Hat tip to Peter Woit for quoting the above yesterday.
* See Crichton in this weblog and the solar Apollo symbols
of CBS Sunday Morning, which this week featured Crichton.
As an Apollo symbol, I prefer the Chinese "holy field" —
a ninefold square.
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
See as well this journal on the above mad-scientist date.
* See Crichton's Rising Sun in this journal.
Goes to Feynman, Epstein, and Kaplan
“A self-replicating swarm of predatory molecules
is rapidly evolving outside the plant.”
— Amazon.com synopsis of Michael Crichton’s
2002 novel Prey
Washington Post online today —
Nobel Prize in chemistry is awarded
for molecular machines
” The physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman
gave a seminal lecture on the subject in 1959,
envisioning a ‘great future’ in which ‘we can arrange
the atoms the way we want; the very atoms,
all the way down.’ ” — Sarah Kaplan
“How do we write small?”
Related material quoted here on Sunday morning, Oct. 2, 2016 —
” Westworld is especially impressive because it builds two worlds
at once: the Western theme park and the futuristic workplace.
The Western half of Westworld might be the more purely
entertaining of the two, with its shootouts and heists and chases
through sublime desert vistas. Behind the scenes, the theme park’s
workers show how the robot sausage is made. And as a dystopian
office drama, the show does something truly original.”
— Adam Epstein at QUARTZ, October 1, 2016
|
Excerpt from a Log24 post of May 2, 2003 Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations. From a review of the film “The Terminator”:
From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:
From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):
Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement. Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:
Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number. The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981) … on, of course, page 373. |
Related graphic art —
This is from a Log24 search, "Windmill + Diamond."
From an Instagram ad today —
See also this meaning of "manifest" in Sphere —
novel by Michael Crichton, film by Barry Levinson.
Related material —
"Program or be programmed."
— A saying by the author of the above graphic novel.
"The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence.
You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to
solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is
what makes it happen.
This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you
do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things
and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the
choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the
power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one
thing inside you—the ability to imagine."
— Michael Crichton, Sphere
I prefer a different tune . . . Number 117 on
Cara Delevingne's Wall of Sound (click to enlarge):
He beomes aware of something else… some other presence.
“Anybody here?” he says.
I am here.
He almost jumps, it is so loud. Or it seems loud. Then he wonders if
he has heard anything at all.
“Did you speak?”
No.
How are we communicating? he wonders.
The way everything communicates with everything else.
Which way is that?
Why do you ask if you already know the answer?
— Sphere by Michael Crichton, Harvard ’64
In memory of Michael Crichton, Harvard '64.
Those who have not yet seen the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet
should skip this post. For those who know and love it, here is an
aide-mémoire .
Happy birthday to the late Michael Crichton (Harvard ’64).
See also Diamond Theory Roulette —
Part of the ReCode Project (http://recodeproject.com). Based on "Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane, originally published in "Computer Graphics and Art" Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977. Copyright (c) 2013 Radames Ajna — OSI/MIT license (http://recodeproject/license).
Related remarks on Plato for Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design —
See also posts from the above publication date, March 31,
2006, among posts now tagged “The Church in Philadelphia.”
… and Finishing Up at Noon
This post was suggested by last evening’s post on mathematics and narrative
and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning’s New York Times.
Above: Frank Langella in Right: Johnny Depp in |
 |
“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage.”
— “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?”* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times essay of October 7, 1984
My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa’s remark.
A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven’t touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—
What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.
Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.
* The Web version’s title has a misprint— “living” instead of “lying.”
Lowell House alumni include novelists John H. Updike ’54 and Michael Crichton ’64. Lowell House can also count several famous actors as alumni—Natalie Portman ’03 and Matt P. Damon (formerly ’92) both resided in Lowell House as undergraduates. Several Lowell alumni—such as Nicholas D. Kristof ’81 and Chris Wallace ’69—have pursued careers in journalism. Other famous names include former Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter ’61 and Japenese [sic] Crown Princess Masako ’85.
Death of a Classmate
Michael Crichton,
Harvard College, 1964
Authors Michael Crichton and
David Foster Wallace in today’s
New York Times obituaries
The Times’s remarks above
on the prose styles of
Crichton and Wallace–
“compelling formula” vs.
“intricate complexity”–
suggest the following works
of visual art in memory
of Crichton.
“Crystal”—
Some philosophical
remarks related to
the Harvard background
that Crichton and I share–
Hitler’s Still Point
and
The Crimson Passion.
And now, from
the author of Sphere…
He beomes aware of something else… some other presence.
"Anybody here?" he says.
I am here.
He almost jumps, it is so loud. Or it seems loud. Then he wonders if he has heard anything at all.
"Did you speak?"
No.
How are we communicating? he wonders.
The way everything communicates with everything else.
Which way is that?
Why do you ask if you already know the answer?
— Sphere, by Michael Crichton, Harvard '64
"… when I went to Princeton things were completely different. This chapel, for instance– I remember when it was just a clearing, cordoned off with sharp sticks. Prayer was compulsory back then, and you couldn't just fake it by moving your lips; you had to know the words, and really mean them. I'm dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ."
— Baccalaureate address at Princeton, Pentecost 2006, reprinted in The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick, Princeton '81
Related figures:
For further details,
see Solomon's Cube
and myspace.com/affine.
For further details,
see Jews on Buddhism
and
Adventures in Group Theory.
"In this way we are offered
a formidable lesson
for every Christian community."
Pope Benedict XVI
on Pentecost,
June 4, 2006,
St. Peter's Square.
ART WARS:
The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month.
From On Certainty, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969):
#508: What can I rely on?
#509: I really want to say that a language game is only possible if one trusts something. (I did not say “can trust something”).
— Quoted by Hilary Putnam in Renewing Philosophy, Chapter 8 (Harvard University Press, 1992)
From “Deconstructing Postmodernism,” by Ziauddin Sardar, at the website “The Free Arab Voice”:
Doubt, the perpetual and perennial condition of postmodernism, is best described by the motto of the cult television series The X-files: ‘Trust no One’….
Deconstruction – the methodology of discursive analysis – is the norm of postmodernism. Everything has to be deconstructed. But once deconstruction has reached its natural conclusion, we are left with a grand void: there is nothing, but nothing, that can remotely provide us with meaning, with a sense of direction, with a scale to distinguish good from evil.
Those who, having reviewed a thousand years of lies by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, are sick of language games, and who are also offended by the recent skillful deconstruction of the World Trade Center, may find some religious solace in the philosophy of Zen.
Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations.
From a review of the film “The Terminator”:
Some like to see Sarah as a sort of Mother of God, and her son as the saviour in a holy context. John Connor, J.C. , but these initials are also those of the director, so make up your own mind.
— http://www.geocities.com/
hackettweb2/terminator.html
From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:
“What is 256 about?”
— S. H. Cullinane
From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (Ballantine paperback, 1993) —
John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):
“It seems to be.”
“Is your investigation finished?”
“For all practical purposes, yes,” Connor said.
Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement.
Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:
Connor sighed.
“The clock isn’t moving.”
Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number.
The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981)… on, of course, page 373.
Pray
This brief heading echoes the title of the latest novel by Michael Crichton, perhaps the best-known member of the Harvard College class of 1964. In honor of that class and of Q (see the preceding entry), here is a condensed excerpt from a passage of Plato quoted by Q:
Socrates. ‘Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?’
‘By all means,’ Phaedrus agrees.
Socrates (praying): ‘Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one!….
That prayer, I think, is enough for me.’
Phaedrus. ‘Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.’
Socrates. ‘So be it…. Let us go.’
In accordance with this prayer, and with the coming of summer to Australia, that land beloved of Pan, this site’s music now returns to the theme introduced in my note of September 10, 2002, “The Sound of Hanging Rock.”
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