The conclusion of an obituary for a former resident of Laurel Canyon —
“He would go to all these old junk shops and buy
black-and-white photos of nobody actors,’’
Mr. Klein said. “He didn’t want stills of the stars.
He said, ‘Actors that never made it — that’s
the real Hollywood.’ ’’
— Guy Trebay in The New York Times , June 23
Related music and art — Posts tagged Hollywood Nights.
| Maria Shriver, a contributor for NBC’s “TODAY,” remembered her aunt as an “extraordinary woman.”
Smith “had a great career on behalf of this country as ambassador to Ireland promoting peace there and also started very special arts for people with intellectual disabilities,” Shriver said on the 3rd hour of “TODAY.” “So I take solace in the fact that she is joining every other member of her family up in heaven. So it’s nice for her,” she added. Smith was born on Feb. 20, 1928, in Boston, Massachusetts to Rose and Joseph Kennedy. |
Related graphic design:
Feb. 20 square and June 17 Circle.
Related entertainment: “The Foreigner” (2017 film) and . . .
“Mr. Caplan, an essayist, professor, lecturer and consultant on design,
died on June 4 in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
He was 95.” — Penelope Green in The New York Times today.
This journal on that date —
Related cultural icons —
” James, Alec. Alec, James.”
Click the Springer “train of thought” advertisement below to enlarge.
A line for Stephen King:
“She gets the locomotive, I get the caboose.”
. . . . . . . 
Cover Design: Will Staehle / Unusual Co.
In memory of an architect who reportedly died yesterday at 88,
a search in this journal for capilla (Spanish for chapel).
|
A doodle from 2012’s Feast of the Epiphany—
A doodle based on a post for Twelfth Night, 2003—
|
From this journal on August 9, 2019 —
Perhaps not.
From an Instagram account, also on August 9, 2019 — (click to enlarge) —
The Boston Globe on the dead architect of the previous post —
"Mr. McKinnell, who was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the
Royal Institute of British Architects, taught for many years at the
Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology School of Architecture and Planning."
Some ugly rhetoric to go with the ugly architecture —
[Steam calliope plays] As a stationary object,
it always needs to be activated.
— Kara Walker at
Backstory —
See also this journal on the above "catastrophe" weekend.
Cover Design: Will Staehle / Unusual Co.
This post is in memory of "Wes Wilson, Psychedelic Poster Pioneer,"
who died at 82 on January 24, according to the NY Times today.
Related material — This journal on January 24.
Epigraph from Ch. 4 of Design Theory , Vol. I:
"Es is eine alte Geschichte,
doch bleibt sie immer neu "
—Heine (Lyrisches Intermezzo XXXIX)
This epigraph was quoted here earlier on
the morning of September 1, 2011.
Illustration, from a search in this journal for “Symplectic” —
.
Some background: Rift-design in this journal and …
Art notes —
See also the "Night of the Iguana" logo by Saul Bass,
a student of Gyorgy Kepes.
Postscript for synchronologists —
See this journal on that date: Nov. 6, 2011.
In memory of an artist who reportedly died in Venice, CA, on Jan. 2 —
Two quotes from the website Quotes Sayings —
"I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window
of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast." — John Baldessari
"A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION
IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE" — John Baldessari
The "dead experience" quote is actually from Gyorgy Kepes:
From Corrections: Jan. 1, 2020 —
The astronomy article, by Dennis Overbye, is dated Dec. 23* (a Monday).
The above reference to "Tuesday" is explained by the fine print
at the bottom of the Science Times article — "A version of this article
appears in print on [Tuesday] , Section D, Page 6 of the
New York edition with the headline: In Battle of Giant Telescopes,
Outlook for the U.S. Dims."
From the article as quoted on Thursday, Dec. 26,
at https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com —
|
"Now, as the wheels of the academic and government bureaucracy begin to turn, many American astronomers worry that they are following in the footsteps of their physicist colleagues. In 1993, Congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, and the United States ceded the exploration of inner space to Europe and CERN, which built the Large Hadron Collider, 27 miles in diameter, where the long-sought Higgs boson was eventually discovered. The United States no longer builds particle accelerators. There could come a day, soon, when Americans no longer build giant telescopes. That would be a crushing disappointment to a handful of curious humans stuck on Earth, thirsting for cosmic grandeur. In outer space, nobody can hear you cry." Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/science/telescopes-magellan-hawaii-astronomy.html |
Related material from this journal on April 2, 2019 —
Cover design by Greg Stadnyk, available in an animated gif.
* See also this journal on Dec. 23.
Porsche.com on Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, who reportedly
died at 76 in Salzburg on 5 April 2012 —
"The credo of his design work was:
'Design must be functional and functionality has to
be translated visually into aesthetics, without gags
that have to be explained first.'
F.A. Porsche:
'A coherently designed product requires no adornment;
it should be enhanced by its form alone.'
The design’s appearance should be readily comprehensible
and not detract from the product and its function.
His conviction was: 'Good design should be honest.' "
See also last night's 11:32 PM post, and posts tagged Structural Logic.
Rules for a game codesigned by Ellie Black, the cartoonist
of yesterday's post Cutting-Edge Prize —
|
Friday, March 10, 2017
The Transformers
|
There are many approaches to constructing the Mathieu
group M24. The exercise below sketches an approach that
may or may not be new.
Exercise:
It is well-known that …
There are 56 triangles in an 8-set.
There are 56 spreads in PG(3,2).
The alternating group An is generated by 3-cycles.
The alternating group A8 is isomorphic to GL(4,2).
Use the above facts, along with the correspondence
described below, to construct M24.
Some background —
A Log24 post of May 19, 2013, cites …
Peter J. Cameron in a 1976 Cambridge U. Press
book — Parallelisms of Complete Designs .
See the proof of Theorem 3A.13 on pp. 59 and 60.
See also a Google search for “56 triangles” “56 spreads” Mathieu.
Update of October 31, 2019 — A related illustration —
Update of November 2, 2019 —
See also p. 284 of Geometry and Combinatorics:
Selected Works of J. J. Seidel (Academic Press, 1991).
That page is from a paper published in 1970.
Update of December 20, 2019 —
On the word Gestaltung —
(Here “eidolon” should instead be “eidos .”)
A search for a translation of the book "Facettenreiche Mathematik " —
A paper found in the above search —
A related translation —
See also octad.design.
"Leonardo was something like what we now call a Conceptual artist,
maybe the original one. Ideas — experiments, theories — were
creative ends in themselves."
— Holland Cotter in the online New York TImes this evening
From other Log24 posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square —
* Phrase from the previous post, "Overarching Narrative."
In memory of a retired co-director of Galerie St. Etienne
who reportedly died on October 17 . . .
"It is… difficult to mount encyclopedic exhibitions
without an overarching art-historical narrative…."
— Jane Kallir, director of Galerie St. Etienne, in
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/
visual-art-and-design/269564/the-end-of-middle-class-art
An overarching narrative from the above death date —
See as well the previous post
and "Dancing at Lughnasa."
"And the new dumbed-down gallery headings and word salads
of the main wall texts definitely need work."
— Roberta Smith yesterday in The New York Times
on the reopening Museum of Modern Art.
Sample gallery heading and word salad from this journal —
Heading:
Salad:
Movie poster designer Philip Gips reportedly died on
Thursday, October 3, 2019. This journal on that date:
For a first look at octad.space, see that domain.
For a second look, see octad.design.
For some other versions, see Aitchison in this journal.
The previous post displayed part of a page from
a newspaper published the day Olivia Newton-John
turned 21 — Friday, September 26, 1969.
A meditation, with apologies to Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Newton-John
A stately pleasure-square decree
Where Aleph the sacred symbol ran
Through subsquares measureless to man.
A related video —
Beware, beware, her flashing eyes, her floating hair:
Set design —
As opposed to block design —
For those who prefer greater clarity than is offered by Stevens . . .
The A section —
The B section —
"A paper from Helsinki in 2005 says there are more than a million
3-(16,4,1) block designs, of which only one has an automorphism
group of order 322,560. This is the affine 4-space over GF(2)."
The exercise in the previous post was suggested by a passage
purporting to "use standard block design theory" that was written
by some anonymous author at Wikipedia on March 1, 2019:
Here "rm OR" apparently means "remove original research."
Before the March 1 revision . . .
The "original research" objected to and removed was the paragraph
beginning "To explain this further." That paragraph was put into the
article earlier on Feb. 28 by yet another anonymous author (not by me).
An account of my own (1976 and later) original research on this subject
is pictured below, in a note from Feb. 20, 1986 —
An image from a Log24 post of March 5, 2019 —
The following paragraph from the above image remains unchanged
as of this morning at Wikipedia:
"A 3-(16,4,1) block design has 140 blocks of size 4 on 16 points,
such that each triplet of points is covered exactly once. Pick any
single point, take only the 35 blocks containing that point, and
delete that point. The 35 blocks of size 3 that remain comprise
a PG(3,2) on the 15 remaining points."
Exercise —
Prove or disprove the above assertion about a general "3-(16,4,1)
block design," a structure also known as a Steiner quadruple system
(as I pointed out in the March 5 post).
Relevant literature —
A paper from Helsinki in 2005* says there are more than a million
3-(16,4,1) block designs, of which only one has an automorphism
group of order 322,560. This is the affine 4-space over GF(2),
from which PG(3,2) can be derived using the well-known process
from finite geometry described in the above Wikipedia paragraph.
* "The Steiner quadruple systems of order 16," by Kaski et al.,
Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A Volume 113, Issue 8,
November 2006, pages 1764-1770.
|
arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1905.06914 Quantum Physics Placing Kirkman's Schoolgirls and Quantum Spin Pairs on the Fano Plane: A Rainbow of Four Primary Colors, A Harmony of Fifteen Tones J. P. Marceaux, A. R. P. Rau (Submitted on 14 May 2019) A recreational problem from nearly two centuries ago has featured prominently in recent times in the mathematics of designs, codes, and signal processing. The number 15 that is central to the problem coincidentally features in areas of physics, especially in today's field of quantum information, as the number of basic operators of two quantum spins ("qubits"). This affords a 1:1 correspondence that we exploit to use the well-known Pauli spin or Lie-Clifford algebra of those fifteen operators to provide specific constructions as posed in the recreational problem. An algorithm is set up that, working with four basic objects, generates alternative solutions or designs. The choice of four base colors or four basic chords can thus lead to color diagrams or acoustic patterns that correspond to realizations of each design. The Fano Plane of finite projective geometry involving seven points and lines and the tetrahedral three-dimensional simplex of 15 points are key objects that feature in this study. Comments:16 pages, 10 figures Subjects:Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as:arXiv:1905.06914 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:1905.06914v1 [quant-ph] for this version) Submission history
From: A. R. P. Rau [view email] |
See also other posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square.
The previous post suggests a search for Buber in this journal
that yields a passage from New Year's Eve 2017 —
" As for 'that you in which the lines of relation, though parallel,
intersect,' and 'intimations of eternity,' see Log24 posts on
the concept 'line at infinity' as well as 'Lost Horizon.' "
Related illustrations —
From Pi Day 2017 —
"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard."
From April 20, 2019 —
From "A History of Violence" —
Edifice Complex
A Doll's House
Somebody Doesn't Like Sara Lee
Dialogue and Story Points —
The previous post, "Dream of Plenitude," suggests . . .
"So here's to you, Nordstrom-Robinson . . . ."
The online New York Times this afternoon has an article on "the
preparatory cartoon for Raphael’s fresco 'The School of Athens.'"
Other preparatory cartoons:
The first New Yorker cover above is from a search for Hustvedt
in this journal. See the 2003 post "Art at the Vanishing Point."
Casa Malaparte, also known as Villa Malaparte —
Related film image with architectural quotation superimposed —
Related art prose —
"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body
of ideas, having little or no outward reference, placing
considerable emphasis on formal aspects of the work
and maintaining a complicated—indeed, anxious—
rather than a naïve relationship with the day-to-day
world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based
group that has a high sense of the seriousness and
value of what it is trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."
— Jeremy Gray, Plato's Ghost: The Modernist
Transformation of Mathematics , Princeton, 2008
"Even as the dominant modernist narrative was being written,
there were art historians who recognized that it was inaccurate.
The narrative was too focused on France . . . . Nor was it
correct to build the narrative so exclusively around formalism;
modernism was far messier, far more multifaceted than that."
— Jane Kallir, https://www.tabletmag.com/
jewish-arts-and-culture/visual-art-and-design/
269564/the-end-of-middle-class-art,
quoted here on the above date — Sept. 11, 2018.
From some related Log24 posts —
A story from the NY Times Sunday morning print edition —
"A version of this article appears in print on ,
on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Kevin Roche, 96, Is Dead; Famed Modernist Architect."
" When Mr. Roche received the Pritzker in 1982, he delivered
an acceptance speech that displayed both his capacity for
self-deprecating humor and his belief that architecture was
a noble pursuit. He quoted from a letter he had received
complaining that his work was 'moribund' and that the Pritzker
jury 'must be out of their minds' to have given him the prize.
He could only respond, he said, by asking: 'Is not the act of building
an act of faith in the future, and of hope? Hope that the testimony of
our civilization will be passed on to others, hope that what we are doing
is not only sane and useful and beautiful, but a clear and true reflection
of our own aspirations. And hope that it is an art, which will communicate
with the future and touch those generations as we ourselves have been
touched and moved by the past.' "
— Paul Goldberger
Goldberger on Roche's earlier career —
". . . He continued to finish projects Saarinen had started, including
the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, designed
in collaboration with Charles Eames . . . ."
Illustration —
The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair
See also the film "Tomorrowland."
"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie
This post continues a post from yesterday on the square model of
PG(3,2) that apparently first appeared (presented as such*) in . . .
Cullinane, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring,"
Notices of the AMS , pp. A193-194, Feb. 1979.
Yesterday's Wikipedia presentation of the square model was today
revised by yet another anonymous author —
Revision history accounting for the above change from yesterday —
The jargon "rm OR" means "remove original research."
The added verbiage about block designs is a smokescreen having
nothing to do with the subject, which is square representation
of the 35 points and lines.
* The 35 squares, each consisting of four 4-element subsets, appeared earlier
in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis (published in 1976).
They were not at that time presented as constituting a finite geometry,
either affine (AG(4,2)) or projective (PG(3,2)).
From The Atlantic September 2017 issue — "How America Lost Its Mind,"
by former Harvard Lampoon writer Kurt Andersen —
Note the accusing phrase "a suspicion of science and reason."
Related material by Andersen received in today's mail —
Note the accusing phrase "the cyanide in Donald Trump's Kool-Aid."
Related graphic design —
The source of the above cover art —
Earlier in Frenkel's above opinion piece —
"What this research implies is that we are not just hearing
different 'stories' about the electron, one of which may be
true. Rather, there is one true story, but it has many facets,
seemingly in contradiction, just like in 'Rashomon.'
There is really no escape from the mysterious — some
might say, mystical — nature of the quantum world."
See also a recent New Yorker version of the fashionable cocktail-party
phrase "the Rashomon effect."
For a different approach to the dictum "there is one true story, but
it has many facets," see . . .
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker motto
See also Katherine Neville, Karl Pribram, and Cooper Hewitt in this journal.
For those who prefer more elaborate decorations —
1. A Facebook image from last August …
2. The Facebook glider suggests a tune from "The Thomas Crown Affair"
(1968) that appeared in a Dec. 16, 2018 post on Christianity and
"interlocking names"—
The revised lyrics describe a square space.
3. An even more elaborate square space:
the Dance of the Snowflakes from
Balanchine's version of The Nutcracker —
… as opposed to The Dreaming Jewels .
A July 2014 Amsterdam master's thesis on the Golay code
and Mathieu group —
"The properties of G24 and M24 are visualized by
four geometric objects: the icosahedron, dodecahedron,
dodecadodecahedron, and the cubicuboctahedron."
Some "geometric objects" — rectangular, square, and cubic arrays —
are even more fundamental than the above polyhedra.
A related image from a post of Dec. 1, 2018 —
The above graphic design is by Noma Bar.
See as well the lamb-in-triangle of the Dec. 27 post
A Candle for Lily —
Related material —
Remarks by Evelyn Lamb on the Deathly Hallows symbol.
"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence."
— G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology
From Log24 on Friday, Nov. 16 —
This evening's New York Times on an opening-credits designer,
Pablo Ferro, who reportedly died at 83 on Friday, Nov. 16 —
An example of Ferro's later work in film —
Musical accompaniment from Sunday morning —
Musical accompaniment from Sunday morning —
Update of Nov. 21 —
The reader may contrast the above Squarespace.com logo
(a rather serpentine version of the acronym SS) with a simpler logo
for a square space (the Galois window ):
See also 12 AM Sept. 4 in this journal, "Identity Crisis."
Related material — "Overarching" in this journal.
Update of 4:12 AM ET —
The name of the New Yorker artist in the Identity Crisis post,
Tamara Shopsin, has now been added to the illustrated excerpt.
See as well . . .
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/obituaries/
kenny-shopsin-dead.html.
itemprop="datePublished"
content="2018-09-04T22:17:59.000Z"
|
“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.
Three hidden keys open three secret gates
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits
And those with the skill to survive these straits
Will reach The End where the prize awaits
— Ready Player One , by Ernest Cline
Related text —
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram
aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi
dabo claves regni caelorum
Related imagery —
From Steven Spielberg's film "Ready Player One" (2018) —
From this journal on June 17, 2003 —
From The New York Times on Easter night, 2007 —
See as well Rosalind Krauss on LeWitt:
The phrase "quantum space" in today's 10:45 AM post
was used earlier in a book title —
Amazon.com gives the Quantum Space publication date
for its Kindle edition as April 10, 2017.
I prefer my own remarks of April 10, 2017 —
|
From "Heidegger for Passover"
"Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying
— p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings ,
"Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" |
"A blank underlies the trials of device."
"Designing with just a blank piece of paper is very quiet."
Related material —
An image posted at 12 AM ET December 25, 2014:
The image stands for the
phrase "five by five,"
meaning "loud and clear."
Other posts featuring the above 5×5 square with some added structure:
Two visions of happy neurons:
This post was suggested by a link in today's New York Times —
"Simon Denny, the New Zealand artist whose work incorporates
board games, intervenes by introducing his own pieces into an attic of
the late-18th-century Haus zum Kirschgarten, already filled with
'old historical dollhouses, board games, chess games' and the like …."
From a 2003 obituary of author Neil Postman —
"In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business (Viking, 1985; Penguin, 1986),
he indicted the television industry on the charge of making
entertainment out of the world's most serious problems.
The book was translated into eight languages and sold
200,000 copies worldwide, according to N.Y.U."
Postman reportedly died on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2003.
Log24 on that date —
Art Theory for Yom Kippur and Ado.
See also today's obituary reporting the May 21 death of Postman's
erstwhile agent Elaine Markson.
This journal on May 21, in a post titled "Crux" —
"Chance became tied to the liberties
of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication
or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny."
— Google Books description of No Accident, Comrade:
Chance and Design in Cold War American Narrative,
by Steven Belletto, Oxford U. Press (first published
in hardcover on Dec. 28, 2011)
Midrash —
Click the image for related posts.
See Solomon Marcus in this journal.
Related art —
Related fictions: The Seventh Function of Language (2017)
and Lexicon (2013). I prefer Lexicon .
Dialogue from the 1984 fourth draft of the script, as found on the Web,
for "Back to the Future" (1985) (apparently some changes were made
in the filming) —
A sort of "flux capacitor" (see previous post) —
… plus "e" for Einstein …
An April 25, 2015, Internet review of "The Dead Pool" (1988) —
"The biggest problem with this movie is the fact that
we have Liam Neeson and Clint Eastwood on the screen
at the same time and they are not facing off
in a battle of badass action stars.
Neeson wasn’t really considered to be much more than
a supporting character at this point in his career,
but his recent action run proves that he is the goods."
— Geno McGahee
Click to enlarge the above IMDb screenshot.
See also a related May 16 review from The Boston Globe .
I prefer the remarks of J. G. Ballard linked to here on May 11.
The glitter-ball-like image discussed in the previous post
is of an artwork by Olafur Eliasson.
See the kaleidoscopic section of his website.
From that section —
Related art in keeping with the theme of last night's Met Gala —
See also my 2005 webpage Kaleidoscope Puzzle.
Art enthusiast Phyllis Tuchman in The New York Times yesterday —
"Ms. Rockburne's understated work plugged into
the prevailing Minimalist aesthetic of the day . . . ."
This was quoted here yesterday, followed by a visual flash drive
of sorts —
Another Parisian flash drive of sorts —
Two excerpts from today's Art & Design section of
The New York Times —
For the deplorables of France —
For further remarks on l'ordre , see
other posts tagged Galois's Space
(… tag=galoiss-space).
* The radical of the title is Évariste Galois (1811-1832).
The FBI holding cube in "The Blacklist" —
" 'The Front' is not the whole story . . . ."
— Vincent Canby, New York Times film review, 1976,
as quoted in Wikipedia.
See also Solomon's Cube in this journal.
Some may view the above web page as illustrating the
Glasperlenspiel passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica —
“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”
A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —
"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."
See also a related remark by Lévi-Strauss in 1955:
"…three different readings become possible:
left to right, top to bottom, front to back."
From this journal at midnight (12 AM ET) on April 4 —
Related material —
From the weblog of Ready Player One author Ernest Cline —
"Recently, a lot of people have asked me if a real person
inspired the character of James Halliday, the eccentric
billionaire video game designer in my book. Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak are both mentioned in the text,
because their world changing partnership inspired the
relationship between James Halliday and Ogden Morrow,
with Morrow being a charismatic tech industry leader like
Jobs, and Halliday being the computer geek genius of the
duo like Woz. But the character of James Halliday was
inspired by two other very different people.
As I told Wired magazine earlier this year, from the
beginning, I envisioned James Halliday’s personality as
a cross between Howard Hughes and Richard Garriott.
If I had to break it down mathematically, I’d estimate that
about 15% of Halliday’s character was inspired by
Howard Hughes (the crazy reclusive millionaire part), with
most of the other 85% being inspired by Richard Garriott."
See as well Log24 posts tagged "Space Writer"
and the classic tune "Midnight at the Oasis."
Related material on automorphism groups —
The "Eightfold Cube" structure shown above with Weyl
competes rather directly with the "Eightfold Way" sculpture
shown above with Bryant. The structure and the sculpture
each illustrate Klein's order-168 simple group.
Perhaps in part because of this competition, fans of the Mathematical
Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, pronounced "Misery') are less likely
to enjoy, and discuss, the eight-cube mathematical structure above
than they are an eight-cube mechanical puzzle like the one below.
Note also the earlier (2006) "Design Cube 2x2x2" webpage
illustrating graphic designs on the eightfold cube. This is visually,
if not mathematically, related to the (2010) "Expert's Cube."
The search for Langlands in the previous post
yields the following Toronto Star illustration —
From a review of the recent film "Justice League" —
"Now all they need is to resurrect Superman (Henry Cavill),
stop Steppenwolf from reuniting his three Mother Cubes
(sure, whatever) and wrap things up in under two cinematic
hours (God bless)."
For other cubic adventures, see yesterday's post on A Piece of Justice
and the block patterns in posts tagged Design Cube.
The Java applets at the webpage "Diamonds and Whirls"
that illustrate Cullinane cubes may be difficult to display.
Here instead is an animated GIF that shows the basic unit
for the "design cube" pages at finitegeometry.org.
WISC = Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer or
Rust Inventory of Schizotypal Cognitions
See related material in earlier WISC RISC posts.
See also . . .
"Many parents ask us about the Block Design section
on the WISC and hope to purchase blocks and exercises
like those used on the WISC test. We explain that doing that
has the potential to invalidate their child's test results.
These Froebel Color Cubes will give you a tool to work with
your child on the skills tested for in the Block Design section
of the WISC in an ethical and appropriate way. These same
skills are applicable to any test of non-verbal reasoning like
the NNAT, Raven's or non-verbal sections of the CogAT or OLSAT. "
For a webpage that is perhaps un ethical and in appropriate,
see Block Designs in Art and Mathematics.
(Title suggested by the TV series Stranger Things )
" 'Untitled' (2016) is the most recent painting in the show
and includes one of Mr. Johns’s recurring images of a ruler."
— Image caption in an article by Deborah Solomon
in The New York Times online, Feb. 7, 2018
From a Log24 search for "Ruler" —
Related art —
See also, in this journal, Magic Mountain and Davos.
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
Related conceptual art —
Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word :
Click the automat image above to enlarge.
See as well a new retrospective at Facebook.
From the post "For Guy Noir" of Wednesday morning, January 24 —
"as privileged viewers of the shadows and reflections"
Related material —
The death on January 24 of a famed ski film maker,
and the Sun Valley icon below (one of a pair of ski
location icons by Wink, a Minneapolis design firm).
From a Log24 post of March 4, 2008 —
|
SINGER, ISAAC:
"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children and laments
— An Annotated Listing of Criticism
"She returned the smile, then looked across the room to
— A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
For "the dimension of time," see A Fold in Time, Time Fold,
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children |
Ibid. —
The pen's point:
John Trever, Albuquerque Journal, 2/29/08
Note the figure on the cover of National Review above —
A related figure from Pentagram Design —
See, more generally, Isaac Singer in this journal.
From a search for Limerick in this journal —
"C A V E S is an exhibition of three large scale works,
each designed to immerse the viewer, and then to
confront the audience with a question regarding how far
they, as privileged viewers of the shadows and reflections
being played out upon the walls, are willing to allow
themselves to believe what they know to be a false reality."
Jodie Foster in a Dec. 15, 2017, sketch with Stephen Colbert —
"People invest in and take ownership of brands,
and they wonder why the brand didn’t
ask their permission to change."
— Michael Bierut of Pentagram Design
in a Design Week article of Jan. 17, 2018
The online New York Times reports this afternoon
the death of a production designer on January 9th —
"In addition to the two Oscars Mr. Marsh won
(which he shared with others), he was nominated
for two more: for 'Scrooge' (1970), with Albert Finney and
Alex [sic ] Guinness, and 'Mary, Queen of Scots' (1971),
with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson."
"… The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart,
illustrated by Shirley Hughes, published Brockhampton 1971.
The story is about Mary, staying at Great-Aunt Charlotte's house,
bored until she meets the black cat Tib and finds the purple flower
fly-by-night that makes the little broomstick fly. In chapter 10
'gay go up and gay go down' Mary hides in Endor College,
the witch school, after hours and finds Tib transformed into a frog
(Madame Mumblechook had taken him from her as her entry fee).
She recites the Master Spell to release him. ' It was a simple,
gay little rhyme, and it ended on a phrase that might have been
(but wasn't) "the dancing ring of days".' "
"Bah, humbug!" — A Christmas Carol
The Matrix —
The Grid —
Picturing the Witt Construction —
"Read something that means something." — New Yorker ad
Wikipedia on a figure from the previous post —
" Antonelli was recognized with an AIGA Medal in 2015
for 'expanding the influence of design in everyday life
by sharing fresh and incisive observations and
curating provocative exhibitions at MoMA'.[4] She was
rated one of the one hundred most powerful people in
the world of art by Art Review and Surface Magazine.[5] "
Speaking of exhibitions —
Washington Post dateline . . .
November 20 at 6:34 PM
Address . . .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/
eight-women-say-charlie-rose-sexually-harassed-them–
with-nudity-groping-and-lewd-calls/2017/11/20/ . . .
See also Charlie Rose in this journal.
The only post found in a Log24 search for "Charlie Rose" is about
his May 7, 2008, interview with a Museum of Modern Art figure,
Paola Antonelli. A more recent appearance by Antonelli —
Synchronolgy check — Log24 on the date 5 June 2012.
* Title and wording of post revised the following day.
The Harvard Crimson , Feb. 28, 2017 —
Cambridge City Councillors formally requested that the Cambridge
Historical Commission consider designating the Abbott Building in
Harvard Square as a historical landmark at its weekly meeting Monday.
. . . .
“There are only a few gems that give the really Square character.”
Councillor Dennis J. Carlone said. “And in the heart of the square,
it’s this building.”
See as well the cover of
The Monkey Grammarian ,
a book by Octavio Paz —
A related NPR book review yesterday —
"Like Curious George , another vaguely imperialist children's classic —
which Prose refers to frequently — the simian hero of Mister Monkey
gets into trouble in his new urban environment."
From The New York Times this morning —
Where the Journey
is the Destination
A writer finds emotional solace on some of
Norway’s scenic remote roads, which have been
transformed into architectural wonders.
By ONDINE COHANE OCT. 16, 2017
. . . .
"… another project conceived along these routes is
the Juvet Landscape Hotel, designed by the architects
Jensen & Skodvin, and the creepy, if incredibly appropriate
aesthetically, setting for the 2015 film 'Ex Machina.' "
<meta property="article:published"
itemprop="datePublished"
content="2017-10-16T00:01:38-04:00" />
From posts tagged Design Deadline —
A quotation from Lefebvre:
"… an epoch-making event so generally ignored
that we have to be reminded of it at every moment.
The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered…
the space… of classical perspective and geometry…."— Page 25 of The Production of Space
(Blackwell Publishing, 1991)
This suggests, for those who prefer Harvard's past glories
to its current state, a different Raum from the Zeit 1910.
In January 1910 Annals of Mathematics , then edited at Harvard,
published George M. Conwell's "The 3-space PG (3, 2) and Its Group."
This paper, while perhaps neither epoch-making nor shattering, has
a certain beauty. For some background, see this journal on February 24, 2009.
… who reportedly died at 62 late on Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011.
Related material — The "What As Is" link above, and a Sept. 14 post
quoting art critic Roberta Smith on a current exhibition —
"You grab your experiential richness where you find it."
— Roberta Smith, "Postwar Art Gets a Nervy Makeover"
in the online New York Times
"You grab your experiential richness where you find it."
— Roberta Smith, "Postwar Art Gets a Nervy Makeover"
in the online New York Times today
The New York Times online this evening —
"Mr. Jobs, who died in 2011, loomed over Tuesday’s
nostalgic presentation. The Apple C.E.O., Tim Cook,
paid tribute, his voice cracking with emotion, Mr. Jobs’s
steeple-fingered image looming as big onstage as
Big Brother’s face in the classic Macintosh '1984' commercial."
Review —
|
Thursday, September 1, 2011
How It Works
|
See also 1984 Bricks in this journal.
A flashback from the previous post, "Leave a Space" —
From my RSS feed this evening —
Related material from the Web —
Len Wein reportedly died on Sunday.
An image from this journal on Sunday —
" There was an Outer Limits episode called 'The Architects of Fear.'
I thought: 'Wow. That’s a bit close to our story.' " — Alan Moore
— https://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/01/29/
len-wein-the-outer-limits-and-rewriting-watchmen/
See as well a Log24 post from the above Bleeding Cool date,
2013-01-29, for more comic-book-related material.
Del Toro and the History of Mathematics ,
Or: Applied Bullshit Continues
For del Toro —
For the history of mathematics —
|
Thursday, September 1, 2011
How It Works
|
The obituary for Sekler is somewhat surprising, given that he
reportedly died on May 1, 2017. His burial is also rather late,
according to the Globe —
"A service has been held for Dr. Sekler . . . .
He will be buried Sept. 29 in a cemetery
in Vienna, in his family’s plot."
"A memorial lecture in his honor is planned for November
at the Harvard Graduate School of Design." — The Globe
"All in good time, my little pretty."
Another design note related to May Day 2017 —
Related material —
A Vanderbilt University article titled "The significance of Sheriff Bell’s
dreams at the end of No Country for Old Men," and an obituary from
a Log24 post, "Extreme Aesthetic Distance," of August 27, 2017 . . .
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor.
Book published on July 14, 2015.
For this journal on that date, see posts tagged Perspective.
On Ursula K. Le Guin's short story
"The Rock That Changed Things"
(in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea ) —
|
By Richard D. Erlich, December 2005 … And at this point a wise, old nur, so excellent at maintaining patterns that the obls let him live even after he was maimed, enters the discussion to do some pattern criticism. For a first-order approximation reading, he suggests "It might say, 'The nur places stones,'" and others fill in that the nur would be Bu. Ko corrects them with "patterns aren't ever about nurs!" and Bu counters with "Maybe patterns made of colors are." Looking with all three of his eyes, Ko reads, "—'the nur places stones beautifully in uncontrollable loopingness …. foreshadowing the seen.'" Un suggests "The vision" but cannot figure out the last word. Bu is very excited, inferring that "the patterns of the colors …. aren't accidental. Not meaningless. All the time, we have been putting them here in patterns—not just ones the obls design and we execute, but other patterns—nur patterns—with new meanings." Amid the straight lines of the obls' designs they now see, "other designs, less complete, often merely sketched or hinted—circles, spirals, ovals, and complex curvilinear mazes and labyrinths of great and unpredictable beauty and significance. *** Both patterns were there; did one cancel the other, or was each part of the other? It was difficult to see them both at once, but not impossible." Had the nurs done this all totally unconsciously "without even knowing we were doing it?" Un admits to having looked at colors, and so did Ko, plus "grain and texture." Un warns them to keep word of their works from the Professors: "They don't like patterns to change…. It makes them nervous"— and nervous Professors are dangerous to nurs (62-63). Bu, however "was so excited and persuasive" about colors of stones "that other nurs of Obling began studying the color patterns, learning how to read their meanings." And the practice spreads. Soon, all sorts of nurs were finding "wild designs in colored stones, and surprising messages concerning obls, nurs, and blits" (64) Conservative nurs— "Many nurs," we're told—resist the trend. "If we start inventing new meanings, changing things, disturbing the patterns, where will it end?" It is unclear just how many of the nurs believe «Mr. Charlie treats us real good»—or, as we soon see, Ms. Charlie—but certainly not Bu; she "would hear none of that; she was full of her discovery. She no longer listened in silence. She spoke." Bu goes up to the Rectory Mosaic, wearing around her neck a turquoise that she calls her "selfstone." Up at the Mosaic, Bu crouches before the Rectoress and asks "Would the Lady Rectoress in her kindness answer a question I have?" ["The Rock That Changed Things" was first published in Amazing Stories , Vol. 67 # 6, No. 574, September 1992, pp. 9-13.] |
For an alternative to the Rectoress, see the Abbess of the previous post.
From Blockbuster, a post of Friday, August 4, 2017 —
The article suggests a look at a July 3 Times review of the life
of Jan Fontein, a former Boston Museum of Fine Arts director —
"Mr. Fontein’s time as director coincided with
the nationwide rise of the blockbuster exhibition,
and he embraced the concept. 'There was such a thing
as a contemplative museum, but I don’t think that can
survive anymore,' he told Newsweek in 1978."
From The New York Times this evening —
"Mr. Roth made his mark at the Victoria and Albert
with record-breaking exhibitions focused on
David Bowie in 2013, Alexander McQueen in 2015
and The Beatles and the youth revolution of the 1960s
in 2016."
Related material —
Record-breaking in this journal and Sunday in the Park with Death.
This post was suggested by a New York Times article online today
about an upcoming exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts —
"A version of this article appears in print on August 6, 2017,
on Page AR2 of the New York edition with the headline:
The article suggests a look at a July 3 Times review of the life of
Jan Fontein, a former Boston Museum of Fine Arts director —
"Mr. Fontein’s time as director coincided with
the nationwide rise of the blockbuster exhibition,
and he embraced the concept. 'There was such a thing
as a contemplative museum, but I don’t think that can
survive anymore,' he told Newsweek in 1978."
Fontein died at 89 on May 19, 2017. See Dharmadhatu — a Log24 post
of July 4, 2017 — and its link to posts tagged May 19 Gestalt.
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times —
"The detective story genre concerns the finding of clues
and the search for hidden designs, and its very form
underscores Mr. Pynchon’s obsession with conspiracies
and the existence of systems too complicated to understand."
— Review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge , Sept. 10, 2013
Background: "Moss on the Wall," this journal on that date.
A less complicated system —
"Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead."
— Bill Murray in "Ed Wood"
(The plan , as well as the elevation ,
of the above structure is a 3×3 grid.)
"The heart of the doctor's show is a magic mirror that allows
those who go through it to experience another dimension of
their own minds. Once inside, people choose for good or evil,
opting for — to give one example — either the difficult but
rewarding heights of Mt. Parnassus or the easy pleasures of
Mr. Nick's Lounge Bar. As the doctor angrily puts it when asked
what he's playing at, 'We don't play, what we do is deadly serious,'
which means nothing less than the eternal battle with the devil
for the spirit of man."
— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times film critic, Christmas Day 2009,
reviewing "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus."
In terms that might interest the late museum director of the previous post …
Quoted here from The New Criterion on June 2, 2017 —
Quoted here from The New York Times on June 1, 2017 —
MoMA’s Makeover Rethinks the Presentation of Art
"The new design calls for more gallery space and a transformed
main lobby, physical changes that, along with the re-examination
of art collections and diversity, represent an effort to open up MoMA
and break down the boundaries defined by its founder, Alfred Barr.
'It’s a rethinking of how we were originally conceived,' Glenn D. Lowry,
the museum’s director, said in an interview at MoMA. 'We had created
a narrative for ourselves that didn’t allow for a more expansive reading
of our own collection, to include generously artists from very different
backgrounds.'"
Remark on conceptual art quoted in the previous post —
"…he’s giving the concept but not the realization."
A concept — See a note from this date in 1983:
A realization —
Not the best possible realization, but enough for proof of concept .
Excerpt from the above story —
"The project could also be a new frontier for Mr. Koons.
'It’s superconceptual,' said Judith Benhamou-Huet,
a French art critic and blogger, in that 'he’s giving
the concept but not the realization.' She compared
the approach to that of Sol LeWitt, who sold wall drawings
that buyers then executed on their own."
See also the previous post and Rota on Beauty.
* A reference to Truly Tasteless Jokes , by Blanche Knott
(Book 1 of 11, Ballantine Books paperback, May 1985, page 50).
At MASS MoCA, the installation "Chalkroom" quotes a lyric —
Oh beauty in all its forms funny how hatred can also be a beautiful thing When it's as sharp as a knife as hard as a diamond Perfect |
— From "One Beautiful Evening," by Laurie Anderson.
See also the previous post and "Smallest Perfect" in this journal.
This journal on the above date —
Thursday, April 13, 2017
|
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