Log24

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Very Stable Kool-Aid

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:16 pm

Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM  post

"Hum a few bars"

"For 6 Prescott Street"

Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to

A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961

Harvard University
Department of Social Relations
Center for Research in Personality
Morton Prince House
5 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

July 17, 1961

Dr. Thomas S. Szasz
c/o Upstate Medical School
Irving Avenue
Syracuse 10, New York

Dear Dr. Szasz:

Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun.

The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry.

I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century.

It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty.

. . . .

The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.

Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —

"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering 
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."

— Tim Doody in The Morning News  web 'zine on July 26, 2012**

Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's
"jewel box" post …

A 4-dimensional hypercube H (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces
.  In its incarnation as a Galois  tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois 
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of  2,304 affine transformations.

Similar remarks apply to the I Ching  In its incarnation as  
a Galois hexaract , for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.

* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.

** See also this  journal on that date — July 26, 2012.

Friday, June 2, 2023

Acid Test

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:24 am

"Boro makes Jim Jones look like Jim Henson."

FUBAR, Netflix, Episode 1 (May 25, 2023)

"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering 
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."

— Tim Doody in The Morning News  web 'zine on July 26, 2012

Related material — Brown Acid.

* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.

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