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"Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more — Anne Carson's new translation of |
Well, maybe one.
"And he turned to me and he said you know Mister
This is the only place in the world that I'm not ashamed to show my face"
— Skid Row Joe
Happy birthday to the late Porter Wagoner.
"Viva’s weekly magazine has a weekly readership of over 259,000 people
and is available in the New Zealand Herald every Wednesday."
From a Viva article dated Monday, October 2, 2023 —
From this journal on October 2, 2023 —
"Faster, better, and more fun"
— AI companion promotional slogan
|
… in his book “Catch the Falling Flag: A Republican’s Challenge to His Party,” Mr. Whalen detailed his disappointments with Nixon, including his pledge in March 1968 to end the Vietnam War, presumably swiftly, if President Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t end it by the end of the year. “This promise, implying a plan to fulfill it, splashed across the front pages and brought the reporters and TV crews rushing back to the Republican side of the New Hampshire campaign, eager for details,” he wrote. “There weren’t any. Nothing lay behind the ‘pledge’ except Nixon’s instinct for an extra effort of salesmanship when the customers started drifting away.” |
"Gimme the beat boys and free my soul . . . ."
Some unsolicited, but good, advice this afternoon
from my first wife —
"Forty-two percent of reviews on Amazon are fake."
(Brandishing a July 4 copy of Consumer Reports ).
Related image . . .
…230811-Marcelanow-Amazon-box-
MADE_WITH_LESS_MATERIAL.jpg
"Ride a painted pony, let the spinning wheel spin." — Song Lyric
"I love you Mony Mony . . . ." — Another song
Related art from http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=104669 —
A Log24 search for "Watercourse" leads to . . .
("Watercourse" is in the Customer review link.)
The "five years ago" link leads to . . .
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"What modern painters are trying to do,
— James J. Gibson in Leonardo An example of invariant structure:
The three line diagrams above result from the three partitions, into pairs of 2-element sets, of the 4-element set from which the entries of the bottom colored figure are drawn. Taken as a set, these three line diagrams describe the structure of the bottom colored figure. After coordinatizing the figure in a suitable manner, we find that this set of three line diagrams is invariant under the group of 16 binary translations acting on the colored figure. A more remarkable invariance — that of symmetry itself — is observed if we arbitrarily and repeatedly permute rows and/or columns and/or 2×2 quadrants of the colored figure above. Each resulting figure has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry. This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible "form" or "idea" behind the visible two-color pattern. Hence it exemplifies, in a way, the conflict described by Plato between those who say that "real existence belongs only to that which can be handled" and those who say that "true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms." |
* See that title in this journal.
See also a poem by Nick Tosches from the preceding day —
August 11, 2010 — "He Who Is of Name," in which Tosches
addresses actor James Franco (Esquire magazine).
See as well, from this journal recently . . .
Down the Rabbit Hole with James Franco —
(Continued from 10 AM)
"Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram,
a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram.
It tells you what to do or not do, but not why.
The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture."
— Customer review at Amazon.com
Tiptoe through the tulips with Rota and Erickson:
|
Attempts have been made to string together beautiful mathematical results and to present them in books bearing such attractive titles as The One Hundred Most Beautiful Theorems of Mathematics. Such anthologies are seldom found on a mathematician’s bookshelf. The beauty of a theorem is best observed when the theorem is presented as the crown jewel within the context of a theory. — Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts |
See also Martin Erickson in this journal . . .
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/29/NonSimple4E.gif
See also Dueling Formulas, Sinner or Saint?, and The Zero Obit.
Or: Debriefing Josefine
From the CV of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche:
Selected Collections/ Public Commissions:
2016 Jarfjord Grensevaktstasjon,
Jarfjord/Kirkenes, NO (upcoming)
From an Amazon.com customer review of a book on
northern Norway in World War II, Fire and Ice —
"… Hunt doesn't take sides. He approaches
the story as a journalist and documentary maker,
rather than as an academic."
The book, as the author notes, was published in Britain
on October 6, 2014.
A synchronicity check of the publication date yields
a variation on the "Fire and Ice" theme —
____________________________
"Jeg prøver å innføre et narrativ, noe magisk og forførende,
samt erstatte den iboende materialistiske logikken med
esoterisk kosmologi og symbolikk." — Josefine Lyche
The Ball-Weiner date above, 5 September 2011,
suggests a review of this journal on that date —
"Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram,
a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram.
It tells you what to do or not do, but not why.
The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture."
— Customer review at Amazon.com
This passage was quoted here on August 10, 2009.
Also from that date:
The Sept. 5, 2011, Ball-Weiner paper illustrates the
"doily" view of the mathematical structure W(3,2), also
known as GQ(2,2), the Sp(4,2) generalized quadrangle.
(See Fig. 3.1 on page 33, exercise 13 on page 38, and
the answer to that exercise on page 55, illustrated by
Fig. 5.1 on page 56.)
For "another view, hidden yet true," of GQ(2,2),
see Inscape and Symplectic Polarity in this journal.
The title, which I dislike, is taken from a 2011 publication
of the MAA, also sold by Cambridge University Press.
Some material relevant to the title adjective:
| "For those who have learned something of higher mathematics, nothing could be more natural than to use the word 'beautiful' in connection with it. Mathematical beauty, like the beauty of, say, a late Beethoven quartet, arises from a combination of strangeness and inevitability. Simply defined abstractions disclose hidden quirks and complexities. Seemingly unrelated structures turn out to have mysterious correspondences. Uncanny patterns emerge, and they remain uncanny even after being underwritten by the rigor of logic."— Jim Holt, opening of a book review in the Dec. 5, 2013, issue of The New York Review of Books |
Some relevant links—
The above list was updated on Jan. 31, 2014, to include the
"Strangeness" and "Hidden quirks" links. See also a post of
Jan. 31, 2014.
Update of March 9, 2014 —
The link "Simply defined abstractions" is to the construction of the Steiner
system S(5, 8, 24) described by R. T. Curtis in his 1976 paper defining the
Miracle Octad Generator. It should be noted that this construction is due
to Richard J. Turyn, in a 1967 Sylvania research report. (See Emily Jennings's
talk of 1 Nov. 2012.) Compare the Curtis construction, written in 1974,
with the Turyn construction of 1967 as described in Sphere Packings, Lattices
and Groups , by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane (first published in 1988).
Yesterday's post on epistemology and geometry
suggests an Amazon customer review of Descartes's
Rules for the Direction of the Mind —
Quoted in that review —
"… we must make use of every assistance
of the intellect, the imagination, the senses,
and the memory" (Descartes, Rules, XII)
One such assistance is the calendar.
See the date of the Blasjo review, Dec. 20, 2009,
in this journal. See also Descartes.
This post was suggested by—
The above Sábato novel was translated as The Angel of Darkness .
Its Spanish title was "Abaddón el Exterminador " (Abaddon the Exterminator ).
From a customer review of the novel at Amazon.com—
"Early in the book a drunken outcast will see the vision of the Great Beast of Revelation. Near the end he will tell others of what he has seen. Meanwhile Sábato, who was originally trained as a scientist, seeks out the supernatural and the mystical in order to find an antidote to Stalinism, simple-minded 'Progress' and a superficial positivism."
For a more sophisticated vision of the Beast, see The Ninth Gate.
For Abaddon in a less sophisticated antidote to positivism, see The Chronicle of Abaddon the Destroyer: The War in Heaven .
I prefer Charles Williams's approach to War in Heaven .
If there is an afterlife, perhaps Sábato's experience there will be more lively than his novel's tombstone would imply.
He may, despite his wish for heavenly peace, turn out to be (in a phrase from this morning's post) a badly needed "ghost warrior."
A film by Julie Taymor, Across the Universe —  Detail of the Strawberry Fields Forever Sacred Heart — 
Julie Taymor "Shinin' like a diamond, — Album "The Dark," |
Today's noon post included a search result from a website titled "Enchanted Mind."
Related thoughts:
Today's New York Times on Julie Taymor's "Spider-Man"—
"Gone, when the show resumes performances on May 12 after a three-week overhaul, will be the Geek Chorus of narrators…."
A theatrical alternative—
National Catholic Reporter in 1995 on "Mighty Aphrodite"—
"Woody's neuroticism may be wearing thin, but he has invented a comic Greek chorus to comment on his problems…."
For a less comic Greek chorus, see The Quiet Customer (August 10, 2010).
"Hello, are you my 3 o'clock?"
See also Spider Girl (August 2, 2009).
Evariste Galois, 1811-1832 (Vita Mathematica, V. 11)
Awarded 5 stars by Christopher G. Robinson (Cambridge, MA USA).
See also other reviews by Robinson.
Galois was shot in a duel on today's date, May 30, in 1832. Related material for those who prefer entertainment to scholarship—
"It is a melancholy pleasure that what may be [Martin] Gardner’s last published piece, a review of Amir Alexander’s Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics, will appear next week in our June issue." —Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, May 23, 2010.
Today is, incidentally, the feast day of St. Joan of Arc, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. (See "against stupidity" in this journal.)
An educated consumer
is our best customer!
“Acme Klein Bottles — where
yesterday’s future is here today!”
Sophists
From David Lavery’s weblog today—
Kierkegaard on Sophists:
“If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates’ day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract customers, and then would have had a sign painted saying: Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: that is how men who do not think behave).”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, edited and translated by Alexander Dru
To anyone familiar with Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the above remarks of Kierkegaard ring false. Actually, the sophists as described by Pirsig are not at all like scientists, but rather like relativist purveyors of postmodern literary “theory.” According to Pirsig, the scientists are like Plato (and hence Socrates)– defenders of objective truth.
Pirsig on Sophists:
“The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them. Their common effort united them into a group that may be called Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ These were the famous teachers of ‘wisdom,’ the Sophists of ancient Greece.
To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people… there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it’s unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists.”
I agree with Plato’s (and Rebecca Goldstein’s) contempt for relativists. Yet Pirsig makes a very important point. It is not the scientists but rather the storytellers (not, mind you, the literary theorists) who sometimes seem to embody Quality.
As for hanging a sign outside the shop, I suggest (particularly to New Zealand’s Cullinane College) that either or both of the following pictures would be more suggestive of Quality than a microscope:
For the “primordial protomatter”
in the picture at left, see
The Diamond Archetype.
Pictures Within Pictures
"The Chinese language is written in ideograms, pictures. Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram, a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram. It tells you what to do or not do, but not why. The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture. Such is the nature of the Chinese language. Simple yet complex. Pictures within pictures."
— Customer review at Amazon.com
See also the pictures in this journal on today's date five years ago.
Eight is a Gate
From the most highly
rated negative review:
“I never did figure out
what ‘The Eight’ was.”
Various approaches
to this concept
(click images for details):
PRESS RELEASE
U.S. Steel Consolidates Production
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56 Triangles
"This wonderful picture was drawn by Greg Egan with the help of ideas from Mike Stay and Gerard Westendorp. It's probably the best way for a nonmathematician to appreciate the symmetry of Klein's quartic. It's a 3-holed torus, but drawn in a way that emphasizes the tetrahedral symmetry lurking in this surface! You can see there are 56 triangles: 2 for each of the tetrahedron's 4 corners, and 8 for each of its 6 edges."
Exercise:
Click on image for further details.
Note that if eight points are arranged
in a cube (like the centers of the
eight subcubes in the figure above),
there are 56 triangles formed by
the 8 points taken 3 at a time.
Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds
and Sacred Heart
PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.
Related material:
and
a film by Julie Taymor,
Across the Universe:
Detail of the
Strawberry Fields Forever
Sacred Heart:
A song:
Julie Taymor
“Shinin’ like a diamond,
she had tombstones
in her eyes.”— Album “The Dark,”
by Guy ClarkFor related tombstones,
see May 16-19, 2006,
and April 19, 2008.Further background:
Art Wars for
Red October.
"I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class."
The "Jumper" theme, teleportation, has been better developed by three other writers– Bester, Zelazny, and King–
"As a long-time fan of both Alfie Bester and Roger Zelazny, I was delighted to find this posthumous collaboration. Psychoshop is, I think, true to both authors' bodies of work. After all, Bester's influence on Zelazny is evident in a a number of works, most notably Eye of Cat with its dazzling experimental typography so reminiscent of what Bester had done in The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination."
— Amazon.com customer review
"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,' the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal."
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
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From another "Jaunt-701"– Log24, Feb. 7:
The Football
Mandorla New York Lottery, 2008: "He pointed at the football "The |
"It's eternity in there,"
he said, and dropped dead….
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
Related material:
the previous entry.
This morning’s previous entry featured contemptibly mediocre Jewish fiction. In contrast, here is a passage from first-rate Jewish fiction– the little boy and little girl of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime:
“Their desire for each other’s company was unflagging. This was noted with amusement by the adults. They were inseparable until bedtime but uncomplaining when it was announced. They ran off to their separate rooms with not a glance backward. Their sleep was absolute. They sought each other in the morning. He did not think of her as beautiful. She did not think of him as comely. They were extremely sensitive to each other, silhouetted in a diffuse excitement, like electricity or a nimbus of light, but their touching was casual and matter-of-fact. What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other’s fairness. Yet they were beautiful, he in his stately blond thoughtfulness, she a smaller, darker, more lithe being, with flash in her dark eyes and an almost military bearing. When they ran their hair lay back from their broad foreheads. Her feet were small, her brown hands were small. She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans. She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements. The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles. She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels. He had never gone without a meal. He had never been cold at night. He ran with his mind. He ran toward something. He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he. He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by a coincidence. A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes.”
Symbol from a
website on
“Presbyterian
Creedal Standards”
The above symbol
appeared here
on 11/8/02.
Related material:
1. The remarks of
Bradley Whitford
at Princeton’s
Class Day yesterday:
2. An illustration from
Log 24 on 11/10/06:
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Paul Robeson in |
3. The Whirligig of Time
(1/5/03):
4. Natalie Angier, priestess of Scientism
(5/26/07), and her new book
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of
the Beautiful Basics of Science
(available as a special from
Amazon.com):
| Better Together Buy this book with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens today!
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"The arrest was supported by…
an open container… 75% full,
labeled 'Cazador [sic] tequila'
(a strong type of mezcal)."
Refined Tequilas,
Meant to be Savored:
Photo by Lars Klove for
The New York Times
— Essay by Eric Asimov,
"Spirits of the Times"
"Remember that we deal with
Herb Alpert–
First album, 1962
cunning, baffling, and powerful."
(Adapted from Chapter 5
of Alcoholics Anonymous)
"Tequila,"
by The Champs
(1958)
The Spirituality of
Addiction and Recovery
"Turns out she's a party girl
who loves Tequila:
'Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.'"
Yvonne returns to the Bella Vista
in Under the Volcano:
"… a glass partition
that divided the room
(from yet another bar,
she remembered now,
giving on a side street)"
David Sanborn
(a reply to Alpert's
Lonely Bull ):
— Review of Sanborn's album "Timeagain"
by Geoffrey Himes in Jazz Times,
June 2003
"It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357."
From Log 24.net on
Thursday, February 19, 2004:
Five Easy Pieces
for Lee Marvin’s Birthday
| 1. |
“EVERYTHING’S a story. |
|
| 2. |
“You see that sign, sir?” |
|
| 3. |
|
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| 4. |
|
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| 5. |
Lorna Thayer,
1954
The 2 PM June 4 Log24 entry
has a link to
The Quality of Diamond,
where more of the Lorna Thayer
story may be found.
"Difficult to understand because of intricacy: byzantine, complex, complicated, convoluted, daedal, Daedalian, elaborate, intricate, involute, knotty, labyrinthine, tangled."
— Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition
Five Easy Pieces
for Lee Marvin’s Birthday
| 1. |
“EVERYTHING’S a story. |
|
| 2. |
“You see that sign, sir?” |
|
| 3. |
|
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| 4. |
|
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| 5. |
Resurrection
The previous entry, on Christian theology, does not imply that all religion is bad. Consider, for instance, the following from a memorial web page:
“Al Grierson’s song Resurrection was sung by Ray Wylie Hubbard, on his outstanding Dangerous Spirits album. The song is awesome, and fits right into Ray Wylie’s spirit ‘and an angel lay on a mattress and spoke of history and death with perfume on her lingerie and whiskey on her breath . . . he’s loading up his saddlebags on the edge of wonder, one is filled with music and the other’s filled with thunder.’ Wow.”
Amen.
Grierson died on November 2, 2000
— All Souls Day, Dia de los Muertos.
My own favorite resurrection story is “Damnation Morning,” by Fritz Leiber; see Why Me?
For more on the Day of the Dead, see Under the Volcano.
These are, of course, just stories, but may reflect some as yet unknown truth.
By the way, thanks, Joni, for leading me to KHYI.com on the day of the Toronto Stones concert.
Links for St. Benedict
Today is the feast of St. Benedict.
Here is a link from the left:
The Trial of Depleted Uranium,
by Saint Philip Berrigan
Here is a link from the right:
On a Preview of “The Passion,”
a film by Saint Mel Gibson
Both Berrigan and Gibson are devout Catholics. (I use the present tense for Berrigan, though he is dead, since, as a saint, he is not very dead.) Both are worthy of respect, and should be listened to carefully, even though the religion they espouse is that of Hitler and Torquemada.
For more details, see sites related to the above links…. Click on either of the logos below — on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.
Both logos represent different embodiments of the “story theory” of truth, as opposed to the “diamond theory” of truth. Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion. I personally prefer the “diamond theory” of truth, represented by the logo below.
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