"The nightingale tells his fairy tale" — Song lyric
Saturday, February 19, 2022
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Cheesecake for Princeton
From the previous post . . .
A color analogy — The orange and black (Princeton colors) in the above
conference schedule suggest a recent screengeek image . . .
Related geek lore —
Comments Off on Cheesecake for Princeton
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
Digital Heaven: Cloud Nine
Secular viewers during the writers' strike must rely on AI . . .
Comments Off on Digital Heaven: Cloud Nine
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Ice Medley
"Gabriel Ice is supposed to be an 'amiable geek'
whose greed and success as a tech entrepreneur
have turned him to the dark side, but it’s hard to
believe that this kid billionaire and his wife would
choose to live in 'deep hairband country' on the
Upper East Side, in a grand dwelling boasting a
Bösendorfer Imperial in the corner of one of its
public rooms, 'at which generations of hired piano
players have provided hours of Kander & Ebb,
Rodgers & Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber
medleys.' "
— Michiko Kakutani,
review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge
Related Internet material —
See also LARB on Pynchon's fictional DeepArcher program.
Comments Off on Ice Medley
Sunday, July 10, 2022
Midnight in the Garden
Today's date — "10" or one-zero — suggests a review of base-16
(hexadecimal) notation. In hexadecimal, "10" means 16.
See as well some other Geek Lore.
Comments Off on Midnight in the Garden
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Devs
Comments Off on Devs
Thursday, May 12, 2022
“All the Old Knives” for Doctor Strange Fans
Comments Off on “All the Old Knives” for Doctor Strange Fans
Thursday, April 14, 2022
Ouellette vs. the Cube
From the 2019 post Spring Loaded —
A more recent image, from Carroll's wife Jennifer Ouellette —
For a more sophisticated approach to the 4x4x4 cube,
see a page at finitegeometry.org.
Comments Off on Ouellette vs. the Cube
Sunday, February 6, 2022
Ringing the Changes
In memory of Hale Trotter, a mathematician who reportedly
died at Princeton, N.J., on Jan. 17, 2022.
Other perspectives —
“The carnival is an incredibly close-knit, hermetic society.”
— Guillermo del Toro, director and co-writer of
the new remake of "Nightmare Alley"
Dialogue from that remake —
STAN — How do you ever get a guy to geek?
CLEM — Oh- I ain’t going to crap you up. It ain’t easy.
"There is such a thing as a four-set."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel
Comments Off on Ringing the Changes
Saturday, November 27, 2021
Cable
"SS refers to SuperSpeed,
a new transfer rate…"
And then there is USB,
the Universal Serial Bus . . .
From a post of 11/11, 2003.
Comments Off on Cable
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
The 7-11 Culture War
Comments Off on The 7-11 Culture War
Friday, October 30, 2020
Game for Devil’s Night in an Election Year
Comments Off on Game for Devil’s Night in an Election Year
Monday, October 26, 2020
Monday, March 16, 2020
Mathematics and Narrative* Continues:
Mathematics: See Tetrahedron vs. Square in this journal
(Notes on two different models of schoolgirl space ).
Narrative: Replacing the square from the above posts by
a related cube …
… yields a merchandising inspiration —
Dueling Holocrons:
Jedi Cube vs. Sith Tetrahedron —
.* See also earlier posts on Mathematics and Narrative.
Comments Off on Mathematics and Narrative* Continues:
Friday, February 22, 2019
Annals of Entertainment
See also a post of August 8, 2018, "Annals of Phenomenology."
Comments Off on Annals of Entertainment
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Breadcrumbs for Sophia
Comments Off on Breadcrumbs for Sophia
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Available Light
Comments Off on Available Light
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Sides
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."
Comments Off on Sides
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Easter Fantasy
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."
Comments Off on Easter Fantasy
Saturday, June 24, 2017
It’s 10 PM.
Joke question from the 2013 film "Her" —
"What does a baby computer call its father?"
Answer for Harvard Summer School —
"Department of Diachronic Operations."
Comments Off on It’s 10 PM.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Aesthetics
A college girl's remarks in the previous post suggested
a search in this journal for "vulgar and stupid."
That search yielded a date — March 2, 2014.
In the spirit of the Church of Synchronology, a further search —
for that date — yielded, in a March 2, 2014, post, the following —
Square Dance
|
And no fact of Alain Resnais’s life seemed to strike a stranger note than his assertion that the films which first inspired his ambition to become a film director were those in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Or was it Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler? He could never be sure. “I wondered if I could find the equivalent of that exhilaration,” he recalled. If he never did it was perhaps because of his highly cultivated attitude to serious cinema. His character and temperament were more attuned to the theory of film and a kind of intellectual square dance* which was far harder to bring to the screen with “exhilaration” than the art of Astaire and Rogers. *See today's 11 AM ET Sermon. |
The college girl, who reportedly died at 70 on May 11, was
Katherine Dunn, author of the book One Ring Circus quoted
above. She apparently improved with age.
Comments Off on Aesthetics
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Yeah, Art, Beauty
From a New York Times obituary this evening —
"She entered Reed College in Portland as a philosophy major.
'I enjoyed it until I ran aground in an aesthetics class,'
Ms. Dunn told Wired magazine. 'I went in thinking, yeah,
art, beauty — my meat, drink and air. But on the first day,
I didn’t understand a word that was said in class, so I
marched out and changed my major to psychology.' "
Could have marched out and bought a dictionary .
Comments Off on Yeah, Art, Beauty
Friday, May 13, 2016
The Zorro of Mark
Comments Off on The Zorro of Mark
Monday, July 6, 2015
War Haiku
Remark by the director of "Project Almanac" on Feb. 10, 2015
about a proposed remake of "War Games":
"Israelite admitted that he was 'always very sceptical of remakes,
because the story's already been told,' but added that 'with this
particular title, I feel it's primed to say something new.'"
Related material: Log24 posts tagged Haiku.
Comments Off on War Haiku
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Colorful Song
For geeks* —
" Domain, Domain on the Range , "
where Domain = the Galois tesseract and
Range = the four-element Galois field.
This post was suggested by the previous post,
by a Log24 search for Knight + Move, and by
the phrase "discouraging words" found in that search.
* A term from the 1947 film "Nightmare Alley."
Comments Off on Colorful Song
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Cube of Ultron
The Blacklist “Pilot” Review
"There is an element of camp to this series though. Spader is
quite gleefully channeling Anthony Hopkins, complete with being
a well educated, elegant man locked away in a super-cell.
Speaking of that super-cell, it’s kind of ridiculous. They’ve got him
locked up in an abandoned post office warehouse on a little
platform with a chair inside a giant metal cube that looks like
it could have been built by Tony Stark. And as Liz approaches
to talk to him, the entire front of the cube opens and the whole
thing slides back to leave just the platform and chair. Really?
FUCKING REALLY ? "
— Kate Reilly at Geekenstein.com (Sept. 27, 2013)
Comments Off on Cube of Ultron
Saturday, October 11, 2014
The Code of Beauty
Dialogue from "Django Unchained" —
"What's a bounty?" "It's like a reward."
Today's noon post links to posts on Tony Scott
that in turn lead to…
A post from June 27, 2005—
the date of Domino Harvey's death.
A link at the end of that post leads to…
"Dr. Chandra?" "Yes?" "Will I dream?"
See also…
Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime:
The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
Comments Off on The Code of Beauty
Friday, April 15, 2011
Enchanted
Today's noon post included a search result from a website titled "Enchanted Mind."
Related thoughts:
Today's New York Times on Julie Taymor's "Spider-Man"—
"Gone, when the show resumes performances on May 12 after a three-week overhaul, will be the Geek Chorus of narrators…."
A theatrical alternative—
National Catholic Reporter in 1995 on "Mighty Aphrodite"—
"Woody's neuroticism may be wearing thin, but he has invented a comic Greek chorus to comment on his problems…."
For a less comic Greek chorus, see The Quiet Customer (August 10, 2010).
"Hello, are you my 3 o'clock?"
See also Spider Girl (August 2, 2009).
Comments Off on Enchanted
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The Leonardo Code
"If you’re the kind of geek who yearns for detailed schematics
of the technology behind all of this, you’ll be disappointed—
there are none."
— "7 Reasons Why Techies Love 'Inception'," by John Hagel
"Show me all the blueprints"
— Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Aviator" (2004)
Comments Off on The Leonardo Code
Monday, February 25, 2008
Monday February 25, 2008
A System of SymbolsA book from
Yale University Press
discussed in Log24
four years ago today:
Yale University Press
discussed in Log24
four years ago today:
Click on image for details.
The book is titled
Inside Modernism:
Relativity Theory,
Cubism, Narrative.
For a narrative about relativity
and cubes, see Knight Moves.
Related material:
Geek chic in
this week’s New Yorker—
“… it takes a system of symbols
to make numbers precise–
to ‘crystallize’ them….”
— and a mnemonic for three
days in October 2006
following a memorial to
the Amish schoolchildren
slain that month:
Comments Off on Monday February 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Wednesday September 22, 2004
Tribute
In memory of Russ Meyer, who "made industrial films for Standard Oil and lumber companies before making his own films," a picture that might aptly (see Pi continued) be titled
.
By the same designer:
Click on picture for details.
Object of game:
Connect the devils
with their tail ends.
Manufacturer:
Click on logo for details.
Related material:
The Crimson Passion
Comments Off on Wednesday September 22, 2004