Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Outside the Box*
Lee Marvin in the 1983 film Gorky Park
For related material, see yesterday's post on Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy and a May 27, 2010, post— Masks .
The link to the Masks post was suggested by four things:
- Tonight's Tony Awards
- A speech dated May 27, 2010 (the Masks date)—
"Russia— Getting It Right the First Time" - The name of the organization on whose website
the speech appears— Tertium Datur - Tertium Datur in this journal—
* The title is in memory of business writer Mike Hammer.
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Monday, February 26, 2024
Design School for Harvard: Tri.be
The name TRI.BE of the musical group in
the previous post suggests the URL https://tri.be
of the design firm Modern Tribe . . .
The above Tri.be color palette suggests a review of
the phrase "Color Box" in this journal, and an image:
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Monday, May 23, 2005
Monday May 23, 2005
From the J. Paul Getty Trust:
"I've recently had it brought to my attention that the current accepted primary colors are magenta, cyan, and yellow. I teach elementary art and I'm wondering if I really need to point out that fact or if I should continue referring to the primary colors the way I always have — red, yellow, and blue! Anyone have an opinion?"
Color vs. Pigment
("CMYK" at Whatis.com):
("CMYK" at Whatis.com):
"There is a fundamental difference between color and pigment. Color represents energy radiated…. Pigments, as opposed to colors, represent energy that is not absorbed…."
Illustrations from
Color Box Applet:
Color Box Applet:
Another good background page
for elementary color education:Colored Shadow Explorations.A good starting point for
non-elementary education:
for elementary color education:Colored Shadow Explorations.A good starting point for
non-elementary education:
The "Color" category in Wikipedia.Further background:
From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
|
From Bester's The Deceivers (1981):
He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk's cell,
p a t t e r n s |
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024
“Show Me All Your Sources”
— Adapted from Leo DiCaprio
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— Adapted from Leo DiCaprio
— Adapted from Leo DiCaprio
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Hurly Burly: Code for Something
|
https://subslikescript.com/movie/Hurlyburly-119336 — So what do you want to do?
You want to go to your place, You want to go to a sex motel? They got waterbeds.
They got porn I'm hungry. You want a Jack-in-the-Box? I love Jack-in-the-Box. Is that code for something? What? What? Is what code for what? I don't know. I don't know the goddamn code! |
The Didion Logo:
“Looking carefully at Golay’s code
is like staring into the sun.”
See as well a discussion of
Meta's new (2023) Threads logo,
illustrated below.
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Monday, December 18, 2023
AI Class
|
Bringing Up Bing : A Tutorial for Bing on Monday, December 18, 2023 Prompt: How is the Cullinane Diamond Theorem related to the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator?
Response: Searching for: Generating answers for you… The Cullinane Diamond Theorem and the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) are both mathematical concepts that are deeply intertwined with finite projective geometry1,2. The Cullinane Diamond Theorem explains the surprising symmetry properties of some simple graphic designs and underlies the structure of the 35 square patterns in R. T. Curtis’s MOG1,2. The theorem uses a 4×4 array of two-color diagonally-divided square tiles, and considers the group of permutations of these 16 tiles generated by mixing random permutations of rows, columns, and the four 2×2 quadrants1,2. The theorem states that every image of the 4×4 array has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry1,2. The 35 structures of the 840 images of the 4×4 array are isomorphic to the 35 lines in the 3-dimensional projective space over GF(2), a finite field with two elements1,2. This can be seen by viewing the 35 structures as three-sets of line diagrams, based on the three partitions of the four-set of square two-color tiles into two two-sets1,2. The MOG is a 4×6 array of combinations describing any point in 24-dimensional space1. It preserves all of the symmetries and maximal subgroups of the Mathieu group M241. The MOG is used in the construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24), and hence is also related to the Leech lattice2. In summary, the Cullinane Diamond Theorem provides a geometric explanation for the structure and symmetries of the patterns in the MOG1,2. Both theorems are connected through their use of finite projective geometry and their applications to the study of symmetry1,2. Learn more Reply to Bing's Response — Actually, the Cullinane diamond theorem, by itself, does NOT explain the patterns in the MOG. The MOG is a natural correspondence, or pairing, of the 35 diamond-theorem structures with the 35 partitions of an eight-element set into two four-element sets. That correspondence is explained in a 1910 paper by G. M. Conwell, "The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group." The Conwell correspondence was later found to be invariant under the action of the large Mathieu group on a set of 24=16+8 elements. Response to the Above Reply — Generating answers for you… Thank you for the clarification. You’re correct that the Cullinane Diamond Theorem, by itself, does not explain the patterns in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG). The MOG is indeed a natural correspondence of the 35 structures from the Diamond Theorem with the 35 partitions of an eight-element set into two four-element sets. This correspondence was explained by G. M. Conwell in his 1910 paper “The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group.” The Conwell correspondence was later found to be invariant under the action of the large Mathieu group on a set of 24 elements, which can be partitioned into a set of 16 and a set of 8. I appreciate your input and the opportunity to learn from it. If you have any more questions or need further clarification, feel free to ask!
|
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Saturday, June 3, 2023
Space Drama
"It seems fitting that a handsome, professional and future-minded
space drama in fine color, like 'Marooned,' should open a new
jewel box of a theater, the Ziegfeld."
— Howard Thompson in The New York Times , Dec. 19, 1969
A related film tells of a real-life April 1970 sequel
to the 1969 film "Marooned."
Then there is my own "jewel box" picture with three horses . . .
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Monday, July 11, 2022
Forevermore
From a New York Times obituary today —
By Robert D. McFadden
Francis X. Clines, a reporter, columnist and foreign correspondent
for The New York Times whose commentaries on the news and
lyrical profiles of ordinary New Yorkers were widely admired as a
stylish, literary form of journalism, died on Sunday at his home in
Manhattan. He was 84.
. . . .
As a national correspondent … he tracked political campaigns
and the Washington scene, taking occasional trips through the
hills and hollows of Appalachia to write of a largely hidden
Other America.
. . . .
From an Editorial Notebook piece by Clines in 2010 —
|
The sound of that student’s holler tale remains — how to say? — precious or cool or awesome, worthy of preserving. A good phrase was offered by Kathy Williams, the teacher who invited Dr. Hazen to deal with her students’ inferiority complex. She quoted her 93-year-old grandmother’s version of “cool!” “Grandma Glenna always says, ‘Forever more !’ ” “Forever more !” she shouted, offering the youngsters something old that sounded new. "A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 23, 2010, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Say It Loud." |
From Piligrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson
(a 1961 collection, published by Doubleday, of earlier stories) —
But all things have to end, and I sat one May afternoon, staring into my top desk drawer, the last to be cleaned out, wondering what to do with the accumulation of useless things in it. But I wasn’t really seeing the contents of the drawer, I was concentrating on the great weary emptiness that pressed my shoulders down and weighted my mind. “It’s not fair,” I muttered aloud and illogically, "to show me Heaven and then snatch it away.” “That’s about what happened to Moses, too, you know.” My surprised start spilled an assortment of paper clips and thumb tacks from the battered box I had just picked up. “Well forevermore!” I said, righting the box. "Dr. Curtis! What are you doing here?” "Returning to the scene of my crime,” he smiled, coming through the open door. |
This is from Henderson's "Pottage," a story first published in 1955.
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Monday, May 10, 2021
For a Quicker Picker-Upper
“The following is an excerpt from Joshua Cohen’s
new novel, The Netanyahus, out next week
in the UK from Fitzcarraldo Editions, and on June 22
in the US from New York Review Books.”
— https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/
online-only/an-american-historian/
” After half a century in the professorate,
I was recently retired from my post as the
Andrew William Mellon Memorial Professor
of American Economic History at Corbin University
in Corbindale, New York, in the occasionally rural,
occasionally wild heart of Chautauqua County,
just inland from Lake Erie among the apple orchards
and apiaries and dairies—or, as dismissive, geographically
illiterate New York City–folk insist on calling it, ‘Upstate.’ ”
For some background on the source, see Wikipedia
on Joshua Cohen and on n+1 magazine.
A related search result:
Though the n+1 piece was published April 27, I have only now noticed it.
Perhaps some quicker picker-upper in Chautauqua County has already
written about the novel’s local color.
A post from this journal on that date, April 27, was related to my own
non-fictional college experience in Fredonia, NY (Chautauqua County) —
Tuesday, April 27, 2021 —New Site
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Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Ink
From this journal on Nov. 9-12, 2004:
|
Fade to Black “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi “‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.” — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital  Ad Reinhardt An Ad Reinhardt painting described in the entry of
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960-66. The viewer may need to tilt the screen to see that “The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross.  Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.” — “Grids,” by Rosalind Krauss, |
Related material from The New York Times today —
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Thursday, May 14, 2020
For Mask Aficionados
|
Saturday, September 17, 2016
|
For those who prefer comedy —
Other toys: Archimedes at Hiroshima and related posts.
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Thursday, May 30, 2019
Stiff
"The stiffest material around is diamond.
The strength and lightness of a material
depends on the number and strength of
the bonds that hold its atoms together,
and on the lightness of the atoms.
The element that best fits both criteria
is carbon, which is lightweight and forms
stronger bonds than any other atom.
The carbon-carbon bond is especially
strong; each carbon atom can bond to
four neighboring atoms. In diamond,
then, a dense network of strong bonds
creates a strong, light, and stiff material.
Indeed, just as we named the Stone Age,
the Bronze Age, and the Steel Age after
the materials that humans could make,
we might call the new technological epoch
we are entering the Diamond Age."
[Link added.]
— "It's a Small, Small, Small, Small World,"
by Ralph C. Merkle,
MIT Technology Review , Feb./Mar. 1997
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Monday, August 6, 2018
The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes
|
“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!” • • •
Barry, Max. Lexicon: A Novel (pp. 247-248). |
Related material from Log24 on All Hallows' Eve 2013 —
"Just another shake of the kaleidoscope" —
Related material:
Kaleidoscope Puzzle,
Design Cube 2x2x2, and
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity.
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Sunday, July 15, 2018
Jewish Oases
"… Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the Juilliard String Quartet,
and the Strand Book Store remained oases
for cultural and intellectual stimulation."
— John S. Friedman in The Forward , Jan. 21, 2018
Read more:
https://forward.com/culture/392483/
how-fred-bass-dan-talbot-robert-mann
-shaped-new-york-culture/
From the Oasis in Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One" (2018) —
I prefer, from a Log24 search for Flux Capacitor …
From "Raiders of the Lost Images" —
"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."
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Friday, December 8, 2017
Logos (Continued)
"Denn die Welt braucht ewig die Wahrheit,
also braucht sie ewig Heraklit:
obschon er ihrer nicht bedarf.
Was geht ihn sein Ruhm an?
Der Ruhm bei »immer fortfließenden Sterblichen!«,
wie er höhnisch ausruft.
Sein Ruhm geht die Menschen etwas an, nicht ihn,
die Unsterblichkeit der Menschheit braucht ihn,
nicht er die Unsterblichkeit des Menschen Heraklit.
Das, was er schaute, die Lehre vom Gesetz im Werden
und vom Spiel in der Notwendigkeit , muß von jetzt
ab ewig geschaut werden: er hat von diesem größten
Schauspiel den Vorhang aufgezogen."
Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —
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Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Notes towards a Dark Tower*
Or: Shema, SXSW
|
The doors open slowly. I step into a hangar. From the rafters high above, lights blaze down, illuminating a twelve-foot cube the color of gunmetal. My pulse rate kicks up. I can’t believe what I’m looking at. Leighton must sense my awe, because he says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” It is exquisitely beautiful. At first, I think the hum inside the hangar is coming from the lights, but it can’t be. It’s so deep I can feel it at the base of my spine, like the ultralow-frequency vibration of a massive engine. I drift toward the box, mesmerized.
— Crouch, Blake. Dark Matter: A Novel |
Related reading —
"Do you know there is a deliberate sinister conspiracy at work?"
"No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it."
A few bars —
* Not the Dark Tower of Stephen King, but that of the
University of Texas at Austin, back in time 50 years and a day.
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Monday, August 1, 2016
Cube
From this journal —
See (for instance) Sacred Order, July 18, 2006 —
From a novel published July 26, 2016, and reviewed
in yesterday's (print) New York Times Book Review —
|
The doors open slowly. I step into a hangar. From the rafters high above, lights blaze down, illuminating a twelve-foot cube the color of gunmetal. My pulse rate kicks up. I can’t believe what I’m looking at. Leighton must sense my awe, because he says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” It is exquisitely beautiful. At first, I think the hum inside the hangar is coming from the lights, but it can’t be. It’s so deep I can feel it at the base of my spine, like the ultralow-frequency vibration of a massive engine. I drift toward the box, mesmerized.
— Crouch, Blake. Dark Matter: A Novel |
See also Log24 on the publication date of Dark Matter .
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Saturday, May 14, 2016
The Hourglass Code
A version of the I Ching’s Hexagram 19:
From Katherine Neville's The Eight , a book on the significance
of the date April 4 — the author's birthday —
|
The Eight by Katherine Neville —
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?” |
Related material: Posts now tagged Hourglass Code.
See also the hourglass in a search for Pilgrim's Progress Illustration.
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Sunday, August 9, 2015
Knell
From a French dictionary —
|
Tintement lent, sur une seule note,
d’une cloche d’église pour annoncer l’agonie, la mort ou les obsèques de quelqu’un. |
” I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell. “
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Saturday, August 8, 2015
Seing
From a French dictionary —
|
A. − HIST. Signe de croix, marque ou signature apposé(e)
au bas d'une lettre, d'un document, par celui qui veut attester la validité, l'authenticité de son contenu. |
From Glas , by Jacques Derrida —
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Saturday, July 25, 2015
Strange Loop
From an explanation of the Web app IFTTT —
"IF This Then That" —
"If you are a programmer you can think of it as a loop*
that checks for a certain condition… to run one or
multiple actions if the condition is met."
After Completion (from Friday night, and 1989) —
Advertisement —
"On February 19, 2015, IFTTT renamed
their original application to IF…."
From Tuesday's post on the death of E. L. Doctorow —
“…right through hell
there is a path…”
— Malcolm Lowry
* More precisely, a conditional or conditional loop .
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Thursday, July 2, 2015
Running from Crazy
The title is that of a film which, according to Wikipedia,
"was promoted on the Oprah Winfrey Network, which
had the television premiere of the film on April 27, 2014."
See also this journal on that date.
Trailer for "Welcome to Me" published on Feb. 23, 2015 —
Related material: Manifest O (April 1, 2015).
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Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Traveling Salesmen
Click the above image for the IMDb page from which it is taken.
"Course material associated with Jack Edmonds’ lectures
can be found here."
See also High Concept (Jan. 21, 2015) —
Image from the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman"
— and another eye in a triangle …
From the Log24 post Prize (June 7, 2015)
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Wednesday, June 3, 2015
For Soccer Moms
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Monday, April 20, 2015
Immaculate Inception
Continued from a post of April 10, 2015 —
Maya Angelou stamp with
misattributed quote and
Oprah on April 7, 2015
Trailer for "Welcome to Me" published on Feb. 23, 2015 —
Related material: Manifest O (April 1, 2015).
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Sunday, February 15, 2015
Inside the White Square
Review:
Monday, November 7, 2011
|
See also the phrase "a dance results" in the original
source and in yesterday's Valentine Dance.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Kulturkampf for Princeton*
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
A sequel to Princeton Requiem,
Gesamtkunstwerk , and Serial Box —
Fearful Symmetry, Princeton Style:
* See as well other instances of Kulturkampf in this journal.
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Wednesday, November 19, 2014
The Eye/Mind Conflict
Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words,"
The New Yorker , March 29, 1969. From page 110:
"An advanced painting of this century inevitably gives rise
in the spectator to a conflict between his eye and his mind;
as Thomas Hess has pointed out, the fable of the emperor's
new clothes is echoed at the birth of every modemist art
movement. If work in a new mode is to be accepted, the
eye/mind conflict must be resolved in favor of the mind;
that is, of the language absorbed into the work. Of itself,
the eye is incapable of breaking into the intellectual system
that today distinguishes between objects that are art and
those that are not. Given its primitive function of
discriminating among things in shopping centers and on
highways, the eye will recognize a Noland as a fabric
design, a Judd as a stack of metal bins— until the eye's
outrageous philistinism has been subdued by the drone of
formulas concerning breakthroughs in color, space, and
even optical perception (this, too, unseen by the eye, of
course). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that paintings
are today apprehended with the ears. Miss Barbara Rose,
once a promoter of striped canvases and aluminum boxes,
confesses that words are essential to the art she favored
when she writes, 'Although the logic of minimal art gained
critical respect, if not admiration, its reductiveness allowed
for a relatively limited art experience.' Recent art criticism
has reversed earlier procedures: instead of deriving principles
from what it sees, it teaches the eye to 'see' principles; the
writings of one of America's influential critics often pivot on
the drama of how he failed to respond to a painting or
sculpture the first few times he saw it but, returning to the
work, penetrated the concept that made it significant and
was then able to appreciate it. To qualify as a member of the
art public, an individual must be tuned to the appropriate
verbal reverberations of objects in art galleries, and his
receptive mechanism must be constantly adjusted to oscillate
to new vocabularies."
New vocabulary illustrated:
Graphic Design and a Symplectic Polarity —
Background: The diamond theorem
and a zero system .
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Thursday, November 13, 2014
Progressive Matrix
Yesterday's post and recent Hollywood news suggest
a meditation on a Progressive Matrix —
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
Structurally related images —
A sample Raven's Progressive Matrices test item
(such items share the 3×3 structure of the hash symbol above):
Structural background —
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Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Cards of Identity
Or: Plan 9 Continues
(Suggested by this afternoon’s post Concepts of Space.)
See also Card…
… and Tick Tick Hash.
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Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Vril Chick
Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo—
Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.
From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —
|
Josefine Lyche
Keywords (to help place my artwork in the (See also the original catalog page.) |
Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.
For some background, see (for instance)
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .
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Saturday, February 2, 2013
Mad Day
A perceptive review of Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life—
"Page 185: 'Whatever else we are, we are also mad.' "
Related material— last night's Outside the Box and, from Oct. 22 last year—
"Some designs work subtly.
Others are successful through sheer force."
Par exemple—
See also Cartier in this journal.
The Cartier link leads to, among other things…
“A Mad Day’s Work: From Grothendieck to Connes and Kontsevich.
The Evolution of Concepts of Space and Symmetry,”
by Pierre Cartier, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society ,
Vol. 38 (2001) No. 4, pages 389-408
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Wednesday, October 31, 2012
The Malfunctioning TARDIS
(Continued from previous TARDIS posts)
Summary: A review of some posts from last August is suggested by the death,
reportedly during the dark hours early on October 30, of artist Lebbeus Woods.
An (initially unauthorized) appearance of his work in the 1995 film
Twelve Monkeys …
… suggests a review of three posts from last August.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012Defining FormContinued from July 29 in memory of filmmaker Chris Marker, See Slides and Chanting†and Where Madness Lies. See also Sherrill Grace on Malcolm Lowry. * Washington Post. Other sources say Marker died on July 30. † These notably occur in Marker's masterpiece |
Wednesday, August 1, 2012Triple Feature
For related material, see this morning's post Defining Form. |
Sunday, August 12, 2012Doctor WhoOn Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road— "Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox , a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside. It is unclear if Glory Road was influenced by the debut of the science fiction television series Doctor Who on the BBC that same year. In Doctor Who , the main character pilots a time machine called a TARDIS, which is built with technology which makes it 'dimensionally transcendental,' that is, bigger inside than out." — Todd, Tesseract article at exampleproblems.com From the same exampleproblems.com article— "The connection pattern of the tesseract's vertices is the same as that of a 4×4 square array drawn on a torus; each cell (representing a vertex of the tesseract) is adjacent to exactly four other cells. See geometry of the 4×4 square." For further details, see today's new page on vertex adjacency at finitegeometry.org. |
"It was a dark and stormy night."— A Wrinkle in Time
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Saturday, October 20, 2012
Saturday, September 29, 2012
B17
The New York Times on its print edition yesterday:
A version of this article appeared in print
on September 28, 2012, on page B17
of the New York edition with the headline:
John Silber Dies at 86; Led Boston University.
The Times 's Robert D. McFadden wrote that
Silber was "a philosopher by training but
a fighter by instinct."
That phrase was brought to mind today
by a Sept. 25 link in The Harvard Crimson
to Mumford & Sons singing "The Boxer"
in Providence on Transfiguration Day.
There was no Transfiguration Day post
in this journal. Here are parts of the posts
for the preceding and following days—
See also "The Count" from September 17.
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Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Ageometretos Medeis Eisito
See Bagombo Snuff Box and
"Will this be on the test?"
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Thursday, January 5, 2012
Crown Archetype
"Publisher: Crown Archetype (November 1, 2011)"
— Amazon.com on Piper Laurie's new self-portrait
See also last year's For All Hallows Day and today's previous post.
Some context: "God's Girlfriend" in this journal
and "Shouts & Murmurs" in The New Yorker
of January 9th, 2012—
Life is like a box of chocolates.
ILLUSTRATION: Maximilian Bode
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Stoned*
From "The Stone" in Sunday's online New York Times—
Cosmic Imagination
By William Egginton
Do the humanities need to be defended from hard science?
Illustration of hard science —
Illustration of the humanities —
(The above illustrations from Sunday's "The Stone" are by Leif Parsons.)
Midrash by the Coen brothers— "The Dude Abides."
See also 10/10/10— The Day of the Tetractys—
* Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011—
From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
|
Sunday, January 2, 2011
m759 @ 6:40 PM Simon Critchley today in the New York Times series "The Stone"— Philosophy, among other things, is that living activity of critical reflection in a specific context, by which human beings strive to analyze the world in which they find themselves, and to question what passes for common sense or public opinion— what Socrates called doxa— in the particular society in which they live. Philosophy cuts a diagonal through doxa. It does this by raising the most questions of a universal form: “What is X?”
Actually, that's two diagonals. See Kulturkampf at the Times and Geometry of the
[Here the "Stoned" found by the search |
See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
.
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Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Symmetry
An article from cnet.com tonight —
For Jobs, design is about more than aesthetics
By: Jay Greene
… The look of the iPhone, defined by its seamless pane of glass, its chrome border, its perfect symmetry, sparked an avalanche of copycat devices that tried to mimic its aesthetic.
Virtually all of them failed. And the reason is that Jobs understood that design wasn't merely about what a product looks like. In a 2003 interview with the New York Times' Rob Walker detailing the genesis of the iPod, Jobs laid out his vision for product design.
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' Jobs told Walker. "People think it's this veneer— that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''
Related material: Open, Sesame Street (Aug. 19) continues… Brought to you by the number 24—
"By far the most important structure in design theory is the Steiner system
— "Block Designs," by Andries E. Brouwer (Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics , Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham, Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))
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Sunday, July 10, 2011
Wittgenstein’s Diamond
Philosophical Investigations (1953)—
97. Thought is surrounded by a halo.
—Its essence, logic, presents an order,
in fact the a priori order of the world:
that is, the order of possibilities * ,
which must be common to both world and thought.
But this order, it seems, must be
utterly simple . It is prior to all experience,
must run through all experience;
no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it
——It must rather be of the purest crystal.
But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction;
but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete,
as it were the hardest thing there is
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus No. 5.5563).
— Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe
All propositions of our colloquial language
are actually, just as they are, logically completely in order.
That simple thing which we ought to give here is not
a model of the truth but the complete truth itself.
(Our problems are not abstract but perhaps
the most concrete that there are.)
97. Das Denken ist mit einem Nimbus umgeben.
—Sein Wesen, die Logik, stellt eine Ordnung dar,
und zwar die Ordnung a priori der Welt,
d.i. die Ordnung der Möglichkeiten ,
die Welt und Denken gemeinsam sein muß.
Diese Ordnung aber, scheint es, muß
höchst einfach sein. Sie ist vor aller Erfahrung;
muß sich durch die ganze Erfahrung hindurchziehen;
ihr selbst darf keine erfahrungsmäßige Trübe oder Unsicherheit anhaften.
——Sie muß vielmehr vom reinsten Kristall sein.
Dieser Kristall aber erscheint nicht als eine Abstraktion;
sondern als etwas Konkretes, ja als das Konkreteste,
gleichsam Härteste . (Log. Phil. Abh. No. 5.5563.)
Related language in Łukasiewicz (1937)—
* Updates of 9:29 PM ET July 10, 2011—
A mnemonic from a course titled “Galois Connections and Modal Logics“—
“Traditionally, there are two modalities, namely, possibility and necessity.
The basic modal operators are usually written 
(square) for necessarily
and 
(diamond) for possibly. Then, for example, P can be read as
‘it is possibly the case that P .'”
| See also Intensional Semantics , lecture notes by Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim, MIT, Spring 2007 edition—
“The diamond ⋄ symbol for possibility is due to C.I. Lewis, first introduced in Lewis & Langford (1932), but he made no use of a symbol for the dual combination ¬⋄¬. The dual symbol □ was later devised by F.B. Fitch and first appeared in print in 1946 in a paper by his doctoral student Barcan (1946). See footnote 425 of Hughes & Cresswell (1968). Another notation one finds is L for necessity and M for possibility, the latter from the German möglich ‘possible.’” Barcan, Ruth C.: 1946. “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication.” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11(1): 1–16. URL http://www.jstor.org/pss/2269159. Hughes, G.E. & Cresswell, M.J.: 1968. An Introduction to Modal Logic. London: Methuen. Lewis, Clarence Irving & Langford, Cooper Harold: 1932. Symbolic Logic. New York: Century. |
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Sunday, June 26, 2011
Sunday Dinner
From "Sunday Dinner" in this journal—
"'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"
—Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
Some table topics—
Today's midday New York Lottery numbers were 027 and 7002.
The former suggests a Galois cube, the latter a course syllabus—
CSC 7002
Graduate Computer Security (Spring 2011)
University of Colorado at Denver
Department of Computer Science
An item from that syllabus:
| Six | 22 February 2011 | DES | History of DES; Encryption process; Decryption; Expander function; S-boxes and their output; Key; the function f that takes the modified key and part of the text as input; mulitple Rounds of DES; Present-day lack of Security in DES, which led to the new Encryption Standard, namely AES. Warmup for AES: the mathematics of Fields: Galois Fields, particularly the one of order 256 and its relation to the irreducible polynomial x^8 + x^4 + x^3 + x + 1 with coefficients from the field Z_2. |
Related material: A novel, PopCo , was required reading for the course.
Discuss a different novel by the same author—
Discuss the author herself, Scarlett Thomas.
Background for the discussion—
Derrida in this journal versus Charles Williams in this journal.
Related topics from the above syllabus date—
Metaphor and Gestell and Quadrat.
Some context— Midsummer Eve's Dream.
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Friday, April 8, 2011
Concepts of Space
Part I — Roberta Smith in today's New York Times —
"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."
– Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met
|
Pictorial version |
|
“Space: what you damn well have to see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
Part II — Window from A Crooked House
"Teal lifted the blind a few inches. He saw nothing, and raised it a little more—still nothing. Slowly he raised it until the window was fully exposed. They gazed out at—nothing.
Nothing, nothing at all. What color is nothing? Don't be silly! What shape is it? Shape is an attribute of something . It had neither depth nor form. It had not even blackness. It was nothing ."
Part III — Not So Crooked: The Cabinet of Dr. Montessori
An April 5 Wall Street Journal article on Montessori schools, and…
A cabinet from Dr. Montessori's own
explanation of her method
Part IV — Pilate Goes to Kindergarten and The Seven
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Saturday, October 23, 2010
Paranormal Jackass
The follow-up to last year's runaway horror hit, "Paranormal Activity 2," kicked off its first weekend in theaters with a major haul. The creepy tale… pulled in $20.1 million on Friday.
Trailing behind "Paranormal" is last week's box-office busting debut "Jackass 3D. " The prank-fest, which landed about $50 million its first weekend in theaters, slipped to the second-place slot….
…
The Clint Eastwood-helmed ensemble drama "Hereafter" landed in fourth place. Exploring the lives of three people who are dealing with death and the afterlife in several ways, including the story of a psychic played by Matt Damon, the screen legend's latest turn in the director's chair made approximately $4.1 million on Friday.
Related material—
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.
George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner and the paranormal.
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Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Tuesday September 8, 2009
Froebel's
Magic Box
Continued from Dec. 7, 2008,
and from yesterday.
|
Non-Euclidean
Blocks
Passages from a classic story:
… he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads….  Tesseract
"Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid," Holloway said. "So this– thing– bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn't impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees."
"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth dimensional extension?" Paradine demanded. "Hardening of the thought-arteries," Jane interjected. Paradine was not convinced. "Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don't mean that. I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only–" "Well, look. Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry– we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid–" "Poor kid," Jane said. Holloway shot her a quick glance. "The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra– they come much later. We're familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic–" "Blocks? What kind?" Holloway looked at the abacus. "It wouldn't make much sense to us. But we've been conditioned to Euclid." — "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," Lewis Padgett, 1943 |
Padgett (pseudonym of a husband-and-wife writing team) says that alphabet blocks are the intuitive "basis of Euclid." Au contraire; they are the basis of Gutenberg.
For the intuitive basis of one type of non-Euclidean* geometry– finite geometry over the two-element Galois field– see the work of…
Friedrich Froebel
(1782-1852), who
invented kindergarten.
His "third gift" —
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
* i.e., other than Euclidean
Comments Off on Tuesday September 8, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Monday September 7, 2009
Magic Boxes
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don't exactly know what they are!…. Let's have a look at the garden first!"
— A passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The "garden" part– but not the "ideas" part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, "The Time before First."
Commentary
on the passage:
Part I "The Magic Box," shown on Turner Classic Movies earlier tonight
Part II: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," a classic science fiction story:
"… 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."
Part III: A Crystal Block —
Image of pencils is by
Diane Robertson Design.
Related material:
"A Four-Color Theorem."
Part IV:
Comments Off on Monday September 7, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Sunday September 6, 2009
Magic Boxes
Part I: “The Magic Box,” shown on Turner Classic Movies tonight
Part II: “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” a classic science fiction story:
“… 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.”
Comments Off on Sunday September 6, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Saturday August 15, 2009
For St. Willard
Van Orman Quine
" ... to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint" -- Four Quartets
The Timeless:
Time
(64 years,
and more):
| Today in History
Today is Saturday, Aug. 15, the 227th day of 2009. There are 138 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On Aug. 15, 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced to his subjects in a prerecorded radio address that Japan had accepted terms of surrender for ending World War II. On this date: In 1057, Macbeth, King of Scots, was killed in battle by Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had slain. |
Macbeth:
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
Quine:
“I really have nothing to add.”
— Quine, quoted
on this date in 1998.
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Saturday August 15, 2009
An Honest Question:
“Did the Catholic Church just jump the shark by electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger? This is an honest question… not a slam.”
— Anonymous user at an online forum on April 19, 2005
A Munificent Answer:
No. That leap of faith was taken long before, on November 1, 1950. See the note below.
“The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 15 August….
…has a double object: (1) the happy departure of Mary from this life; (2) the assumption of her body into heaven. It is the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin….
Note: By promulgating the Bull Munificentissimus Deus, 1 November, 1950, Pope Pius XII declared infallibly that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a dogma of the Catholic Faith.”
Also on today’s date (AP, Today in History)–
“In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh, Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility.”
On the same day in 1998, The New York Times published Sarah Boxer’s century-end summary:
Comments Off on Saturday August 15, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Wednesday July 15, 2009
DETAIL
of obituaries page,
New York Times,
Monday morning:
of obituaries page,
New York Times,
Monday morning:
| Detail of arts page, New York Times, Wednesday morning: (Click ad for more on the Monday night death of Dash Snow.) |
Hurt yet?
_________________
Update of 5:01 AM:
Lavery Hits
Literary Jackpot
From the top right of
this morning's online
New York Times front page:
Click on voodoo doll
for further details.
See also…
1. Monday's link to a
Wallace Stevens poem,
"Snow and Stars"
2. The conclusion of this
morning's Times obituary
for artist Dash Snow, which
gives his daughter's name…
"Secret."
3. David Lavery's excellent
analysis of the classic
Conrad Aiken story
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow."
Comments Off on Wednesday July 15, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Saturday March 7, 2009
One or Two Ideas
|
From James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
he hearth and began to stroke his chin. –When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked. –From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky. –These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again. –If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws. –Ha! –For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas. –I see. I quite see your point. |
Besides being Mondrian's birthday, today is also the dies natalis (in the birth-into-heaven sense) of St. Thomas Aquinas and, for those who believe worthy pre-Christians also enter heaven, possibly of Aristotle.
Pope Benedict XVI explained the dies natalis concept on Dec. 26, 2006:
"For believers the day of death, and even more the day of martyrdom, is not the end of all; rather, it is the 'transit' towards immortal life. It is the day of definitive birth, in Latin, dies natalis."
The Pope's remarks on that date
were in St. Peter's Square.
were in St. Peter's Square.
Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
The square may be regarded as
symbolizing art itself.
(See Nov.30 – Dec.1, 2008.)
symbolizing art itself.
(See Nov.30 – Dec.1, 2008.)
In honor of
Aristotle and Aquinas,
here is a new web site,
illuminati-diamond.com,
with versions of the diamond shape
made famous by Mondrian —
— a shape symbolizing
possibility within modal logic
as well as the potentiality of
Aristotle's prima materia.
Comments Off on Saturday March 7, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Wednesday February 18, 2009
Raiders of
the Lost Well
| “The challenge is to keep high standards of scholarship while maintaining showmanship as well.” |
— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized “The Vatican Collections,” a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.
The next day, “The Last Templar,” starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.
“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.”
Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:
at the Church of the Lost Well:
“One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start.”
— Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today
Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine’s Day:
“Stephanie started at the Voice of America as an intern in 1991. She left briefly to attend film school in London in 2000. Although she didn’t finish, she has always wanted to be a film school dropout, so now she’s living one of her dreams.
Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese.”
—VOA
As is Mira Sorvino.
Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino’s fictional archaeologist in
“The Last Templar,” prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
“well” symbol to a cross
(or a thick “+” sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.
In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora’s Box.
(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)
Krauss
Comments Off on Wednesday February 18, 2009
Monday, December 29, 2008
Monday December 29, 2008
The Gift
Robert Stone,
"'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.' Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion." For further details, click on the diamond. |
Related narratives:
Today's online Times on
the Saturday, Dec. 27,
death of an artist:
"Dale Wasserman… the playwright responsible for two Broadway hits of the 1960s, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest' and 'Man of La Mancha,' died on Sunday [December 21, 2008] at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., near Phoenix….
Mr. Wasserman wrote more than 75 scripts for television, the stage and the movies, including screenplays for 'The Vikings' (1958), a seafaring epic with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and 'A Walk With Love and Death' (1969), a John Huston film set in 14th-century Europe….
He feuded with… John Huston, who gave the lead female role in 'Walk' to his teenage daughter, Anjelica, against Mr. Wasserman's wishes. And he never attended ceremonies to receive the awards he won."
Accepting for Mr. Wasserman:
Mr. Graham's widow,
Anjelica Huston —
"Well…"
Comments Off on Monday December 29, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Tuesday August 5, 2008
Published Today:
The Last Theorem, a novel by
Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
From the publisher's description:
"The Last Theorem is a story of one man’s mathematical obsession, and a celebration of the human spirit and the scientific method. It is also a gripping intellectual thriller….
In 1637, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a book about an enigmatic theorem: 'I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.' He also neglected to record his proof elsewhere. Thus began a search for the Holy Grail of mathematics– a search that didn’t end until 1994, when Andrew Wiles published a 150-page proof. But the proof was burdensome, overlong, and utilized mathematical techniques undreamed of in Fermat’s time, and so it left many critics unsatisfied– including young Ranjit Subramanian, a Sri Lankan with a special gift for mathematics and a passion for the famous 'Last Theorem.'
When Ranjit writes a three-page proof of the theorem that relies exclusively on knowledge available to Fermat, his achievement is hailed as a work of genius, bringing him fame and fortune…."
For a similar third-world fantasy about another famous theorem, see the oeuvre of Ashay Dharwadker.
Note the amazing conclusion of Dharwadker's saga (thus far)–
Dharwadker devises a proof of the four-color theorem that leads to…
Grand Unification
of the Standard Model
with Quantum Gravity!
of the Standard Model
with Quantum Gravity!
For further background, see
Ashay Dharwadker
and Usenet Postings.
and Usenet Postings.
Clarke lived in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) from 1956 until his death last March.
For another connection with Sri Lanka, see
Comments Off on Tuesday August 5, 2008
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Sunday July 6, 2008
"Hancock" Powers to the Top
of July Fourth Box Office
— This evening's online
New York Times
|
New York Lottery
Sunday, July 6, 2008:
Mid-day 307
Evening 921 |
|
Symbols:
|
|
"The consolations of form,
the clean crystalline work"
— Iris Murdoch,
"Against Dryness" |
Will Smith
on Chess
Will Smith
"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.
'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'
He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street– that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.
'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves– like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'
Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday July 6, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Monday June 16, 2008
Bloomsday for Nash:
The Revelation Game
(American Mathematical Society Feb. 2008
review of Steven Brams’s Superior Beings:
If They Exist, How Would We Know?)
(pdf, 15 megabytes)
"Brams does not attempt to prove or disprove God. He uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios….
In the 'Revelation Game,' for example, the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB's existence
2) P can not believe in SB's existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself
1) P can believe in SB's existence
2) P can not believe in SB's existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself
Each player also has a primary and secondary goal. For the Person, the primary goal is to have his belief (or non-belief) confirmed by evidence (or lack thereof). The secondary goal is to 'prefer to believe in SB’s existence.' For the Supreme Being, the primary goal is to have P believe in His existence, while the secondary goal is to not reveal Himself. These goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best (4) to worst (1). We end up with a matrix as follows (the first number in the parentheses represents the SB's ranking for that box; the second number represents P's ranking):
The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?"
Analogously:
|
Lotteries on Bloomsday, June 16, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
|
Mid-day (No belief) |
418
No belief, |
064
Revelation |
|
Evening (Belief) |
709
Belief without |
198
|
The holy image
denoting belief and revelation
may be interpreted as
a black hole or as a
symbol by James Joyce:
|
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Chapter 17 |
Comments Off on Monday June 16, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
Comments Off on Sunday May 25, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Thursday May 22, 2008
The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art
Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT
THE JUDGMENT
Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.
“Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
— New York Times, May 22, 2008
THE IMAGE
Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.
Another version of
the image:
See 2/22/08
and 4/19/08.
Related material:
Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times—
“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”
Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:
“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. 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.”
See also Epiphany 2008:
“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54
|
…. Now thou art an 0 |
“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”
— The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
* For a different, Jungian, alter ego, see Irish Fourplay (Jan. 31, 2003) and “Outside the Box,” a New York Times review of O’Doherty’s art (featuring a St. Bridget’s Cross) by Bridget L. Goodbody dated April 25, 2007. See also Log24 on that date.
Comments Off on Thursday May 22, 2008
Friday, December 28, 2007
Friday December 28, 2007
The Gospel according to
Harvard Business School:
Harvard Business School:
Last Temptation
The New York Times today:
|
Teen Vogue
From The Harbus, the Harvard Business School independent weekly, a 4/28/03 interview with the late Steven Florio: HARBUS: It seems you attribute the ability to ‘invest in quality’ and to say ‘we’re going this direction because it’s going to help us be the best’ directly to being a private company. SF: For the 10 years I’ve been CEO, that has been the marching order I’ve given to my staff, to all the Editors and Publishers, and quite frankly the order that has been given to me by Newhouse. Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t get memos from him saying ‘I noticed that we spent an additional $100,000 last year on Christmas parties, can you please cut this back?’. He’s not a guy who’s just standing on top of the building throwing off $100 bills. He wants the company run efficiently. On the other hand, if I say to him we really ought to take a hard look at this idea called ‘Teen Vogue’, he’ll smile, as he did, and say ‘The rest of the industry is cutting back, and you want to do a $50 million launch?’. And I said ‘It’s time. It is time for this magazine, it is time for line extension, and we should do it’. I have a management meeting once a week, which he [Newhouse] attends more often than not, where I presented the new magazine idea to the whole management team, which is only 6 or 7 people. I looked at him and said ‘We’re doing it’, and he said ‘Go ahead, it’s a great idea’. |
A Great Idea:
 Model: Irina Kulikova |
 Kulikova
elsewhere |
Related material:
Plato’s “Heaven of Ideas”
Welcome to the Cave
April 22, 2007
Comments Off on Friday December 28, 2007
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Sunday August 19, 2007
Symmetry and Mirroring
Logo design by Anton Stankowski
"… at the beginning of the thirties… Stankowski began to work as a typographer and graphic designer in a Zurich advertising agency. Together with a group of friends– they were later to be known as the 'Zurich Concretists'– he explored the possibilities of symmetry and mirroring in the graphic arts. Stankowski experimented with squares and diagonals, making them the hallmarks of his art. Of his now world-famous logo for the Deutsche Bank— the soaring diagonal in the stable square– he proudly said in 1974: 'The company logo is a trade-mark that sends out a signal.'"
— Deutsche Bank Collection
New York firefighters
killed at Deutsche Bank
RTE News, Ireland
Sunday, 19 August 2007 09:21–
Sunday, 19 August 2007 09:21–
"Two New York fire fighters were killed while trying to douse a blaze in the former Deutsche Bank building in the city.
The fire broke out on 14th and 15th floors yesterday afternoon and spread to several floors before it was brought under control about five hours later.
The building had been heavily damaged during the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The building, which was damaged by falling debris of the twin towers that had collapsed in 2001 when terrorists flew hijacked planes into them, was being 'deconstructed' to make way for construction of a new Freedom Tower."
Related material
|
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Restoring the Faith
By SELENA ROBERTS
What good is a nadir if it's denied or ignored? What's the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can't buy a cheap epiphany? |
When you care enough
to send the very best…
See also
"Cheap Epiphany, continued,"
from Aug. 3, as well as
A Writer's Reflections
(Aug. 14):
"Cheap Epiphany, continued,"
from Aug. 3, as well as
A Writer's Reflections
(Aug. 14):
"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte
Comments Off on Sunday August 19, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Tuesday August 14, 2007
Philip K. Dick,
1928 – 1982
on the cover of
a 1987 edition of
his 1959 novel
Time Out of Joint:
1928 – 1982
on the cover of
a 1987 edition of
his 1959 novel
Time Out of Joint:
Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted
from an earlier (1984) edition
Philip K. Dick as a
window wraith (see below)
The above illustration was suggested by yesterday's quoted New Yorker characterization by Adam Gopnik of Philip K. Dick–
"… the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe."
— as well as by the illustrations of Gopnik's characterization in Kernel of Eternity, and by the following passage from Gopnik's 2005 novel The King in the Window:
"What's a window wraith?"
"It's someone who once lived in the ordinary world who lives now in a window, and makes reflections of the people who pass by and look in."
"You mean you are a ghost?!" Oliver asked, suddenly feeling a little terrified.
"Just the opposite, actually. You see, ghosts come from another world and haunt you, but window wraiths are the world. We're the memory of the world. We're here for good. You're the ones who come and go like ghosts. You haunt us."
Related material: As noted, Kernel of Eternity, and also John Tierney's piece on simulated reality in last night's online New York Times. Whether our everyday reality is merely a simulation has long been a theme (as in Dick's novel above) of speculative fiction. Interest in this theme is widespread, perhaps partly because we do exist as simulations– in the minds of other people. These simulations may be accurate or may be– as is perhaps Gopnik's characterization of Philip K. Dick– inaccurate. The accuracy of the simulations is seldom of interest to the simulator, but often of considerable interest to the simulatee.
The cover of the Aug. 20 New Yorker in which the Adam Gopnik essay appears may also be of interest, in view of the material on diagonals in the Log24 entries of Aug. 1 linked to in yesterday's entry:
"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte
Comments Off on Tuesday August 14, 2007
Friday, January 19, 2007
Friday January 19, 2007
Twisted Honeycomb
From a review in today’s New York Times by Janet Maslin of Norman Mailer’s new novel, The Castle in the Forest:
“The wise beekeeper does not wear dark clothing, lest it pick up light-colored pollen. Italian bees are gentler and more chic than the Austrian variety. The mating box, capping fork and spur-wheel embedder are essential tools for apiculture. And all power in the beehive rests with a treacherous but fragrant bitch.
All this bee talk crops up in ‘The Castle in the Forest,’ Norman Mailer’s zzzzz-filled new novel about Adolf Hitler’s tender, metaphor-fraught and (in this book’s view) literally bedeviled boyhood. So it is not a stretch for the book’s jacket copy to insist that ‘now, on the eve of his 84th birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before.’ More about beekeeping– absolutely.”
Comments Off on Friday January 19, 2007
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Tuesday January 9, 2007
For Balanchine's Birthday
(continued from
January 9, 2003)
George Balanchine
|
"What on earth is
a concrete universal?"
— Robert M. Pirsig
Review:
From Wikipedia's
"Upper Ontology"
and
Epiphany 2007:
"There is no neutral ground
that can serve as
a means of translating between
specialized (lower) ontologies."
There is, however,
"the field of reason"–
the 3×3 grid:
Click on grid
for details.
As Rosalind Krauss
has noted, some artists
regard the grid as
"a staircase to
the Universal."
Other artists regard
Epiphany itself as an
approach to
the Universal:
— Richard Kearney, 2005,
in The New Arcadia Review
Kearney (right) with
Martin Scorsese (left)
and Gregory Peck
in 1997.
"… one of the things that worried me about traditional metaphysics, at least as I imbibed it in a very Scholastic manner at University College Dublin in the seventies, is that philosophy was realism and realism was truth. What disturbed me about that was that everything was already acquired; truth was always a systematic given and it was there to be learned from Creation onwards; it was spoken by Jesus Christ and then published by St. Thomas Aquinas: the system as perfect synthesis. Hence, my philosophy grew out of a hunger for the 'possible' and it was definitely a reaction to my own philosophical formation. Yet that wasn't my only reaction. I was also reacting to what I considered to be the deep pessimism, and even at times 'nihilism' of the postmodern turn."
— Richard Kearney, interview (pdf) in The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, Vol. 14, 2005-2006
For more on "the possible," see Kearney's The God Who May Be, Diamonds Are Forever, and the conclusion of Mathematics and Narrative:
|
"We symbolize
logical necessity with the box  )and logical possibility with the diamond  )."
"The possibilia that exist,
— Michael Sudduth, |
Friday, December 15, 2006
Friday December 15, 2006
Putting the
X
in Xmas
— C. S. Lewis
Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair, as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today’s New York Times. Let us hope that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved beyond these now– singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” rather than “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
|
“In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s cracked up to be. He manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that Borges’s narrator finds to be ‘infinitely richer’ than the original because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections, wrenched as it is from its proper time and context….”
[An artist’s version of a newspaper is]…. “a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between. In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas….” |
The Work:
Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):
| Borges, Menard’s Quixote, and The Harvard Crimson |
Mon., Dec. 11: 133 |
| Baudrillard (via a white Matrix) |
Sun., Dec. 10: 569 |
| Benjamin and a black view of life in “The Garden of Allah” |
Sat., Dec. 9: 602 |
Click on numbers
for commentary.
Borges and Benjamin are
referenced directly in the
commentary. For Baudrillard,
see Richard Hanley on
Baudrillard and The Matrix:
referenced directly in the
commentary. For Baudrillard,
see Richard Hanley on
Baudrillard and The Matrix:
“There is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already always reproducing itself.” –Jean Baudrillard
Related material:
Comments Off on Friday December 15, 2006
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Tuesday October 10, 2006
Mate in
Two Seconds
From Oct. 13 last year
(Yom Kippur):
Two Seconds
From Oct. 13 last year
(Yom Kippur):
|
A Poem for Pinter
Oct. 13, 2005 The Guardian on Harold Pinter, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature: "Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry," Michael Muskal in today's Los Angeles Times: "Pinter, 75, is known for his sparse and thin style as well as his etched characters whose crystal patter cuts through the mood like diamond drill bits." Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (See Jan. 25): "'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond…. 'It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal….'"
"Modal logic was originally developed to investigate logic under the modes of necessary and possible truth. The words 'necessary' and 'possible' are called modal connectives, or modalities. A modality is a word that when applied to a statement indicates when, where, how, or under what circumstances the statement may be true. In terms of notation, it is common to use a box [] for the modality 'necessary' and a diamond <> for the modality 'possible.'"
Commentary:
"Waka" also means Japanese poem or Maori canoe. (For instance, this Japanese poem and this Maori canoe.)
For a meditation on "bang splat," see Sept. 25-29. For the meaning of "tick tick," see Emily Dickinson on "degreeless noon." "Hash," of course, signifies "checkmate." (See previous three entries.) |
For language more suited to
the year's most holy day, see
this year's Yom Kippur entry,
from October 2.
That was also the day of the
Amish school killings in
Pennsylvania and the day that
mathematician Paul Halmos died.
For more on the former, see
Death in Two Seconds.
For more on the latter, see
The Halmos Tombstone.
Comments Off on Tuesday October 10, 2006
Sunday, October 8, 2006
Sunday October 8, 2006
Today’s Birthday:
Matt Damon
Matt Damon
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
 Natasha Wescoat, 2004 Shakespearean Fool |
|
| Not to mention Euclid and Picasso | |
 |
 |
(Click on pictures for details. Euclid is represented by Alexander Bogomolny, Picasso by Robert Foote.)
|
|
See also works by the late Arthur Loeb of Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” — Frank Costello in The Departed
For more on the Harvard environment,
see today’s online Crimson:
| The Harvard Crimson, Online Edition |
Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 |
|
POMP AND
Friday, Oct. 6: The Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has come to town, and yesterday the animals were disembarked near MIT and paraded to their temporary home at the Banknorth Garden. |
OPINION At Last, a By THE CRIMSON STAFF The Trouble By SAHIL K. MAHTANI |
Comments Off on Sunday October 8, 2006
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Thursday September 28, 2006
A Table
| From the diary of John Baez: September 22, 2006… Meanwhile, the mystics beckon:
September 23, 2006I’m going up to San Rafael (near the Bay in Northern California) to visit my college pal Bruce Smith and his family. I’ll be back on Wednesday the 27th, just in time to start teaching the next day. |
A check on the Rumi quote yields
this, on a culinary organization:
|
“Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
This is the starting place of good spirit for relationship healing and building prescribed centuries ago in the Middle East by Muslim Sufi teacher and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273). Even earlier, the Psalmists knew such a meeting place of adversaries was needed, sacred and blessed: |
A Field and a Table:
From “Communications Toolbox”
at MathWorks.com
For more on this field
in a different context, see
Generating the Octad Generator
and
“Putting Descartes Before Dehors”
in my own diary for December 2003.
Descartes
Après l’Office à l’Église
de la Sainte-Trinité, Noël 1890
(After the Service at Holy Trinity Church,
Christmas 1890), Jean Béraud
Let us pray to the Holy Trinity that
San Rafael guides the teaching of John Baez
this year. For related material on theology
and the presence of enemies, see Log24 on
the (former) Feast of San Rafael, 2003.
Comments Off on Thursday September 28, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Saturday March 25, 2006
Built
In memory of Rolf Myller,
who died on Thursday,
March 23, 2006, at
Mount Sinai Hospital
in Manhattan:
Myller was,
according to the
New York Times,
an architect
whose eclectic pursuits
included writing
children’s books,
The Bible Puzzle Book, and
Fantasex: A Book of Erotic Games.
He also wrote, the Times says,
“Symbols and Their Meaning
(1978), a graphic overview of
children’s nonverbal communication.”
This is of interest in view of the
Log24 reference to “symbol-mongers”
on the date of Myller’s death.
In honor of Women’s History Month
and of Myller’s interests in the erotic
and in architecture, we present
the following work from a British gallery.
This work might aptly be
retitled “Brick Shithouse.”
Related material:
(1) the artist’s self-portrait
and, in view of the cover
illustration for Myller’s
The Bible Puzzle Book,
(2) the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain
The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.
For devotees of women’s history
|
Liza Lou 03.03.06 – 08.04.06 White Cube is pleased to present the first UK solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou. Combining visionary, conceptual and craft approaches, Lou makes mixed-media sculptures and room-size installations that are suggestive of a transcendental reality. Lou’s work often employs familiar, domestic forms, crafted from a variety of materials such as steel, wood, papier-mâché and fibreglass, which is then covered with tiny glass beads that are painstakingly applied, one at a time, with tweezers. Dazzling and opulent and constantly glistening with refracted light, her sculptures bristle with what Peter Schjeldahl has aptly described as ‘surreal excrescence’. This exhibition, a meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the architecture of confinement, will include several new figurative sculptures as well as two major sculptural installations. Security Fence (2005) is a large scale cage made up of four steel, chain link walls, topped by rings of barbed wire and Cell (2004-2006), as its name suggests, is a room based on the approximate dimensions of a death row prison cell, a kind of externalized map of the prisoner’s mind. Both Security Fence and Cell, like Lou’s immense earlier installations Kitchen (1991-1995) and Back Yard (1995-1999) are characterized by the absence of their real human subject. But whereas the absent subject in Kitchen and Back Yard could be imagined through the details and accessories carefully laid out to view, in Lou’s two new installations the human body is implied simply through the empty volume created by the surrounding architecture. Both Cell and Security Fence are monochromatic and employ iconic forms that make direct reference to Minimalist art in its use of repetition, formal perfection and materiality. In contrast to this, the organic form of a gnarled tree trunk, Scaffold (2005-2006), its surface covered with shimmering golden beads, juts directly out from the wall. Lou’s work has an immediate ‘shock’ content that works on different levels: first, an acknowledgement of the work’s sheer aesthetic impact and secondly the slower comprehension of the labour that underlies its construction. But whereas in Lou’s earlier works the startling clarity of the image is often a counterpoint to the lengthy process of its realization, for the execution of Cell, Lou further slowed down the process by using beads of the smallest variety with their holes all facing up in an exacting hour-by-hour approach in order to ‘use time as an art material’. Concluding this body of work are three male figures in states of anguish. In The Seer (2005-2006), a man becomes the means of turning his body back in on himself. Bent over double, his body becomes an instrument of impending self-mutilation, the surface of his body covered with silver-lined beads, placed with the exactitude and precision of a surgeon. In Homeostasis (2005-2006) a naked man stands prostrate with his hands up against the wall in an act of surrender. In this work, the dissolution between inside and outside is explored as the ornate surface of Lou’s cell-like material ‘covers’ the form while exposing the systems of the body, both corporeal and esoteric. In The Vessel (2005-2006), Christ, the universal symbol of torture and agony holds up a broken log over his shoulders. This figure is beheaded, and bejewelled, with its neck carved out, becoming a vessel into which the world deposits its pain and suffering. Lou has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo and Fondació Joan Miró, Barcelona. She was a 2002 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Liza Lou’s film Born Again (2004), in which the artist tells the compelling and traumatic story* of her Pentecostal upbringing in Minnesota, will be screened at 52 Hoxton Square from 3 – 25 March courtesy of Penny Govett and Mick Kerr. Liza Lou will be discussing her work following a screening of her film at the ICA, The Mall, London on Friday 3 March at 7pm. Tickets are available from the ICA box office (+ 44 (0) 20 7930 3647). A fully illustrated catalogue, with a text by Jeanette Winterson and an interview with Tim Marlow, will accompany the exhibition. White Cube is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00 am to 6.00 pm.
For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on + 44 (0) 20 7930 5373 * Warning note from Adrian Searle |
Comments Off on Saturday March 25, 2006
Friday, March 24, 2006
Friday March 24, 2006
Women’s History Month continues…
Activity
From the New York Times
on the First of May, 1999:
From the New York Times
on the First of May, 1999:
|
Combinatorics in higher mathematics is the study of permutations and combinations of elements in finite sets. In an interview with M.I.T. News last year, [Gian-Carlo Rota (pdf)] gave this definition of his field of study: “Combinatorics is putting different-colored marbles in different-colored boxes, seeing how many ways you can divide them. I could rephrase it in Wall Street terms, but it’s really just about marbles and boxes, putting things in sets.” Indeed, Dr. Rota added, some of his best students go to Wall Street. “It turns out that the best financial analysts are either mathematicians or theoretical physicists,” he said. |
Rota graduated from
Princeton University in 1953.
Some may prefer the following
marbles and boxes:
Related material:
Oct. 21, 2002,
April 30, 2005.
Comments Off on Friday March 24, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Thursday January 19, 2006
Comments Off on Thursday January 19, 2006
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Tuesday January 10, 2006
Ten is a Hen
(continued)
From Nov. 12, 2005:
“Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON.“
(continued)
From Nov. 12, 2005:
“Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON.“
“‘Tikkun Olam,
the fixing of the world,’
she whispers. ‘I’ve been
gathering up the broken vessels
to make things whole again.'”
From Nov. 14, 2005:
|
Culture Wars
‘Chicken Little’ Lays Golden Egg (Dean Goodman, Reuters) ‘Bee Season’ Anxiety
The mixed bag of limited release preems was highlighted by an excellent response to the concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. The film recorded a $19,000 plus per engagement average from seven outings for a $130,000 gross. The family drama Bee Season had a comparable gross but on three times as many screens that translated into anxiety about the Richard Gere film’s expansion prospects.
|
Today’s vocabulary lesson:
Click on the word for the definition.
A search on the related adjective “hendiadic”
leads to an insightful discussion of
religion and law
in contemporary Latin America
by Antônio Flávio Pierucci.
For other material on
Latin America and religion
from Robert Stone and
Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira,
see the Jan. 25, 2005, entry
Diamonds Are Forever.
Related material:
Yesterday’s link for Nixon’s birthday
led to an obituary of a Marxist
writer that concluded as follows:
“In 2004, Mr. Magdoff wrote about his friendship with Che Guevara, one of his revolutionary heroes. At what proved to be their final meeting before Mr. Guevara’s death in 1967, Mr. Magdoff asked what he could do to help Cuba. ‘Keep on educating me,’ was the response.”
For the education of Latin America
I recommend the writings of
Pierucci, Stone, and Oliveira,
but not those of Magdoff.
I recommend the writings of
Pierucci, Stone, and Oliveira,
but not those of Magdoff.
Comments Off on Tuesday January 10, 2006
Monday, December 26, 2005
Monday December 26, 2005
Language Game on
Boxing Day
Boxing Day
In the box-style I Ching
Hexagram 34,
The Power of the Great,
is represented by
.
Art is represented
by a box
(Hexagram 20,
Contemplation, View)
.
And of course
great art
is represented by
an X in a box.
(Hexagram 2,
The Receptive)
.
“… as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually
in its stillness”
“… at the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot
 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.” |
For those who prefer
technology to poetry,
there is the Xbox 360.
(Today is day 360 of 2005.)
Monday, November 14, 2005
Monday November 14, 2005
Culture Wars
‘Chicken Little’ Lays Golden Egg
(Dean Goodman, Reuters)
‘Bee Season’ Anxiety
(Leonard Klady, Movie City News):
The mixed bag of limited release preems was highlighted by an excellent response to the concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. The film recorded a $19,000 plus per engagement average from seven outings for a $130,000 gross. The family drama Bee Season had a comparable gross but on three times as many screens that translated into anxiety about the Richard Gere film’s expansion prospects.
Weekend Estimates
Nov. 11-13, 2005
Nov. 11-13, 2005
| Title |
Gross (average)
|
Theaters
|
Cume
|
| Chicken Little |
32.7 ( 8,950)
|
3658
|
81.5
|
| Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic |
0.13 (19,210)
|
7
|
0.13
|
| Bee Season |
0.13 ( 6,280)
|
21
|
0.13
|
Comments Off on Monday November 14, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
Monday August 22, 2005
The Hole
Part I: Mathematics and Narrative
Apostolos Doxiadis on last month's conference on "mathematics and narrative"–
Doxiadis is describing how talks by two noted mathematicians were related to
"… a sense of a 'general theory bubbling up' at the meeting… a general theory of the deeper relationship of mathematics to narrative…. "
Doxiadis says both talks had "a big hole in the middle."
"Both began by saying something like: 'I believe there is an important connection between story and mathematical thinking. So, my talk has two parts. [In one part] I’ll tell you a few things about proofs. [And in the other part] I’ll tell you about stories.' …. And in both talks it was in fact implied by a variation of the post hoc propter hoc, the principle of consecutiveness implying causality, that the two parts of the lectures were intimately related, the one somehow led directly to the other."
"And the hole?"
"This was exactly at the point of the link… [connecting math and narrative]… There is this very well-known Sidney Harris cartoon… where two huge arrays of formulas on a blackboard are connected by the sentence ‘THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.’ And one of the two mathematicians standing before it points at this and tells the other: ‘I think you should be more explicit here at step two.’ Both… talks were one half fascinating expositions of lay narratology– in fact, I was exhilarated to hear the two most purely narratological talks at the meeting coming from number theorists!– and one half a discussion of a purely mathematical kind, the two parts separated by a conjunction roughly synonymous to ‘this is very similar to this.’ But the similarity was not clearly explained: the hole, you see, the ‘miracle.’ Of course, both [speakers]… are brilliant men, and honest too, and so they were very clear about the location of the hole, they did not try to fool us by saying that there was no hole where there was one."
Part II: Possible Worlds
"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer
Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:
"The concept of possible worlds dates back to a least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."– Voltaire
Background:
Modal Logic in Wikipedia
Possible Worlds in Wikipedia
Possible-Worlds Theory, by Marie-Laure Ryan
(entry for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory)
Part III: Modal Theology
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
"'What is this Stone?' Chloe asked….
'…It is told that, when the Merciful One made the worlds, first of all He created that Stone and gave it to the Divine One whom the Jews call Shekinah, and as she gazed upon it the universes arose and had being.'"
'…It is told that, when the Merciful One made the worlds, first of all He created that Stone and gave it to the Divine One whom the Jews call Shekinah, and as she gazed upon it the universes arose and had being.'"
— Many Dimensions, by Charles Williams, 1931 (Eerdmans paperback, April 1979, pp. 43-44)
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
— Aion, by C. G. Jung, 1951 (Princeton paperback, 1979, p. 236)
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, 1956 (Vintage hardcover, July 1996, p. 216)
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"We symbolize
logical necessity with the box )and logical possibility with the diamond ).
"The possibilia that exist,
— Michael Sudduth, |
Comments Off on Monday August 22, 2005
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Sunday June 19, 2005
ART WARS:
Darkness Visible
Darkness Visible
“No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
A famed vulgarizer, Martin Gardner,
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt
(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt
(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):
“Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color. He had his black period in which the canvas was totally black. And then he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue. He was exhibited in top shows in New York, and his pictures wound up in museums. I did a column in Scientific American on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s black paintings. Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black. The publisher insisted on getting permission from the gallery to reproduce it.”
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Fade to Black “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi
“‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.” — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital
An Ad Reinhardt painting
Ad Reinhardt, The viewer may need to tilt “The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.” — Rosalind Krauss,
|
In memory of
St. William Golding
(Sept. 19, 1911 – June 19, 1993)
Comments Off on Sunday June 19, 2005
Friday, April 15, 2005
Friday April 15, 2005
Leonardo Day
In memory of Leonardo and of Chen Yifei (previous entry), a link to the Sino-Judaic Institute’s review of Chen’s film “Escape to
Click on the above for details.
Related material
from Log24.net:
Saturday, December 27, 2003 10:21 PM
Toy
“If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything — one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them — it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don’t have to put it together on Christmas morning.
The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they’d rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don’t play some people’s game, they say that you have ‘lost your marbles,’ not recognizing that,
while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.
One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called ‘rational
“I took the number twenty-four and there’s twenty-four ways of expressing the numbers one, two, three, four. And I assigned one kind of line to one, one to two, one to three, and one to four. One was a vertical line, two was a horizontal line, three was diagonal left to right, and four was diagonal right to left. These are the basic kind of directions that lines can take…. the absolute ways that lines can be drawn. And I drew these things as parallel lines very close to one another in boxes. And then there was a system of changing them so that within twenty-four pages there were different arrangements of actually sixteen squares, four sets of four. Everything was based on four. So this was kind of a… more of a… less of a rational… I mean, it gets into the whole idea of methodology.”
Yes, it does.
See Art Wars, Poetry’s Bones, and Time Fold.
Friday, December 26, 2003 7:59 PM
ART WARS, St. Stephen’s Day:
The Magdalene Code
Got The Da Vinci Code for Xmas.
From page 262:
When Langdon had first seen The Little Mermaid, he had actually gasped aloud when he noticed that the painting in Ariel’s underwater home was none other than seventeenth-century artist Georges de la Tour’s The Penitent Magdalene — a famous homage to the banished Mary Magdalene — fitting decor considering the movie turned out to be a ninety-minute collage of blatant symbolic references to the lost sanctity of Isis, Eve, Pisces the fish goddess, and, repeatedly, Mary Magdalene.
Related Log24 material —
The Da Vinci Code, pages 445-446:
“The blade and chalice?” Marie asked. “What exactly do they look like?”
Langdon sensed she was toying with him, but he played along, quickly describing the symbols.
A look of vague recollection crossed her face. “Ah, yes, of course. The blade represents all that is masculine. I believe it is drawn like this, no?” Using her index finger, she traced a shape on her palm.
“Yes,” Langdon said. Marie had drawn the less common “closed” form of the blade, although Langdon had seen the symbol portrayed both ways.
“And the inverse,” she said, drawing again upon her palm, “is the chalice, which represents the feminine.”
“Correct,” Langdon said….
… Marie turned on the lights and pointed….
“There you are, Mr. Langdon. The blade and chalice.”….
“But that’s the Star of Dav–“
Langdon stopped short, mute with amazement as it dawned on him.
The blade and chalice.
Fused as one.
The Star of David… the perfect union of male and female… Solomon’s Seal… marking the Holy of Holies, where the male and female deities — Yahweh and Shekinah — were thought to dwell.
Related Log24 material —
May 25, 2003:
Star Wars.
Concluding remark of April 15, 2005:
For a more serious approach to portraits of
redheads, see Chen Yifei’s work.
Star Wars.
Concluding remark of April 15, 2005:
For a more serious approach to portraits of
redheads, see Chen Yifei’s work.
Thursday, April 7, 2005
Thursday April 7, 2005
ART WARS Toys
From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column of June 9, 2002:
“The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art.”
Last year’s suggested ART WARS toy:
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Today’s birthdays: Francis Ford Coppola and From MindfulGroup.com:
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The Coliseum Builder Block System can be used to recreate the Roman Coliseum. Reenact ancient Gladiator matches and bring Ancient Rome into your home.
This year’s suggested ART WARS toy:
To order, see the
Amazing Music Box & Gifts Company.
Comments Off on Thursday April 7, 2005
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Tuesday January 25, 2005
Diamonds Are Forever
" 'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.'
Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.
'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don't it?'
'I have heard it,' Egan said. 'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "
"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box )
and logical possibility
with the diamond ).
From
DIALECTIC AND EXISTENCE
IN KIERKEGAARD AND KANT
Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira
Pontifical Catholic University
at Porto Alegre, Brazil
"Such is the paradoxical 'encounter' of the eternal with the temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant (Danish Ojeblikket, 'a glance of the eye, eyeblink,' German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:
If the instant is posited, so is the eternal –but also the future, which comes again like the past … The concept around which everything turns in Christianity, the concept which makes all things new, is the fullness of time, is the instant as eternity, and yet this eternity is at once the future and the past.
Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the opposition between 'eternity' and 'temporality': the instant, as 'an atom of eternity,' serves to restructure the whole synthesis of selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s 'ascent' toward its Other and the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness, preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore, that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),
The possibility of the good is more than possibility, for it is the eternal. This is the basis of the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived, for to hope is to expect the possibility of the good; but the possibility of the good is eternal. …But if there is less love in him, there is also less of the eternal in him; but if there is less of the eternal in him, there is also less possibility, less awareness of possibility (for possibility appears through the temporal movement of the eternal within the eternal in a human being)."
Comments Off on Tuesday January 25, 2005
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Tuesday November 9, 2004
The Nine
(Readings for
Weyl’s birthday)
“The grid is a staircase to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
‘Art is art,’
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.
Greek Cross
There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape and the
Pandora’s box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses it.”
— Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
in “Grids”
“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,
in The Magic Circle,
Ballantine paperback,
1999, p. 339
“To live is to defend a form.”
(“Leben, das heisst eine Form verteidigen“)
— attributed to Hölderlin
For details on the above picture,
which deals with properties of the
nine-square grid, see
For more on the defense
of this form,
see the Log24.net entry of
June 5, 2004, A Form,
and the Art Wars entries
for St. Peter’s Day, 2004.
Comments Off on Tuesday November 9, 2004
Saturday, September 18, 2004
Saturday September 18, 2004
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
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Exhibit C:
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Log24.net, Thursday, Soul and “In the fullness of time, |
Click on pictures for details.
Comments Off on Saturday September 18, 2004
Saturday, May 8, 2004
Saturday May 8, 2004
Royal Roads
“Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point,
— Albert Einstein
on his “holy geometry book”
(entry of 3/14/04)
“We’ll try to understand
how people decide what is true.”
— Nathaniel Miller
on his geometry course
“People make up stories
about what they experience.
Stories that catch on are called ‘true.’ “
— Richard J. Trudeau
on his geometry course
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“There is no royal road to geometry.” — Saying attributed to Euclid “The royal road to knowledge, — Nathaniel Miller‘s Prison-Abuse Panel is Third — Headline from today’s “The royal road to ruin — George W. Bush’s |
Comments Off on Saturday May 8, 2004
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Wednesday September 10, 2003
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Sept. 9, 2003, |
And |
“Dr. Jose Barchilon, a psychoanalyst and educator who studied the unconscious roots of creativity and mental illness, died on
at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 90.
In addition to training and teaching in New York and Denver, Dr. Barchilon wrote extensively, including early studies of psychosomatic illness and psychoanalytic studies of novels by Jane Austen, Albert Camus, Mark Twain and others.
He also trained a generation of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts….”
— The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2003
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NYT Store |
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Photo: Sigmund Freud, 1922. |
Comments Off on Wednesday September 10, 2003
Friday, September 5, 2003
Friday September 5, 2003
Recommended Reading
for Cullinane College:
- Trifecta
- The Pegasus Prize
- The Bone People
- Alchemical Kubrick 2001
- The Diamond Archetype
- The Deceivers
- The Demolished Man
- To Ride Pegasus
“The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather. No, not birds. Winged horses! Ha! Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy. A bloody good symbol for us. You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”
— To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey.
“Born in Cambridge, MA, on April Fool’s Day 1926 (‘I’ve tried very hard to live up to being an April-firster,’ she quips), McCaffrey graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947.”
Born on March 9, 1947, in Christchurch, Keri Hulme won the Pegasus Prize for her Maori novel, The Bone People.
Comments Off on Friday September 5, 2003
Saturday, July 12, 2003
Saturday July 12, 2003
Wake
From my entry of Epiphany 2003,
Dead Poet in the City of Angels:
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Certain themes recur in these entries. To describe such recurrent themes, in art and in life, those enamoured of metaphors from physics may ponder the phrase “implicate order.” For an illustration of at least part of the implicate order, click here . |
On this, the day when Orangemen parade in Northern Ireland, it seems appropriate to expand on the two links I cited last Epiphany.
For the implicate order and Finnegans Wake, see sections 33 and 34 of
The second link in the box above is to the Chi-Rho page in the Book of Kells. For a commentary on the structure of this page and the structure of Finnegans Wake, see
Comments Off on Saturday July 12, 2003
Monday, February 17, 2003
Monday February 17, 2003
Saint Faggot’s Day
“During the European Inquisitions, faggot referred to the sticks used to set fires for burning heretics, or people who opposed the teachings of the Catholic Church. Heretics were required to gather bundles of sticks (‘faggots’) and carry them to the fire that was being built for them. Heretics who changed their beliefs to avoid being killed were forced to wear a faggot design embroidered on their sleeve, to show everyone that they had opposed the Church.”
— Handout
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N.Y. Times Feb. 2, 2003
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Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:
“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins. Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
“At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds….”
— William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium”
On this date in 1600, Saint Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.
He was resurrected by Saint Frances Yates, who went to her reward on the feast day of Saint Michael and All Angels, 1981.
Comments Off on Monday February 17, 2003
Sunday, February 2, 2003
Sunday February 2, 2003
Steering a Space-Plane
Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:
“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins. Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
Yesterday’s note, “Time and Eternity,” supplies the “immortal diamond” part of this meditation. For the “matchwood” part, see the cover of The New York Times Book Review of February 2 (Candlemas), 2003:
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N.Y. Times Feb. 2, 2003
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See also the Times’s excerpt from Baker‘s first chapter,
about “steering a space-plane.”
For the relationship of Hopkins to Eastern religions,
see “Out of Inscape,” by Robert Morris.
Comments Off on Sunday February 2, 2003
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Tuesday December 17, 2002
ART WARS:
Just Seventeen
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Today's site music* is in honor of a memorable date.
*© 1963 |
Veronica |
From a June/July 1997
Hadassah Magazine article:
"Plato is obviously Jewish."
— Rebecca Goldstein
Readings on the Dark Lady
From a July 27, 1997
New York Times article
by Holland Cotter:
"The single most important and sustained model for Khmer culture was India, from which Cambodia inherited two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and an immensely sophisticated art. This influence announces itself early in this exhibition in a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work."
From The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard '64:
"The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."
"Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.
This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her."
How could I dance with another….?
— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963