Log24

From the previous post:

"Words are events, happenings, not things,
as letters make them appear to be."
— Walter J. Ong, S.J., page 2 in 
"Writing and the Evolution of Consciousness,"

". . . originally delivered by Walter J. Ong
as the 7th Annual 'Sidney Warhaft Memorial Lecture',
January 26, 1984, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg."

A different Sidney Warhaft memorial —

Photographs are also events.

See this journal on the above photo date — Sept. 17, 2014.

See “Einstein on Acid” by Stephen Battersby
(New Scientist , Vol. 180, issue 2426 — 20 Dec. 2003, 40-43).

That 2003 article is about some speculations of Metod Saniga.

“Saniga is not a professional mystic or
a peddler of drugs, he is an astrophysicist
at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.
It seems unlikely that studying stars led him to
such a way-out view of space and time. Has he
undergone a drug-induced epiphany, or a period
of mental instability? ‘No, no, no,’ Saniga says,
‘I am a perfectly sane person.'”

Some more recent and much less speculative remarks by Saniga
are related to the Klein correspondence —

arXiv.org > math > arXiv:1409.5691:
Mathematics > Combinatorics
[Submitted on 17 Sep 2014]
The Complement of Binary Klein Quadric
as a Combinatorial Grassmannian
By Metod Saniga

“Given a hyperbolic quadric of PG(5,2), there are 28 points
off this quadric and 56 lines skew to it. It is shown that the
(28₆,56₃)-configuration formed by these points and lines
is isomorphic to the combinatorial Grassmannian of type
G₂(8). It is also pointed out that a set of seven points of
G₂(8) whose labels share a mark corresponds to a
Conwell heptad of PG(5,2). Gradual removal of Conwell
heptads from the (28₆,56₃)-configuration yields a nested
sequence of binomial configurations identical with part of
that found to be associated with Cayley-Dickson algebras
(arXiv:1405.6888).”

Related entertainment —

See Log24 on the date, 17 Sept. 2014, of Saniga’s Klein-quadric article:

Articulation Day.

(The above title was suggested by today's "Child-Resistant 4×4.")

* Specifically, resistant to the above revelation attributed to Barbara Johnson
   by  Harvard University Press —

   "Deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals
    that their claims upon us are fraudulent."

    A related search at Amazon.com:

Barbara Johnson explains Lacan:

" The 'gap' in the real is the leap 
from the empirical to 
the signifying articulation 
of the object of desire; 
it cannot be perceived empirically. 
It is 'nothing.' "

— Persons and Things , paperback (2010),
  Harvard University Press, page 213

Why "Omega?"

Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in
mathematics to denote a set on which
a group acts. 

On Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators :

“Yet as the book’s five hundred–plus pages unwind, Isaacson interrupts himself to present small bromides about what it means to innovate and what we might learn from these innovators, our presumed betters. “Innovation requires articulation,” he tells us, after explaining how the main strength of Grace Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist for the US Navy, was her ability to speak in the languages of mathematicians, engineers, programmers, and soldiers alike. ‘One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them,’ he offers later.

The book is peppered with these kinds of passages, which often intrude on the narrative, depriving us of moments of real emotional power.”

— Jacob Silverman in Bookforum , Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

From Isaacson’s book:

Related material:

In memory of T. S. Eliot…

… and in memory of Stanley Chase, producer of Colossus: The Forbin Project
and of Threepenny Opera :

Ninefold square from Colossus
(“There is another system”) —

Fourfold square introducing Brecht
in  Dreigroschen Trifft Vierfarben —

Review of DeLillo's novel Point Omega—

"One difference between art and entertainment has to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so that you’re challenged to re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so that you don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all except, perhaps, the adrenalin rush before dazzling spectacle. Although, of course, there can be myriad gradations between the former and latter, in their starkest articulation we’re talking about the distance between, say, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest  and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol…."

— Lance Olsen, March 1, 2010, in The Quarterly Conversation

Robert Hughes on fast and slow art—

"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game."

– Speech of June 1, 2004

Log24 on art speeds—

A Study in Art Education (June 15, 2007)

Twenty-four (March 13, 2011)

Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
 

— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010

Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching  and…

Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—

"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254)  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

"Professor Krauss even uses many of the same decorations with which she festooned earlier volumes. Bataille’s photograph of a big toe, for example, which I like to think of as her mascot, reappears. As does her favorite doodle, a little graph known as a 'Klein Group' or 'L Schema' whose sides and diagonals sport arrows pointing to corners labeled with various opposing pairs: e.g., 'ground' and 'not ground,' 'figure' and 'not figure.' Professor Krauss seems to believe that this device, lifted from the pages of structuralist theory, illuminates any number of deep mysteries: the nature of modernism, to begin with, but also the essence of gender relations, self-consciousness, perception, vision, castration anxiety, and other pressing conundrums that, as it happens, she has trouble distinguishing from the nature of modernism. Altogether, the doodle is a handy thing to have around. One is not surprised that Professor Krauss reproduces it many times in her new book."
 

From Drid Williams,
The Semiotics of Human Action,
Ritual, and Dance:

This is closely related to
Beckett's "Quad" figure

A Jungian on this six-line figure: "They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching…. Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer…. For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results."   — Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time (1970)

and to the Greimas "semiotic square":

"People have believed in the fundamental character of binary oppositions since at least classical times. For instance, in his Metaphysics Aristotle advanced as primary oppositions: form/matter, natural/unnatural, active/passive, whole/part, unity/variety, before/after and being/not-being.*  But it is not in isolation that the rhetorical power of such oppositions resides, but in their articulation in relation to other oppositions. In Aristotle's Physics the four elements of earth, air, fire and water were said to be opposed in pairs. For more than two thousand years oppositional patterns based on these four elements were widely accepted as the fundamental structure underlying surface reality….

The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully…."

 

— Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners.

* Compare Chandler's list of Aristotle's primary oppositions with Aristotle's list (also in the  Metaphysics) of Pythagorean oppositions (see Midrash Jazz Quartet).