Continues.

From the above aldaily.com link —

Related course — "History and Human Capital" at Harvard, a course
taught last spring by professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz —

Related reading — "Human Capital," by Claudia Goldin:

The above material suggested this post's title, "Das Humankapital ."

The same phrase is also the title of a perceptive website from Linz, Austria.

* For the alternative title, see a Wikipedia article on The Jew of Linz .

Continued from Dec. 11, 2014.

Click images for related material.

See Ellen Page as Ariadne.

(Continued from the previous post, with its
link to Jeff Bridges in a scene from "Heaven's Gate.")

See an obituary for the widow of the late Robert Maxwell 
in today's Jerusalem Post , and The Dude.

Related material:  Peter O'Toole as another Jesus for Jews.

And then there is Liam Neeson….

“Orthodox Jews are disappearing from Jerusalem. One moment they are praying at the Western Wall, and in the blink of an eye, they seem to evaporate…. In order to build the Third Temple while being respectful of the Islamic structures on the Temple Mount, the Jews have discovered a way to access a fourth spatial dimension. They will build the Third Temple invisibly ‘above’ the Temple Mount and ‘above’ the Mosque in the direction of the fourth dimension.”

— Clifford Pickover, description of his novel Jews in Hyperspace

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

— Henry David Thoreau, conclusion of Walden

Related material: Log24 entries, morning and evening of June 11, 2009,  “Text” (June 22, 2009), and Salomon Bochner‘s remarks on space in “Eight is a Gate” (Feb. 26, 2008).

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.

Nautilus , March 10, 2022 —

Earlier . . . From "Deep Learning for Jews," July 17, 2018 —

* See Watchmen  in this journal.

(The title refers to the previous post.)

"There is a house in New Orleans…
Not the one you've heard about,
I'm talking about another house.
They spoke of gold in the cellar
That a Spanish gentleman had left…"

— Song lyric by David Berman suggested by
his New Yorker  elegy

"Reddington and Vesco are watching the opera,
and the plan begins."

See also http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Cleft .

* For the title, see yesterday's post "Noto."   See also yesterday's
  "Saturday Dialectics." For further background, see an October 2 
  Rosh Hashanah piece in Politico Magazine  by Ben Wofford. 
  From "Saturday Dialectics" —

"You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher"

— Song written by Robby Krieger, The Doors
(album produced by Paul A. Rothchild)

For remarks by a non-fictional Harvard professor, 
see the previous post.

See also Jews Telling Stories.

Jews on Style  continues …

From a Washington Post  obituary  this morning —

"For the past 30 years, while teaching at New York University’s
law school, Dr. Bruner explored the idea of storytelling as a
fundamental way of understanding the nature of the world
around us. He believed that the choices we make in telling
stories 'become so habitual that they finally become recipes
for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into
memory,' he said in 1987.

'This is a mode of cognition,' Gardner said, 'at least as
important as STEM' — the science, technology, engineering
and mathematics model of instruction that has gained
currency in recent years.

'He made narrative a form of thinking,' Gardner added.

Jerome Seymour Bruner was born Oct. 1, 1915,
in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe."

Related material —

A Log24 post yesterday was titled
"To an Old Philosopher in Cambridge."
This  post is about one such philosopher,
the current president of Harvard University.

From May 2015 —

" 'When I publicly engage on an issue, it elevates it,' 
Faust said in an interview this month. 'So I want to
be very careful of how I use my voice ….'

In 2007, Faust put her philosophy more succinctly.
Referencing Harvard Business School professor
Michael E. Porter, Faust told the New York Times
that she often considers the mantra 'strategy is
what you don’t do.' "

— The Harvard Crimson  on May 28, 2015

This  journal on May 28, 2015 —

Related material —  Michael Porter: The Great and Powerful.

Two transitions from last Monday, Oct. 26, 2015,
according to the online New York Times  today —

Related remarks:

Posts tagged "Steam," the post "On Ice-Breaking" from Oct. 27,
the post "Expanding the Seagram Spielraum" from Oct. 26, and
a 2008 article on the subject of the obituary at right above.

"Integrity, Craftsmanship, Tradition"

A Phrase That Haunts

From this journal on August 23, 2013 —

Illustration from a New York Times  review 
of the novel Point Omega —

From the print version of The New York Times Sunday Book Review
dated Sept. 13, 2015 —

The online version, dated Sept. 11, 2015 —

From the conclusion of the online version —

On the above print  headline, "Wrinkles in Time,"
that vanished in the online version —

"Now you see it, now you don't"
is not a motto one likes to see demonstrated
by a reputable news firm.

Related material:  Jews Telling Stories.

See as well Jews on Fiction.

Links to the above essays:  
Shields (Jan. 5, 2015),  Rothstein (Jan. 12, 2015)

Talk amongst yourselves.

(Continued)

At right above, a possible image of Queen Isabella I 
of Castile, attributed to Gerard David.

At left above, a Hollywood version.

Happy birthday to Chris Wallace and Hugh Jackman.

Related material: The Foot Configuration 
and Jews Telling Stories.

See also the epigraph to this morning's post Deconstruction —

"                          … Had they deceived us 
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?"

— Four Quartets

See Hollywood + Vine in this journal.

See also Jews on Fiction.

Today is Commencement Day at MIT.

Well, perhaps not quite nothing.

The above pictures were posted here on the day the following book was published—

The lives of the nine Jews in the above book amount to more than Yau's "nothing."

Note, however, that claims by Jews (see Jill Abramson yesterday) 
that their secular publications constitute a substitute for religion
and contain only "absolute truth" should be viewed with at least one
raised eyebrow.

Abramson's remark yesterday that her promotion to New York Times  executive editor
was like "ascending to Valhalla" had a religious flavor worthy of yesterday's
Feast of the Ascension.

In related news from yesterday's Times—

See also a symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"—

A minimalist 3×3 matrix favicon—

This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation.  See Jim Holt on physics.

Edward Rothstein reviewing The Red Book of Jung in today's New York Times—

"The temptation, after numbingly turning these pages, is to react finally like the psychiatrist Spielvogel at the end of Philip Roth’s 'Portnoy’s Complaint,' and say: 'So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?'"

Free association via Google Image Search on Spielvogel + Portnoy:

Click for further details.
See also Jews Telling Stories.

Continued from Monday:

An educated consumer
is our best customer!

“Acme Klein Bottles — where
yesterday’s future is here today!”

Clifford Pickover now seems to be trying to catch up with Christian fantasists Madeleine L’Engle and Charles Williams. Click on the images below for further details.

From Mitchell Stephens, author of a website mentioned here yesterday:

“This paper is designed to be a conversation….

The ideas are organized loosely around a single theme: the Roman leader Pompey’s forced entry into the most sacred place of the Jewish temple. At issue are the origins and prevalence of doubt, even at the heart of religion….

The paper will be initially presented, with comments and additions, to the working group on ‘Secularism, Religious Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge’ of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University on December 8, 2006.”

From the paper itself:

“All Pompey’s intrusion into the Holy of Holies will leave behind is one sentence in Tacitus; still, it is not hard to imagine it as a media show. As he enters this hidden room in the Temple of those weird, unGreek, Asian, tribal Jews, this cosmopolitan, sophisticated Roman is not just the insensitive anthropologist. He wants, to continue our imagining, to display the lack of contents of the Holy of Holies in a museum, to take them, like the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, on tour. This all-powerful Roman wields klieg lights; he brings the press. He exposes. His expedition is something of an exposé. The whole scene feels as if it might have been filmed: like Dorothy’s peek behind the curtain at the diminutive Wizard of Oz. It feels as if it might have been televised: like Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s ‘secret vault.’ Pompey has in common with all journalists a desire to shove a microphone in God’s face. He wants to rant about what he has learned on his blog.

In his desecration of the Holy of Holies, Pompey has with him, in other words, what Jacques Derrida, in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ calls the ‘powers of abstraction’: ‘deracination, delocalization, disincarnation, formalization, universalizing schematization, objectification, telecommunication etc.'”

Related material:

This meditation is prompted by memories of suicidal alcoholics Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, as well as by the title of Mel Gibson’s latest project, “Apocalypto.”

A search on Gibson’s film title leads to this quotation:

“And what does apocalypse mean? It means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence and immediately you see the relevance of this.”

— Interview with Rene Girard in the June 1996 issue of UCLA’s Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology

It is by no means clear that “apocalypse” means “violence,” let alone “absolute violence,” except in the Christian tradition.

For apocalyptic Christian violence, see “Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation” (pdf), by Christopher Rowland of Oxford University.

As for “the relevance of this,” see the definition of “generative anthropology” (GA) at

anthropoetics.ucla.edu/purpose.htm:

“The originary hypothesis of GA is that human language begins as an aborted gesture of appropriation representing–and thereby renouncing as sacred– an object of potential mimetic rivalry. The strength of our mimetic intelligence makes us the only creatures for whom intraspecific violence is a greater threat to survival than the external forces of nature. Human language defers potential conflict by permitting each to possess the sign of the unpossessable object of desire– the deferral of violence through representation.”

Compare with the remarks of Jung on Transformation Symbolism in the Mass:

Antecedents and parallels are found for the ritual of the Christian religious Mass in Aztec, Mithraic and pagan religious practices. “The Aztecs make a dough figure of the god Huitzilopochtli, which is then symbolically killed, divided and consumed….”

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1969. (pp. 222-225)

Mel Gibson’s interest in religion and violence is well known.  His film “Apocalypto,” scheduled for release on Dec. 8, 2006, deals with human sacrifice among the Maya, rather than the Aztecs or Jews.  (Cf. Abraham and “Highway 61 Revisited.”)

It seems unlikely that Mel will learn more about these issues in his recovery program. Too bad.

Wittgenstein’s
Passion
 
From today’s
London Daily Mail:

Related
Philosophy:

Related
Art in Our Schools:

Former President
of Dartmouth Dies

From today’s New York Times:

“In one widely publicized episode, in 1988, he condemned The Dartmouth Review, a conservative student newspaper, for ridiculing blacks, gay men and lesbians, women and Jews.”

From James A. Michener‘s The Source:

“Trouble started in a quarter that neither Uriel nor Zadok could have foreseen.  For many generations the wiser men of Zadok’s clan had worshipped El-Shaddai with the understanding that whereas Canaanites and Egyptians could see their gods directly, El-Shaddai was invisible and inhabited no specific place.  Unequivocally the Hebrew patriarchs had preached this concept and the sager men of the clans accepted it, but to the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher the theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend.  Such people were willing to agree with Zadok that their god did not live on this mountain– the one directly ahead– but they suspected that he did live on some mountain nearby, and when they said this they pictured an elderly man with a white beard who lived in a proper tent and whom they might one day see and touch.  If questioned, they would have said that they expected El-Shaddai to look much like their father Zadok, but with a longer beard, a stronger voice, and more penetrating eyes.

Now, as these simpler-minded Hebrews settled down outside the walls of Makor, they began to see Canaanite processions leave the main gate and climb the mountain to the north, seeking the high place where Baal lived, and they witnessed the joy which men experienced when visiting their god, and the Hebrews began in subtle ways and easy steps to evolve the idea that Baal, who obviously lived in a mountain, and El-Shaddai, who was reported to do so, must have much in common.  Furtively at first, and then openly, they began to climb the footpath to the place of Baal, where they found a monolith rising from the highest point of rock.  Here was a tangible thing they could comprehend, and after much searching along the face of the mountain, a group of Hebrew men found a straight rock of size equal to the one accorded Baal, and with much effort they dragged it one starless night to the mountain top, where they installed it not far from the home of Baal….”

Rabbi Chitrik died on
Valentine’s Day, 2006,
having had a heart attack
on Feb. 8, 2006–

Grammy Night.

The above monolith is perhaps more
closely related to El-Shaddai than to
Madonna, Grammy Night, and Baal.
It reflects my own interests
(Mathematics and Narrative)
and those of Martin Buber
(Jews on Fiction):
 

“Among Buber’s early philosophical influences were Kant’s Prolegomena, which he read at the age of fourteen, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.  Whereas Kant had a calming influence on the young mind troubled by the aporia of infinite versus finite time, Nietzsche’s doctrine of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ constituted a powerful negative seduction.  By the time Buber graduated from Gymnasium he felt he had overcome this seduction, but Nietzsche’s prophetic tone and aphoristic style are evident in Buber’s subsequent writings.”

— Plato.stanford.edu

Martin Buber

Rabbi Chitrik

Jews on Fiction

See Tony Kushner and E.L. Doctorow in today’s New York Times, Rebecca Goldstein’s talk from last summer’s Mykonos conference on mathematics and narrative, and Martin Buber on the Bible.

The Oscar for best picture goes to…

“… And when at last one has arrived at San Sepolcro, what is there to be seen? A little town surrounded by walls, set in a broad flat valley between hills; some fine Renaissance palaces with pretty balconies of wrought iron; a not very interesting church, and finally, the best picture in the world.

The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall….  Its clear, yet subtly sober colours shine out from the wall with scarcely impaired freshness….  We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty; it stands there before us in entire and actual splendour, the greatest picture in the world.

The greatest picture in the world…. You smile. The expression is ludicrous, of course.”

Yet not as ludicrous as the following

Cheesy Consolation

Doonesbury 2/26/04:

Maureen Dowd on
The Passion of the Christ:

“I went with a Jewish pal, who tried to stay sanguine. ‘The Jews may have killed Jesus,’ he said.  ‘But they also gave us ‘Easter Parade.’ “

— New York Times, Feb. 26, 2004

For a truly cheesy Easter parade at Harvard University, see

The Crimson Passion.

Hello, Columbus

“Dunne is to Irish Catholics as
Philip Roth is to Eastern European Jews,
and True Confessions is Dunne’s
Goodbye Columbus.”
— Amazon.com review

The Unity of Mathematics,

or “Shema, Israel”

A conference to honor the 90th birthday (Sept. 2) of Israel Gelfand is currently underway in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The following note from 2001 gives one view of the conference’s title topic, “The Unity of Mathematics.”

Related Reading

For four different proofs of Euler’s result, see the inexpensive paperback classic by Konrad Knopp, Theory and Application of Infinite Series (Dover Publications).

Related Websites

Evaluating Zeta(2), by Robin Chapman (PDF article) Fourteen proofs!

Zeta Functions for Undergraduates

The Riemann Zeta Function

Reciprocity Laws
Reciprocity Laws II

The Langlands Program

Recent Progress on the Langlands Conjectures

For more on
the theme of unity,
see

Monolithic Form
and
ART WARS.

Passing the Crown

Today’s New York Times Book Review vilifies author John O’Hara as a “jerk.”  Earlier this week, the Times called him a “lout.”  These attacks amount to a virtual crown of thorns. For commentary on these attacks by the Times (a publication generally more sympathetic to Jews than to Catholics), see

The Crucifixion of John O’Hara.

But there is, to use a term of Harvard philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, “compensation.”

Today’s New York Times Magazine paints an excellent portrait of Harvard President Larry Summers.  This portrait, by author James Traub, is less than flattering.  Traub notes that Summers is “a blunt and overbearing figure,” and quotes an anonymous faculty friend of Summers as saying that many on campus “just despise him. The level of the intensity of their dislike for him is just shocking.”

Traub notes that at Harvard, “Despite the protections of tenure, virtually all of Summers’s critics were too afraid of him to be willing to be quoted by name.”

At Yale, however, at least one professor has dared to criticize Summers openly.

In the Boston Globe on August 14, Alex Beam, Globe columnist, quoted Yale music professor John Halle as saying that Summers, an economist, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. By all accounts, he is a deeply vulgar individual….”

These remarks suggest the following illustrations, based on today’s Times Book Review and Times Magazine, of a thorny crown being thoughtfully passed to a new generation.