Season 1 of "The Resort" will end as "The Lord of the Rings:
The Rings of Power" begins.

For seekers of the Pasaje — "The Room Outside of Time" —

"The Vision is of what the transliteration of their collaborative
Great Music into a material reality would be like. They are
shown that the Music has a point, has a result and effect
beyond its composition and singing: it amounts to no less
than a highly detailed template commensurate with the entire
history – beginning to end – of a material, 'physical' Universe
that could exist inside 'time'." 

— https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Ainulindal%C3%AB

From a post at midnight on the night of Jan. 7-8, 2018:

"The resulting figures look rather unimpressive
until they are superimposed, but then they yield
a variety of surprisingly orderly figures."

Context: See the tag The Overnight Case .

See as well a search in this journal for "Double Day."

Clue:

The clue leads to . . .

The above Spratt date leads to . . .

The above snark from this  journal leads to . . .

… as well as …

Click the chessboard for some Chinese hermeneutics.

From the above aldaily.com link —

Related course — "History and Human Capital" at Harvard, a course
taught last spring by professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz —

Related reading — "Human Capital," by Claudia Goldin:

The above material suggested this post's title, "Das Humankapital ."

The same phrase is also the title of a perceptive website from Linz, Austria.

* For the alternative title, see a Wikipedia article on The Jew of Linz .

The time of the previous post, 3:10 (AM), suggests, in a
surreal manner that the spirit of the late David Bowie might
find amusing, a review of Log24 posts last year on 3/10 —

An Obit for Dooley and The Big Screw.

As for the time, 6:25, of this  post, see Apocatastasis.

 Part 3 of 5  (See also Part 1 and Part 2) begins as follows…

"Incommensurable. It is a strange word. I wondered, why  did Kuhn choose it? What was the attraction? 

Here’s one clue. At the very end of 'The Road Since Structure,' a compendium of essays on Kuhn’s work, there is an interview with three Greek philosophers of science, Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu and Vassiliki Kindi. Kuhn provides a brief account of the historical origins of his idea. Here is the relevant segment of the interview.

T. KUHN: Look, 'incommensurability' is easy.

V. KINDI: You mean in mathematics?

T. KUHN: …When I was a bright high school mathematician and beginning to learn Calculus, somebody gave me—or maybe I asked for it because I’d heard about it—there was sort of a big two-volume Calculus book by, I can’t remember whom. And then I never really read it. I read the early parts of it. And early on it gives the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2. And I thought it was beautiful. That was terribly exciting, and I learned what incommensurability was then and there. So, it was all ready for me, I mean, it was a metaphor but it got at nicely what I was after. So, that’s where I got it.

'It was all ready for me.' I thought, 'Wow.' The language was suggestive. I imagined √2 provocatively dressed, its lips rouged. But there was an unexpected surprise. The idea didn’t come from the physical sciences or philosophy or linguistics, but from mathematics ."

A footnote from Morris (no. 29)—

"Those who are familiar with the proof [of irrationality] certainly don’t want me to explain it here; likewise, those who are unfamiliar with it don’t want me to explain it here, either. There are many simple proofs in many histories of mathematics — E.T. Bell, Sir Thomas Heath, Morris Kline, etc., etc. Barry Mazur offers a proof in his book, 'Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen),' New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003, 26ff. And there are two proofs in his essay, 'How Did Theaetetus Prove His Theorem?', available on Mazur’s Harvard Web site."

There may, actually, be a few who do  want the proof. They may consult the sources Morris gives, or the excellent  description by G.H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology , or, perhaps best of all for present purposes, the proof as described in a "sort of a big two-volume Calculus book" (perhaps the one Kuhn mentioned)…  See page 6 and page 7 of  Volume One  of Richard Courant's classic Differential and Integral Calculus  (second edition, 1937, reprinted many times through 1970, and again in a Wiley Classics Library Edition in 1988).

“You’re reading me,” she murmurs.

“Particularly and surprisingly well-preserved;
tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered.”

Update of 7 PM ET Sept. 14, 2020 —

A sequel to Creamy and Sweaty —

“Stop loading this page.” . . . “Too late.”

The New York Times  today on a Feb. 24 death —

"Mr. Tenney was released when Japan surrendered
in August 1945, days after America dropped atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki, a city across
the bay from the prison camp where he was held.
. . . .

Mr. Tenney recounted his wartime experiences in
a memoir, My Hitch in Hell , published in 1995."

Related material —

Zen ideal —

"… and Hell followed with him." 

Happy birthday to composer John Kander, who turns 89 today.

* See Noonan Weimar in this journal.

Two transitions from last Monday, Oct. 26, 2015,
according to the online New York Times  today —

Related remarks:

Posts tagged "Steam," the post "On Ice-Breaking" from Oct. 27,
the post "Expanding the Seagram Spielraum" from Oct. 26, and
a 2008 article on the subject of the obituary at right above.

"Integrity, Craftsmanship, Tradition"

Cool Mystery:

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

The above images are from a Log24 post of October 5, 2011.

Related material for fans of recreational math and Manil Suri —

A book that Amazon.com says was published on that same date —
October 5, 2011 —

Space, Time and Matter 

by Ashay Dharwadker (Author), Vinay Dharwadker  (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 98 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
                     Platform (October 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,605,448 in Books 

See as well …

Con Vocation  (Log24, Sept. 2, 2014).

Robin Williams and the Stages of Grief

A weblog post from Jan. 25, 2014 (click image to enlarge)—

Clues for a Mystery   (Click links for more details)—

Clue 1:  A June 11,* 2014, math death.

Clue 2:  The answer is a surname.

Midrash for Will Hunting:

See Nanavira Thera at Wikipedia and space notes from September 2012.

* According to a (perhaps inaccurate) math department.
June 10, according to other sources cited by the department.

A field in China —

The following link was suggested by today’s previous post
and by the ABC TV series “Resurrection” scheduled to start
at 9 PM ET Sunday, March 9, 2014 —

Field Dream

For Terry Gilliam

See also, from the the above uploading date, Taylor Made,
with its linked-to passage from a book by Charles Taylor.

For some more recent background, see

• "Fallen" in this journal,
•  the film by that name,
• Wednesday evening's execution in Virginia, and
• Wednesday afternoon's Treasure Hunt

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued)

Fact—

Sabol died yesterday.

Truth—

An art gallery in Oslo is exhibiting a tesseract.

Story—

The Jewel of Odin's Treasure Room

(Click to enlarge.)

* I.e., Wednesday. For some apt Nordic spirit,
   see Odin's Day 2012 Trailer.

Frogs:

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time."

— Freeman Dyson (See July 22, 2011)

A Rhetorical Question:

Robert Osserman in 2004—

"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….

Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"

A Rhetorical Answer:

Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"

Related material:

• "Decomposition" in this journal 
• "What is Truth (continued)," May 1, 2012
• The Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT)
• Remarks on SAT by Stanislav Busygin
• A related remark on complexity by Busygin
• Hashtag #sexyface and the Empty Chair

"High summer holds the earth." 

— James Agee, quoted in a post by University Diaries
linked to here on Thursday.

See also For Taylor and Country Strong.

* A phrase from the quoted Agee poem

The New York Times online front page last night—

"Microsoft introduced its own tablet computer,
called Surface, illustrating the pressure
Apple's success has put on it to marry
software and hardware more tightly."

Commentary—

Google Maps image

Related material—

"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
 erfassen und gestalten?"

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus  (1923)

Update of Feb. 3, 2013:
See also The Perception of Doors in this journal.

Six PM EDT is midnight in Paris.

Así Que Pasen Cinco Años

Theater review from The Guardian—

" 'Impossible' was how the Spanish playwright
Lorca described his own 1931 'legend of time
in three acts and five scenes,' which draws
strongly on the surrealist influences and experiments
of his close friends Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel."

Related material—

This afternoon's previous post Murió Fuentes  and,
from this date five years ago…

A Flag for Sunrise and Jerry Falwell Dies.

Peter Woit, phrase from a weblog post on October 25th, 2011—

"In possibly related news…."

For 779, see post 779 in this  weblog.

For 8974, see Hollywood Endings.

For 082, see page  82 of Culture and Value , ed. G.H. von Wright, tr. Peter Winch (Oxford 1980) (as quoted by M. Jamie Ferreira in "The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion," Religious Studies , Vol. 30, March 1994, pp. 29-44, reprinted in Wittgenstein Studies  (1997))—

Wittgenstein: “God’s essence is supposed to guarantee his existence— but what this really means is that what is here at issue is not the existence of something.”

For 0372, see page  372 in Essays of Three Decades , by Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947 ("Schopenhauer," 1938, pp. 372-410)—

THE PLEASURE we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the high and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life's manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.

Truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other. Each by itself, without the support given by the other, remains a very fluctuating value. Beauty that has not truth on its side and cannot have reference to it, does not live in it and through it, would be an empty chimera— and "What is truth?"

University Diaries  today—

"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."

This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .

Today's New York Lottery—

A quote suggested by the UD  post—

"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté  (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."

— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut

Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut  and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—

(Click images to enlarge.)

Cool Mystery:

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

As for the midday numbers—

For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).

For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.

The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group

by George M. Conwell, Annals of Mathematics ,
Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1967582

At least for now, this paper may be downloaded without
signing in or making a payment. Click the "View PDF" link.

Update of Sept. 13— From Library Journal  on Sept. 7—

The JSTOR journal archive announced today that it is making nearly 500,000 public domain journal articles from more than 220 journals—or about six percent of JSTOR's total content—freely available for use by "anyone, without registration and regardless of institutional affiliation."

The material, entitled Early Journal Content, will be rolled out in batches starting today over the course of one week. It includes content published in the United States before 1923 and international content published before 1870, which ensures that all the content is firmly in the public domain. JSTOR, in an announcement, said that the move was "a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options" to JSTOR content for independent scholars and others unaffiliated with universities.

Venus and Mars Realigned (continued from July 20) …

A review —

“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”

— The New York Times

A related Google image search yields more Cracker Jack prizes.

Today is Commencement Day at MIT.

Well, perhaps not quite nothing.

The above pictures were posted here on the day the following book was published—

The lives of the nine Jews in the above book amount to more than Yau's "nothing."

Note, however, that claims by Jews (see Jill Abramson yesterday) 
that their secular publications constitute a substitute for religion
and contain only "absolute truth" should be viewed with at least one
raised eyebrow.

Abramson's remark yesterday that her promotion to New York Times  executive editor
was like "ascending to Valhalla" had a religious flavor worthy of yesterday's
Feast of the Ascension.

In related news from yesterday's Times—

See also a symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"—

A minimalist 3×3 matrix favicon—

This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation.  See Jim Holt on physics.

From the Guardian  yesterday—

Sunday 15 May 2011 22.00 BST

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares
his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence

Escape from Kitsch Mountain

"Why you gotta be so mean?" — Taylor Swift (see last night)

This song includes, as part of the hook, the recurring phrase

"Someday I'll be livin' in a big ol' city."

From a big ol' city—

A Return to Kitsch Mountain

By AUSTIN CONSIDINE

Published in The New York Times  on January 16, 2009

As my girlfriend, Larissa, and I approached Gatlinburg, Tenn., this fall, I did my best to prepare her. She hadn’t been to Gatlinburg before, but I had. I understood the town’s complicated reputation both as a gateway to some of the most beautiful country in the United States— the Great Smoky Mountains National Park— and as a flamboyant capital of kitsch….

… It turned out that by 8 or 9 p.m., it was way too late to find a dinner show. The next morning, we had the opposite problem. By the time we woke up and wandered into Gatlinburg, it was noon. All the pancake houses were closed, and I was desolate. I had been thinking about those pancakes since the night before. So we did a little more sightseeing on foot.

Looking at Gatlinburg’s strip with adult eyes, I wondered how much self-awareness was at work there. It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines. In truth, I decided, it merely embraces that special brand of conscious kitsch that forms its own American kind of authenticity. With all its absurdities, Gatlinburg knows what it is and proclaims it loudly, from one flashing signboard to the next….

From Gatlinburg—

(Click to enlarge.)

A Story in Pictures

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9—

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

Now Lens—

Uncertified Copy—

Del Toro—

Plato's Diamond—

Portrait of an Artist—

Meanwhile, back at the Times—

For Tom Hanks

and Kristin Davis

__________________________________________

Interpretations

7/23/09 — Artistic Vision

7/21/09 — The Lotus

"And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light"

__________________________________________

Background

Sunday night, Tuesday morning and afternoon

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.

"It's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment
of the Talented in the scheme of things."
— Anne McCaffrey

From this journal on August 23,
a look at Resurrection Road  in M magazine—

Notes for an unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald—

"There is a place for a hint somewhere
  of a big agent to complete the picture."

See Susan Howe on Wallace Stevens and Henry Church.

"    … Only the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire."

— "The Owl in the Sarcophagus"

For one approach to such forms, see

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

(continued)

Art review by Holland Cotter in The New York Times this morning–

"Although Confucius initially escaped severe censure by Mao, in the early 1970s he became 'No. 1 hooligan,' the embodiment of the hated 'four olds' (old culture, old ideology, old customs and old habits), a symbol of ruling-class oppression."

For another hooligan fond of old customs, see yesterday's post and Sterling Hayden in "The Asphalt Jungle"–

Related material:

For Alyssa

From Google News this evening–

Now Showing- “Alice in Wonderland”

Red and Black – Michael Prochaska
Tim Burton receives praise for his imaginative constructions
(“Nightmare Before Christmas” was inspired by a dream),
but if you analyze his work on adaptations of classic
children-oriented escapism, whimsical surrealism bears
a ball and chain.

A serenade for Einstein's birthday–

Ball and Chain– Janis Joplin—

If you got it today you don't want it tomorrow, man,
'cause you don't need it, 'cause as a matter of fact,
as we discovered in the train,
tomorrow never happens, man.
It's all the same fucking day, man.

              Tell me about yourself, Linda.
              What do you want to know?
              Anything. I'd just like to know about you.
              Well, basically...
              Yes?
              ...I'm an actress.
              That's wonderful.
              I like drama. I study.
              Yes? Where's that?
              Paul DeLucca. Have you ever heard of him?
              Paul DeLucca? No, but then I wouldn't.
              He's really well-known. He's a genius.
              I'm sure.
              He says he thinks I'm going to make it big.
              I know you will.
              Maybe you've seen some of my movies.
              It's possible.
              Did you ever see The Enchanted Pussy?
              Not yet. But I... I... it's on my list.
              They're videotaped, so you could rent it.
              
              -- Mighty Aphrodite

                   See also Fish Story.

Detail from yesterday's post—

Surrealistic Alarm Clock

_________________________________________________________

THE SEQUEL:

"…and Surrealistic Pillow  became
a household name
in the house of rock ‘n’ roll."

— Denise Sullivan in Crawdaddy,
October 8, 2009

Related material:

"Which Dreamed It?"
— Title of final chapter,
Through the Looking Glass

"Go ask Alice…
I think she'll know."
— Grace Slick, 1967   

The Crawdaddy  date Oct. 8, 2009
leads to the Log24 post
Graphic Austerity.

Clicking on those words
  in that post will lead you to…
The Logic of Dreams.