For "sexy as well," read "stupid as hell."
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Tuesday, August 20, 2024
Bullshit Studies
From the above piece by Colby College professor Scott Taylor —
"… a metaphorical 'Rosetta stone' of analogies between
advanced versions of three basic mathematical objects:
numbers, polynomials and geometric spaces."
This is the same sort of contemptible dumbing-down discussed here in
a May 8, 2024 post. In fact, it links to the Quanta essay discussed in that post.
A rather different connection between the above "three basic
mathematical objects" —
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Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Bullshit Studies: “Projective Opera”
Meanwhile . . .
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Sunday, May 26, 2024
Bullshit Studies: Grounding the Problèmatique
For Candlebrow University:
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Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Bullshit Studies
The above phrase "interpellative assemblages" suggests . . .
See also this journal on the above Won Choi date —
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Friday, December 30, 2022
Bullshit Studies: The View from East Lansing
Detail of the above screen (click to enlarge) —
See also this journal on the above date — June 10, 2021.
From this journal on May 6, 2009 —
A related picture of images that "reappear metamorphosed
in the coordinate system of the high region" —
(For the backstory, see Geometry of the I Ching
and the history of Chinese philosophy.)
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Thursday, December 29, 2022
Bullshit Studies: “Foundations of Modern Consciousness”
The first Romantics
"How a close group of brilliant friends,
in a tiny German university town, laid
the foundations of modern consciousness"
— Headline for the article whose URL is . . .
https://aeon.co/essays/
english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania
The article was published by Aeon on December 20, 2022,
and is featured in today's Arts & Letters Daily . On the author:
"Andrea Wulf is a historian and the award-winning author
of several books, including the bestselling
The Invention of Nature (2015) and, most recently,
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and
the Invention of the Self (2022). She is a Miller Scholar
and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature."
Related material — "The Eight" According to Coleridge.
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Monday, December 12, 2022
Bullshit Studies
From Peter Woit's weblog today —
The New Yorker and the Publicity Stunt
Posted on December 12, 2022 by woit
The wormhole publicity stunt story just keeps going.
Today an article about the Google Santa Barbara lab
and quantum computer used in the publicity stunt
appeared in the New Yorker.
From The New Yorker itself —
See also a very different take from another New Yorker author —
(Cf. Log24, Plan 9 at Yale, Nov. 13, 2017).
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Friday, November 18, 2022
Bullshit Studies: Cohen on Kiefer
" La Ribaute is hard to classify. It is now controlled by
a foundation for which Kiefer chose the name 'Eschaton,'
meaning the final event in the divine plan, or the end of
the world. 'You can say it’s the end of the beginning,'
Kiefer said. 'Eschaton means that something comes after.'
So why, I asked, did he pick this name? 'Because it’s the
beginning.' "
I prefer T. S. Eliot on ends and beginnings, as well as
R. A. Wilson on the Eschaton.
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Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Bullshit Studies
Yesterday morning's post "First Step" quoted an essay by Michael Spitzer
published online in Aeon on October 18 —
https://aeon.co/essays/
can-music-give-you-an-orgasm-the-short-answer-is-yes .
A look at earlier essays in that publication reveals . . .
Related material — From a search for Wertheim in this journal —
“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
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Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Bullshit Studies: Plato vs. Peirce, or Cornerstone vs. Keystone
From a post of August 13, "The Divided Square" —
From a post of April 25, 2016, "Peirce's Accounts of the Universe" —
For the Peirce arrangement, see the imaginary film
reviewed in last night's post Packend! .
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Saturday, February 13, 2021
Bullshit Studies . . .
Background reading — Math’s Big Lies and, more generally, Mazur.
Related news for fans of Language Games —
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Saturday, August 8, 2020
Bullshit Studies
In memory of Wilford Brimley:
“The polymorphic Thing, capable of absorbing the human
as but one among other morphological possibilities in its
seemingly infinite repertoire, can be understood, that is,
as the embodiment of evolution.”
— Eric White, Science Fiction Studies #61 (Vol. 20, Part 3, Nov. 1993),
“The Erotics of Becoming: XENOGENESIS and The Thing“
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Friday, June 12, 2020
Bullshit Studies: “Hyperseeing”
In memoriam —
Friedman co-edited the ISAMA journal Hyperseeing . See also . . .
See too the other articles in Volume 40 of Kybernetes .
Related material —
Compare and contrast the discussion of the geometry
of the 4×4 square in the diamond theorem (1976) with
Nat Friedman’s treatment of the same topic in 2001 —
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Saturday, May 16, 2020
Bullshit Studies
From https://www.mathunion.org/outreach/logos/versions-all-logos —
Click the logo for some IMU history.
Related bullshit —
“Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action” —
Click the banner below for the background of the logo —
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Friday, May 1, 2020
Bullshit Studies
The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn (Bantam Books, 2014).
| “You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”
I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.” I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary. “If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.” That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing. |
My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (Cornell, 1970) —
“There is a point at which
‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’ “
The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”
Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:
See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.
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Friday, September 8, 2017
Bullshit Studies
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Sunday, May 28, 2017
Bullshit Studies
The previous post dealt with a symbol of an apparently
admirable "social development environment."
For a less admirable development environment, see a film
described in a July 2014 story from Film New Europe —
"Shooting started in Bucharest on 9 June 2014. . . ."
This journal on 8-9 June 2014 —
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Monday, April 10, 2017
Bullshit Studies Continued*
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Monday, March 6, 2017
Bullshit Studies
From The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 2, 2017 —
|
These days, in a world totally dependent on microprocessors, lasers, and nanotechnology, it has been estimated that 30 percent of the U.S. gross national product is based on inventions made possible by quantum mechanics. With the booming high-tech industry and the expected advent of quantum computers, this percentage will only grow. Within a hundred years, an esoteric theory of young physicists became a mainstay of the modern economy. It took nearly as long for Einstein’s own theory of relativity, first published in 1905, to be used in everyday life in an entirely unexpected way. The accuracy of the global positioning system, the space-based navigation system that provides location and time information in today’s mobile society, depends on reading time signals of orbiting satellites. The presence of Earth’s gravitational field and the movement of these satellites cause clocks to speed up and slow down, shifting them by 38 milliseconds a day. In one day, without Einstein’s theory, our GPS tracking devices would be inaccurate by about seven miles. — Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton |
The above paragraphs are clearly propaganda, not physics.
For "It has been estimated," see …
The "without Einstein 's theory" statement may or may not be correct.
See the lengthy discussion at …
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1061/
why-does-gps-depend-on-relativity .
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Thursday, February 23, 2017
Bullshit Studies
" The origin of new ways of doing things may often be
a disciplinary crisis. The definition of such a crisis
provided by Barry Mazur in Mykonos (2005) applies
equally well to literary creation. '[A crisis occurs] when
some established overarching framework, theoretical
vocabulary or procedure of thought is perceived as
inadequate in an essential way, or not meaning
what we think it means.' "
— Circles Disturbed :
The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative
Edited by Apostolos Doxiadis & Barry Mazur
Princeton University Press, 2012. See
Chapter 14, Section 5.1, by Uri Margolin.
See also "overarching" in this journal.
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Thursday, November 17, 2016
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Bullshit Studies
"The allusion to 'the most precious square of sense' shows
Shakespeare doing an almost scholastic demonstration of
the need for a ratio and interplay among the senses as
the very constitution of rationality."
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy ,
University of Toronto Press, 1962, page 13
"What Shakespeare refers to in Lear as the 'precious
square of sense' probably has reference to the traditional
'square of opposition' in logic and to that four-part analogy
of proportionality which is the interplay of sense and reason."
— McLuhan, ibid. , page 241
This is of course nonsense, and, in view of McLuhan's pose
as a defender of the Catholic faith, damned nonsense.
Epigraph by McLuhan —
"The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field
approach to its problems."
I prefer a different "mosaic or field" related to the movable
blocks of Fröbel, not the movable type of Gutenberg.
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Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Bullshit Studies
The originator of the phrase 'Fab Four' reportedly
died at 80 on Saturday, May 14, 2016.
This suggests a review of another noted four-set.
The above image is from a study of Lévi-Strauss's "Canonical Formula" …
Midrash —
[Above photo of Lévi-Strauss and formula added June 6, 2016.]
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Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Bullshit Studies
The essay excerpted in last night's post on structuralism
is of value as part of a sustained attack by the late
Robert de Marrais on the damned nonsense of the late
French literary theorist Jacques Derrida—
Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets:
Deploying the Glass Bead Game
Part I: Ministrations Concerning Silliness, or:
Is “Interdisciplinary Thought” an Oxymoron?
Part II: Canonical Collage-oscopes, or:
Claude in Jacques’ Trap? Not What It Sounds Like!
Part III: Grooving on the Sly with Klein Groups
Part IV: Claude’s Kaleidoscope . . . and Carl’s
Part V: Spelling the Tree, from Aleph to Tav
(While Not Forgetting to Shin)
The response of de Marrais to Derrida's oeuvre nicely
exemplifies the maxim of Norman Mailer that
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Mage Studies: Art vs. Bullshit
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Wednesday, July 26, 2023
One for the Kaku’s Nest
Related material
from Log24 on July 20 —
Remarks by Kai Bird, co-author
of the biography behind the July 21
film "Oppenheimer" . . .
Wormhole Science: The Kaku’s Nest
Filed under: General — Tags: Bullshit Studies — m759 @ 9:29 AM
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Saturday, October 1, 2022
Mexican Beach Bum Glam
Also on the above Berlin date —
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
|
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Sunday, July 30, 2017
Sunday School:
Bullshit Studies Continued
The remarks by Mikhail Gromov on neuroscience in his papers
cited in the previous post suggest some related remarks —
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Friday, October 7, 2016
Paz
The Paz quote below is from the last chapter
of his book, titled "The Dialectic of Solitude."
The phrase "dialectic of solitude" has been applied also to a 1967
book by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez:
|
The conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude , "He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations. Only then did he discover that Amaranta Úrsula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." |
Update of Saturday, October 8:
I do not recommend taking very seriously the work of Latin American leftists
(or American academics) who like to use the word "dialectic."
A related phrase does, however, have a certain mystic or poetic charm,
as pointed out by Wikipedia —
"Unity of opposites is the central category of dialectics,
and it is viewed sometimes as a metaphysical concept,
a philosophical concept or a scientific concept."
See also Bullshit Studies.
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Saturday, August 27, 2016
Folk Notation
See the Chautauqua Season post of June 25
and a search for Notation in this journal.
See as well the previous post and Bullshit Studies .
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Monday, June 6, 2016
Intellect Limited
Explorations in Media Ecology
Volume 12 Numbers 3 & 4
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article.
For some background, see Bullshit Studies.
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