Log24

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Blockheads…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:43 pm

Continues.

"Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

— Wallace Stevens

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Blockheads

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:35 am

(Continued)

Cartoon from the current (Sept. 7, 2015) New Yorker , p. 25 —

See as well searches in this journal for Montessori and Machiavelli.

Midrash from Sept. 3 at the online New Yorker

"We don’t instinctively care about the brand unity
Google wants to achieve with its new mega-company,
Alphabet, of which it is now a part. Especially because
Alphabet takes our most elementally wonderful
general-use word—the name of the components of
language itself—and reassigns it, like the words tweet,
twitter, vine, facebook, friend, and so on, into a branded
realm. In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us,
Alphabet is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks.
Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."

— Sarah Larson

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Blockheads continues

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

For Little Man Tate —

Related material — Wechsler in this journal.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Blockheads

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am

(Continued)

For Magnolia:

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Blockheads

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(Continued)

"It should be emphasized that block models are physical models, the elements of which can be physically manipulated. Their manipulation differs in obvious and fundamental ways from the manipulation of symbols in formal axiomatic systems and in mathematics. For example the transformations described above, in which two linear arrays are joined together to form one array, or a rectangle of blocks is re-assembled into a linear array, are physical transformations not symbolic transformations. …"

— Storrs McCall, Department of Philosophy, McGill University, "The Consistency of Arithmetic"

"It should be emphasized…."

OK:

Storrs McCall at a 2008 philosophy conference .

His blocks talk was at 2:50 PM July 21, 2008.
See also this journal at noon that same day:

Froebel's Third Gift and the Eightfold Cube

Froebel's Third Gift: A cube made up of eight subcubes

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Blockheads

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 pm

(Continued from earlier posts.)

http://www.log24.com/log11/saved/111203-BigApple_WithWorm-360w.jpg

See the online New York Times  on November 27—

With Blocks, Educators Go Back to Basics

— and related letters, online today—

The Building Blocks of Education

Another back-to-basics illustration—

http://www.log24.com/log11/saved/111203-SnakeApple.jpg

"Design is how it works."
— Steve Jobs

See also the designer of the above Big  apple

“I’m fascinated with how past designers
had to come up with ideas
and solve problems using limited resources.”

Mikey Burton

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Compare and Contrast

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:05 pm

From Log24 last summer . . .

Defense Against the Dark Arts

From Log24 yesterday:

Catchup for Blockheads . . . Da Capo

Related material: Posts tagged Metadata.

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

A Critic’s Part

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:28 pm

Defense Against the Dark Arts

https://monoskop.org/images/2/28/Dyer-Witheford_Nick_Cyber-Marx_Cycles_and_Circuits_of_Struggle_in_High_Technology_Capitalism.pdf

Catchup for Blockheads . . . Da Capo

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

In Search of Hauora

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:54 pm

Compare and contrast with —

Wechsler blocks (illustrating the 'Blockheads' theme)

WAIS blocks

IZZI puzzle
IZZI puzzle

Michael Douglas in 'The Game'

Sondheim: 'Putting It Together'

Related material:  Bochner and Carnegie-Mellon.

Alfred Bester fans may also enjoy more
damned confusion from Dan Brown —

(Not to be confused with Gully Foyle .)

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Interconnecting the Meaning Fragments

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:01 pm

"Meaning fragments" is a phrase from the previous post.

See Wechsler in this journal.

Wechsler blocks (illustrating the 'Blockheads' theme)

Related material —

"the liberation of the plastic elements."

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Hell-Dunkel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

http://www.martin-missfeldt.de/kontrast/hell-dunkel-kontrast.php
 

Related material:

Montessori vs. Machivavelli 

http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/A-group-holding-a-flag-that-says-
Machiavelli-School-spies-on-a-Montessori-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints
_i13739885_.htm

and Montessori Oberösterreich .

Saturday, April 18, 2015

The Acme Corporation Presents…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:45 am

Kyle Smith on April 15 in the New York Post —

"The ludicrous action thriller 'Beyond the Reach'
fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency
of 'No Country for Old Men,' but there’s no denying
it brings to mind another Southwestern classic
about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons."

Related material: 

  1. Legespiel  Meets Würfelspiel  in…
    Gift of the Third Kind
    (April 7, 2007), featuring Ellen Yi-Luen Do —

    Reinventing Froebel's Gifts

  2. the current home page of Ellen Yi-Luen Do,
    now at Georgia Tech, and…
  3. a page about her ACME Lab —

Welcome to ACME lab!
A Creativity Machine Environment!
aka ACME Creativity Machine Environment –
ACME Lab

Yes, the name is both confusing and has
many meanings. We like the acronym of ACME,
since it means the highest point, and also refers to
the fictional company in Looney Tunes, which is
A Company that Makes Everything!

We call it ACME Creativity Machine Environment –
yes, the acronym of this is ACME.

We like recursive ideas.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Mathematics for Jews*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

Headline at the Toronto Star  on Friday, March 27, 2015:

Robert Langlands: The Canadian
who reinvented mathematics

“He’s like a modern-day Einstein.”

Apparently, unlike God, Langlands würfelt .

* See also Blockheads  in this journal.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Old Jew

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:25 pm

See also Blockheads (esp. today’s 2 PM post) and
That old Jew gave me this here.”

IMAGE- 'A Flag for Sunrise,' by Robert Stone, p. 373

Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Uploading

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:01 pm

(Continued)

"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs

From a commercial test-prep firm in New York City—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111231-TeachingBlockDesign.jpg

From the date of the above uploading—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110708-ClarkeSm.jpg

After 759

m759 @ 8:48 AM
 

Childhood's End

From a New Year's Day, 2012, weblog post in New Zealand

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111231-Pyramid-759.jpg

From Arthur C. Clarke, an early version of his 2001  monolith

"So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered
throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the
promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been
patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.
Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set…."

The numerical  (not crystal) pyramid above is related to a sort of
mathematical  block design known as a Steiner system.

For its relationship to the graphic  block design shown above,
see the webpages Block Designs and The Diamond Theorem
as well as The Galois Tesseract and R. T. Curtis's classic paper
"A New Combinatorial Approach to M24," which contains the following
version of the above numerical pyramid—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111231-LeechTable.jpg

For graphic  block designs, I prefer the blocks (and the parents)
of Grand Rapids to those of New York City.

For the barbed tail  of Clarke's "Angel" story, see the New Zealand post
of New Year's Day mentioned above.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Magical Realism Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110728-RogerCohen-MagicalRealism.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110727-ProtoZone-Quilters500w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110727-LICM-QuiltMaker500w.jpg

The magical part— Synchronicity—

See Roger Cohen in this journal on January 15, 2009 and, on the
same date, Jesse Jarnow on Bob Dylan in  The Jewish Daily Forward .

The realism part— Cohen's "smart power" and IQ tests involving pattern blocks.

The above quilt pattern software (both versions) is by Jarnow's father Al.
For a realistic approach to such patterns, see Blockheads in this journal.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Kulturkampf

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Kulturkampf,  (German: “culture struggle”), the bitter struggle
(c. 1871–87) on the part of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck
to subject the Roman Catholic church to state controls.

Kulturkampf at The New York Times

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110401-Kulturkampf.jpg

"Bismarck: 13 blocks short of a design."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110401-BismarckBlocks500w.jpg

Mathematics Awareness Month

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

April is Mathematics Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "Unraveling Complex Systems."

From Log24 during Women's History Month 2006—

March 3

Images related to the film "Proof"

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060117-Globe.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Some friends of mine
 are in this band….

In related education news—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110402-PaltrowGlee.jpg

Some other material related to women (quilt patterns) and mathematics—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110401-Kohs500w.jpg

Click for higher quality.

For those who prefer drama from a more masculine point of view—

A film released on the above date— March 3, 2006—

16 Blocks.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110401-16BlocksWillis.jpg

A midrash for Paltrow—

The last New York Lottery number
of Women's History Month 2011 was 146.

"…every answer involves as much of history
and mythology as Joyce can cram into
remarks which are ostensibly about
popular entertainment…."

James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake:
A Study of Literary Allusions
in James Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE
,
Southern Illinois University Press,
Carbondale and Edwardsville
(1959. Arcturus Books Edition 1974), p. 146.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Absolute Ambition

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

"It's my absolute ambition that you are touched to the core of your being with the content…."

— Julie Taymor on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  (Playbill video, undated)

Another ambitious comic-book promotion —

"What Logicomix  does that few works in any medium do is to make intellectual passion palpable. That is its greatest strength. And it’s here that its form becomes its substance."

— Judith Roitman, review (pdf, 3.7 MB) of Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth , in …

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101119-AMSnoticesSm.jpg

 The December 2010 AMS Notices  cover has excerpts from Logicomix.

Related material:

"In the classical grammarians’ sense of the power of form over 'content' and style over 'substance,' he originated the phrase, 'the medium is the message.'"

— Joseph P. Duggan on Marshall McLuhan at The University Bookman

See also, in this  journal, The Medium is the Message, Wechsler, and Blockheads .

Monday, June 7, 2010

Inspirational Combinatorics

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

According to the Mathematical Association of America this morning, one purpose of the upcoming June/July issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society  is

"…to stress the inspirational role of combinatorics…."

Here is another contribution along those lines—

Eidetic Variation

from page 244 of
From Combinatorics to Philosophy: The Legacy of  G.-C. Rota,
hardcover, published by Springer on August 4, 2009

(Edited by Ernesto Damiani, Ottavio D'Antona, Vincenzo Marra, and Fabrizio Palombi)

"Rota's Philosophical Insights," by Massimo Mugnai—

"… In other words, 'objectivism' is the attitude [that tries] to render a particular aspect absolute and dominant over the others; it is a kind of narrow-mindedness attempting to reduce to only one the multiple layers which constitute what we call 'reality.' According to Rota, this narrow-mindedness limits in an essential way even of [sic ] the most basic facts of our cognitive activity, as, for example, the understanding of a simple declarative sentence: 'So objectivism is the error we [make when we] persist in believing that we can understand what a declarative sentence means without a possible thematization of this declarative sentence in one of [an] endless variety of possible contexts' (Rota, 1991*, p. 155). Rota here implicitly refers to what, amongst phenomenologists is known as eidetic variation, i.e. the change of perspective, imposed by experience or performed voluntarily, from which to look at things, facts or sentences of the world. A typical example, proposed by Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit  (1927) and repeated many times by Rota, is that of the hammer."

* Rota, G.-C. (1991), The End of Objectivity: The Legacy of Phenomenology. Lectures at MIT, Cambridge, MA, MIT Mathematics Department

The example of the hammer appears also on yesterday's online New York Times  front page—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100606-Touchstones.jpg

Related material:

From The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

Eidetic variation — an alternative expression for eidetic reduction

Eidetic reduction

Husserl's term for an intuitive act toward an essence or universal, in contrast to an empirical intuition or perception. He also called this act an essential intuition, eidetic intuition, or eidetic variation. In Greek, eideo  means “to see” and what is seen is an eidos  (Platonic Form), that is, the common characteristic of a number of entities or regularities in experience. For Plato, eidos  means what is seen by the eye of the soul and is identical with essence. Husserl also called this act “ideation,” for ideo  is synonymous with eideo  and also means “to see” in Greek. Correspondingly, idea  is identical to eidos.

An example of eidos— Plato's diamond (from the Meno )—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100607-PlatoDiamond.gif

For examples of variation of this eidos, see the diamond theorem.
See also Blockheads (8/22/08).

Related poetic remarks— The Trials of Device.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Saturday October 3, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:31 am

Missing Pieces: 'Build It' art by Cullinane and Bochner

Related material:

Frame Tales, as well as
The Sacred Day of Kali,
this morning's
New York Times obituaries,
and
Mental Health Month, 2003:

Wechsler blocks (illustrating the 'Blockheads' theme)

WAIS blocks

IZZI puzzle
IZZI puzzle

Michael Douglas in 'The Game'

Sondheim: 'Putting It Together'

Monday, June 29, 2009

Monday June 29, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:29 pm
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter’s Day

Have your people
  call my people.
— George Carlin 


Diamond life, lover boy;
we move in space
with minimum waste
 and maximum joy.

— Sade, quoted here on
 Lincoln’s Birthday, 2003

This is perhaps suitable
for the soundtrack of
the film “Blockheads
  (currently in development)–

Kohs Block Design Test


Diamond Life

Related material from Wikipedia:

“Uta Frith, in her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma,[5] addresses the superior performance of autistic individuals on the block design [link not in Wikipedia] test. This was also addressed in [an] earlier paper.[6] A particularly interesting article demonstrates the differences in construction time in the performance of the block design task by Asperger syndrome individuals and non-Asperger’s individuals. An essential point here is that in an unsegmented version of the task, Asperger’s individuals performed dramatically faster than non-Asperger’s individuals: [7].”

5. Frith, Uta (2003). Autism: explaining the enigma (2nd ed. ). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Pub. ISBN 0-631-22901-9.

6. Shah A, Frith U (Nov 1993). “Why do autistic individuals show superior performance on the block design task?”. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 34 (8): 1351–64. PMID 8294523. 

7. Caron MJ, Mottron L, Berthiaume C, Dawson M (Jul 2006). “Cognitive mechanisms, specificity and neural underpinnings of visuospatial peaks in autism”. Brain 129 (Pt 7): 1789–802. doi:10.1093/brain/awl072. PMID 16597652. “Fig 3”.

Lover Boy

Related material from a film (see Calvinist Epiphany, June 17):

Still from the film 'Adam'-- Adam looking at photo

Related material from another film:

Monty Python - Bright Side of Life

For the relevance of this maxim to autism, see Markoff Process (March 4, 2009).

Friday, August 22, 2008

Friday August 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:01 am

Tentative movie title:
Blockheads

Kohs Block Design Test

The Kohs Block Design
Intelligence Test

Samuel Calmin Kohs, the designer (but not the originator) of the above intelligence test, would likely disapprove of the "Aryan Youth types" mentioned in passing by a film reviewer in today's New York Times. (See below.) The Aryan Youth would also likely disapprove of Dr. Kohs.

Related material from
Notes on Finite Geometry:

Kohs Block Design figure illustrating the four-color decomposition theorem

Other related material:

1.  Wechsler Cubes (intelligence testing cubes derived from the Kohs cubes shown above). See…

Harvard psychiatry and…
The Montessori Method;
The Crimson Passion;
The Lottery Covenant.

2.  Wechsler Cubes of a different sort (Log24, May 25, 2008)

3.  Manohla Dargis in today's New York Times:

"… 'Momma’s Man' is a touchingly true film, part weepie, part comedy, about the agonies of navigating that slippery slope called adulthood. It was written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, a native New Yorker who has set his modestly scaled movie with a heart the size of the Ritz in the same downtown warren where he was raised. Being a child of the avant-garde as well as an A student, he cast his parents, the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and the artist Flo Jacobs, as the puzzled progenitors of his centerpiece, a wayward son of bohemia….

In American movies, growing up tends to be a job for either Aryan Youth types or the oddballs and outsiders…."

4.  The bohemian who named his son Azazel:

"… I think that the deeper opportunity, the greater opportunity film can offer us is as an exercise of the mind. But an exercise, I hate to use the word, I won't say 'soul,' I won't say 'soul' and I won't say 'spirit,' but that it can really put our deepest psychological existence through stuff. It can be a powerful exercise. It can make us think, but I don't mean think about this and think about that. The very, very process of powerful thinking, in a way that it can afford, is I think very, very valuable. I basically think that the mind is not complete yet, that we are working on creating the mind. Okay. And that the higher function of art for me is its contribution to the making of mind."

Interview with Ken Jacobs, UC Berkeley, October 1999

5.  For Dargis's "Aryan Youth types"–

From a Manohla Dargis
New York Times film review
of April 4, 2007
   (Spy Wednesday) —

Scene from Paul Verhoeven's film 'Black Book'

See also, from August 1, 2008
(anniversary of Hitler's
opening the 1936 Olympics) —

For Sarah Silverman

and the 9/9/03 entry 

Olympic Style.

Doonesbury,
August 21-22, 2008:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/080821-22-db16color.gif
 

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Saturday April 7, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:25 pm
Today's birthdays:
Francis Ford Coppola
and Russell Crowe

Gift of the Third Kind
 

Background:
Art Wars and
Russell Crowe as
Santa's Helper
.

From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:

Froebel's Third Gift

From Christmas 2005:

The Eightfold Cube

Related material from
Pittsburgh:

Reinventing Froebel's Gifts

… and from Grand Rapids:

Color Cubes

Click on pictures for details.

Related material
for Holy Saturday:

Harrowing,
"Hey, Big Spender,"
and
Santa Versus the Volcano.

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