Log24

Monday, April 16, 2012

Carroll Thanks the Academy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:30 am

Gary Gutting, "Arguing About Language," in "The Stone,"
The New York Times  philosophy column, yesterday—

There's a sense in which we speak language
and a sense in which, in Mallarmé's famous phrase,
“language itself speaks.”

Famous? A Google Book Search for

"language itself speaks" Mallarmé

yields 2 results, neither helpful.

But a Google Book Search for

"language itself speaks" Heidegger

yields "about 312 results."

A related search yields the following

Paul Valéry, encountering Un Coup de Dés  in Mallarmé’s worksheets in 1897, described the text as tracing the pattern of thought itself:

It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms….

… there in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word! (Leonardo  309*)

* The page number is apparently a reference to The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé , translated by Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler, Princeton University Press, 1972. (As a temporal  form, "309" might be interpreted as a reference to 3/09, March 9, the date of a webpage on the Void.)

For example—

Symbologist Robert Langdon views a corner of Solomon's Cube

Background:
Deconstructing Alice
and Symbology.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

For E. Lily Yu* — Devs Setting

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:49 pm
 

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

* Author of Jewel Box: Stories  ( Erewhon Books, Oct. 24, 2023).

Monday, January 16, 2023

Ready When You Are, C. B.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:23 pm

Thursday, November 10, 2022

For Students of the Forked Tongue

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:42 am

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

The above 1975 book by Robert Greer Cohn, Modes of Art, is
Volume I of a planned three-volume work.

The passage below is from a review of Cohn's Vol. II, Ways of Art — 

Franklin, Ursula (1987) "Book Review: A Critical Work II.
Ways of Art: Literature. Music, Painting in France 
,"
Grand Valley Review : Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 19. Available at: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gvr/vol3/iss1/19 .

. . . .

Those not familiar with the author's epistemology should begin with Appendix A of Ways of Art , a schematic demonstration of his tetrapolar-polypolar-dialectic, especially as it concerns the development of the French novel within the European tradition. But this dialectic, which has antecedents in Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Joyce, underlies all art, because: "this dimensional pulsation, or tetrapolar (and polypolar) higher vibrancy is, in short, the stuff of life: life is vibrant in this more complex way as well as in the more bipolar sense" (7). Cohn shows that "far out enough" the male or linear and the female or circular, the male vertical and the female horizontal dimensions "tend to merge as in relativity theory" (19). Ways of Art  shows us the way through a historical becoming of art in its complex dialectic in which the metonymic (horizontal) axis constantly interrelates with the metaphoric (vertical). "Life is the mother, art the father" (vii); hence Cohn's quarrel with most contemporary Feminism, which is pronounced throughout the volume. Firmly grounded in its author's tetra-polypolar epistemology, this beautiful book becomes, however, at no point dryly abstract; it is the mature work of a true humanist who stands in clear and open opposition to the dehumanizing trend of "the quasi-scientific reductionism and abstract gimmickry of a great deal of current academic literary study, bellwethered by the structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists" (vi). Abundant footnotes constitute a substantial part of Ways of Art , on occasion developing insights almost into essays demonstrating crucial points along the general flow of the tradition from "Obscure Beginnings;' the opening chapter, to our "Contemporaries;' the last.

Cohn reminds us that "In the Beginning was the Word;' for the Judaeo-Christian tradition at least, which his study fervently embraces; thus, for example, in Appendix 0 on "The Dance of the Sexes;' he censures "those who live by slogans, camps, and peer-opinion, the countless little bastard cults which characterize an era which has massively veered away from our free and beautiful Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition" (332). Cohn traces man's way and that of his myths and rituals culminating in his art from that beginning along the lines of Freud, Neumann and Cassirer, and many others, always demonstrating the underlying polypolar dialectical rhythm. Thus in "From Barbarism to Young Culture;' we follow the Celts to Druidic ritual, Hebrew beginnings to the Psalms, Dionysian ritual to Greek tragedy, and thence to the beginnings of French dramatic literature originating in the Quem quaeritis sequence of the medieval Mass. Along the way arises artistic symbolism, for Cohn synonymous with "effective poetry;' to finally "ripen in France as never before" (99). Table I (134) graphs this development from the twelfth to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author traces the rise of the artistic vocation from its antecedents in the double function of bard and priest, with the figure of Ronsard at the crossroads of that dying institution and the nascent concept of personal glory. "The Enlightenment Vocation" is exemplified in Montaigne, who humanizes the French cultural elite and points the way to French classicism and, farther down the road, after the moral collapse with the outgoing reign of Louis XIV, toward the Age of Reason. Clearly the most significant figure of the French Enlightenment for all of Western civilization is Rousseau, and Cohn beautifully shows us why this is so. Subsequently, "the nineteenth-century stage of the writer's journey will lead, starting from the crossroads of Rousseau, primarily in these two directions: the imperialistic and visionary prose of Balzac, the equally ambitious poetry of Mallarme", brothers under the skin" (199). And these two paths will then be reconciled in Proust's monumental A la recherche du temps perdu .

. . . .

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Bitspace Note

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:28 pm

Update of 5:20 AM ET on Sept. 29. 2022 —

The octads of the [24, 8, 8] cube-motif code
can be transformed by the permutation below
into octads recognizable, thanks to the Miracle
Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis, as
belonging to the Golay code.

Saturday, March 5, 2022

Word and World*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:28 pm

This afternoon's post with the phrase
"Eternal Word Meets Eternal World" 
suggests a book

A search in this journal for "world within" yields . . .

"Instead of the 'static spacetime jewel' of blockworld that is often invoked by eternalists to help their readers conceptualize of what a blockworld would 'look like' from the outside, now imagine that a picture on a slide is being projected onto the surface of this space-time jewel.

From the perspective of one inside the jewel, one might ask 'Why is this section blue while this section is black?,' and from within the jewel, one could not formulate an answer since one could not see the entire picture projected on the jewel; however, from outside the jewel, an observer (some analogue of Newton's God, perhaps, looking down on his 'sensorium' from the 5th dimension) could easily see the pattern and understand that all of the 'genuinely fortuitous' events inside the space-time jewel are, in fact, completely determined by the pattern in the projector."

— "Genuine Fortuitousness, Relational Blockworld, Realism, and Time" (pdf), by Daniel J. Peterson, Honors Thesis, Swarthmore College, December 13, 2007, footnote 55, page 114

A related image from pure  mathematics —

The Mathieu Cube Puzzle

* The title is thanks to William Gass.

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Pythagorean Letter Meets Box of Chocolates

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 10:30 am

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

Monday, September 9, 2019

ART WARS at Harvard: The Wertham Professorship

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

See as well an obituary for Mrs. Wertham from 1987.

Related art —

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

For further details, search the Web for "Wertham Professor" + Eck.

Thursday, June 7, 2018

For Dan Brown

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:09 pm

See also Eightfold Trinity in this  journal.

Symbologist Robert Langdon views a corner of Solomon's Cube

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Flux Capacitor

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:13 pm

For Tom Hanks and Dan Brown —

Symbologist Robert Langdon views a corner of Solomon's Cube

From "Raiders of the Lost Images" —

"The cube shape of the lost Mother Box,
also known as the Change Engine,
is shared by the Stone in a novel by
Charles Williams, Many Dimensions .
See the Solomon's Cube webpage."

See as well a Google search for flux philosophy
https://www.google.com/search?q=flux+philosophy.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

An Orison for Ha-Why

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

'Cloud Atlas' book cover illustrating the film

Lines from characters played in the film by Tom Hanks and Halle Berry —

— Cloud Atlas , by David Mitchell (2004).

An orison of sorts from a post on Martin Scorsese's
birthday, Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 —

BlackBerry with pictures from Log24

Displayed on the BlackBerry are parts
of Log24 posts from October 25, 2007,
and October 24, 2007.

Related pattern geometry 

From a Log24 search for Angleton + Brotherhood:
A photo of Angleton in a post from 12/9/5

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051209-Angleton.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From a post of 11/7/8

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08A/081107-Tilespuzzle.jpg

A cryptic note for Dan Brown:

The above dates 11/7/8 and 12/9/5 correspond to the corner-labels
(read clockwise and counter-clockwise) of the two large triangles
in the Finkelstein Talisman

Magic cube and corresponding hexagram, or Star of David, with faces mapped to lines and edges mapped to points

Above: More symbology for Tom Hanks from
this morning's post The Pentagram Papers.

The above symbology is perhaps better suited to Hanks in his
role as Forrest Gump than in his current role as Ben Bradlee.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051211-gump.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For Hanks as Dan Brown's Harvard symbologist 
Robert Langdon, see the interpretation 12/5/9, rather
than 12/9/5, of the above triangle/cube-corner label.

The Pentagram Papers

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:16 am

Other intersection-points-counting material —

The Finkelstein Talisman:

Magic cube and corresponding hexagram, or Star of David, with faces mapped to lines and edges mapped to points

See also Hanks + Cube in this journal —

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube.

Friday, March 10, 2017

Transformers

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Or:  Y  for Yale  continued

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

See also Transformers in this journal and Y for Yale.

Thursday, March 2, 2017

Ageometretos*

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

Or:  "A Hologram for the King" Meets "Big"

* A reference to an alleged motto of Plato's Academy

Stories

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:48 pm

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion

The New York Times Magazine  online today —

"As a former believer and now a nonbeliever, Carrère,
seeking answers, sets out, in The Kingdom , to tell
the story of the storytellers. He is trying to understand
what it takes to be able to tell a story, any story.
And what he finds, once again, is that you have to find
your role in it."

Wyatt Mason in The New York Times Magazine ,
     online March 2, 2017 

Like Tom Hanks?

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Click image for related posts.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Solid Symmetry (continued)

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

See Hanks + Cube in this journal For instance

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

Monday, December 26, 2016

Fanciful (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From "Plato Thanks the Academy," March 19, 2014 —

IMAGE- Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) and Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes), 'Mercury Rising' (1998)

“Click on fanciful .”

A possible result —

See also "Triple Cross."

Monday, October 3, 2016

Ein Eck

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

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

Friday, August 5, 2016

Sleight of Post

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From an earlier Log24 post —

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

From a post of the next day, July 12, 2014 —

"So there are several different genres and tones
jostling for prominence within Lexicon :
a conspiracy thriller, an almost abstract debate
about what language can do, and an ironic
questioning of some of the things it’s currently used for."

Graham Sleight in The Washington Post 
     a year earlier, on July 15, 2013

For the Church of Synchronology, from Log24 on the next day — 

From a post titled Circles on the date of Marc Simont's death —

See as well Verhexung  in this journal.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Symmetries and Correspondences

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:30 pm

The title is that of a large-scale British research project
in mathematics. On a more modest scale

"Hanks + Cube" in this journal —

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Block That Metaphor

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Raiders of the Lost Articulation

Tom Hanks as Indiana Langdon in Raiders of the Lost Articulation :

An unarticulated (but colored) cube:

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

A 2x2x2 articulated cube:

IMAGE- Eightfold cube with detail of triskelion structure

A 4x4x4 articulated cube built from subcubes like
the one viewed by Tom Hanks above:

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Mars Package

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm

For Ursula K. Le Guin

“For me it is a sign that we have fundamentally different
conceptions of the work of the intelligence services.”

— Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in
theguardian.com, Saturday, 12 July 2014, 14.32 EDT

Another sort of service, thanks to Dan Brown and Tom Hanks:

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

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

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Vector Addition in a Finite Field

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:18 am

The finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(16),
according to J. J. Seidel in 1974—

The same field according to Steven H. Cullinane in 1986,
in its guise as the affine 4-space over GF(2)—


The same field, again disguised as an affine 4-space,
according to John H. Conway and N.J.A. Sloane in
Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups , first published in 1988—

The above figure by Conway and Sloane summarizes, using
a 4×4 array, the additive vector-space structure of the finite
field GF(16).

This structure embodies what in Euclidean space is called
the parallelogram rule for vector addition—

(Thanks to June Lester for the 3D (uvw) part of the above figure.)

For the transition from this colored Euclidean hypercube
(used above to illustrate the parallelogram rule) to the
4×4 Galois space (illustrated by Cullinane in 1979 and
Conway and Sloane in 1988— or later… I do not have
their book’s first edition), see Diamond Theory in 1937,
Vertex Adjacency in a Tesseract and in a 4×4 Array,
Spaces as Hypercubes, and The Galois Tesseract.

For some related narrative, see tesseract  in this journal.

(This post has been added to finitegeometry.org.)

Update of August 9, 2013—

Coordinates for hypercube vertices derived from the
parallelogram rule in four dimensions were better
illustrated by Jürgen Köller in a web page archived in 2002.

Update of August 13, 2013—

The four basis vectors in the 2002 Köller hypercube figure
are also visible at the bottom of the hypercube figure on
page 7 of “Diamond Theory,” excerpts from a 1976 preprint
in Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977.
A predecessor:  Coxeter’s 1950 hypercube figure from
Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs.”

Monday, August 27, 2012

Touchy-Feely

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

A remark by the late William P. Thurston

Please note: I'm not advocating that
we turn mathematics into a touchy-feely subject.

Noted. But see this passage—

The Mathematical Experience , by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh (1981), updated study edition, Springer, 2011—

From the section titled "Four-Dimensional Intuition," pages 445-446:

"At Brown University Thomas Banchoff, a mathematician, and Charles Strauss, a computer scientist, have made computer-generated motion pictures of a hypercube….

… at the Brown University Computing Center, Strauss gave me a demonstration of the interactive graphic system which made it possible to produce such a film….

… Strauss showed me how all these controls could be used to get various views of three-dimensional projections of a hypercube. I watched, and tried my best to grasp what I was looking at. Then he stood up, and offered me the chair at the control.

I tried turning the hypercube around, moving it away, bringing it up close, turning it around another way. Suddenly I could feel  it!. The hypercube had leaped into palpable reality, as I learned how to manipulate it, feeling in my fingertips the power to change what I saw and change it back again. The active control at the computer console created a union of kinesthetics and visual thinking which brought the hypercube up to the level of intuitive understanding."

Thanks to the Web, a version of this experience created by Harry J. Smith
has been available to non-academics for some time.

IMAGE- The Harry J. Smith Memorial Tesseract

IMAGE- From 'Touchy-Feely: The Musical!'

Monday, February 21, 2011

The Abacus Conundrum*

From Das Glasperlenspiel  (Hermann Hesse, 1943) —

“Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it.… …what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.”

From “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (Lewis Padgett, 1943)—

…”Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—
…”Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”
…Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin,  rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But— a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking  wires—
…So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.
…The framework itself— Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was— a puzzle.
…”Where’d you get this?”
…”Uncle Harry gave it to me,” Scott said on the spur of the moment. “Last Sunday, when he came over.” Uncle Harry was out of town, a circumstance Scott well knew. At the age of seven, a boy soon learns that the vagaries of adults follow a certain definite pattern, and that they are fussy about the donors of gifts. Moreover, Uncle Harry would not return for several weeks; the expiration of that period was unimaginable to Scott, or, at least, the fact that his lie would ultimately be discovered meant less to him than the advantages of being allowed to keep the toy.
…Paradine found himself growing slightly confused as he attempted to manipulate the beads. The angles were vaguely illogical. It was like a puzzle. This red bead, if slid along this  wire to that  junction, should reach there— but it didn’t. A maze, odd, but no doubt instructive. Paradine had a well-founded feeling that he’d have no patience with the thing himself.
…Scott did, however, retiring to a corner and sliding beads around with much fumbling and grunting. The beads did  sting, when Scott chose the wrong ones or tried to slide them in the wrong direction. At last he crowed exultantly.
…”I did it, dad!”
…””Eh? What? Let’s see.” The device looked exactly the same to Paradine, but Scott pointed and beamed.
…”I made it disappear.”
…”It’s still there.”
…”That blue bead. It’s gone now.”
…Paradine didn’t believe that, so he merely snorted. Scott puzzled over the framework again. He experimented. This time there were no shocks, even slight. The abacus had showed him the correct method. Now it was up to him to do it on his own. The bizarre angles of the wires seemed a little less confusing now, somehow.
…It was a most instructive toy—
…It worked, Scott thought, rather like the crystal cube.

* Title thanks to Saturday Night Live  (Dec. 4-5, 2010).

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

September Morn

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:59 am

For Alyssa Milano —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100901-MilanoFork.jpg

The Forking

(Click here for cheesy Neil Diamond background music.)

For some related philosophical remarks, see Deconstructing Alice

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

and the new Pythagorean thriller The Thousand.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Garden of Forking Paths

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:18 am

For Alyssa

 

 An Old Magic Symbol

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100319-Palermo.gif

… and for Dan Brown —

Symbology
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Deconstructing Alice

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

Alyssa is  Wonderland

Manohla Dargis in The New York Times  yesterday

“Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in ‘Wonderland’ and in the sequel, ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’ which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination. (She is  Wonderland.)”

Alyssa Milano as a child, with fork

From Inside the White Cube

“The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear, and so does one of the great projective laws of modernism: as modernism gets older, context becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery ‘frames’ the gallery and its laws.”

From Yogi Berra–

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Related material:  For Baron Samedi and…

Symbology
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Symbology

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

From this journal:

Friday December 5, 2008

m759 @ 1:06 PM
 
Mirror-Play of
the Fourfold

For an excellent commentary
 on this concept of Heidegger,

View selected pages
from the book

Dionysus Reborn:

Play and the Aesthetic Dimension
in Modern Philosophical and
Scientific Discourse

(Mihai I. Spariosu,
Cornell U. Press, 1989)

Related material:
the logo for a
web page

Logo for 'Elements of Finite Geometry'

– and Theme and Variations.

Transition to the
Garden of Forking Paths–

(See For Baron Samedi)–

The Found Symbol
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

and Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida,
translated by Barbara Johnson,
London, Athlone Press, 1981–

Pages 354-355
On the mirror-play of the fourfold

Pages 356-357
Shaking up a whole culture

Pages 358-359
Cornerstone and crossroads

Pages 360-361
A deep impression embedded in stone

Pages 362-363
A certain Y, a certain V

Pages 364-365
The world is Zeus's play

Page 366
It was necessary to begin again

 

Saturday, January 23, 2010

For Baron Samedi

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

Yesterday's Times —

NY Times banner with Eve and apple

Today's Times —

NY Times ad for Goldstein's '36 Arguments'-- 'Deconstruct the Arguments'

   Annals of Deconstruction —

Click on image for background.

New Yorker cover on Haiti featuring Baron Samedi

Related material
   for Baron Samedi

The Found Symbol
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Wednesday September 16, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 am
The Found Symbol
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Saturday May 10, 2008

MoMA Goes to
Kindergarten

"… the startling thesis of Mr. Brosterman's new book, 'Inventing Kindergarten' (Harry N. Abrams, $39.95): that everything the giants of modern art and architecture knew about abstraction they learned in kindergarten, thanks to building blocks and other educational toys designed by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who coined the term 'kindergarten' in the 1830's."

— "Was Modernism Born
     in Toddler Toolboxes?"
     by Trip Gabriel, New York Times,
     April 10, 1997
 

RELATED MATERIAL

Figure 1 —
Concept from 1819:

Cubic crystal system
(Footnotes 1 and 2)

Figure 2 —
The Third Gift, 1837:

Froebel's third gift

Froebel's Third Gift

Froebel, the inventor of
kindergarten, worked as
an assistant to the
crystallographer Weiss
mentioned in Fig. 1.

(Footnote 3)

Figure 3 —
The Third Gift, 1906:

Seven partitions of the eightfold cube in 'Paradise of Childhood,' 1906

Figure 4 —
Solomon's Cube,
1981 and 1983:

Solomon's Cube - A 1981 design by Steven H. Cullinane

Figure 5 —
Design Cube, 2006:

Design Cube 4x4x4 by Steven H. Cullinane

The above screenshot shows a
moveable JavaScript display
of a space of six dimensions
(over the two-element field).

(To see how the display works,
try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.)

For some mathematical background, see

Footnotes:
 
1. Image said to be after Holden and Morrison, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 1982
2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs
3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9

Sunday, July 9, 2006

Sunday July 9, 2006

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

Today’s birthday:
Tom Hanks, star of
“The Da Vinci Code”

Ben Nicholson
and the Holy Grail


Part I:
A Current Exhibit

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Kufi Blocks“*

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by Ben Nicholson,
Illinois Institute of Technology

Part II:
Some Background

A. Diamond Theory, a 1976 preprint containing, in the original version, the designs on the faces of Nicholson’s “Kufi blocks,” as well as some simpler traditional designs, and
B. Block Designs,” a web page illustrating design blocks based on the 1976 preprint.

Part III:
The Leonardo Connection

 

See Modern-Day Leonardos, part of an account of a Leonardo exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry that includes Ben Nicholson and his “Kufi Blocks.”

Part IV:
Nicholson’s Grail Quest

“I’m interested in locating the holy grail of the minimum means to express the most complex ideas.”

Ben Nicholson in a 2005 interview

Nicholson’s quest has apparently lasted for some time.  Promotional material for a 1996 Nicholson exhibit in Montreal says it “invites visitors of all ages to experience a contemporary architect’s search for order, meaning and logic in a world of art, science and mystery.”  The title of that exhibit was “Uncovering Geometry.”

For web pages to which this same title might apply, see Quilt Geometry, Galois Geometry, and Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

* “Square Kufi” calligraphy is used in Islamic architectural ornament.  I do not know what, if anything, is signified by Nicholson’s 6×12 example of “Kufi blocks” shown above.

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