"Even so, Pattinson, I wouldn't kick her out of bed."
Monday, March 10, 2025
Annals of Cinematic Confusion:
Back in the High Life
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Back in the High Life
Back in the High Life
Monday, April 1, 2019
Indiana Jones and the Temple of High Life
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Monday, November 5, 2018
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Space Dreams: The High/Low Life
See Claire Denis. Not unrelated —
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Wednesday, November 5, 2025
The Gospel According to Commonweal . . .
Via CHE, The Chronicle of Higher Education*
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Via CHE, The Chronicle of Higher Education*
Via CHE, The Chronicle of Higher Education*
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Lifestyle News: “Program or Be Programmed”
Related imagery for Coppola . . .
Stunt Double Lifts Leg —
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Friday, December 27, 2019
The Secret Life of Mark Alpert
"Alpert, an editor for Scientific American , laces his high-IQ
doomsday thriller with clearly explicated and hauntingly beautiful
scientific theories…."
Booklist on The Omega Theory :
"Alpert’s follow-up to his acclaimed first novel, Final Theory (2008),
continues the adventures of science historian David Swift."
See as well this journal on June 1, 2008.
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Sunday, September 4, 2016
Piled High and Deep
Quoted here at 10 PM Pacific Time on Friday night —
"If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while . . . ."
— Poem by Lee Hays
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Friday, August 26, 2022
“A Room Somewhere” — Song Lyric
The Peacock series "The Resort" yesterday presented its concept
of "a room outside of time" (the Pasaje ) as a hole in the ground.
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Friday, May 20, 2022
“A Room Somewhere” — Eliza Doolittle
See "High Life" in this journal.
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Monday, May 24, 2021
Frontiers of Minimal Art
"… Denis fashioned a minimalist chamber
that derives eroticism from its sparseness."
That remark describes a film, "High Life,"
that stars Juliette Binoche.
Binoche, along with other minimalist art, appeared here
in the post "The Triangle Induction" on May 11, 2021 —
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The logo of a news site that yesterday
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Related material:
From a 2014 review, remarks by a noted minimalist sculptor
who reportedly died at 85 on the above date … May 11, 2021.
I personally prefer remarks by Munari —
For the Church of Synchronology:
This journal on the above HuffPost date — April 11, 2019.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2020
What Part of NO Don’t You Understand?
The previous post addressed the "N" part.
For the "O" part, see Juliette Binoche in "High Life,"
a sequel to Kristen Stewart as bait in "Clouds of
Sils Maria" (2014) —
The Tackle —
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Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Business Models
Yesterday's post on a recent sci-fi film suggests a look at LA news . . .
|
From the LA Times Monday morning — “He was working at the Children’s Television Workshop, as the treasurer or something, and I felt that wasn’t an important enough job for him,” Fuchs said. “At that time, we were doing a lot of acquisitions so he was buying music and concerts from around the world. I once asked him how he liked it, and Frank said: ‘I don’t know. There are no answers in this business.’” Biondi is credited with helping establish the successful model of a premium subscription channel…. |
As opposed to an unsuccessful model —
See also "High Life" (from a post of April 1 this year) —
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Sunday, April 19, 2026
From The Redacted Files —
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Friday, March 21, 2025
Axiom Attics … Continues.
Thursday, March 13, 2025
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An illustration from the Axiom Attics post linked to on March 13 —
Clay Risen in The New York Times yesterday, in reporting the March 13
death of a Mother-Jones-cofounding journalist . . .
"In between editing investigative journalism, he wrote
a science fiction thriller, The Black Hole Affair (1991)."
The description at Amazon.com of that thriller —
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The Black Hole Affair Paperback – January 1, 1991 by Jeffrey Klein (Author) Zebra Books, 1991. Mass market paperback, stated first Zebra printing, August 1991. (SBN 0-8217-3470-9) Embossed wrappers with foil lettering. Good copy, back wrapper scuffed. thight copy, unread. It was the orbital weapon powerful enough to destroy entire nations. The Pentagon would kill anyone who tried to expose the lethal secrets of the Black Hole Affair. "Klein knows more about Silicon Valley's Dark Side than anyone!" — Mike Malone, PBS. "'The Black Hole Affair' captures the terror of our times!" — Mike Weiss, Edgar Award Winner. The Black Hole Affair, code name for a super secret Star Wars weapons program powerful enough to destroy America's enemies in minutes and reduce half the earth to a nuclear wasteland. The most closely guarded military program ever funded by the Pentagon's infamous "black budget" — only two men knew its true power and would kill to protect it. The deadliest government conspiracy in U.S. history, it was the story of a lifetime for Silicon Valley's investigative reporter Eli Franklin, that if if he lived long enough to tell it. Fiction. |
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Monday, November 25, 2024
A Swan Boat for Wiig
"Then moved o’er the waters by might of the wind
that bark like a bird with breast of foam,
till in season due, on the second day,
the curved prow such course had run
that sailors now could see the land,
sea-cliffs shining, steep high hills,
headlands broad." — Beowulf
Or its prowess . . .
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Saturday, June 15, 2024
Screwing Up a Space
Flashback to April 12, 2011 —
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In the landscape of minimalism, John McCracken cuts a unique figure. He is often grouped with the “light and space” artists who formed the West Coast branch of the movement. Indeed, he shares interests in vivid color, new materials, and polished surfaces with fellow Californians enamored of the Kustom Kar culture. On the other hand, his signature works, the “planks” that he invented in 1966 and still makes today, have the tough simplicity and aggressive presence of New York minimalism…. “They kind of screw up a space because they lean,” McCracken has said of the planks. Their tilting, reflective surfaces activate the room, leaving the viewer uncertain of traditional boundaries. He notes that the planks bridge sculpture (identified with the floor) and painting (identified with the wall)…. His ultimate goal, as with all mystics, is unity— not just of painting and sculpture, but of substance and illusion, of matter and spirit, of art and life. Such ideas recall the utopian aspirations of early modernists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. Related Art —
Unity
—Roman numeral I For a related figure, see a film review by A. O. Scott at The New York Times (September 21, 2010)— “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator— , sounding a lot like — paraphrasing . You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious. If life signifies nothing, perhaps the tall dark figure above signifies something . Discuss. |
Related (if only phonetically) drama . . . Detective Cruz at Planck's Café.
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Monday, December 25, 2023
“Weird Pharaonic Monument”
Epigraph for Cormac McCarthy —
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"When I got to high school the first place I went was to the library. It was just a small room with a desk and maybe a thousand books. Maybe not that. But among them was a volume of Berkeley. I dont know what it was doing there. Probably because Berkeley was a bishop. Well. Almost certainly because Berkeley was a bishop. But I sat in the floor and I read A New Theory of Vision. And it changed my life. I understood for the first time that the visual world was inside your head. All the world, in fact. I didnt buy into his theological speculations but the physiology was beyond argument. I sat there for a long time. Just letting it soak in."
— McCarthy, Cormac. Stella Maris (p. 39). |
From this journal on April 18, 2023 —
" NY Times columnist's advice to the recent Harvard donor of $300 million —
'At least make them build you some weird pharaonic monument.' "
Illustration suggested by my own high-school library reading many years ago —
Click to enlarge:
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
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Sunday, October 1, 2023
The Usual Suspects: Schmeikal
From a search in this journal for "Schmeikal" —
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Schmeikal Bio https://keplerspaceinstitute.com/project/volume-9-number-1/ [Spring 2020] [Page 7] — Introduction by the Editors We have been blessed throughout the publication history of the Journal of Space Philosophy, beginning in 2012, with the volunteer service of 42 professionals in the Space community to act as reviewers and consultants to our authors. They have been listed in the final article of each published issue. We are proud to announce with this letter the addition of our latest Senior Consultant, Dr. Bernd Anton Schmeikal. [Image of Dr. Schmeikal] This Letter to the Editor is about Dr. Schmeikal. Bernd Anton Schmeikal, born May 15, 1946, is a retired freelancer in research and development, qualified in Sociology with a treatise about cultural time reversal. He is a real maverick, still believing that social life can be based on openness and honesty. As a PhD philosopher from Vienna, with a typical mathematical physics background, he entered the Trace Analysis Group of the UA1 Experiment at CERN, under the leadership of Walter Thirring, in 1965. This was in the foundation phase of the Institute for High Energy Physics (HEPhy) at the Austrian Academy of Science. He has always been busy solving fundamental problems concerning the unity of matter and space-time, the origin of the HEPhy standard model, and the phenomenology of relativistic quantum mechanics. In the Sociology Department of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS Vienna), he helped James Samuel Coleman to conceive his mathematics of collective action as a cybernetic system, and he gave the process of internalization of 7 ………………. End of page 7 [Page 8] — Journal of Space Philosophy 9, No. 1 (Spring 2020) collective values an exact shape. He implemented many transdisciplinary research projects for governmental and non-governmental organizations, universities, and non-university institutions, and several times he introduced new views and methods. He founded an international work stream that, for the first time, worked under the name of the Biofield Laboratory (BILAB). Although close to fringe science and electromedicine, the work of BILAB had a considerable similarity to the Biological Computer Laboratory run earlier by Heinz von Foerster. Lately, he has applied Foerster’s idea of a universal relevance of hyperbolic distributions (Zipf’s law) in social science to the labor market. This signifies a last contribution to the research program of the Wiener Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM) under the sponsorship of the Austrian Federal Presidential Candidate Rudolf Hundstorfer. Dr. Schmeikal is convinced that a unity of science and culture can be achieved, but that this demands more than one Einstein. Consequently, he sought cooperation with Louis Kauffman and Joel Isaacson. Dr. Bernd Schmeikal’s review and evaluation of Joel Isaacson and Louis Kauffman’s Recursive Distinctioning (aka “Nature’s Cosmic Intelligence”) research and papers, published in the first issue of the JSP, Fall 2012, again in the Special JSP Issue on Recursive Distinctioning, Spring 2016, and again in the Fall 2017 issue, are very valuable contributions to this forefront science investigation of Nature’s Cosmic Intelligence. Dr. Schmeikal, University of Vienna Professor in mathematics, linguistics, and physics is one of the world’s distinguished scholars for this special field of universe autonomous intelligence. He begins his abstract with the statement: “This paper investigates a universal creative system,” and ends it with “That is to say, our universe may be a representation of Isaacson’s system, and entertainingly, with his US Patent specification 4,286,330, 1981, it seems he has patented creation.” Reports on the four annual KSI-sponsored Conferences for Recursive Distinctioning, to date, can be found in JSP publications. Dr. Schmeikal’s latest book publication is Nuclear Time Travel and the Alien Mind, published by Nova Science Publishers, New York. In 119 pages, Dr. Schmeikal tells the historic story of unidentified objects, and the knowns and unknowns of advanced space-time warping time-travel technology. He includes a September 24, 1947 top secret letter of President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense Forrestal, authorizing research into these matters, but confining ultimate disposition to be solely under the Office of the President. Dr. Schmeikal’s discussions of the impacts of the extraterrestrial mind on past Earth events give a research variable as we attempt to understand and predict future outcomes of attempts at improving humanity’s prospects (see Yehezkel Dror, JSP, Summer 2015 and Kepler Space Institute, book publication, 2019) as we humans proceed with exploring, developing and building human Space settlements. Bob Krone and Gordon Arthur Founding and Current Editors, Journal of Space Philosophy April 15, 2020 8 …………………………… [End of page 8] |
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Thursday, December 22, 2022
For Harlan Kane: The Canetti Maxim
"Most important for Canetti are certain events
that he calls 'illuminations,' such as his witnessing
of striking workers being mowed down by Viennese
police on July 15, 1927, which was the germ of both
Auto-da-Fé and Crowds and Power. For Canetti,
these epiphanies are moments of metamorphosis,
which he prizes above all in art as well as in life.
Canetti aspired to be a 20th-century Ovid, but
precisely because he was modern, this ambition
landed him, again and again, in paradox, such as
the one expressed in the aphorism that gives this
compilation its title, or in this characteristic maxim:
'It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves .'"
— Hal Foster in The Chronicle of Higher Education ,
"The Best Scholarly Books of 2022," Dec. 21, 2022.
See also this journal on Nov, 25, 2022 —
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Thursday, November 10, 2022
For Students of the Forked Tongue
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 —
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Franklin, Ursula (1987) "Book Review: A Critical Work II. . . . . 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 . . . . . |
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Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Watchmen Squid Game: Pronoun Trouble
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"… Wade’s entire life is built around the squid attack. In the episode’s opening, we see that 34 years ago, young Wade was at a carnival in Hoboken, New Jersey, proselytizing as a Jehovah’s Witness when the squid emitted a psychic blast that killed three million people in the New York area. Just before the attack, a girl led him into a house of mirrors, feigning interest in hooking up with him in order to steal his clothes, leaving him naked and humiliated in the fairground attraction. But the cruel prank also saved his life, as mirrors can apparently repel the squid's psychic blast." |
Related literary remarks —
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"It may have been by chance, and it may have had the side effect of being easy to read, but this way of putting a novel together offered a bridge between the miniaturist in Doerr and the seeker of world-spanning connections. He could focus on the details of every piece in the narrative, but there was pleasure, too, in placing them against each other. Sometimes he would lay out all these micro chapters on the floor so he could see them and discover the resonances between characters across space and time. 'That’s the real joy,' Doerr said, 'the visceral pleasure that comes from taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.'" — "A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 20, 2021, Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing His Readers To Higher Ground." |
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Thursday, January 7, 2021
The Purloined* Void
From a post of Tuesday, May 7, 2019 —
“Honored in the Breach:
Graham Bader on Absence as Memorial”
Artforum International , April 2012
| . . . .
“In the wake of a century marked by inconceivable atrocity, the use of emptiness as a commemorative trope has arguably become a standard tactic, a default style of public memory. The power of the voids at and around Ground Zero is generated by their origin in real historical circumstance rather than such purely commemorative intent: They are indices as well as icons of the losses they mark. Nowhere is the negotiation between these two possibilities–on the one hand, the co-optation of absence as tasteful mnemonic trope; on the other, absence’s disruptive potential as brute historical scar–more evident than in Berlin, a city whose history, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, can be seen as a ‘narrative of voids.’ Writing in 1997, Huyssen saw this tale culminating in Berlin’s post-wall development, defined equally by an obsessive covering-over of the city’s lacunae–above all in the elaborate commercial projects then proliferating in the miles-long stretch occupied until 1989 by the Berlin Wall–and a carefully orchestrated deployment of absence as memorial device, particularly in the ‘voids’ integrated by architect Daniel Libeskind into his addition to the Berlin Museum, now known as the Jewish Museum Berlin.” |
See also Breach in this journal, as well as Void.
* Literary background — The word “Purloined” in this journal.
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Saturday, June 29, 2019
That’s “Merry” … And Quite Contrary
"John Horton Conway is a cross between
Archimedes, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí."
— The Guardian paraphrasing Siobhan Roberts,
John Horton Conway and his Leech lattice doodle
in The Guardian . Photo: Hollandse Hoogte/Eyevine.
. . . .
"In junior school, one of Conway’s teachers had nicknamed him 'Mary'.
He was a delicate, effeminate creature. Being Mary made his life
absolute hell until he moved on to secondary school, at Liverpool’s
Holt High School for Boys. Soon after term began, the headmaster
called each boy into his office and asked what he planned to do with
his life. John said he wanted to read mathematics at Cambridge.
Instead of 'Mary' he became known as 'The Prof'. These nicknames
confirmed Conway as a terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware
of his own suffering." — Siobhan Roberts, loc. cit.
From the previous post —
See as well this journal on the above Guardian date —
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Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Quaternion at Candlebrow
From a Groundhog Day post in 2009 —
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The Candlebrow Conference The conferees had gathered here from all around the world…. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries. "Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon– the earth's own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything–"
"Um, Professor–"…. … Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie "twister"…. … In the storm cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions…. "Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions." "Build a time machine." "Not the way I would have put it, but if you like, fine." Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up…. "We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long 'passes,' with a linear velocity, but 'returns,' with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly." "Born again!" exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened. Above, the devastation had begun. |
"As if the professor had lectured it into being . . . ."
See other posts now tagged McLuhan Time.
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Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Taken In
A passage that may or may not have influenced Madeleine L'Engle's
writings about the tesseract :
|
From Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis (1952) —
"Book IV – Beyond Personality: I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully. You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares. Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels. Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already. You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time —tonight, if you like. . . . . |
But beware of being drawn into the personal life of the Happy Family .
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966339 —
"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
And ends with …
"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a 'personality disorder.' His anger was
paranoid and unremitting."
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Monday, March 6, 2017
Bullshit Studies
From The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 2, 2017 —
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These days, in a world totally dependent on microprocessors, lasers, and nanotechnology, it has been estimated that 30 percent of the U.S. gross national product is based on inventions made possible by quantum mechanics. With the booming high-tech industry and the expected advent of quantum computers, this percentage will only grow. Within a hundred years, an esoteric theory of young physicists became a mainstay of the modern economy. It took nearly as long for Einstein’s own theory of relativity, first published in 1905, to be used in everyday life in an entirely unexpected way. The accuracy of the global positioning system, the space-based navigation system that provides location and time information in today’s mobile society, depends on reading time signals of orbiting satellites. The presence of Earth’s gravitational field and the movement of these satellites cause clocks to speed up and slow down, shifting them by 38 milliseconds a day. In one day, without Einstein’s theory, our GPS tracking devices would be inaccurate by about seven miles. — Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton |
The above paragraphs are clearly propaganda, not physics.
For "It has been estimated," see …
The "without Einstein 's theory" statement may or may not be correct.
See the lengthy discussion at …
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1061/
why-does-gps-depend-on-relativity .
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Saturday, October 22, 2016
Magis
From "The Magis way: Notes on the publishing culture,"
by Giampiero Bosoni, at http://www.magisdesign.com/magis-world/ —
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"… perhaps it is interesting to reflect further on the relationship between a design object and a literary work, by reading (in whatever interpretative key you choose) the illuminating definition given by the great semiologist Roland Barthes of the act of writing and of the literary value of a text. 'Writing,' Barthes tells us, 'is historically an action that involves constant contradiction, based on dual expectations. One aspect of writing is essentially commercial, a means of control and segregation, steeped in the most materialistic aspect of society. The other is an act of pleasure, connected to the deepest urges of the body and to the subtlest and most successful products of art. This is how the written text is woven. All I have done is to arrange and reveal the threads. Now each can add his own warp to the weft.' [3] Magis’ long and highly advanced experience has given evidence, further confirmed by this latest publishing catalogue, of an ever-growing awareness of this necessary interweaving between warp and weft, between the culture of craftsmanship and that of industry, between design culture and business culture, between form and technique, between symbolic codes and practical functions, between poetry and everyday life." — Giampiero Bosoni [3] Barthes R., Variations sur l’écriture (1972), Editions du Seuil, Paris 1994, published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes 1966-1975 (freely translated from the Italian translation, Variazioni sulla scrittura seguite da Il piacere del testo , Ossola C. (editor) Einaudi, Turin 1999). |
See as well "Interweaving" in this journal.
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
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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
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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.
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Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Voiced
"J.A.R.V.I.S. (Stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System),
also stylized as JARVIS, or Jarvis, is a highly advanced
computerized A.I. developed by Tony Stark, and was voiced
by actor Paul Bettany, to manage almost everything, especially
matters related to technology, in Tony's life."
Happy birthday, Mr. Bettany.
View from the intersection of U.S. Routes 6 and 62.
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