Log24

Actor James Spader in a 2014 interview —

". . . my father taught English. My mother taught art . . . ."

Detail of part of a text by Magritte (1929) that appeared  
without attribution in the online New York Times  today —

See also, from a search for the phrase "Word and Image"
in this  journal —

The Philosophers' Stone as originally
illustrated in The New York Times —

 .

Related images —

See as well a Log24 search for "Philosophers' Stone"
and remarks related to the Magritte pictures above 
in the post Story of March 13, 2014.

Related material: 

For code  in a different sense, but related to the first passage above,
see Diamond Theory Roullete, a webpage by Radamés Ajna.

For "the method of the kaleidoscope" mentioned in the second
passage above, see both the Ajna page and a webpage of my own,
Kaleidoscope Puzzle.

The title is from an essay by James C. Nohrnberg—

(Click to enlarge.)

"Just another shake of the kaleidoscope" —

Related material:

Kaleidoscope Puzzle,  
Design Cube 2x2x2, and 
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity.

In memory of Robert de Marrais, an excerpt from an obituary at Legacy.com—

(Click to enlarge.)

Robert “Bob” Paul de Marrais died April 4, 2011 in Boston, Mass. One measure of a life is those that grieve our absence. Bob is dearly missed. He is survived by his 92 year old mother Yvette (nee Pétronille) in NY, his brother John A. in NY, his Aunt Mae in NJ; three children Luc, Sylvie, and Nathalie in Mass, and his devoted wife Dali (nee Zangurashvili) from Georgia of the ex-Soviet-Union. Bob was born Nov. 30, 1948, grew up in Cresskill, NJ, made life-long friends during some of his happiest days at MIT in Mass., and did not wander far from there for the rest of his life. He had a lifelong interest in history, his French heritage, music, history of science, and multidimensional algebras. His wife, friends Izzy and Mitch, brother John (and wife Caroline), little nephew Louis J., and two of his own children got to say goodbye. He found the energy to reward us with a smile. Bob has now joined his loving dad Louis J., Uncle Jack, Aunt Ginny, Uncle Gil, et. al.

For some details of de Marrais's life, see a separate biography from Legacy.com.

Related material—  A search for "deMarrais" in this journal. (The name often occurs only within links.)
Cached copies of the 5-part "Kaleidoscopes" work by de Marrais referred to in the search can be found here.

A more personal note, from a quotation linked to here on the date of de Marrais's death—

… and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.

May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed.

— James Agee, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915"

The Diamond 16 Puzzle and the Kaleidoscope Puzzle can now be downloaded in the normal way from a browser, with the save-as web-page-complete option, and have their JavaScript still work— if  the files are saved with the name indicated in the instructions on the puzzles' web pages. (There was a problem with file names in the JavaScript that has been fixed.)

The JavaScript pages Design Cube 2x2x2 and Design Cube 4x4x4 have not been changed. To download these, it is necessary to…

1. Do a web-page-complete save to get an image-files folder, then
2. do an HTML-only save to the image-files folder  to put an unaltered copy of the the web page there, then
3. rename the image-files folder to unlink it from the altered HTML page downloaded in step 1, then
4. delete the altered HTML page downloaded in step 1.

The result is a folder containing both image files and the HTML page, just as it is on the Web.

The Philosophers' Stone
according to
  The New York Times—

Related material
from French cinema—

"a 'non-existent myth' of a battle between
goddesses of the sun and the moon
for a mysterious blue diamond
that has the power to make
mortals immortal and vice versa."

See also

   Word and Image—

* The title is a reference to Jim Dodge's 1989 novel Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler.

Dialogue from Forbidden Planet —

Dialogue from another story —

At a British puzzle website today I found this, titled “Tiles Puzzle by Steven H. Cullinane”–

The version there states that

“there are 322,560 patterns made by swapping rows, swapping columns and swapping the four 2×2 quadrants!”

Actually, only 840 patterns can be made in this version. These are formed by 322,560 permitted permutations of the 16 tiles. This is also true in my Kaleidoscope Puzzle. For a display of all 322,560 permutations as pairs of (orthogonal) patterns, see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.

Update of Nov. 10, 2008: The error has been corrected.

Windmills
 

Upper part of above picture–

From today’s New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.

Lower part of above picture–
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:

“This magical place, according to Navajo Legend, was the home of Spider Woman, who gave the gift of weaving to the Dineh’ People.  Today’s Navajos trace the excellence of their finest textiles to this time of legends, when their patron, Changing Woman, met Spider Woman, the first Weaver.”

Vine Deloria Jr.,
 
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:

“The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment.  Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills.”

    “Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, ‘Look, Buster, do you want to live?’….
    Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

Bordered version
of the sigil

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a plus sign.  It looked permanent.”

— Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning“

For Vine Deloria Jr., who died at 72 on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005:

        Things forgotten are shadows.
        The shadows will be as real
        as wind and rain and song and light,
        there in the old place.
        Spider Woman atop your rock,
        I would greet you,
        but I am going the other way.
        Only a fool would pursue a Navajo
        into the Canyon of Death.

From a
Beethoven’s Birthday entry:

Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat

Related material:

Blue
(below),

Bee Season
(below),

Halloween Meditations,
Aquarius Jazz,
We Are the Key,
and
Jazz on St. Lucia’s Day.

“Y’know, I never imagined
the competition version involved
so many tricky permutations.”

— David Brin, Glory Season

Kaleidoscope, continued:

Austere Geometry

From Noel Gray, The Kaleidoscope: Shake, Rattle, and Roll:

“… what we will be considering is how the ongoing production of meaning can generate a tremor in the stability of the initial theoretical frame of this instrument; a frame informed by geometry’s long tradition of privileging the conceptual ground over and above its visual manifestation.  And to consider also how the possibility of a seemingly unproblematic correspondence between the ground and its extrapolation, between geometric theory and its applied images, is intimately dependent upon the control of the truth status ascribed to the image by the generative theory.  This status in traditional geometry has been consistently understood as that of the graphic ancilla– a maieutic force, in the Socratic sense of that term– an ancilla to lawful principles; principles that have, traditionally speaking, their primary expression in the purity of geometric idealities.*  It follows that the possibility of installing a tremor in this tradition by understanding the kaleidoscope’s images as announcing more than the mere subordination to geometry’s theory– yet an announcement that is still in a sense able to leave in place this self-same tradition– such a possibility must duly excite our attention and interest.

* I refer here to Plato’s utilisation in the Meno of graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave.”

See also

Noel Gray, Ph.D. thesis, U. of Sydney, Dept. of Art History and Theory, 1994:

“The Image of Geometry: Persistence qua Austerity– Cacography and The Truth to Space.”

Notes

On “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” by Wallace Stevens:

“This third section continues its play of opposing forces, introducing in the second canto a ‘blue woman,’ arguably a goddess- or muse-figure, who stands apart from images of fecundity and sexuality….”

— Michael Bryson 

From a Beethoven’s Birthday entry:

Moulin Bleu

Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat   

See, too, Blue Matrices, and
a link for Beethoven’s birthday:

Song for the
Unification of Europe
(Blue 1)

From today’s news:

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) – Ushering in a bold new era, hundreds of thousands of people packed streets and city squares across Europe on Friday for festivals and fireworks marking the European Union’s historic enlargement to 25 countries from 15.

The expanded EU, which takes in a broad swath of the former Soviet bloc – a region separated for decades from the West by barbed wire and Cold War ideology – was widening to 450 million citizens at midnight (6 p.m.EDT) to create a collective superpower rivalling the United States.

“All these worlds are yours
except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.”