “I am feeling out of the great critical trends today”…. Northrop Frye was right that he was “out of fashion,” both in terms of his own theories and his place in literary theory; however, he did seek to reverse the course. Frye hoped to reclaim literary studies from deconstruction, which had become, in a sense, his chief opponent ….
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
masculine and feminine,
life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy–
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
“Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.”
— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)
“In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love’s recision
is the music of the spheres.”
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)
A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded:
“Art inherited from the old religion
the power of consecrating things
and endowing them with
a sort of eternity;
museums are our temples,
and the objects displayed in them
are beyond history.”
— Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52
From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space:
“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”
An excerpt from the quoted remarks by the Institute for
Advanced Study director —
"All of this is part of a much larger shift in
the very scope of science, from studying what is
to what could be. In the 20th century, scientists
sought out the building blocks of reality:
the molecules, atoms and elementary particles
out of which all matter is made;
the cells, proteins and genes
that make life possible;
the bits, algorithms and networks
that form the foundation of information and intelligence,
both human and artificial. This century, instead,
we will begin to explore all there is to be made with these building blocks."
Then there are, of course, the building blocks of mathematical reality:
unit cubes. See building-block.space.
“One day — ‘I don’t know exactly why,’ he writes — he tried to
put together eight cubes so that they could stick together but
also move around, exchanging places. He made the cubes out
of wood, then drilled a hole in the corners of the cubes to link
them together. The object quickly fell apart.
Many iterations later, Rubik figured out the unique design
that allowed him to build something paradoxical: a solid, static object that is also fluid….” — Alexandra Alter
“He recounted the story of Adam and Eve, who were banished
from paradise because of their curiosity. Their inability to resist
the temptation of the forbidden fruit. Which itself was a metaphorical
stand-in for knowledge and power. He urged us to find the restraint
needed to resist the temptation of the cube—the biblical apple
in modern garb. He urged us to remain in Eden until we were able
to work out the knowledge the apple offered, all by ourselves.”
— Richards, Douglas E.. The Enigma Cube (Alien Artifact Book 1)
(pp. 160-161). Paragon Press, 2020. Kindle Edition.
The biblical apple also appears in the game, and film, Assassin’s Creed .
Related material —
See the cartoon version of Alfred North Whitehead in the previous post,
and some Whitehead-related projective geometry —
The above arrangement of graphic images on cube faces is purely
decorative and static, and of little mathematical interest.
(A less static, but structurally chaotic, artifact might be made by
pasting the above 24 graphic images in the "Cosets in S4" picture
above onto the 24 faces of a 2x2x2 Rubik cube. This suggests the
reflection below on the poet Wallace Stevens, whose "Connoisseur
of Chaos" first appeared on page 90 of Twentieth Century Verse ,
Numbers 12-13, October 1938.)
If mathematically interesting permutations of the graphic images
are to be done, the images should be imagined as situated on parallel planes, as in the permutahedron below —
Click the above permutahedron for an analysis of its structure.
The following figure may help relate labelings of the
truncated octahedron ("permutahedron") to labelings
of its fellow Archimedean solid, the cuboctahedron.
“I held him in the highest respect and was delighted
to find him living in a room above mine on the same
staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down
the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation.”
Frank Close on Ron Shaw:
“Shaw arrived there in 1949 and moved into room K9,
overlooking Jesus Lane. There is nothing particularly
special about this room other than the coincidence that
its previous occupant was Freeman Dyson.”
If Minimalist artist Donald Judd is known as a writer at all, it’s likely for one important text— his 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” in which he observed the rise of a new kind of art that collapsed divisions between painting, sculpture, and other mediums. But Judd was a prolific critic, penning shrewd reviews for various publications throughout his career—including ARTnews . With a Judd retrospective going on view this Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ARTnews asked New York Times co-chief art critic Roberta Smith— who, early in her career, worked for Judd as his assistant— to comment on a few of Judd’s ARTnews reviews. How would she describe his critical style? “In a word,” she said, “great.” . . . .
And then there is Temple Eight, or Ex Fano Apollinis —
He reached Delos. There one night he secretly 46
carried off, from the much-revered sanctuary of
Apollo, several ancient and beautiful statues, and
had them put on board his own transport. Next
day, when the inhabitants of Delos saw their sanc-
tuary stripped of its treasures, they were much
distressed . . . .
Delum venit. Ibi ex fano Apollinis religiosissimo
noctu clam sustulit signa pulcherrima atque anti-
quissima, eaque in onerariam navem suam conicienda
curavit. Postridie cum fanum spoliatum viderent ii
qui Delum incolebant, graviter ferebant . . . .
"Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same,
nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed
to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. ….
The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively."
That Ereignis post is dated July 3, 2007.
Related material for the Church of Synchronology —
"The deepest strain in a religion is the particular
and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart,
in the company of such pronouncements as ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’
Take the deepest strain of religion away…
and what remains are the surface pieties —
abstractions without substantive bite —
to which everyone will assent
because they are empty, insipid, and safe."
Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to …
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University
Department of Social Relations
Center for Research in Personality
Morton Prince House
5 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts
July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz
c/o Upstate Medical School
Irving Avenue
Syracuse 10, New York
Dear Dr. Szasz:
Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun.
The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry.
I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century.
It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty.
. . . .
The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.
Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."
Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's "jewel box" post …
A 4-dimensional hypercubeH (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces. In its incarnation as a Galois tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of 2,304 affine transformations.
Similar remarks apply to the I Ching In its incarnation as
a Galois hexaract, for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.
"In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest
for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific.
Physicists want to show that all things came from
one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane
wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that
manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their
search for this primordial symmetry, however,
physicists have gone off the deep end . . . ."
Other approaches —
See "Story Theory of Truth" in this journal and, from the November 2019 Notices of the American Mathematical Society. . .
More fundamental than the label of mathematician is that of human. And as humans, we’re hardwired to use stories to make sense of our world (story-receivers) and to share that understanding with others (storytellers) [2]. Thus, the framing of any communication answers the key question, what is the story we wish to share? Mathematics papers are not just collections of truths but narratives woven together, each participating in and adding to the great story of mathematics itself.
The first endeavor for constructing a good talk is recognizing and choosing just one storyline, tailoring it to the audience at hand. Should the focus be on a result about the underlying structures of group actions? . . . .
[2] Gottschall, J. , The Storytelling Animal ,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
— "Giving Good Talks," by Satyan L. Devadoss
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
"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 —
(Ch. 2 in Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Eds.), Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics , Lexington Books, October 14, 2010)
"The term 'spacing' ('espacement ') is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those of différance (characterized, in the text from 1968 bearing this name, as '[at once] spacing [and] temporizing' 1), writing (of which 'spacing' is said to be 'the fundamental property' 2) and deconstruction (with one of Derrida's last major texts, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy , specifying 'spacing ' to be 'the first word of any deconstruction' 3)."
1 Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 14. Henceforth cited as D .
2 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. A. Bass, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 217. Henceforth cited as FSW .
3 Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 207.
. . . .
"… a particularly interesting point is made in this respect by the French philosopher, Michel Haar. After remarking that the force Derrida attributes to différance consists simply of the series of its effects, and is, for this reason, 'an indefinite process of substitutions or permutations,' Haar specifies that, for this process to be something other than a simple 'actualisation' lacking any real power of effectivity, it would need “a soubassement porteur ' – let’s say a 'conducting underlay' or 'conducting medium' which would not, however, be an absolute base, nor an 'origin' or 'cause.' If then, as Haar concludes, différance and spacing show themselves to belong to 'a pure Apollonism' 'haunted by the groundless ground,' which they lack and deprive themselves of,16 we can better understand both the threat posed by the 'figures' of space and the mother in the Timaeus and, as a result, Derrida’s insistent attempts to disqualify them. So great, it would seem, is the menace to différance that Derrida must, in a 'properly' apotropaic gesture, ward off these 'figures' of an archaic, chthonic, spatial matrix in any and all ways possible…."
16 Michel Haar, “Le jeu de Nietzsche dans Derrida,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 2 (1990): 207-227.
. . . .
… "The conclusion to be drawn from Democritus' conception of rhuthmos , as well as from Plato's conception of the chôra , is not, therefore, as Derrida would have it, that a differential field understood as an originary site of inscription would 'produce' the spatiality of space but, on the contrary, that 'differentiation in general' depends upon a certain 'spatial milieu' – what Haar would name a 'groundless ground' – revealed as such to be an 'in-between' more 'originary' than the play of differences it in-forms. As such, this conclusion obviously extends beyond Derrida's conception of 'spacing,' encompassing contemporary philosophy's continual privileging of temporization in its elaboration of a pre-ontological 'opening' – or, shall we say, 'in-between.'
For permutations and a possible "groundless ground," see
the eightfold cube and group actions both on a set of eight
building blocks arranged in a cube (a "conducting base") and
on the set of seven natural interstices(espacements ) between
the blocks. Such group actions provide an elementary picture of the isomorphism between the groups PSL(2,7) (acting on the
eight blocks) and GL(3,2) (acting on the seven interstices).
This post was suggested by the phrase "Froebel Decade" from
the search results below.
This journal a decade ago had a post on the late Donald Westlake,
an author who reportedly died of a heart attack in Mexico on Dec. 31,
2008, while on his way to a New Year's Eve dinner.
Einstein, "Geometry and Experience," lecture before the
Prussian Academy of Sciences, January 27, 1921–
… This view of axioms, advocated by modern axiomatics, purges mathematics of all extraneous elements, and thus dispels the mystic obscurity, which formerly surrounded the basis of mathematics. But such an expurgated exposition of mathematics makes it also evident that mathematics as such cannot predicate anything about objects of our intuition or real objects. In axiomatic geometry the words "point," "straight line," etc., stand only for empty conceptual schemata. That which gives them content is not relevant to mathematics.
Yet on the other hand it is certain that mathematics generally, and particularly geometry, owes its existence to the need which was felt of learning something about the behavior of real objects. The very word geometry, which, of course, means earth-measuring, proves this. For earth-measuring has to do with the possibilities of the disposition of certain natural objects with respect to one another, namely, with parts of the earth, measuring-lines, measuring-wands, etc. It is clear that the system of concepts of axiomatic geometry alone cannot make any assertions as to the behavior of real objects of this kind, which we will call practically-rigid bodies. To be able to make such assertions, geometry must be stripped of its merely logical-formal character by the coordination of real objects of experience with the empty conceptual schemata of axiomatic geometry. To accomplish this, we need only add the proposition: solid bodies are related, with respect to their possible dispositions, as are bodies in Euclidean geometry of three dimensions. Then the propositions of Euclid contain affirmations as to the behavior of practically-rigid bodies.
Geometry thus completed is evidently a natural science; we may in fact regard it as the most ancient branch of physics. Its affirmations rest essentially on induction from experience, but not on logical inferences only. We will call this completed geometry "practical geometry," and shall distinguish it in what follows from "purely axiomatic geometry." The question whether the practical geometry of the universe is Euclidean or not has a clear meaning, and its answer can only be furnished by experience. ….
Later in the same lecture, Einstein discusses "the theory of a finite
universe." Of course he is not using "finite" in the sense of the field
of mathematics known as "finite geometry " — geometry with only finitely
many points.
Nevertheless, his remarks seem relevant to the Fano plane , an
axiomatically defined entity from finite geometry, and the eightfold cube,
a physical object embodying the properties of the Fano plane.
I want to show that without any extraordinary difficulty we can illustrate the theory of a finite universe by means of a mental picture to which, with some practice, we shall soon grow accustomed.
First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To "visualize" a theory therefore means to bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement. In the present case we have to ask ourselves how we can represent that behavior of solid bodies with respect to their mutual disposition (contact) that corresponds to the theory of a finite universe.
Eidetic reduction, in phenomenology, a method by which the philosopher moves from the consciousness of individual and concrete objects to the transempirical realm of pure essences and thus achieves an intuition of the eidos (Greek: “shape”) of a thing—i.e., of what it is in its invariable and essential structure, apart …
The eidetic reduction: eidos. Method: Bracket all incidental meaning and ask: what are some of the possible invariate aspects of this experience? The research …
Sep 19, 2017 – Eidetic reduction is a technique in Husserlian phenomenology, used to identify the essential components of the given phenomenon or experience.
The reduction of two-colorings and four-colorings of a square or cubic
array of subsquares or subcubes to lines, sets of lines, cuts, or sets of
cuts between* the subsquares or subcubes.
“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”
“Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.
Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “Lucy in the sky!” she sang. “With diamonds!”
McCarthy's "materialization of plot and character" does not,
for me, constitute a proof that "there is being, after all,
beyond the arbitrary flux of existence."
Neither does the above materialization of 281 as the page
number of her philosophical remark.
"The cube shape of the lost Mother Box,
also known as the Change Engine,
is shared by the Stone in a novel by
Charles Williams, Many Dimensions .
See the Solomon's Cube webpage."
For a smaller tetrahedral arrangement, within the Steiner quadruple
system of order 8 modeled by the eightfold cube, see a book chapter
by Michael Huber of Tübingen —
Once the question of truth is settled, and often prior to it, what we value in a mathematical proof or conjecture is what we value in a work of lyric art: potency of meaning. An absence of clutter is a feature of such artifacts: they possess a resonant clarity that allows their meaning to break on our inner eye like light. But this absence of clutter is not tantamount to ‘being simple’: consider Eliot’s Four Quartets or Mozart’s late symphonies. Some truths are complex, and they are simplified at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be truths. Nonetheless, it’s often possible to express a complex truth in a way that precipitates a powerful experience of meaning. It is that experience we seek — not simplicity per se , but the flash of insight, the sense we’ve seen into the heart of things. I’ll first try to say something about what is involved in such recognitions; and then something about why an absence of clutter matters to them.
"Book IV – Beyond Personality:
or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity" . . . .
I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully.
You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine.
In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.
You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time —tonight, if you like.
. . . .
But beware of being drawn into the personal life of the Happy Family .
"Here’s a caveat about my glib earlier remark that
'There are only finitely many numbers ' in a finite field.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call the elements of finite fields
'numbers'. Elements of GF(q ) can be thought of as
the integers mod q when q is prime, and they can be
represented by 0, 1, 2, …, q–1; but when q is a prime
raised to the 2nd power or higher, describing the
elements of GF(q ) is more complicated, and the word
'number' isn’t apt."
Related material —
See also this journal on the date of Propp's remarks — April 17, 2016.
Dialogue from the 1984 fourth draft of the script, as found on the Web,
for "Back to the Future" (1985) (apparently some changes were made
in the filming) —
For instance, it’s on the record that Picasso’s lovers
Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter had
a wrestling match in his studio while he was
painting 'Guernica.' 'Genius' includes that
scene, naturally, but adds its own detail: The altercation helps Picasso overcome a creative block
and gleefully set to work on the gigantic painting.
It may be news to scholars that one of art’s
greatest testaments to the horror of war was
inspired, in part, by the excitement of being
fought over by a pair of jealous women."
Some may view the above web page as illustrating the Glasperlenspiel passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica—
“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”
A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —
"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."
The "Eightfold Cube" structure shown above with Weyl
competes rather directly with the "Eightfold Way" sculpture
shown above with Bryant. The structure and the sculpture
each illustrate Klein's order-168 simple group.
Perhaps in part because of this competition, fans of the Mathematical
Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, pronounced "Misery') are less likely
to enjoy, and discuss, the eight-cube mathematical structure above
than they are an eight-cube mechanical puzzle like the one below.
Note also the earlier (2006) "Design Cube 2x2x2" webpage
illustrating graphic designs on the eightfold cube. This is visually,
if not mathematically, related to the (2010) "Expert's Cube."
"Josefine has taken me through beautiful stories,
ranging from the personal to the platonic
explaining the extensive use of geometry in her art.
I now know that she bursts into laughter when reading
Dostoyevsky, and that she has a weird connection
with a retired mathematician."
"Many parents ask us about the Block Design section
on the WISC and hope to purchase blocks and exercises
like those used on the WISC test. We explain that doing that
has the potential to invalidate their child's test results.
These Froebel Color Cubes will give you a tool to work with
your child on the skills tested for in the Block Design section
of the WISC in an ethical and appropriate way. These same
skills are applicable to any test of non-verbal reasoning like
the NNAT, Raven's or non-verbal sections of the CogAT or OLSAT. "
"However, during World War I, the British rediscovered mankind's lost Mother Box. They conducted numerous studies
but were unable to date it due to its age. The Box was then
shelved in an archive, up until the night Superman died,
where it was then sent to Doctor Silas Stone, who
recognized it as a perpetual energy matrix. . . ." [Link added.]
The cube shape of the lost Mother Box, also known as the
Change Engine, is shared by the Stone in a novel by Charles Williams, Many Dimensions . See the Solomon's Cube webpage.
Who speaks in primordial images speaks to us
as with a thousand trumpets, he grips and overpowers,
and at the same time he elevates that which he treats
out of the individual and transitory into the sphere of
the eternal. — C. G. JUNG
"In the conscious use of primordial images—
the archetypes of thought—
one modern novelist stands out as adept and
grand master: Charles Williams.
In The Place of the Lion he incarnates Plato’s
celestial archetypes with hair-raising plausibility.
In Many Dimensions he brings a flock of ordinary
mortals face to face with the stone bearing
the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, the sign of Four.
Whether we understand every line of a Williams novel
or not, we feel something deep inside us quicken
as Williams tells the tale.
Here, in The Greater Trumps , he has turned to
one of the prime mysteries of earth . . . ."
— William Lindsay Gresham, Preface (1950) to
Charles Williams's The Greater Trumps (1932)
For fans of what the recent series Westworld called "bulk apperception" —
"The controversy between analytic and synthetic theories
of perception goes back many years: the Associationists
asserted that the experience of complex wholes is built
by combining more elementary sensations, while the
Gestalt psychologists claimed that the whole precedes
its parts, that we initially register unitary objects and
relationships, and only later, if necessary, analyze these
objects into their component parts or properties. This view
is still active now . . . ."
— Anne M. Treisman, University of British Columbia,
and Garry Gelade, Oxford University, in Cognitive Psychology 12, 97-136 (1980)
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
The previous post contrasted the number-triple 11-7-8 below
with number triples 12-9-5 and 12-5-9.
A perhaps more logical counterpart of the triple 11-7-8, based
on opposite locations of star-points or cube-edges, is
the triple 9-12-5. For a theological interpretation, see 9/12/05.
The above dates 11/7/8 and 12/9/5 correspond to the corner-labels
(read clockwise and counter-clockwise) of the two large triangles
in the Finkelstein Talisman —
Above: More symbology for Tom Hanks from
this morning's post The Pentagram Papers.
The above symbology is perhaps better suited to Hanks in his
role as Forrest Gump than in his current role as Ben Bradlee.
For Hanks as Dan Brown's Harvard symbologist
Robert Langdon, see the interpretation 12/5/9, rather
than 12/9/5, of the above triangle/cube-corner label.
“It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene.”
"While I was in Holland my enterprising student assistant at Smith had found, in Soviet Physics – Crystallography, an article by N. N. Sheftal' on tetrahedral penetration twins. She gave it to me on my return. It was just what I was looking for. The twins Sheftal' described had evidently begun as (111) contact twins, with the two crystallites rotated 60o with respect to one another. As they grew, he suggested, each crystal overgrew the edges of the other and proceeded to spread across the adjacent facet. When all was said and done, they looked like they'd grown through each other, but the reality was over-and-around. Brilliant! I thought. Could I apply this to cubes? No, evidently not. Cube facets are all (100) planes. But . . . these crystals might not have been cubes in their earliest stages, when twinning occurred! I wrote a paper on "The mechanism of certain growth twins of the penetration type" and sent it to Martin Buerger, editor of Neues Jarbuch für Mineralogie. This was before the Wrinch symposium; I had never met him. Buerger rejected it by return mail, mostly on the grounds that I hadn't quoted any of Buerger's many papers on twinning. And so I learned about turf wars in twin domains. In fact I hadn't read his papers but I quickly did. I added a reference to one of them, the paper was published, and we became friends.[5]
After reading Professor Sheftal's paper I wrote to him in Moscow; a warm and encouraging correspondence ensued, and we wrote a paper together long distance.[6] Then I heard about the scientific exchanges between the Academies of Science of the USSR and USA. I applied to spend a year at the Shubnikov Institute for Crystallography, where Sheftal' worked. I would, I proposed, study crystal growth with him, and color symmetry with Koptsik. To my delight, I was accepted for an 11-month stay. Of course the children, now 11 and 14, would come too and attend Russian schools and learn Russian; they'd managed in Holland, hadn't they? Diana, my older daughter, was as delighted as I was. We had gone to Holland on a Russian boat, and she had fallen in love with the language. (Today she holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale.) . . . .
. . . we spent the academic year 1978-79 in Moscow.
Philosophy professors and those whose only interest in mathematics
is as a path to the occult may consult the Log24 posts tagged Tsimtsum.
"The concept under review is that of the Holy Trinity.
See also, in this journal, Cube Trinity.
For a simpler Trinity model, see the three-point line…"
Frank calls his niece Mary to breakfast on the morning she is
to enter first grade. She is dressed, for the first time, for school —
- Hey! Come on. Let's move!
- No!
- Let me see.
- No.
- Come on, I made you special breakfast.
- You can't cook.
- Hey, Mary, open up.
(She opens her door and walks out.)
- You look beautiful.
- I look like a Disney character.
Where's the special?
- What?
- You said you made me special breakfast.
Read more: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/
movie_script.php?movie=gifted
"The detective story genre concerns the finding of clues
and the search for hidden designs, and its very form
underscores Mr. Pynchon’s obsession with conspiracies
and the existence of systems too complicated to understand."
"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from
its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt,
whose elements acquire their significance from the
system as a whole."
"Krauss’s core argument (what she deems a 'crusade')
is that the 'white cube,' which conceptual and installation
artists have deemed obsolete, actually thrives."
From an Anthony Lane movie review in the April 8, 2013,
issue of The New Yorker —
"When the Lord God forbade his worshippers to bow down
before any graven image, [Rosario] Dawson’s face was
exactly the kind of thing He had in mind. No other star can
boast such sculptured features—except Vincent Cassel,
who is pretty damn graven himself. When the two of them
make love, in 'Trance,' one strong bone structure pressed
against another, it’s like a clash of major religions. What if
they had a family? The kids would be practically Cubist."
As for the other film Lane reviewed in that issue, "Blancanieves" —
Plot summary — "An ancient struggle between two Cybertronian races,
the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, comes to Earth, with
a clue to the ultimate power held by a teenager."
"The deepest strain in a religion is
the particular and particularistic doctrine
it asserts at its heart,
in the company of such pronouncements as ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’
Take the deepest strain of religion away…
and what remains are the surface pieties —
abstractions without substantive bite —
to which everyone will assent
because they are empty, insipid, and safe."
"Rilke's insistent quest for a purity associated with primitive origins
took a Russian turning, but could also be seen as an extension of
traditions developed in Europe in the modern era. When Balzac
takes a metaphysical look at modern life, he exclaims: 'There is a
primitive principle! . . . .' "
"Clearly, there is a spirit of openhandedness in post-conceptual art
uses of the term 'Conceptualism.' We can now endow it with a
capital letter because it has grown in scale from its initial designation
of an avant-garde grouping, or various groups in various places, and
has evolved in two further phases. It became something like a movement,
on par with and evolving at the same time as Minimalism. Thus the sense
it has in a book such as Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art. … Beyond that,
it has in recent years spread to become a tendency, a resonance within
art practice that is nearly ubiquitous." — Terry Smith, 2011
"In teaching a course on combinatorics I have found
students doubting the existence of a finite projective
plane geometry with thirteen points on the grounds
that they could not draw it (with 'straight' lines)
on paper although they had tried to do so. Such a
lack of appreciation of the spirit of the subject is but
a consequence of the elements of formal geometry
no longer being taught in undergraduate courses.
Yet these students were demanding the best proof of
existence, namely, production of the object described."
"He… stands in contrast to the the dualistic
approach of Eliot, who so often speaks of poetry
as though it were an emotional and sensational
soul looking for a 'correlative' skeleton of
thought to be provided by a philosopher, a
Cartesian ghost trying to find a machine that
will fit."
"The new position of the advancing man has all
the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past,
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast
away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain."
“That words can be made to reach across the void
left by the disappearance of God (and hence of all
Absolutes) and thereby reestablish some basis of
relation with forms existing outside the subjective
and ego-centered self has been one of the chief
concerns of the first half of the twentieth century.”
… And then there is the Snow White void —
A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of a 2x2x2 array
of cubes —
The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).
Watching Westworld , you can sense a grand mythology unfolding before your eyes. The show’s biggest strength is its world-building, an aspect of screenwriting that many television series have botched before. Often shows will rush viewers into plot, forgetting to instill a sense of place and of history, that you’re watching something that doesn’t just exist in a vacuum but rather is part of some larger ecosystem. Not since Lost can I remember a TV show so committed to immersing its audience into the physical space it inhabits. (Indeed, Westworld can also be viewed as a meta commentary on the art of screenwriting itself: brainstorming narratives, building characters, all for the amusement of other people.)
Westworld is especially impressive because it builds two worlds at once: the Western theme park and the futuristic workplace. The Western half of Westworld might be the more purely entertaining of the two, with its shootouts and heists and chases through sublime desert vistas. Behind the scenes, the theme park’s workers show how the robot sausage is made. And as a dystopian office drama, the show does something truly original.
"… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example– They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play."
"When Analogies Fail," by Alexander Stern,
a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Notre Dame, in The Chronicle of Higher Education online September 11, 2016.
The previous post quoted Tom Wolfe on Chomsky's use of
the word "array."
An example of particular interest is the 4×4 array
(whether of dots or of unit squares) —
.
Some context for the 4×4 array —
The following definition indicates that the 4×4 array, when
suitably coordinatized, underlies the Kummer lattice .
Further background on the Kummer lattice:
Alice Garbagnati and Alessandra Sarti,
"Kummer Surfaces and K3 surfaces
with $(Z/2Z)^4$ symplectic action."
To appear in Rocky Mountain J. Math. —
The above article is written from the viewpoint of traditional
algebraic geometry. For a less traditional view of the underlying
affine 4-space from finite geometry, see the website Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
Some further context …
"To our knowledge, the relation of the Golay code
to the Kummer lattice … is a new observation."
As noted earlier, Taormina and Wendland seem not to be aware of R. W. H. T. Hudson's use of the (uncoordinatized*) 4×4 array in his
1905 book Kummer's Quartic Surface. The array was coordinatized,
i.e. given a "vector space structure," by Cullinane eight years prior to
the cited remarks of Curtis.
* Update of Sept. 14: "Uncoordinatized," but parametrized by 0 and
the 15 two-subsets of a six-set. See the post of Sept. 13.
(The crucible in question is from a book by Katherine Neville, The Eight . Any connection with Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible"
is purely coincidental.)
"So there are several different genres and tones
jostling for prominence within Lexicon:
a conspiracy thriller, an almost abstract debate
about what language can do, and an ironic
questioning of some of the things it’s currently used for."
"At CERN the LHC has reached design luminosity,* and is
breaking records with a fast pace of new collisions. This may
have something to do with the report that the LHC is also about to tear open a portal to another dimension."
See also the following figure from the Log24 Bion posts —
— and Greg Egan's short story "Luminous":
"The theory was, we’d located part of the boundary
between two incompatible systems of mathematics –
both of which were physically true, in their respective
domains. Any sequence of deductions which stayed
entirely on one side of the defect – whether it was the
'near side', where conventional arithmetic applied, or
the 'far side', where the alternative took over – would
be free from contradictions. But any sequence which
crossed the border would give rise to absurdities –
hence S could lead to not-S."
In his last theoretical book, Attention and Interpretation (1970), Bion has clearly cast off the mathematical and scientific scaffolding of his earlier writings and moved into the aesthetic and mystical domain. He builds upon the central role of aesthetic intuition and the Keats's notion of the 'Language of Achievement', which
… includes language that is both
a prelude to action and itself a kind of action;
the meeting of psycho-analyst and analysand
is itself an example of this language.29.
Bion distinguishes it from the kind of language which is a substitute for thought and action, a blocking of achievement which is lies [sic ] in the realm of 'preconception' – mindlessness as opposed to mindfulness. The articulation of this language is possible only through love and gratitude; the forces of envy and greed are inimical to it..
This language is expressed only by one who has cast off the 'bondage of memory and desire'. He advised analysts (and this has caused a certain amount of controversy) to free themselves from the tyranny of the past and the future; for Bion believed that in order to make deep contact with the patient's unconscious the analyst must rid himself of all preconceptions about his patient – this superhuman task means abandoning even the desire to cure . The analyst should suspend memories of past experiences with his patient which could act as restricting the evolution of truth. The task of the analyst is to patiently 'wait for a pattern to emerge'. For as T.S. Eliot recognised in Four Quartets , 'only by the form, the pattern / Can words or music reach/ The stillness'.30. The poet also understood that 'knowledge' (in Bion's sense of it designating a 'preconception' which blocks thought, as opposed to his designation of a 'pre -conception' which awaits its sensory realisation), 'imposes a pattern and falsifies'
For the pattern is new in every moment
And everymoment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have ever been.31.
The analyst, by freeing himself from the 'enchainment to past and future', casts off the arbitrary pattern and waits for new aesthetic form to emerge, which will (it is hoped) transform the content of the analytic encounter.
29. Attention and Interpretation (Tavistock, 1970), p. 125
Preconception as mindlessness is illustrated by Rubik's cube, and
"pre -conception" as mindfulness is illustrated by n×n×n Froebel cubes
for n= 1, 2, 3, 4.
.
