Log24

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Livingstone Dies Natalis

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:53 am

The above Livingstone obituary is dated January 29, 2024.
See as well that date in this  journal, and some remarks
by Bernd Witte on Walter Benjamin, science, language, and religion.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Dies Natalis

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:18 am

The New York Times  reports the death yesterday, January 30, 2024,
of the wife of Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson.

According to the Catholic Church, therefore, yesterday was her
dies natalis — day of birth into heaven.

According to the Times, her secular  dies natalis  was Oct. 3 (10/03) —

"Melinda Kae Ledbetter was born on Oct. 3, 1946, in Pueblo, Colo."

According to this  journal, yesterday's significant "10 03" was a time

Fans of hallucinatory fiction might recall a saying of Philip Pullman:

"The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting
between the words on the page
and the thoughts in the reader's mind.
So when people ask me what I meant by this story,
or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one,
I have to explain that I'm not going to explain.

Anyway, I'm not in the message business;
I'm in the 'Once upon a time' business."

Words that are somewhat less hallucinatory —

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Dies Natalis

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:39 pm

June 27, 2016, in YouTube and in life —

Today's  date, July 4, was also, in 1826, the dies natalis  of
former U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Saturday, May 27, 2023

Dies Natalis

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

A related question  — From posts now tagged Weil Misery —
(See today's previous post) . . .

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Dies Natalis: The Frame

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:49 am

From this journal on Candlemas 2018

Also on Candlemas 2018 —

Friday, April 22, 2022

Dies Natalis

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:39 am

October 2, 2016, was, in the Catholic sense, the dies natalis
of a philosopher of science, Mary Hesse.

October 2 was also the day of birth, in the non-Catholic sense,
of philosopher-poet Wallace Stevens.

Cf.  remarks in this  journal on October 2, 2016.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Dies Natalis

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:40 pm

'Sister Wendy's Story of Painting,' Dorling Kindersley Publishers Ltd., 1994

Today is reportedly the dies natalis  of the above author.

 

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Dasein für McConnachie

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:27 pm

Twelfth Night 2024 was the dies natalis  of
comedy writer Brian McConnachie.

From this journal on that date —

Masonic pyramid in 
'Being There' (co-writer of screenplay-- Robert Jones)

Funeral scene from "Being There" (1979)

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Deep Blue

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:41 pm

See also this  journal on the above reported dies natalis .

Friday, December 22, 2023

Wiki’d

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:14 am

Lewis Carroll's chess  Red Queen, from Through the Looking Glass,
is "often confused with" the playing cards  Queen of Hearts, 
from Alice in Wonderland

" The King turned pale, and shut his notebook hastily.
'Consider your verdict,' he said to the jury in a low, trembling voice….

. . . . 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first—verdict afterward.' "

— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The figure at right in the video of today's previous post,
Peter Berck —

"In Alice in Wonderland , the Red Queen
does everything backwards—
she demands the punishment first, and then
the trial, and then the crime comes last of all.
Today, the Red Queen is everywhere."

College of Natural Resources commencement address,
May 12, 2018, University of California, Berkeley

Berck's address was titled "The Red Queen."
It would have had diminished rhetorical effect if
correctly  titled "The Queen of Hearts."

Berck's dies natalis — "birth into heaven," in Catholic parlance —
was reportedly August 10, 2018.  A Log24 synchronology check
yields a different chess-related figure Actor/director John Huston:

Sunday, July 9, 2023

This Is Your Brain on Category Theory

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Remarks by John Baez today suggest a flashback

See as well this  journal on the dies natalis  of Bénabou.

Thursday, June 8, 2023

“On the Route” Continues: Newman Sauce

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:44 pm

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/movies/
barry-newman-dead.html

  An Actor Prepares . . .
     See the previous post.

See also the film "Vanishing Point" discussed
in the above New York Times obituary.

Barry  Newman's dies natalis  is reportedly May 11.
See "On the Route" from that date in this  journal.

An Artist’s Legacy

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:21 pm

A check of today's New Yorker  penbots yields
an entertaining piece on pop culture by Sarah Larson:

Perhaps, in death's dream kingdom, there is some guidance from
the illustrator who reportedly did the book cover in the previous post
one Hector Garrido.  

"Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One."

— Sarah Larson, quoted here  on Sept. 5, 2015.

Garrido's dies natalis  was reportedly 19 April, 2020.
Synchronology check — Log24 search: "Wittgenstein Easter."

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Exploring Color Space . . . Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:10 pm

"Another story" —

See also Sontag's own  account of the Mann meeting.

Related material —

It would seem that Moser is deeply confused about  two different
meetings of Sontag with Mann — discussing Doctor Faustus 
in 1947, and, later, as a U. of Chicago student, discussing
The Magic Mountain  with Mann in 1949 on the Feast of the
Holy Innocents — coincidentally, also the date of her dies natalis
(in the Catholic sense) in 2004.

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Seal 7 . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 am

Continues.

See John Baez this morning on Galois. Note that Baez's
report of Galois's dies natalis  is in error.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

The Cassirer in the Rye

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:01 am

From the American Mathematical Society today —

Robert Earl Tubbs (1954-2023)
May 15, 2023

"Tubbs, associate professor of mathematics at
the University of Colorado Boulder, died April 11, 2023,
at the age of 69. He received his PhD in 1981 from
Penn State University under the supervision of 
W. Dale Brownawell. His research interests included
number theory, especially transcendental number theory,
the intellectual history of mathematical ideas and mathematics,
and the humanities."

This  journal on the dies natalis  of Tubbs had the third of three
posts tagged "Space and Form."  Those posts dealt with European
cultural history related to Tubbs's interests. The "Space and Form"
posts, along with today's previous Log24 post, suggest a review of
the Nov. 10, 2021 post titled European Culture.  An image from that post —

Those who share Cassirer's enthusiasm for myth may regard the
above Josefine Lyche version of my work as a sort of "secret writing,"
to quote a phrase of Cassirer's I find very distasteful. But there is nothing
secret  about it, although there is some resemblance to written characters.

This  post's title was suggested by a Salinger quote in the European Culture post.

Update on the next day, May  17 —

Further reading in Cassirer's Mythical Thought  indicates that in the
passages above, on Schelling, he may be presenting a parody of
Schelling when he writes "a poem hidden behind a wonderful
secret writing."  Later, on page 10, he asks, sensibly, 

"… is there, perhaps, a means of retaining the question
put forward by Schelling's Philosophie der Mythologie
but of transferring it from the sphere of a philosophy of
the absolute to that of critical philosophy?"

There has reportedly been "an upsurge of interest" in Cassirer —

Sunday, May 7, 2023

New Queen

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:56 pm

This post is in memory of Adam Brace, a British comedy director.
His dies natalis  is reported to be April 29, 2023.

See also Dramarama and, from the above story's date . . .

Saturday, May 6, 2023

The Chico Hallows

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:33 pm

The above illustration is from Log24 on the dies natalis
day of birth into heaven, in the Catholic tradition —
of Grace C. Hertlein, a sort of patron saint of computer art
from Chico, California, who reportedly died at 91 in 2015.

It supplies the parts missing from a J. K. Rowling design
See Cinco de Mayo , 2011.

Friday, May 5, 2023

For St. Corky Lee

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:23 am

Today's Google Doodle honors a Chinese-American photographer
who reportedly died on January 27, 2021.

From his dies natalis  (birth into heaven, in the Catholic tradition) —

See as well some background on a Chinese-related cube.

Saturday, April 1, 2023

For this weekend’s Bombay Beach Biennale

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:32 pm

From this  journal on the above artist's dies natalis

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Industrial Heyday*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:48 pm

"Story continues below advertisement" . . .

What if the story is  the advertisement?

This  journal on the above dies natalis :

'Law Play' by Cullinane, 11 March 2023

* See also the previous post, "Language Drill."

Thursday, February 2, 2023

The Menand Lede

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:29 pm

"When the Washington Post  unveiled the slogan
'Democracy Dies in Darkness,' on February 17, 2017,
people in the news business made fun of it.
'Sounds like the next Batman movie,' the New York Times’ 
executive editor, Dean Baquet, said."

— Louis Menand in The New Yorker ,
"When Americans Lost Faith in the News," Jan. 30, 2023.

See also Darkness  in this  journal.

Not so dark:

A Log24 post from February 17, 2017
regarding that year's Groundhog Day — The dies natalis
(in the Catholic sense) of St. Bertram Kostant.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Miles to Go

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:38 pm

Jay Goldberg, Miles Davis, Cicely Tyson

See also a Log24 post from Dec. 5, the lawyer's dies natalis.

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Under the Bridge, Over the Dam … Whatever.

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:24 pm

Bridge

Dam

'Moth-eaten musical brocade' quote

April 11, 2020, was the dies natalis ,
in the Catholic sense,
of John Horton Conway.

Whatever.

 

 

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Sounds of Music: Compare and Contrast

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:28 pm

The New York Times  this afternoon —

From Log24 on the Catholic dies natalis  of
the von Trapp daughter above  —

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Hat Tip to Andrew Cusack

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:03 pm

For a weblog post today on an auction item from
the collection of the late Pierre Le-Tan.

A search for information on Le-Tan reveals that his
dies natalis (in the Catholic sense) was Sept. 17, 2019.

See a poem quoted here on that date in posts tagged Quark Rock.

Friday, August 20, 2021

Diamond Brackets*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:57 am

For more on the phrase "diamond brackets," see the post
Artistic Style of July 24, 2018.

This was the dies natalis  (in the Catholic sense) of philosophy
professor Garth L. Kemerling.

From Kemerling's internet "Philosophy Pages" —

"First, it must be possible in principle to arrange and organize
the chaos of our many individual sensory images by tracing
the connections that hold among them. This Kant called
the synthetic unity of the sensory manifold.

Second, it must be possible in principle for a single subject
to perform this organization by discovering the connections
among perceived images. This is satisfied by what Kant called
the transcendental unity of apperception."

Related Log24 phrases —

"Intake Manifold" and "Bulk Apperception."

* See also Bracketing (phenomenology) in Wikipedia.

Saturday, June 26, 2021

Annals of Experimental Theology . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:58 pm

Continues.

See as well . . .

'Moth-eaten musical brocade' quote

April 11, 2020, was the dies natalis ,
in the Catholic sense,
of John Horton Conway.

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Connection

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:27 am

Hurt’s dies natalis  (date of death, in the saints’ sense) was,
it now seems, 25  January 2017, not 27.

A connection, for fantasy fans, between the Philosopher’s Stone
(represented by the eightfold cube) and the Deathly Hallows
(represented by the usual Fano-plane figure) —

Images from a Log24 search for “Holocron.”

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Dead Poet Joke

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 8:42 pm

From the subtitles of the recent Kristen Stewart film “Underwater” —

427
00:30:26,144 –> 00:30:27,476
He’d always say
he had a new joke,

428
00:30:27,478 –> 00:30:29,445
and then he’d tell
the same stupid joke.

429
00:30:29,447 –> 00:30:32,785
I was… laughing at that joke.

430
00:30:34,053 –> 00:30:35,685
Yeah, what was it?

431
00:30:35,687 –> 00:30:38,654
What did the fish say when
it bumped into the brick wall?

April 11 was the dies natalis , in the Catholic sense, of John Horton Conway.
Related material: Other posts containing the phrase  “brick wall.”

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Ironweed Meditation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:08 pm

Andrew Cusack’s post today on architecture in Albany
suggests a review of the 1988 film Ironweed.

The dies natalis  (in the Catholic sense) of that film’s
director was reportedly July 13, 2016.

See this  journal on that date.

Monday, December 2, 2019

D8: The Black Queen’s Square

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:45 am

The previous post quoted some dialogue from Victor Hugo's
novel about the French Revolution, Ninety-Three.

This suggests a look at the following non-fiction book:

Compare and contrast with the novel The Eight , by Katherine Neville,
about chess and the French Revolution.

Neville's birthday, April 4, plays a major role in her novel. The dies natalis 
(in the Roman Catholic sense) of the above Birth of the Chess Queen 
author, on the other hand, was reportedly November 20, 2019.

Following a link in this journal from November 20 leads to remarks 
that might interest the subjects of an upcoming film, "The Two Popes."

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Sinatra Date

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:14 am

December 14, 2003, was the dies natalis
of actress Jeanne Crain.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Never-Ending Toy Story

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:40 pm

" … this beautiful love story . . . ."

An image from the previous post:

The above line "From the producer of Transformers " suggests
a story from March 18, 2019 . . .

      Misreading the words of di Bonaventura
yields a phrase that might be applied to 
the Church of Rome . . .
     "A franchise based on release dates." 
See dies natalis  in this journal.

     For the Church of Synchronology, see
the above di Bonaventura date, March 18.

     Then there is the Church of Cubism . . .

     "Before time began, there was the Cube."
     — Optimus Prime, Transformers , 2007

Sunday, February 17, 2019

For the Schoolgirls of 1959

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:35 pm

The dies natalis  of St. Buddy Holly was Feb. 3, 1959.

This  year on Feb. 3, a geometric illustration of the well-known
schoolgirl problem was added to a brand-new Wikipedia article
on the finite geometry PG(3,2).

Friday, June 29, 2018

For St. Stanley

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:26 pm

The phrase "Blue Dream" in the previous post
suggests a Web search for Traumnovelle .
That search yields an interesting weblog post
from 2014 commemorating the 1999 dies natalis 
(birth into heaven) of St. Stanley Kubrick.

Related material from March 7, 2014,
in this  journal

IMAGE- Cube for study of I Ching group actions, with Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman 

That  2014 post was titled "Kummer Varieties." It is now tagged
"Kummerhenge." For some backstory, see other posts so tagged.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

A Mad Day’s Work

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Yesterday was the dies natalis , in the Catholic sense,
of the great cartoonist Jack Davis.

From an obituary

From this journal yesterday afternoon and morning

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Block That Metaphor

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:38 pm

Magic cube and corresponding hexagram, or Star of David, with faces mapped to lines and edges mapped to points (The 6 cube faces are mapped to the 6 hexagram lines.)

Happy dies natalis  to the late Frida Kahlo.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Hymn

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:29 am

Yesterday was reportedly the dies natalis  (in the Catholic sense)
of a former president of New York University.

From the conclusion of The Chronicles of Narnia

"The term is over:  the holidays have begun. 
The dream is ended:  this is the morning."

Linda Hamilton's related hymn in the 1984 film "Children of the Corn" —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpHeTcisyRo .

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Miami Mosaic

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:00 pm

He “…believed the art to be real….”
— Lawyer for  Mosaic Miami Church pastor
accused of trying to sell forged Damien Hirst art

A Miami mosaic from this journal last Dec. 21

IMAGE- Miami/Dade County schools page

The indicated link is to…

See also St. Ursula’s Day, 2010, and Emil Artin’s dies natalis  in 2003.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

The Good Earth

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

In Beijing, it is now 3 AM on March 6,
the dies natalis  of St. Pearl Buck.

(Click to enlarge.)

IMAGE- Chiang Yee on the ninefold square and Chinese calligraphy

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

A Riddle for Davos

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Hexagonale Unwesen

Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938


IMAGE- Redefining the cube's symmetry planes: 13 planes, not 9.


See also the life of Diogenes Allen, a professor at Princeton
Theological Seminary, a life that reportedly ended on the date—
January 13, 2013— of the above Log24 post.

January 13 was also the dies natalis  of St. James Joyce.

Some related reflections —

"Praeterit figura huius mundi  " — I Corinthians 7:31 —

Conclusion of of "The Dead," by James Joyce—

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Friday, December 20, 2013

For Emil Artin

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(On His Dies Natalis )

An Exceptional Isomorphism Between Geometric and
Combinatorial Steiner Triple Systems Underlies 
the Octads of the M24 Steiner System S(5, 8, 24).

This is asserted in an excerpt from… 

"The smallest non-rank 3 strongly regular graphs
​which satisfy the 4-vertex condition"
by Mikhail Klin, Mariusz Meszka, Sven Reichard, and Alex Rosa,
BAYREUTHER MATHEMATISCHE SCHRIFTEN 73 (2005), 152-212—

(Click for clearer image)

Note that Theorem 46 of Klin et al.  describes the role
of the Galois tesseract  in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis (original 1976 version). The tesseract
(a 4×4 array) supplies the geometric  part of the above
exceptional geometric-combinatorial isomorphism.

Monday, July 29, 2013

St. Walter’s Day

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:05 pm

Today is the dies natalis  of group theorist  Walter Feit.

     "The Steiner systems (5,6,12) and (5,8,24) are remarkable combinatorial
configurations unlike any others. Their automorphism groups are the Mathieu
groups M12 and M24. These are the only 5-transitive permutation groups other
than symmetric and alternating groups: (a fact long conjectured but only
proved as a consequence of the classification). The Leech lattice is a blown up
version of (5,8,24).
It is the unique even unimodular lattice in 24 dimensions
with no vectors of weight 2. This uniqueness is an essential reason why it is a
geometric object of fundamental importance. The automorphism group Co.O
of the Leech lattice involves about half of the sporadic groups and generally it
is felt that these are well understood."

— Walter Feit, book review, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society ,
     Vol. 8 (1983), 120-124, page 123

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Multispeech (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 pm

For this, the dies natalis  of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,
it seems apt to cite a 1973 master's thesis on what the author
calls multiguity  in Hopkins. 

See also multispeech in this journal.

Related material:

See, too, the online front page of The New York Times
from 1:54 PM ET today, and, as an example  of multispeech,
yesterday morning's post Rubric's Cuber.

Yesterday's noon post concerned a forthcoming novel
about poetry and intelligence services. Some related backstory:

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

For Law Day

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Harvard Gazette , March 4th, 2013:

"Winfrey will speak on May 30 during Commencement day’s
Afternoon Exercises, which serve as the annual meeting of
the Harvard Alumni Association. The exercises will take place
in the Tercentenary Theatre of Harvard Yard,
between Memorial Church and Widener Library."

On the 1977 Octavia Butler novel Mind of My Mind :

"The first chapter in a history that Butler has already taken up
at a much later stage in Patternmaster  (1976).
Mind of My Mind  begins with Doro, a ruthless mutant
as old as the pyramids who has spent the last 4,000 years
trying to breed a race in his own image. The culminating
experiment is his daughter Mary. But, to Doro's astonishment,
Mary's first instinct on attaining her full powers is to begin
building a mental community— a Pattern— out of the
wretched thousands of Doro's half-telepathic failures
and partial successes. Despite some ragged moments,
Butler is clearly on to a promising vein— something like
Zenna Henderson's 'People' stories without their
saccharine silliness. There's a lot of intrinsic energy in the
Pattern idea, and one wants to see where this erratic, gifted
storyteller will pick it up next."

Kirkus Reviews , Vol. XLV, No. 8 (1977), p. 453.

See this journal on Butler's dies natalis , the feast of St. Matthias, 2006.

Those who prefer Eastern approaches to religion may consult
Robert Thurman and his daughter Uma.

"Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah." — David Letterman

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Eight is a Gate*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

For Saint Irving

* For one interpretation of this phrase, see
  Sicilian Reflections (from this year's Feast
  of St. Irving Berlin on his dies natalis ).

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Four Winds

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:07 am

A Quilt Version

IMAGE- Four Winds quilt block

A Mathematical Version

IMAGE- The eight Galois quaternions

Related remarks —

For the eight-limbed star at the top of the quaternion array above,
see "Damnation Morning" in this journal—

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming implement
that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun, a slim
sceptre, and a delicate branding iron—especially when its
tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth
dimension or only die in it.”

— Fritz Leiber, short story, 1959

See also Feb. 19, 2011.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Relativistic Truth

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Today's online New York Times on the conclusion of the Roman Catholic Church's "World Youth" week—

"At the end of Sunday’s Mass, the pope announced that the next such event would be in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. Until then, he told those at the service, in Portuguese, that they 'will be swimming against the tide in a society with a relativistic culture, which wishes neither to seek nor hold on to the truth.'*"

* Fact check— This agrees with the Vatican Radio version.

Related material: Relativity Blues and Portal to 1937

IMAGE- Hotel Bella Vista as 'Portal del Aguila de Oro'

The "Portal" link above is in honor of the May 2 dies natalis of Salomon Bochner (pdf).
For some background, see yesterday's Castles in the Air and Bochner in this journal.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Birthdays

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:29 pm

For Pope Benedict XVI and the late Al Sears

Today is the Pope's birthday. Another date of interest—

Al Sears, composer of "Castle Rock," is said to have died at 80 on March 23, 1990. If Sears were a saint, March 23 would be his saint's day— his dies natalis  (day of birth into heaven).

For Al—

This morning's post linked to a picture of Alicia Keys's hands at a piano keyboard. Some background from March 23 this  year— "Well, she was just 17" and The Heroic Finger.

For the Pope—

IMAGE- book cover- 'Secret of the Golden FLower'

Click, as the instructions say,
to look inside.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Brightness at Noon (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Happy birthday to Mira Sorvino (Harvard '89).

Related material: June 9 and June 10, 2008.

A more dramatic presentation, also done on June 9-10, 2008

Alicia Keys, "Superwoman" video.

Happy dies natalis  to Miles Davis

"… nothing ever truly dies. The universe wastes nothing. Everything is simply… transformed."

— Keanu Reeves in the 2008 "Day the Earth Stood Still." (See today's 11:07 AM entry.)

Friday, September 17, 2010

Fade to Blacker

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:22 pm

From Peter J. Cameron's web journal today—

Eliot’s Four Quartets  has been one of my favourite works of poetry since I was a student…. 

Of course, a poem doesn’t have a single meaning, especially one as long and complex as Four Quartets.  But to me the primary meaning of the poem is about the relationship between time and eternity, which is something maybe of interest to mathematicians as well as to mystics.

Curiously, the clearest explanation of what Eliot is saying that I have found is in a completely different work, Pilgrimage of Dreams  by the artist Thetis Blacker, in which she describes a series of dreams she had which stood out as being completely different from the confusion of normal dreaming. In one of these dreams, “Mr Goad and the Cathedral”, we find the statements

“Eternity isn’t a long time

and

“Eternity is always now, but …”
“Now isn’t always eternity”.

In other words, eternity is not the same as infinity; it is not the time line stretched out to infinity. Rather, it is an intimation of a different dimension, which we obtain only because we are aware of the point at which that dimension intersects the familiar dimension of time. In a recurring motif in the second Quartet, “East Coker”, Eliot says,

Time future and time past
Are both somehow contained in time present

and, in “Little Gidding”,

   … to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint

From this  journal on the date of Blacker's death
what would, if she were a Catholic saint, be called her dies natalis

Monday December 18, 2006

m759 @ 7:20 AM
 
Fade to Black:

Martin Gardner in the Notices of the American Mathematical SocietyJune/July 2005 (pdf):

“I did a column in Scientific American  on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s [sic ] black paintings.  Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black.”

Black square 256x256

Click on picture for details.

The Notices of the American Mathematical SocietyJanuary 2007 (pdf):

“This was just one of the many moments in this sad tale when there were no whistle-blowers. As a result the entire profession has received a very public and very bad black mark.”

– Joan S. Birman
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Barnard College and
Columbia University

Friday, August 13, 2010

The Most Toys*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

"He who dies with the most toys, wins." –Folk saying

Happy dies natalis  to Jack Ryan.

See also "Space Cowboy."

* Cf. the Wikipedia article with this title—
  An evil art collector steals Data from the Enterprise.
  Alternate title for this post: "A Girlfriend for Data." Some background—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100813-Friday.jpg

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Eightgate

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm

"Eight is a gate."
This journal, December 2002   

Tralfamadorian Structure
in Slaughterhouse-Five

includes the following passage:

“…the nonlinear characterization of Billy Pilgrim
 emphasizes that he is not simply an established
 identity who undergoes a series of changes but
 all the different things he is at different times.”

A 2x4 array of squares

This suggests that the above structure be viewed
as illustrating not eight  parts but rather
8! = 40,320 parts.

See also April 2, 2003.

Happy birthday to John Huston and
happy dies natalis  to Richard Burton.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100805-BurtonHuston.jpg

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Prime Directive

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:01 pm

Rigor

“317 is a prime, not because we think so,
or because our minds are shaped in one way
rather than another, but because it is so,
because mathematical reality is built that way.”

 – G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology

The Ratzinger brothers in Germany, Sept. 11, 2006

The above photo is taken from
a post in this journal dated
March 10, 2010.

This was, as the Pope might say,
the dies natalis  of a master gameplayer–

New York Times, March 16, 2010–

Tim Holland, Backgammon Master,
Dies at 79

By DENNIS HEVESI

Tim Holland, who was widely considered the world’s greatest backgammon player during that ancient board game’s modern heyday, in the 1960s and ’70s, died on March 10 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 79. <<more>>

In Holland's honor, a post
from Columbus Day, 2004

Tuesday October 12, 2004

11:11 PM

 Time and Chance

Today’s winning lottery numbers
in Pennsylvania (State of Grace):

Midday: 373
Evening: 816.

New Yorker cartoon-- Heavenly chessboard-- Man peering over the edge sees backgammon board

A quote from Holland on backgammon–

"It’s the luck factor that seduces everyone
into believing that they are good,
that they can actually win,
but that’s just wishful thinking."

For those who are, like G.H. Hardy,
suspicious of wishful thinking,
here is a quote and a picture from
Holland's ordinary  birthday, March 3

"The die is cast." — Caesar

Group of 8 cube-face permutations generated by reflections in midplanes parallel to faces

Monday, January 4, 2010

Google’s Apple Tree

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100104-Apple.jpg

Google has illuminated its search page today with a falling apple in honor of what it is pleased to call the birthday of Newton. (When Newton was born, the calendar showed it was Christmas Day, 1642; Google prefers to associate Sir Isaac with a later version of the calendar.)

Some related observations–

Adapted from a Log24 entry
of Monday, March 24, 2008–
 

 

"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
     the three God's Eyes…"

    — Ken Kesey

"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"

"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."

"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."

"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:– What if I should look ugly without being bad– look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?– What then?"

"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."

"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife– even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife– you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"

"Quite well," said little Diamond.

"Come along, then," said North Wind, and disappeared behind the mountain of hay.

Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.

    — George MacDonald,
      At the Back of the North Wind

   

From Log24 on Sunday, March 23, 2008–

 
A sequel to
The Crimson Passion

Easter Egg

Jill St. John with diamond

Click on image
 for further details.


Duality:


A pair of book covers in honor
  of the dies natalis of T. S. Eliot–

http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100103-TheAristocrat_files/100104-Duality.jpg

From Virginia Woolf,  "Modern Fiction" (Ch. 13 in The Common Reader, First Series)

Woolf on what she calls "materialist" fiction–

Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable….

Sunday, December 20, 2009

The Test

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am

Dies Natalis of
Emil Artin

From the September 1953 Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society

Emil Artin, in a review of Éléments de mathématique, by N. Bourbaki, Book II, Algebra, Chaps. I-VII–

"We all believe that mathematics is an art. The author of a book, the lecturer in a classroom tries to convey the structural beauty of mathematics to his readers, to his listeners. In this attempt he must always fail. Mathematics is logical to be sure; each conclusion is drawn from previously derived statements. Yet the whole of it, the real piece of art, is not linear; worse than that its perception should be instantaneous. We all have experienced on some rare occasions the feeling of elation in realizing that we have enabled our listeners to see at a moment's glance the whole architecture and all its ramifications. How can this be achieved? Clinging stubbornly to the logical sequence inhibits the visualization of the whole, and yet this logical structure must predominate or chaos would result."

Art Versus Chaos

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091220-ForakisHypercube.jpg
From an exhibit,
"Reimagining Space
"

The above tesseract (4-D hypercube)
sculpted in 1967 by Peter Forakis
provides an example of what Artin
called "the visualization of the whole."

For related mathematical details see
Diamond Theory in 1937.

"'The test?' I faltered, staring at the thing.
'Yes, to determine whether you can live
in the fourth dimension or only die in it.'"
Fritz Leiber, 1959

See also the Log24 entry for
Nov. 26,  2009, the date that
Forakis died.

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
Madeleine L'Engle, 1962

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sunday March 8, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:07 pm

Transit Authority

In memory of
Stanley Kubrick
(overlooked in
yesterday's memorial)

"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.

Bowman's end in '2001'

"'Wherever you come near
the human race, there's layers
and layers of nonsense,'
says the Stage Manager in
Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town.'"

Today's sermon
    from Frank Rich

The Eye in the Pyramid

The Seventh Symbol from 'Stargate'

The monolith at the beginning of '2001'

For more layers, see
James A. Michener's
The Source.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Saturday March 7, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

One or Two Ideas
 
Today's birthday: Piet Mondrian
 
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.
 
From this journal on that date,
a different square —
 
The Seventh Symbol:
 

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

The square may be regarded as
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

Cover of  Mondrian: The Diamond Compositions

— a shape symbolizing
possibility within modal logic
 as well as the potentiality of
 Aristotle's prima materia.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Sunday January 18, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am
Birthdays

Part I: The Pagan View

From The Fire, Katherine Neville's sequel to her novel The Eight:

"'Cat…. realized that we all need some kind of a chariot driver to pull our forces together, like those horses of Socrates, one pulling toward heaven, one toward the earth….'

… I asked, 'Is that why you said my mother's and my birthdays are important? Because April 4 and October 4 are opposite in the calendar?'

Rodo beamed a smile…. He said, 'That's how the process takes place….'"

Part II: The Christian View

"The Calendar of saints is a traditional Christian method of organizing a liturgical year by associating each day with one or more saints and referring to the day as that saint's feast day. The system arose from the very early Christian custom of annual commemoration of martyrs on the dates of their deaths, or birth into heaven, and is thus referred to in Latin as dies natalis ('day of birth')." –Wikipedia

The October 4 date above, the birthday of Cat's daughter, Xie, in The Fire, is also the liturgical Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (said by some to be also the date of his death).

The April 4 date above is Neville's birthday and that of her alter ego Cat in The Eight and The Fire. Neville states that this is also the birth date of Charlemagne. It is, as well, the dies natalis (in the "birth into heaven" sense), of Dr. Martin Luther King.

For more about April 4, see Art Wars and 4/4/07.

For more about October 4, see "Revelation Game Continued: Short Story."

Conclusion:

King's Moves

"et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam
non comprehenderunt
"

Sunday, April 16, 2023

Old Year’s Adam, New Year’s Eve

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

Saturday, April 23, 2022

Kaleidoscopic Structuralism

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:10 pm

The previous post suggests two quotes by Elizabeth Janeway 
from her review of the second volume of The Human Predicament ,
an unfinished trilogy by Richard Hughes.

"The Human Predicament  poses a universal question, and Hughes
is grappling with it really as a structuralist  philosopher."

"Hughes's style is kaleidoscopic , the shaking of vivid moments together
until a pattern emerges." 

— The New York Times Book Review Sunday, August 19, 1973, page 2

For a less literary example of kaleidoscopic structuralism, see
a Log24 post from the first anniversary of Janeway's reported death.

Related vocabulary —

Powered by WordPress