See as well the above eight-ray star in Damnation Morning posts.
Saturday, August 13, 2022
At the End
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Saturday, January 20, 2018
The Chaos Symbol of Dan Brown
In the following passage, Dan Brown claims that an eight-ray star
with arrowheads at the rays’ ends is “the mathematical symbol for
entropy.” Brown may have first encountered this symbol at a
questionable “Sacred Science” website. Wikipedia discusses
some even less respectable uses of the symbol.
Related news —
Related symbolism —
A star figure and the Galois quaternion.
The square root of the former is the latter.
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Monday, October 23, 2017
Plan 9 Continues
Click for some background —
Another approach, for Dan Brown fans —
In the following passage, Brown claims that an eight-ray star
with arrowheads at the rays' ends is "the mathematical symbol for
entropy." Brown may have first encountered this symbol at a
questionable "Sacred Science" website. Wikipedia discusses
some even less respectable uses of the symbol.
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Friday, October 13, 2017
Sicut Erat
Smith College in 2011 on some music by Dan Brown's brother —
"Using the conventions of a traditional five-movement
Roman Catholic Mass to revere Darwin’s body of work,
Gregory Brown, Smith’s assistant director of choral
activities and a composer of choral music, is
collaborating with Craig Phillips, an early music specialist
and member of the classical a cappella male quartet
New York Polyphony, to create the piece Missa Charles Darwin .
Brown is building the work in three large-scale sections and
scoring it for a male vocal quartet, which will be performed by
New York Polyphony."
— https://www.smith.edu/insight/stories/darwin.php
Dan Brown has said his brother's Missa helped suggest his new novel Origin .
Material from Smith College related to a performance of
Missa Charles Darwin at the college on Feb. 4, 2011 —
Dan Brown, in the following passage, claims that an eight-ray star with arrowheads
at the rays' ends is "the mathematical symbol for entropy." Brown may have first
encountered this symbol at a questionable "Sacred Science" website. Wikipedia
discusses some even less respectable uses of the symbol.
My own version of the above symbol (from the pure mathematics of group actions
on a 3×3 square) appeared here the day before the Friday, Feb. 4, 2011,
Smith College Darwin Mass . . .
See posts now tagged The Next Thing.
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Thursday, October 20, 2011
The Thing Itself
Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker magazine—
Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—
"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"
A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…
Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…
Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.
The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .
The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—
The Diamond Star
See Configurations and Squares.
That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.
Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero from March 28, 2003.
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Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Wednesday June 3, 2009
Epigraphs
to Four Quartets:
to Four Quartets:
The Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor, printed by C. Whittingham, London, for the translator, 1804, Vol. II, p. 55:
"You see the mutation of bodies, and the transition of generation, a path upwards and downwards according to Heraclitus; and again, as he says, one thing living the death, but dying the life of another. Thus fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, and earth lives the death of water. You see a succession of life, and a mutation of bodies, both of which are the renovation of the whole."
For an interpretation
of the above figure
in terms of the classical
four elements discussed
in Four Quartets,
in Dissertations, and
in Angels & Demons,
see
Notes on Mathematics
and Narrative.
For a more entertaining
interpretation, see Fritz Leiber's
classic story "Damnation Morning."
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
Thursday October 30, 2008
From the Mountaintop
Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:
“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right angles to form a cross.”
Related material
(Oct. 14, 2004):
|
The Eight
Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:
|
The eight-rayed star may be taken
as representing what is known
in philosophy as a “universal.”
See also
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday June 25, 2008
Born 100 years ago today:
Other approaches to the
eight-ray star figure
have been sketched in
various Log24 entries.
See, for instance, the
June 21 entries on
the Kyoto Prize for
arts and philosophy.
Quine won this prize
in 1996.
Quine’s figure, cited in an
argument against universals,
is also a classic symbol for
the morning or evening star.
This year’s winner 
of the Kyoto Prize has
a more poetic approach
to philosophy:
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
For one such frame or space,
a Mexican cantina, see
Shining Forth.
See also Damnation Morning and
The Devil and Wallace Stevens. Charles Taylor. See
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477)
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Friday, August 3, 2007
Friday August 3, 2007
From August 1 —
It contains the
“double cross” symbol
of Fritz Leiber’s
Changewar stories;
the “double cross” is
also the traditional
eight-ray symbol of
the evening star–
the planet Venus.
| SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Restoring the Faith By SELENA ROBERTS What good is a nadir if it’s denied or ignored? What’s the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can’t buy a cheap epiphany? |
The following image
represents an epiphany
of sorts:
It contains the
“double cross” symbol
of Fritz Leiber’s
Changewar stories;
the “double cross” is
also the traditional
eight-ray symbol of
the evening star–
the planet Venus.
Epiphanies due to Venus
are indeed sometimes
cheap… but not always.
are indeed sometimes
cheap… but not always.
For further details, see
and
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Thursday, August 7, 2003
Thursday August 7, 2003
Morning Flight
“I’m working on a morning flight to anywhere but here….
It’s not the way you say you hear my heart
when the music ends
I am just learning how to fly away again”
— Nanci Griffith on KHYI.com, 6:45 AM
Click on the above yantra for deeper meditations from May 24 and 25, 2003.
See entries of June 10-14, 2003, for more on the symbolism of the above figure’s central two triangles, which represent Shiva and Kali united. For the symbolism of the eight petals, see the eight-ray star of Venus in my Oct. 23, 2002, entry. This is one interpretation of the eightfold “Spider” symbol
which plays a major role in the Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber (my favorite mythology). This symbol, like the two-triangles symbol at the center of the eight-petal lotus above, represents “Shiva and Kali united in love,” according to Leiber. (See my journal note “Biblical Proportions,” written on this date in 1997.)
For a Christian perspective on the Spider symbol, see Quine in Purgatory.
For a different religious perspective on the two-triangles symbol in the lotus, see
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