Log24

Friday, February 23, 2024

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:50 pm

A logo from the previous post

This suggests a flashback to an image from Log24 on Nov. 6, 2003

Moral of the
Entertainment:

According to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi],

“Li”  is
“the principle or coherence
or order or pattern
underlying the cosmos.”

— Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt,
Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching ,
Princeton University Press, 1990

Friday, January 5, 2024

Logos and Branding: Gran Torino Soul

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:43 pm

Friday, December 29, 2023

Logos and Branding: Wisconsin* Mystery Logo

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:55 pm

* For clues, see today's post 'The Fandom Thread"

" Say 'Cheese.' "

Friday, December 8, 2023

Raiders of the Lost Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:33 am

Example —

Background —

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Raiders of the Lost Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: ,
,
— m759 @ 8:06 am

See "language animal" in this journal.

Update of 8:36 AM ET — Related reading

The phrase of Blake Chandler in "Irreconcilable Differences"

"I'm gonna find myself a brand new Santa!"

One candidate for that role — See "Out of Nothing, Everything."

Update of 8:45 AM ET — Related imagery

April 28, 2018, and November 27, 2021.

Friday, November 10, 2023

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:08 pm

Related art —

(For some backstory, see Geometry of the I Ching
and the history of Chinese philosophy.)

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Raiders of the Lost Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:06 am

See "language animal" in this journal.

Update of 8:36 AM ET — Related reading

The phrase of Blake Chandler in "Irreconcilable Differences"

"I'm gonna find myself a brand new Santa!"

One candidate for that role — See "Out of Nothing, Everything."

Update of 8:45 AM ET — Related imagery

April 28, 2018, and November 27, 2021.

Sunday, May 7, 2023

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 pm

For the title, see Logos  in this journal.

Some examples —

"Please wait as your operating system is initiated."

Saturday, March 12, 2022

Logos and Branding

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:05 am

The "branding" part of this post's title and tag —

The scene went from bad to worse. The camerlengo’s torn cassock, having been only laid over his chest by Chartrand, began to slip lower. For a moment, Langdon thought the garment might hold, but that moment passed. The cassock let go, sliding off his shoulders down around his waist.

The gasp that went up from the crowd seemed to travel around the globe and back in an instant. Cameras rolled, flashbulbs exploded. On media screens everywhere, the image of the camerlengo’s branded chest was projected, towering and in grisly detail. Some screens were even freezing the image and rotating it 180 degrees.

The ultimate Illuminati victory.

Langdon stared at the brand on the screens. Although it was the imprint of the square brand he had held earlier, the symbol now  made sense. Perfect sense. The marking’s awesome power hit Langdon like a train.

Orientation. Langdon had forgotten the first rule of symbology. When is a square not a square?  He had also forgotten that iron brands, just like rubber stamps, never looked like their imprints. They were in reverse. Langdon had been looking at the brand’s negative !

As the chaos grew, an old Illuminati quote echoed with new meaning: ‘A flawless diamond, born of the ancient elements with such perfection that all those who saw it could only stare in wonder.’

Langdon knew now the myth was true.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

The Illuminati Diamond.

— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

I prefer Modal Nietzsche.

Geometric Theology: Logos vs. Antilogos

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:54 am

In a 1999 Yale doctoral dissertation,

"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol,"

the term "antilogos" occurs 70 times.

Students of poetic structures may compare and contrast . . .

Logos

Antilogos

IMAGE- Illuminati Diamond, pp. 359-360 in 'Angels & Demons,' Simon & Schuster Pocket Books 2005, 448 pages, ISBN 0743412397

Monday, March 7, 2022

Friday, November 5, 2021

Star Wars: Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:48 pm

The three favicons below may be interpreted
as logos representing "A-OK* Space."

"Fans can have the ultimate GAP Band experience
by visiting the members' childhood home and walking
the north Tulsa streets that gave the band its famous
name – Greenwood, Archer and Pine."

— https://www.travelok.com/music-trail/
itineraries/the-gap-band-hometown

*

 

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Monday, December 28, 2020

Logos Animation

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:39 pm

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Halloween Logos for MIT

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:35 am

From the end credits for a 2016 TV mini-series 
based on the Stephen King novel 11/22/63 

This post was suggested by the Oct. 22 post
Logos, by  the Oct. 11 post Dick Date, and by
the Oct. 11 death of an MIT robotics professor.

Related tasteless humor
A headline from the print version of the recent
technology issue of The New Yorker :

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Logos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:22 pm

The production-company logos for Carpenter B and Bad Robot
in end credits for a 2016 TV mini-series based on the Stephen King
novel 11/22/63  suggest a look at . . .

For the Church of Synchronology — 
This  weblog on Aug. 11, 2017:

Symmetry's Lifeboat and Archimedes for Jews.

Thursday, September 12, 2019

Art Logos …

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:19 am

… Continued from previous posts now tagged Art Logos.

"Logos," a Greek word used in philosophy and theology,
is, in modern usage, also a brief form of "logotypes,"
a name for the branding symbols used by businesses.

For some less commercial aspects of the philosophical
concept, see Logo in this journal.

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Logos for Ito

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:57 pm

 

Burning Man and Sugar Labs logos

Saturday, July 6, 2019

Mythos and Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:56 am

Mythos


Logos

The six square patterns which, applied as above to the faces of a cube,
form "diamond" and "whirl" patterns, appear also in the logo of a coal-
mining company —

 .

Related material —

Monday, March 4, 2019

Davos Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:57 pm

A less sophisticated approach to logos —

See also Logos in this  journal.

For those who prefer Latin, there is Verbum.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Logos

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:21 pm

(Continued)

Musical accompaniment from Sunday morning

'The Eddington Song'

Update of Nov. 21 —

The reader may contrast the above Squarespace.com logo
(a rather serpentine version of the acronym SS) with a simpler logo
for a square space (the Galois window ):

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:00 am

New and old AMS logos —

I prefer the old.  Related material —

For an old Crosswicks curse, see that phrase in this journal.

For a new curse, see . . .

    "Unsheathe your dagger definitions." — James Joyce.

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Quantum-Realm Logos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:34 am

For Ant-Man —

For Spider-Man —

Monday, May 14, 2018

Logos at Harvard

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:01 pm

In 2013, Harvard University Press changed its logo to an abstract "H."

Harvard University Press Logo, Before and After

Both logos now accompany a Harvard video first published in 2012,
"The World of Mathematical Reality." 

In the video, author Paul Lockhart discusses Varignon's theorem
without naming Varignon (1654-1722) . . .

Paul Lockhart on geometry

A related view of "mathematical reality" —

Note the resemblance to Plato's Diamond.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Philosophical Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:14 am

Cover illustration: © Béatrice Machet

On the above book cover, presumably the diamond
represents transcendence; the square, immanence.

See also the logos in a Log24 post of April 10.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:28 pm

Nietzsche on Heraclitus— 'play in necessity' and 'law in becoming'— illustrated.

"Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein, Nietzsche.
"

— After David Letterman
at the Academy Awards

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Logos

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 am

The Eightfold Cube

Quantum logo

Business logo

Happy April 1.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Logos for Sunday, February 4

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 am

"The walls in the back of the room show geometric shapes
that remind us of the logos on a space shuttle. "

Web page on an Oslo art installation by Josefine Lyche.

See also Subway Art posts.

The translation above was obtained via Google.

The Norwegian original —

"På veggene bakerst i rommer vises geometriske former
som kan minne om logoene på en romferge."

Related logos — Modal Diamond Box in this journal:

Nietzsche, 'law in becoming' and 'play in necessity'

Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —

Nietzsche, 'law in becoming' and 'play in necessity'

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:35 pm

(Continued)

New logo of the American Mathematical Society, Jan. 10, 2018

Updates of 9:40 PM ET Jan. 10
to 5:45 AM ET the next day:

See a letter from the AMS on their new logo.

      Recent revision (pre-2018) of the former AMS logo

The Society's letter describes perceptions of the pre-2018 logo —

"… market research on our current logo revealed that
the connection between a Greek temple and
a mathematical society has become increasingly tenuous
among non-members and younger mathematicians, who
associate the Greek temple with a financial institution."

The omission of the alleged motto of Plato's Academy,
AGEOMETRETOS ME EISITO, in the recent (pre-2018)
revision of the logo was part of the Society's ongoing
process of politically correct dumbing-down. That omission
may have influenced the perception of the logo as picturing
a Greek temple rather than the Academy.

Some related remarks from 2005 —

Friday, December 8, 2017

Mythos and Logos

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 pm

Part I:  Black Magician

"Schools of criticism create their own canons, elevating certain texts,
discarding others. Yet some works – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
is one of them – lend themselves readily to all critical approaches."

— Joan Givner, review of 
A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century
by Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, eds.

The Asals-Tiessen book (U. of Toronto Press, 2000) was cited today
by Margaret Soltan (in the link below) as the source of this quotation —

"When one thinks of the general sort of snacky
under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes
rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry
his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions,
his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s
consciousness wholly with a black magician’s."

A possible source, Perle Epstein, for the view of Lowry as black magician —

Part II:  Mythos  and Logos

Part I above suggests a review of Adam Gopnik as black magician
(a figure from Mythos ) —

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Polarities and Correlation

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags:  
— m759 @ 11:00 PM 

— and of an opposing figure from Logos
     Paul B. Yale, in the references below:

Logos (Continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Nietzsche, 'law in becoming' and 'play in necessity'

"Denn die Welt braucht ewig die Wahrheit,
also braucht sie ewig Heraklit:
obschon er ihrer nicht bedarf.
Was geht ihn sein Ruhm an?
Der Ruhm bei »immer fortfließenden Sterblichen!«,
wie er höhnisch ausruft.
Sein Ruhm geht die Menschen etwas an, nicht ihn,
die Unsterblichkeit der Menschheit braucht ihn,
nicht er die Unsterblichkeit des Menschen Heraklit.
Das, was er schaute, die Lehre vom Gesetz im Werden
und vom
Spiel in der Notwendigkeit 
, muß von jetzt
ab ewig geschaut werden: er hat von diesem größten
Schauspiel den Vorhang aufgezogen."

Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —

Nietzsche, 'law in becoming' and 'play in necessity'

Monday, December 4, 2017

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:42 pm

See also The Crimson Abyss (March 29, 2017).

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Logos

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

   

In memoriam —

Zadeh is known for the unfortunate phrase "fuzzy logic."

Not-so-fuzzy related material —

“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical.  Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”

Many Dimensions  (1931), by Charles Williams

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Logos Review

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:32 pm

From Balboa Press —

More than a pretty face designed to identify a product, a logo combines powerful elements super boosted with sophisticated branding techniques. Logos spark our purchasing choice and can affect our wellbeing.

Lovingly detailed, researched and honed to deliver a specific intention, a logo contains a unique dynamic that sidesteps our conscious mind. We might not know why we prefer one product over another but the logo, designed to connect the heart of the brand to our own hearts, plays a vital part in our decision to buy.

The power of symbols to sway us has been recognised throughout history. Found in caves and in Egyptian temples they are attributed with the strength to foretell and create the future, connect us with the divine and evoke emotions, from horror to ecstasy, at a glance.  The new symbols we imbue with these awesome powers are our favourite brand logos.

• Discover the unconscious effect of these modern symbols that thrust our most successful global corporations into the limelight and our lives.

• Learn to make informed choices about brands.

• Find out how a logo reflects the state of the brand and holds it to account.

The date of the above remarks on a logo change, March 24, 2016,
suggests a review of a Log24 post from that date —

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Logos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am

From RIP, a post of Wednesday, March 16, 2016

See also earlier posts tagged Sermon Weekend.

From Balboa Press

More than a pretty face designed to identify a product, a logo combines powerful elements super boosted with sophisticated branding techniques. Logos spark our purchasing choice and can affect our wellbeing.

Lovingly detailed, researched and honed to deliver a specific intention, a logo contains a unique dynamic that sidesteps our conscious mind. We might not know why we prefer one product over another but the logo, designed to connect the heart of the brand to our own hearts, plays a vital part in our decision to buy.

The power of symbols to sway us has been recognised throughout history. Found in caves and in Egyptian temples they are attributed with the strength to foretell and create the future, connect us with the divine and evoke emotions, from horror to ecstasy, at a glance.  The new symbols we imbue with these awesome powers are our favourite brand logos.

• Discover the unconscious effect of these modern symbols that thrust our most successful global corporations into the limelight and our lives.

• Learn to make informed choices about brands.

• Find out how a logo reflects the state of the brand and holds it to account.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Logos and Logic

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:11 pm

"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
 Incipit and a form to speak the word
 And every latent double in the word…."

— Wallace Stevens,
    "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
     Section I, Canto VIII

    

Saturday, June 4, 2016

Logos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:14 pm

For related episodes, see previous posts tagged "The Fit."

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:23 am

Charlize Theron in “Young Adult” (2011) —

Related material for older adults: Ravenna and Nietzsche.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:09 am

The Santa Fe Institute logo, together with the previous post,
suggests a review of Whirligig and Quaternion for Goldstein.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Logos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 pm

In memory of Leonard Shlain, author
of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

Alphabet logo from the website
of a religious publishing company—

A logo for Charlize Theron, who played
a goddess figure in "Hancock"—

Click images for further details.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Logos

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

(Continued from December 26th, 2011)

IMAGE- Current math.stackexchange.com logo and a 1984 figure from 'Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986'

Some material at math.stackexchange.com related to
yesterday evening's post on Elementary Finite Geometry

Questions on this topic have recently been
discussed at Affine plane of order 4? and at
Turning affine planes into projective planes.

(For a better discussion of the affine plane of order 4,
see Affine Planes and Mutually Orthogonal Latin Squares
at the website of William Cherowitzo, professor at UC Denver.)

Monday, July 30, 2012

Logos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:48 pm

Related material:

Frank J. Prial on the late singer Tony Martin

— and, on Jan. 1, 2005, on beverage marketing:

Every picture tells a story.

Happy birthday to Hilary Swank.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 am

Click logos for related persons.

IMAGE- Logo of St. Peter's College, Oxford

IMAGE- Logo of St. John's College, Oxford

Some related news.

Background from this journal—

Collegiality, That Hideous Strength , and The Oxford Murders .

See also…

"The heart of the book is the conveying of a meaningful understanding
of where mathematical results originated…."

Monday, December 26, 2011

Logos

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:09 pm

IMAGE- Logo for math.stackexchange.com

IMAGE- 'Affine Groups on Small Binary Spaces,' illustration

  Click images for context.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Logos

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

Continued from All Hallows Eve

The Belgian Lottery logo

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111104-BelgianLotteryLogo-256w.jpg

The Belgian Lottery was a sponsor of 
last month's 25th Solvay Conference —

"The Theory of the Quantum World,"
  Brussels, October 19-22, 2011.

See also this journal in October and Change Logos

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090309-SqInSpace2.jpg

(Physicists will recognize the kinship
with the coat of arms of Niels Bohr.)

Monday, October 31, 2011

Logos at Harvard

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:50 am

From Sean D. Kelly, chairman of Harvard's philosophy department, on Oct. 13, 2011—

"What I’m looking for at the moment is a good reference from Plato to make it clear how he understands the term. I remember that in the Thaeatetus there is discussion of knowledge as true belief with logos, and a natural account here might count logos as something like rational justification or explanation. And perhaps Glaukon’s request in the Republic for an explanation or account (logos) of the claim that Justice is a good in itself is a clue. But there must be other places where the term appears in Plato. Does anyone have them?"

See instances of logos  under "Pl." (Plato) and "Id." (Idem ) in Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=lo/gos .

(See also Liddell and Scott's "General List of Abbreviations"—

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Asection%3D5 .)

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Plato’s Logos

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

"The present study is closely connected with a lecture* given by Prof. Ernst Cassirer at the Warburg Library whose subject was 'The Idea of the Beautiful in Plato's Dialogues'…. My investigation traces the historical destiny of the same concept…."

* See Cassirer's Eidos und Eidolon : Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg II, 1922/23 (pp. 1–27). Berlin and Leipzig, B.G. Teubner, 1924.

— Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, foreword to the first German edition, Hamburg, March 1924

On a figure from Plato's Meno

IMAGE- Plato's diamond and finite geometry

The above figures illustrate Husserl's phrase  "eidetic variation"
a phrase based on Plato's use of eidos, a word
closely related to the word "idea" in Panofsky's title.

For remarks by Cassirer on the theory of groups, a part of
mathematics underlying the above diamond variations, see
his "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception."

Sketch of some further remarks—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100626-Theories.jpg

The Waterfield question in the sketch above
is from his edition of Plato's Theaetetus
(Penguin Classics, 1987).

The "design theory" referred to in the sketch
is that of graphic  design, which includes the design
of commercial logos. The Greek  word logos
has more to do with mathematics and theology.

"If there is one thread of warning that runs
through this dialogue, from beginning to end,
it is that verbal formulations as such are
shot through with ambiguity."

— Rosemary Desjardins, The Rational Enterprise:
Logos in Plato's Theaetetus
, SUNY Press, 1990

Related material—

(Click to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100626-CrossOnSocratesSm.gif

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Li

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:36 am

The Chinese concept of li  in yesterday's post "Logos" is related,
if only by metaphor, to the underlying form (sets of "line diagrams")
of patterns in the Cullinane diamond theorem:

"But very possibly the earliest use of li  is the one instance that
it appears in the Classic of Poetry  (Ode 210) where it refers to
the borders or boundary lines marking off areas in a field.
Here it appears in conjunction with chiang  and is explained
as 'to divide into lots (or parcels of land)' (fen-ti )."

P. 33 of "Li Revisited and Other Explorations"
by Allen Wittenborn, Bulletin of Sung and Yüan Studies
No. 17 (1981), pp. 32-48 (17 pages),
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23497457.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Self as Imago Dei:  Hofstadter vs. Valéry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:41 am
 

Google search result:

Imago Dei  in Thomas Aquinas

Saint Anselm College

https://www.anselm.edu › Documents › Brown

PDF

by M Brown · 2014 · Cited by 14 — Thomas insists that the image of God exists most perfectly in the acts of the soul, for the soul is that which is most perfect in us and so best images God, and …

11 pages

For a Douglas Hofstadter version of the Imago Dei , see the
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" illustration in the Jan. 15 screenshot below —

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Imago, Imago, Imago
 

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Recommended— an online book—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.

See in particular

Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.

Pages 156-157—

Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. “Every act of understanding is based on a group,” he says (C, 1:331). “My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite” (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one “group” undergoes a “transformation” and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: “The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind’s momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. “Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind” (O, 1:36). “Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups” (C, 1:915). “Man is a system that transforms itself” (C, 2:896).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Compare Jung’s image in Aion  of the Self as a four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

and Cullinane’s purely geometric four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-FourD.gif

For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.

What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system  of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem.

Monday, October 23, 2023

For the Church of Stephen King

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 am

"All things serve the Beamery."

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

“A Mad Day’s Work” (Hat tip to Pierre Cartier)*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 6:37 pm

Logos —

Logos**

* See an interview.

** See other posts tagged Triangle.graphics.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

The Missing Links

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:20 am

Pullman links in this journal —

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=wsu.edu .

Specifically . . .

<a href="http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Edee/GLOSSARY/SHUCHUNG.HTM"
target="_new" rel="noopener noreferrer">
<strong><em>Shu</em>: Reciprocity</strong></a>

and 

<a href="http://www.wsu.edu/%7Edee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM"
target="_new"><font size="6"><b>Logos</b></font></a>

Those links no longer work.  See instead . . .

https://web.archive.org/web/20011224032243/
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GLOSSARY/SHUCHUNG.HTM

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20011129072406/
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM
 .

Logo from these  links:

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Mere Synchronology

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:25 am

The date — January 9, 2010 — of the Guardian  book review
in the previous post was noted here by a top 40 music list
from that same date in an earlier year.

Update of 4:07 AM ET the same morning:

Fans of Cormac McCarthy's recent adventures in unreality
might enjoy interpreting the time — 3:25 AM ET — of this post
as the date  3/25, and comparing the logos, both revisited
and new, in a Log24 post from 3/25 . . .

Helen Mirren with plastic Gankyil .

. . . with the logo of a venue whose motto is

"Reality is not enough."

 

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Gogol Dotwork

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:06 pm

The new URL gogol.work forwards to . . .

http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=logos-and-branding .

Friday, February 11, 2022

Space, Piled High and Deep

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:59 pm

"… out of all things there comes a unity,
and out of a unity all things . . . . "

— Heraclitus, according to de Beer quoting McKirahan

An image we may regard as illustrating 
the group-identity symbol "e" for "Einheit " —

Simplex Sigillum Veri.

De Beer’s Consolidated Mine

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101202-DreidelAndStone.jpg

The misleading image at right above is from the cover of
an edition of Charles Williams's classic 1931 novel 
Many Dimensions  published in 1993 by Wm. B. Eerdmans.

But seriously . . .

Thursday, October 7, 2021

The Hunt for Brechtian October  Continues:

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:35 am

Diamond and Chessboard

(For Crystal Field)

"… Mr. Ferencz was a favorite of Crystal Field,
the co-founder and artistic director of Theater for the New City.

'He had the political and historical understanding that is a necessity
for socially relevant theater,' she said in a statement.

'He was a Brechtian director….' " 
Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times

"In the first trailer for The Hunt … we meet a woman by the name of
Crystal (Betty Gilpin) who discovers that although she's been told
she's in Arkansas, when she pulls a license plate off a car, she
discovers a Croatian one underneath."

     See also the previous post, featuring work by a filmmaker from Zagreb.

Monday, August 16, 2021

At McDonald’s

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:30 pm

Click for a webpage on McDonald.

See also . . .

                            http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-McDonaldLogoSm.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-DayTheEarth.jpg

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Associative Logic

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:14 am

“The bureaucratic innovations of the New Deal
fed into the powerful associative logic
of commonsense reasoning,
leading a number of Americans to equate science
with the technocratic, managerial liberalism
of Roosevelt and his allies.”

http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/
andrew-jewett-how-americans-came-distrust-science

From a Log24 search for “Notes Toward” —

Steven H. Cullinane, 'The Line'

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”
— Wallace Stevens,
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Monday, October 19, 2020

A Moritat for Macalester

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:13 am

The previous post, "Frame Analysis," was about a death
related to Macalester College.

Wikipedia on the man for whom the college was named —

"In the 1870s, Rev. Dr. Edward Duffield Neill turned to
Macalester  for sponsorship for the failing institution
in Minnesota known as Jesus College. "

Logos —

"On the sidewalk Sunday morning …"

Sunday, August 2, 2020

The Sword and the Stone

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:42 pm

A post of May 26, 2005, displays, if not the sword,
a place  for it —

Drama of the Diagonal

"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction.
Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor
in mathematics." — Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies,
éd. Quarto
, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100

Logos Alogos  by S. H. Cullinane

"To a mathematician, mathematical entities have their own existence,
they habitate spaces created by their intention.  They do things,
things happen to them, they relate to one another.  We can imagine
on their behalf all sorts of stories, providing they don't contradict
what we know of them.  The drama of the diagonal, of the square…"

— Dennis Guedj, abstract of "The Drama of Mathematics," a talk
to be given this July at the Mykonos conference on mathematics and
narrative. For the drama of the diagonal of the square, see

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Bullshit Studies

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:59 pm

From https://www.mathunion.org/outreach/logos/versions-all-logos

Click the logo for some IMU history.

Related bullshit —

Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action

Click the banner below for the background of the logo

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Compare and Contrast.

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:38 pm

 

Logos —

 

 

See also Devs .

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Columbus Day 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:02 pm

A followup to the previous post:

Related material — A web page on chess cached for use in a
Log24 post on the date of the above post, Columbus Day, 2004.

Sunday, July 7, 2019

Mine Games: Six Degrees

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:49 am

From yesterday's post Mythos and Logos

 .

On January 20, 2011 —

Also on January 20, 2011 —

Monday, March 4, 2019

Variations on a Theme

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:11 pm

Found on the Web today —

In a Google search:


At Instagram:

Monday, December 3, 2018

We See Your Documents.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:45 am

Monday, November 5, 2018

High Life at Sils Maria

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

Related art —

Sunday, November 4, 2018

“Look Up” — The Breakthrough Prize* Theme This Evening

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:45 pm

Looking up images for "The Space Theory of Truth" this evening —

Detail  (from the post "Logos" of Oct. 14)

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=53323

Thursday, September 20, 2018

1971 Mystery Box

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:15 am

Vincent Canby in The New York Times 
January 28, 1971, reviews the film "The Statue" —

There is not much point in going into the dialogue,
but you'll get the idea from the line spoken by
a little girl who is shown gazing in wonderment
at the copy of Michelangelo's work in the
Piazza della Signoria in Florence.
"Golly," she says, "if that's David, I'd like to see Goliath!"
"The Statue" may have the distinction of being the first
adolescent comedy about penis envy. 

In keeping with filmmaker J.J. Abrams's philosophy of the "mystery box"

Canby's phrase "you'll get the idea" suggests a Log24 review . . .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100626-Theories.jpg

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Wheelwright and the Wheel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Wheelwright on 'the still point' at the center of a turning wheel, in 'The Burning Fountain'

From the 1968 "new and revised edition" —

See also the previous post.

For the phrase "burning fountain," see Shelley's "Adonais,"
as well as Logos (a post of Dec. 4) and The Crimson Abyss.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Triptychs

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

Two readings by James Parker —

From next year’s first Atlantic  issue

New Testament 'logos' in a review of a David Bentley Hart translation.

From last month’s Atlantic  issue

“Let’s return to that hillside where Clayton exited his Mercedes.
In the gray light, he climbs the pasture. Halfway up the slope,
three horses are standing: sculpturally still, casually composed
in a perfect triptych of horsitude.”

James Parker in The Atlantic , Nov. 2017 issue

Logos-related material 

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Trends

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:04 am

"The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason
you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed,
to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day."

—  Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker , Dec. 12, 2017

See also "The French Invasion," a Dec. 11 Quarterly Conversation
essay about Derrida in Baltimore in 1966, and the Dec. 10 posts
in this  journal tagged Interlacing Derrida. (The deplorable Derrida
trend is apparently still alive in Buffalo.)

According to Metcalf, Fodor's "occasional review-essays in the L.R.B. 
were masterpieces of a plainspoken and withering sarcasm. To Steven
Pinker’s suggestion that we read fiction because ' it supplies us with a
mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday,' for
instance, Fodor replied, ' What if it turns out that, having just used the ring
that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my
new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to
continue to be immortal and rule the world? ' "

In the Fodor-Pinker dispute, my sympathies are with Pinker.

Related material — Google Sutra (the previous Log24 post) and earlier posts
found in a Log24 search for Ring + Bear + Jung —

Four Colours and Waiting for Logos.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Google Sutra

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:08 pm

Suggested by a Diamond Sutra webpage, by a recent Log24 post . . .

Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —

Nietzsche, 'law in becoming' and 'play in necessity'

. . . and by the Google Play Store logo —

For further details, see . . .

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/
Gemmell_William_The_Diamond_Sutra_Chin_kang_ching?
id=VufuAgAAQBAJ
.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Review

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:04 pm
 

Sunday, October 29, 2017

File System… Unlocked

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:16 PM 

. . . .

"Wikipedia's first true logo . . . . included a quote from the preface
of Euclid and His Modern Rivals  by Lewis Carroll . . . ." 

. . . .

Related dialogue from the new film "Unlocked" —

1057
01:31:59,926 –> 01:32:01,301
Nice to have you back, Alice.

1058
01:32:04,009 –> 01:32:05,467
Don't be a stranger.

See as well Chloë Grace Moretz portraying  a schoolgirl problem.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

File System… Unlocked

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

Logo from the above webpage

See also the similar structure of  the eightfold cube,  and

Related dialogue from the new film "Unlocked"

1057
01:31:59,926 –> 01:32:01,301
Nice to have you back, Alice.

1058
01:32:04,009 –> 01:32:05,467
Don't be a stranger.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Limit Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

See also last night's post Logos .

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Art Space Illustrated

Another view of the previous post's art space  —

IMAGE by Cullinane- 'Solomon's Cube' with 64 identical, but variously oriented, subcubes, and six partitions of these 64 subcubes

More generally, see Solomon's Cube in Log24.

See also a remark from Stack Exchange in yesterday's post Backstory,
and the Stack Exchange math logo below, which recalls the above 
cube arrangement from "Affine groups on small binary spaces" (1984).

IMAGE- Current math.stackexchange.com logo and a 1984 figure from 'Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986'

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 am

Log24 in review — Logos and Logic,  Crystal and Dragon .

Friday, November 6, 2015

Girard’s Transition

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:15 am

"Eight is a gate." — Mnemonic rhyme

Girard reportedly died at 91 on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2015.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Meditation on an Icon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 am

IMAGE- Brian Bard on 'Heidegger's Reading of Heraclitus'

See also Legespiel  in this journal.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Altar

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

"To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods…?"

— Macaulay, quoted in the April 2013 film "Oblivion"

"Leave a space." — Tom Stoppard, "Jumpers"

Related material: The August 16, 2014, sudden death in Scotland
of an architect of the above Cardross seminary, and a Log24 post,
Plato's Logos, from the date of the above photo: June 26, 2010.

See also…

IMAGE- T. Lux Feininger on 'Gestaltung'

Here “eidolon” should instead be “eidos .”

An example of eidos — Plato's diamond (from the Meno ) —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100607-PlatoDiamond.gif

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Two-Part Invention

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:01 pm

Signet

 Ring

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Cube Partitions

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

The second Logos  figure in the previous post
summarized affine group actions on partitions
that generate a group of about 1.3 trillion
permutations of a 4x4x4 cube (shown below)—

IMAGE by Cullinane- 'Solomon's Cube' with 64 identical, but variously oriented, subcubes, and six partitions of these 64 subcubes

Click for further details.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Text and Context

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:02 am

Perhaps the best obituary for the late Morris Philipson

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111110-NYTobit-200w.jpg

(see Nov. 10) is this text, by writer W.P. Norton
(not to be confused with the publishing firm W.W. Norton).
For the text in context, see a screenshot of the Norton
weblog (which was very slow to load this morning).

The Blogspot loading logo that did  appear at Norton's
weblog suggests the following image—

LOGOS

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111112-Blogspot-Loading-Logo.gif http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111112-NYT-thestone75.gif

The logo on the right is that of
The New York Times 's
philosophy weblog "The Stone."

Philipson, incidentally, reportedly died on the morning of November 3.

See the remarks of Tom Wolfe quoted here on that date.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Shadows

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

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

— T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

A passage quoted here on this date in 2005—

Douglas Hofstadter on his magnum opus:

“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions
by some central solid essence."

This refers to Hofstadter's cover image:

IMAGE- http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111105-GEBshadows.jpg

Also from this date in 2005:

IMAGE- www.log24.com/theory/images/GEB.jpg
 
BackgroundYesterday's link Change Logos,
                         
and Solid Symmetry.
 
Midrash:         Hearts of Darkness.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Church Diamond

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 pm

IMAGE- The diamond property

Also known, roughly speaking, as confluence  or the Church-Rosser property.

From “NYU Lambda Seminar, Week 2” —

[See also the parent page Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language or:
What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn’t Know To Ask)
]

A computational system is said to be confluent, or to have the Church-Rosser or diamond property, if, whenever there are multiple possible evaluation paths, those that terminate always terminate in the same value. In such a system, the choice of which sub-expressions to evaluate first will only matter if some of them but not others might lead down a non-terminating path.

The untyped lambda calculus is confluent. So long as a computation terminates, it always terminates in the same way. It doesn’t matter which order the sub-expressions are evaluated in.

A computational system is said to be strongly normalizing if every permitted evaluation path is guaranteed to terminate. The untyped lambda calculus is not strongly normalizing: ω ω doesn’t terminate by any evaluation path; and (\x. y) (ω ω) terminates only by some evaluation paths but not by others.

But the untyped lambda calculus enjoys some compensation for this weakness. It’s Turing complete! It can represent any computation we know how to describe. (That’s the cash value of being Turing complete, not the rigorous definition. There is a rigorous definition. However, we don’t know how to rigorously define “any computation we know how to describe.”) And in fact, it’s been proven that you can’t have both. If a computational system is Turing complete, it cannot be strongly normalizing.

There is no connection, apart from the common reference to an elementary geometric shape, between the use of “diamond” in the above Church-Rosser sense and the use of “diamond” in the mathematics of (Cullinane’s) Diamond Theory.

Any attempt to establish such a connection would, it seems, lead quickly into logically dubious territory.

Nevertheless, in the synchronistic spirit of Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, here are some links to such a territory —

 Link One — “Insane Symmetry”  (Click image for further details)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101227-InsaneSymmetry.jpg

See also the quilt symmetry in this  journal on Christmas Day.

Link Two — Divine Symmetry

(George Steiner on the Name in this journal on Dec. 31 last year (“All about Eve“)) —

“The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.'”

George Steiner, Grammars of Creation

(See also, from Hanukkah this year,  A Geometric Merkabah and The Dreidel is Cast.)

Link Three – Spanning the Arc —

Part A — Architect Louis Sullivan on “span” (see also Kindergarten at Stonehenge)

Part B — “Span” in category theory at nLab —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101227-nLabSpanImage.jpg

Also from nLab — Completing Spans to Diamonds

“It is often interesting whether a given span in some partial ordered set can be completed into a diamond. The property of a collection of spans to consist of spans which are expandable into diamonds is very useful in the theory of rewriting systems and producing normal forms in algebra. There are classical results e.g. Newman’s diamond lemma, Širšov-Bergman’s diamond lemma (Širšov is also sometimes spelled as Shirshov), and Church-Rosser theorem (and the corresponding Church-Rosser confluence property).”

The concepts in this last paragraph may or may not have influenced the diamond theory of Rudolf Kaehr (apparently dating from 2007).

They certainly have nothing to do with the Diamond Theory of Steven H. Cullinane (dating from 1976).

For more on what the above San Francisco art curator is pleased to call “insane symmetry,” see this journal on Christmas Day.

For related philosophical lucubrations (more in the spirit of Kaehr than of Steiner), see the New York Times  “The Stone” essay “Span: A Remembrance,” from December 22—

“To understand ourselves well,” [architect Louis] Sullivan writes, “we must arrive first at a simple basis: then build up from it.”

Around 300 BC, Euclid arrived at this: “A point is that which has no part. A line is breadthless length.”

See also the link from Christmas Day to remarks on Euclid and “architectonic” in Mere Geometry.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Sunday Painting

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

"Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously."
 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100810-ARLISlogoSm.jpg

Click on image for further details.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Art Object, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:00 am

Inside the White Cube

"An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space
 that, more than any single picture, may be
 the archetypal image of 20th-century art."

"May be" —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101123-plain_cube_200x227.gif

     Image from this journal
     at noon (EST) Tuesday

"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
 of several different subjects in mathematics."
                                    — Chuanming Zong

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-ZongAMS.jpg

    (Click to enlarge.)

"A meeting point" —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-NYTobit-UN.jpg

  The above death reportedly occurred "early Wednesday in Beijing."

Another meeting point —

                            http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-McDonaldLogoSm.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-DayTheEarth.jpg

(Click on logo and on meeting image for more details.)

See also "no ordinary venue."

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Midnight in the Garden, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am
 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101113-GoogleLogoStevensonDetail.jpg

Detail from Google logo of Nov. 13, 2010

Related material: After Eden  and Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Note

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:24 am

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

(Quoted here four years ago on October 2, 2006.)

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Architecture Continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:00 am

Yesterday's architectural entertainment coincided, more or less, with the New York Times  article "The Hand of a Master Architect" (Online Sunday, Aug. 8, and in the print edition Monday, Aug. 9).

A search for some background on that architect (Philip Johnson, not Howard Roark) showed that the Art Libraries Society of North America published a notable graphic logo in 2005—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100810-ARLISlogoSm.jpg

See this journal on April 7, 2005, for a related graphic design.

The ARLIS/NA 2005 page cited above says about Houston, Texas, that 

"Just beyond the museum district lies Rice University, the city's most prestigious and oldest college….

Other campuses that contain significant architecture include St. Thomas University where Philip Johnson has made his mark for a period that extends more than forty years."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100810-Chapel.jpg

University of St. Thomas, Chapel of St. Basil

Applying Jungian synchronicity, we note that Johnson designed the Chapel of St. Basil at the University of St. Thomas, that the traditional date of the Feast of St. Basil is June 14, and that this journal on that date contained the following, from the aforementioned Rice University—                          

… a properly formulated Principle of Sufficient Reason plays
a fundamental role in scientific thought and, furthermore, is
to be regarded as of the greatest suggestiveness from the
philosophic point of view.2

… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of
Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle
is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated
mathematical “Theory of Groups.”

If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished
harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire
in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups
arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally3
whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the
Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to
remedy our deficiency in this respect.

The founder of the Theory of Groups was the mathematician
Evariste Galois….

2 As far as I am aware, only Scholastic Philosophy has fully recognized
  and exploited this principle as one of basic importance for philosophic thought.

3 That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp.

George David Birkhoff, 1940

For more about Scholastic Philosophy, see the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

For more about the graphic symbol shown (as above) by ARLIS and by Log24 in April 2005, see in this journal "rature sous rature ."

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Plato’s Code

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

John Allen Paulos yesterday at Twitter

"Plato's code cracked? http://bit.ly/ad6k1S
Fascinating if not a hoax or hype."

The story that Paulos linked to is about a British
academic who claims to have found some
symbolism hidden in Plato's writings by
splitting each into 12 parts and correlating
the 12 parts with semitones of a musical scale.

I prefer a different approach to Plato that is
related to the following hoax and hype—

HOAX:

From Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons  (2000)

IMAGE- Illuminati Diamond, pp. 359-360 in 'Angels & Demons,' Simon & Schuster Pocket Books 2005, 448 pages, ISBN 0743412397

HYPE:

Image-- From 'Alchemy,' by Holmyard, the diamond of Aristotle's 4 elements and 4 qualities

This  four-elements diamond summarizes the classical
four elements and four qualities neatly, but some scholars
might call the figure "hype" since it deals with an academically
disreputable subject, alchemy, and since its origin is unclear.

For the four elements' role in some literature more respectable
than Dan Brown's, see Poetry's Bones.

Although an author like Brown might spin the remarks
below into a narrative—  The Plato Code — they are
neither  hoax nor hype.

NOT  HOAX:

Image-- From the Diamond in Plato's Meno to Modern Finite Geometry

NOT  HYPE:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100626-CrossOnSocratesSm.gif

For related non-hoax, non-hype remarks, see
The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato's Theaetetus,
by Rosemary Desjardins.

Those who prefer  hoax and hype in their philosophy may consult
the writings of, say, Barbara Johnson, Rosalind Krauss, and—
in yesterday's NY Times's  "The Stone" columnNancy Bauer.

Image-- The Philosophers' Stone according to The New York Times

— The New York Times

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Bright Star (continued)

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

From Epiphany 2010

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word."

– Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Pennsylvania Lottery yesterday—

Saturday, June 26, 2010: Midday 846, Evening 106

Interpretation—

Context:
Yesterday's morning post, Plato's Logos
Yesterday's evening post, Bold and Brilliant Emergence

Poem 846, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
"bird-song at morning and star-shine at night"

Poem 106, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
" All labourers draw home at even"

The number 106 may also be read as 1/06, the date of Epiphany.

Posts on Epiphany 2010—

9:00 AM    Epiphany Revisited
12:00 PM  Brightness at Noon
9:00 PM    The Difference

Related material—

Plato's
Tombstone

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Bold and Brilliant Emergence

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:20 pm

"Rosemary Desjardins argues boldly and brilliantly that the Theaetetus  contains not only an answer to the question of the character of knowledge, but considerably more besides — an outline of a Platonic ontology. That ontology is neither materialist nor idealist (it is not a theory of forms), but like the twentieth century theory known as generative emergence holds that beings are particular interactive combinations of material elements. On this view, while wholes (for example, words, to use a Platonic model) may be analyzed into their elemental parts (letters), each whole has a property or quality separate from the aggregated properties of its parts."

— Stephen G. Salkever, 1991 review of The Rational Enterprise : Logos in Plato's Theaetetus  (SUNY Press, 1990)

See also "strong emergence" in this journal.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Group Theory and Philosophy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Excerpts from "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception,"
by Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
Volume V, Number 1, September, 1944.
(Published in French in the Journal de Psychologie, 1938, pp. 368-414.)

The group-theoretical interpretation of the fundaments of geometry is,
from the standpoint of pure logic, of great importance, since it enables us to
state the problem of the "universality" of mathematical concepts in simple
and precise form and thus to disentangle it from the difficulties and ambigui-
ties with which it is beset in its usual formulation. Since the times of the
great controversies about the status of universals in the Middle Ages, logic
and psychology have always been troubled with these ambiguities….

Our foregoing reflections on the concept of group  permit us to define more
precisely what is involved in, and meant by, that "rule" which renders both
geometrical and perceptual concepts universal. The rule may, in simple
and exact terms, be defined as that group of transformations  with regard to
which the variation of the particular image is considered. We have seen
above that this conception operates as the constitutive principle in the con-
struction of the universe of mathematical concepts….

                                                              …Within Euclidean geometry,
a "triangle" is conceived of as a pure geometrical "essence," and this
essence is regarded as invariant with respect to that "principal group" of
spatial transformations to which Euclidean geometry refers, viz., displace-
ments, transformations by similarity. But it must always be possible to
exhibit any particular figure, chosen from this infinite class, as a concrete
and intuitively representable object. Greek mathematics could not
dispense with this requirement which is rooted in a fundamental principle
of Greek philosophy, the principle of the correlatedness of "logos" and
"eidos." It is, however, characteristic of the modern development of
mathematics, that this bond between "logos" and "eidos," which was indis-
soluble for Greek thought, has been loosened more and more, to be, in the
end, completely broken….

                                                            …This process has come to its logical
conclusion and systematic completion in the development of modern group-
theory. Geometrical figures  are no longer regarded as fundamental, as
date of perception or immediate intuition. The "nature" or "essence" of a
figure is defined in terms of the operations  which may be said to
generate the figure.
The operations in question are, in turn, subject to
certain group conditions….

                                                                                                    …What we
find in both cases are invariances with respect to variations undergone by
the primitive elements out of which a form is constructed. The peculiar
kind of "identity" that is attributed to apparently altogether heterogen-
eous figures in virtue of their being transformable into one another by means
of certain operations defining a group, is thus seen to exist also in the
domain of perception. This identity permits us not only to single out ele-
ments but also to grasp "structures" in perception. To the mathematical
concept of "transformability" there corresponds, in the domain of per-
ception, the concept of "transposability." The theory  of the latter con-
cept has been worked out step by step and its development has gone through
various stages….
                                                                                 …By the acceptance of
"form" as a primitive concept, psychological theory has freed it from the
character of contingency  which it possessed for its first founders. The inter-
pretation of perception as a mere mosaic of sensations, a "bundle" of simple
sense-impressions has proved untenable…. 

                             …In the domain of mathematics this state of affairs mani-
fests itself in the impossibility of searching for invariant properties of a
figure except with reference to a group. As long as there existed but one
form of geometry, i.e., as long as Euclidean geometry was considered as the
geometry kat' exochen  this fact was somehow concealed. It was possible
to assume implicitly  the principal group of spatial transformations that lies
at the basis of Euclidean geometry. With the advent of non-Euclidean
geometries, however, it became indispensable to have a complete and sys-
tematic survey of the different "geometries," i.e., the different theories of
invariancy that result from the choice of certain groups of transformation.
This is the task which F. Klein set to himself and which he brought to a
certain logical fulfillment in his Vergleichende Untersuchungen ueber neuere
geometrische Forschungen
….

                                                          …Without discrimination between the
accidental and the substantial, the transitory and the permanent, there
would be no constitution of an objective reality.

This process, unceasingly operative in perception and, so to speak, ex-
pressing the inner dynamics of the latter, seems to have come to final per-
fection, when we go beyond perception to enter into the domain of pure
thought. For the logical advantage and peculiar privilege of the pure con –
cept seems to consist in the replacement of fluctuating perception by some-
thing precise and exactly determined. The pure concept does not lose
itself in the flux of appearances; it tends from "becoming" toward "being,"
from dynamics toward statics. In this achievement philosophers have
ever seen the genuine meaning and value of geometry. When Plato re-
gards geometry as the prerequisite to philosophical knowledge, it is because
geometry alone renders accessible the realm of things eternal; tou gar aei
ontos he geometrike gnosis estin
. Can there be degrees or levels of objec-
tive knowledge in this realm of eternal being, or does not rather knowledge
attain here an absolute maximum? Ancient geometry cannot but answer
in the affirmative to this question. For ancient geometry, in the classical
form it received from Euclid, there was such a maximum, a non plus ultra.
But modern group theory thinking has brought about a remarkable change
In this matter. Group theory is far from challenging the truth of Euclidean
metrical geometry, but it does challenge its claim to definitiveness. Each
geometry is considered as a theory of invariants of a certain group; the
groups themselves may be classified in the order of increasing generality.
The "principal group" of transformations which underlies Euclidean geome-
try permits us to establish a number of properties that are invariant with
respect to the transformations in question. But when we pass from this
"principal group" to another, by including, for example, affinitive and pro-
jective transformations, all that we had established thus far and which,
from the point of view of Euclidean geometry, looked like a definitive result
and a consolidated achievement, becomes fluctuating again. With every
extension of the principal group, some of the properties that we had taken
for invariant are lost. We come to other properties that may be hierar-
chically arranged. Many differences that are considered as essential
within ordinary metrical geometry, may now prove "accidental." With
reference to the new group-principle they appear as "unessential" modifica-
tions….

                 … From the point of view of modern geometrical systematization,
geometrical judgments, however "true" in themselves, are nevertheless not
all of them equally "essential" and necessary. Modern geometry
endeavors to attain progressively to more and more fundamental strata of
spatial determination. The depth of these strata depends upon the com-
prehensiveness of the concept of group; it is proportional to the strictness of
the conditions that must be satisfied by the invariance that is a universal
postulate with respect to geometrical entities. Thus the objective truth
and structure of space cannot be apprehended at a single glance, but have to
be progressively  discovered and established. If geometrical thought is to
achieve this discovery, the conceptual means that it employs must become
more and more universal….

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Go Ask Alice

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:13 pm

McLuhan in Space  by Richard Cavell—

As the word "through" in the title of Through the Vanishing Point hints… key reference points for McLuhan and Parker in writing Through the Vanishing Point  were the "Alice" books.

[The footnote symbol here is mine.]

Alice Rae, McLuhan's Unconscious, doctoral dissertation, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, May 2008

What McLuhan calls the "unconscious"' is more often named by him as Logos, "acoustic space" or the "media environment," and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung, but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth.

The declaration section of the thesis is dated November 19, 2008.

Related material— Halloween 2005 and The Gospel According to Father Hardon.

A work suggested by Ander Monson's new Vanishing Point . (See April 17 and April 23, together with the April 22 picture of a non-Euclidean  point in the context of "The Seventh Symbol.")

Thursday, December 31, 2009

All About Eve

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:57 am

NY Times obituaries on New Year's Eve, 2009-- Carlene Hatcher Polite and David Levine

Genesis 3:24
So he drove out the man; and he placed
at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims,
and a flaming sword which turned every way,
to keep the way of the tree of life.

"The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that 'I am' which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That 'I am' has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes 'a dead letter.'"

George Steiner, Grammars of Creation

Carlene Hatcher Polite–
"Shall I help you?" asked a bass voice.
"If you can," answered a contralto.
"Trace down this tree. Let me show you
men in its stead. Leaf through this bush,
extinguish the burning fire…"
The Flagellants, page 8

"How much story do you want?"
George Balanchine

Monday, November 2, 2009

For All Souls’ Day

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am

The Interpreter’s House

From Sunday morning’s
October Endgame:

A Korean Christian site–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091101-Seal.jpg

See Mizian Translation Service for
some background on the seal’s designer.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part, “The Interpreter’s House“–

“When the Interpreter had shown them this, He has them into the very best room in the house; a very brave room it was. So He bid them look round about, and see if they could find anything profitable there. Then they looked round and round; for there was nothing there to be seen but a very great spider on the wall: and that they overlooked.

MERCY. Then said Mercy, Sir, I see nothing; but Christiana held her peace.

INTER. But, said the Interpreter, look again, and she therefore looked again, and said, Here is not anything but an ugly spider, who hangs by her hands upon the wall. Then said He, Is there but one spider in all this spacious room? Then the water stood in Christiana’s eyes, for she was a woman quick of apprehension; and she said, Yea, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea, and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in her. The Interpreter then looked pleasantly upon her, and said, Thou hast said the truth. This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle.‌74

Then said the Interpreter again, “The spider taketh hold with their hands (as you see), and is in kings’ palaces’ (Prov. 30:28). And wherefore is this recorded, but to show you, that how full of the venom of sin soever you be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the best room that belongs to the King’s house above!‌75

CHRIST. I thought, said Christiana, of something of this; but I could not imagine it all. I thought that we were like spiders, and that we looked like ugly creatures, in what fine room soever we were; but that by this spider, this venomous and ill-favoured creature, we were to learn how to act faith, that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands, as I see, and dwells in the best room in the house. God has made nothing in vain.”

Related material:

The spider metaphor in
Under the Volcano

(April 10, 2004) and
an AP obituary
from yesterday.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Saturday August 29, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Continued from
Father's Day
  last year–

Shoe cartoon, detail, Sunday, June 15, 2008

I Ching hexagram 48, The Well

"For further details,
 click on the well."

From the above link:

James Hillman

"The kind of movement Olson urges is
 an inward deepening of the image,
an in-sighting of the superimposed
 levels of significance within it.
This is the very mode that Jung
suggested for grasping dreams–
 not as a sequence in time,
but as revolving around
 a nodal complex."

And from Feb. 29, 2008:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080229-Doonesbury3.jpg

and the following day:

Heraclitus: '...so deep is its logos'

— Heraclitus

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Wednesday June 3, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 am
Epigraphs
to Four Quartets:

Epigraphs to Eliot's 'Four Quartets'-- Heraclitus on the common logos and on the way up and the way down


The Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor, printed by C. Whittingham, London, for the translator, 1804, Vol. II, p. 55:

"You see the mutation of bodies, and the transition of generation, a path upwards and downwards according to Heraclitus; and again, as he says, one thing living the death, but dying the life of another. Thus fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, and earth lives the death of water. You see a succession of life, and a mutation of bodies, both of which are the renovation of the whole."

Eight-rayed star of Venus (also the symmetry axes of the square)

 

For an interpretation
of the above figure
in terms of the classical
four elements discussed
in Four Quartets,
in Dissertations, and
in Angels & Demons,
see
Notes on Mathematics
 and Narrative.

For a more entertaining
interpretation, see Fritz Leiber's
classic story "Damnation Morning."

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Thursday March 19, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:00 am
An image from
 
Quintessence:
A Glass Bead Game

 
by Charles Cameron

Christ and the four elements, 1495

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought
,

by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge U. Press,
2002, p. 85

From
Kernel of Eternity:

Pauli's Dream Square from 'The Innermost Kernel'

From
Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard
:

The Klein Four-Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity

From "The Fifth Element"
(1997, Milla Jovovich
    and Bruce Willis) —

The crossing of the beams:

The Fifth Element, crossing of the beams

Happy birthday, Bruce Willis.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Tuesday March 17, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 am
Deep Structures

The traditional 'Square of Opposition'

The Square of Oppositon
at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy


The Square of Opposition diagram in its earliest known form

The Square of Opposition
in its original form

"The diagram above is from a ninth century manuscript of Apuleius' commentary on Aristotle's Perihermaneias, probably one of the oldest surviving pictures of the square."

Edward Buckner at The Logic Museum

From the webpage "Semiotics for Beginners: Paradigmatic Analysis," by Daniel Chandler:
 

The Semiotic Square of Greimas

The Semiotic Square

"The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully (Greimas 1987,* xiv, 49). The semiotic square is intended to map the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text. Fredric Jameson notes that 'the entire mechanism… is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition' (in Greimas 1987,* xiv). Whilst this suggests that the possibilities for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the either/or of binary logic, but that [sic] they are nevertheless subject to 'semiotic constraints' – 'deep structures' providing basic axes of signification."

* Greimas, Algirdas (1987): On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (trans. Paul J Perron & Frank H Collins). London: Frances Pinter

Another version of the semiotic square:

Rosalind Krauss's version of the semiotic square, which she calls the Klein group

Krauss says that her figure "is, of course, a Klein Group."

Here is a more explicit figure representing the Klein group:

The Klein Four-Group, illustration by Steven H. Cullinane

There is also the logical
    diamond of opposition

The Diamond of Opposition (figure from Wikipedia)

A semiotic (as opposed to logical)
diamond has been used to illustrate
remarks by Fredric Jameson,
 a Marxist literary theorist:

"Introduction to Algirdas Greimas, Module on the Semiotic Square," by Dino Felluga at Purdue University–

 

The semiotic square has proven to be an influential concept not only in narrative theory but in the ideological criticism of Fredric Jameson, who uses the square as "a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself" ("Foreword"* xv). (For more on Jameson, see the [Purdue University] Jameson module on ideology.)

Greimas' schema is useful since it illustrates the full complexity of any given semantic term (seme). Greimas points out that any given seme entails its opposite or "contrary." "Life" (s1) for example is understood in relation to its contrary, "death" (s2). Rather than rest at this simple binary opposition (S), however, Greimas points out that the opposition, "life" and "death," suggests what Greimas terms a contradictory pair (-S), i.e., "not-life" (-s1) and "not-death" (-s2). We would therefore be left with the following semiotic square (Fig. 1):

A semiotic 'diamond of opposition'

 

As Jameson explains in the Foreword to Greimas' On Meaning, "-s1 and -s2"—which in this example are taken up by "not-death" and "not-life"—"are the simple negatives of the two dominant terms, but include far more than either: thus 'nonwhite' includes more than 'black,' 'nonmale' more than 'female'" (xiv); in our example, not-life would include more than merely death and not-death more than life.

 

* Jameson, Fredric. "Foreword." On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. By Algirdas Greimas. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976.

 

 

"The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."

The Gameplayers of Zan, by M.A. Foster

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon,
 Gravity's Rainbow

Crosses used by semioticians
to baffle their opponents
are illustrated above.

Some other kinds of crosses,
and another kind of opponent:

Monday, July 11, 2005

Logos
for St. Benedict's Day

Click on either of the logos below for religious meditations– on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.

Logo of Conference of Catholic Bishops     Logo of Stormfront website

Both logos represent different embodiments of the "story theory" of truth, as opposed to the "diamond theory" of truth.  Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion.  I personally prefer the "diamond theory" of truth, represented by the logo below.

Illustration of the 2x2 case of the diamond theorem

See also the previous entry
(below) and the entries
  of 7/11, 2003.
 

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Mathematics
and Narrative

 
Click on the title
for a narrative about

Nikolaos K. Artemiadis

Nikolaos K. Artemiadis,
 (co-) author of

Artemiadis's 'History of Mathematics,' published by the American Mathematical Society
 

From Artemiadis's website:
1986: Elected Regular Member
of the Academy of Athens
1999: Vice President
of the Academy of Athens
2000: President
of the Academy of Athens
Seal of the American Mathematical Society with picture of Plato's Academy

 

"First of all, I'd like to
   thank the Academy…"

— Remark attributed to Plato

Monday, March 2, 2009

Monday March 2, 2009

Joyce's Nightmare
continues

Today in History – March 2

Today is Monday, March 2, the 61st day of 2009. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On March 2, 1939, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope on his 63rd birthday; he took the name Pius XII.

Angels and Demons, Illuminati Diamond, pages 359-360

Log24 on June 9, 2008

From Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563:

"He brings out the mandala he found.
'What's it mean?'
[….]

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night…."

 

 

In lieu of Slothrop's mandala, here is another…

Christ and the four elements, 1495
 

 

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 85

 

 

Related mandalas:Diamond arrangement of the four elements
and

Logo by Steven H. Cullinane for website on finite geometry

 

 

For further details,
click on any of the
three mandalas above.

Angels and Demons cross within a diamond (page 306), and Finite Geometry logo

Happy birthday to
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Wednesday December 10, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Sunday November 16, 2008

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

Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– "What is Art For?"–  in today's New York Times Magazine:

Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

"Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "…  almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

For more about
"where things are
joined together," see
 Eight is a Gate and
The Eightfold Cube.
Related material:

The Trickster
and the Paranormal

and
Martin Gardner on
   a disappearing cube —

"What happened to that… cube?"

Apollinax laughed until his eyes teared. "I'll give you a hint, my dear. Perhaps it slid off into a higher dimension."

"Are you pulling my leg?"

"I wish I were," he sighed. "The fourth dimension, as you know, is an extension along a fourth coordinate perpendicular to the three coordinates of three-dimensional space. Now consider a cube. It has four main diagonals, each running from one corner through the cube's center to the opposite corner. Because of the cube's symmetry, each diagonal is clearly at right angles to the other three. So why shouldn't a cube, if it feels like it, slide along a fourth coordinate?"

— "Mr. Apollinax Visits New York," by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, May 1961, reprinted in The Night is Large


For such a cube, see

Cube with its four internal diagonals


ashevillecreative.com

this illustration in


The Religion of Cubism
(and the four entries
preceding it —
 Log24, May 9, 2003).

Beware of Gardner's
"clearly" and other lies.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Thursday October 23, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:29 am
Along Came
a Spider

Symmetry axes of the square

A phrase from 1959
("Damnation Morning"),
from Monday
("Me and My Shadow"),
and from Sept. 28
("Buffalo Soldier") —

"Look, Buster,
do you want to live?"

A closely related phrase:

… Todo lo sé
por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema

de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío

The link to
"Buffalo Soldier"
in this entry
is in memory of
Vittorio Foa, who

died Monday
at his home
 outside Rome.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Monday October 20, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:06 am
Me and My Shadow

Thoughts suggested by Saturday's entry–

"… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality…."

— Carl G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.

For a video of such undifferentiated chaos, see the Four Tops' "Loco in Acapulco."

"Yes, you'll be goin' loco
  down in Acapulco,

  the magic down there
  is so strong."

This song is from the 1988 film "Buster."

(For a related religious use of that name– "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"– see Fritz Leiber's "Damnation Morning," quoted here on Sept. 28.)

Art, science, and religion are not apparent within the undifferentiated chaos of the Four Tops' Acapulco video, which appears to incorporate time travel in its cross-cutting of scenes that seem to be from the Mexican revolution with contemporary pool-party scenes. Art, science, and religion do, however, appear within my own memories of Acapulco. While staying at a small thatched-roof hostel on a beach at Acapulco in the early 1960's, I read a paperback edition of Three Philosophical Poets, a book by George Santayana on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Here we may regard art as represented by Goethe, science by Lucretius, and religion by Dante. For a more recent and personal combination of these topics, see Juneteenth through Midsummer Night, 2007, which also has references to the "primitives" and "magical mentality" discussed by Jung.

"The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about."

— Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos

As for shame and guilt, see Malcolm Lowry's classic Under the Volcano, a novel dealing not with Acapulco but with a part of Mexico where in my youth I spent much more time– Cuernavaca.

Lest Lowry's reflections prove too depressing, I recommend as background music the jazz piano of the late Dave McKenna… in particular, "Me and My Shadow."

McKenna died on Saturday, the date of the entry that included "Loco in Acapulco." Saturday was also the Feast of Saint Luke.
 

Friday, July 11, 2008

Friday July 11, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
AND MORE LOGOS:

"Serious numbers will
always be heard."
Paul Simon  

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-DowLg.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-NYSE.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-HSBClogo.jpg

The HSBC Logo Designer —

Henry Steiner

He is an internationally recognized corporate identity consultant. Based in Hong Kong, his work for clients such as HongkongBank, IBM and Unilever is a major influence in Pacific Rim design.

Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club.

His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995).

Yaneff.com

 

Related material
from the past

Wittgenstein and Fly from Fly-Bottle

Fly from Fly Bottle:

Graphic structures from Diamond Theory and from Kyocera logo

Charles Taylor,
"Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
  (Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —

"… the object sets up
 a kind of frame or space or field
   within which there can be epiphany."

Related material
from today —

Escape from a
  cartoon graveyard:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-BabyBlues.jpg

Friday July 11, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
LOGOS

"Religions are hardy."
— TIME magazine,
issue dated July 14

"I confess I do not believe in time."
Vladimir Nabokov  

"I can hardly do better than
go back to the Greeks."
G. H. Hardy

'The Greeks and the Irrational,' by E.R. Dodds

Figure 1:
The Greeks

Diagonal of the Square

Figure 2:
The Irrational

'You cannot find the limits of the soul even by travelling all roads-- so deep is its logos'-- Heraclitus

Monday, June 9, 2008

Monday June 9, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:20 pm
Lying Rhymes

Readers of the previous entry
who wish to practice their pardes
may contemplate the following:

NY Lottery June 9, 2008: mid-day 007, evening 563

 
The evening 563 may, as in other recent entries, be interpreted as a page number in Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995). From that page:

“He brings out the mandala he found.
‘What’s it mean?’
[….]
Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night….”

In lieu of Slothrop’s mandala, here
is another, from the Dante link
in today’s previous entry:

Christ and the four elements, 1495

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy

in Newton’s Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 85


Related mandalas:

Diamond arrangement of the four elements

and

Logo by Steven H. Cullinane for website on finite geometry

For further details,
click on any of the
three mandalas above.

“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”

— Thomas Pynchon, quoted
here on 9/13, 2007

(As for today’s New York Lottery midday number 007, see (for instance) Edward Rothstein in today’s New York Times on paradise, and also Tom Stoppard on heaven as “just a lying rhyme” for seven.)

Time of entry: 10:20:55 PM

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Saturday March 1, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:02 am

Doonesbury 2/29/08-- Assignment: Identify Sources

Heraclitus: '...so deep is its logos'

— Heraclitus in
   Death by Philosophy,
   by Ava Chitwood

Related material:


International Journal of the Classical Tradition

“Ava Chitwood, ‘The Anonymous Philosopher of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain: A Heraclitean Hero in a Homeric World,’ IJCT 11 (2004-2005), pp. 232-243.

1997’s surprise best-seller, Cold Mountain, is the first novel of North Carolina native and travel writer, Charles Frazier. Two ancient Greek authors shape and drive the novel, set in the post-war Southern Appalachians of 1865. Homer’s Odyssey frames the novel: the hero Inman undergoes epic adventures after the war, has his own Penelope waiting, and travels back to a land as remote as any island, Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But fragments of an anonymous philosopher who can be identified as Heraclitus alienate Inman from the Homeric world around him and determine his fate. Ada, his Penelope, also casts off her shroud of tradition: impatient with the ‘glorious war,’ no longer content to wait, Ada plunges into the new business of living. And just as the archaic, post-Homeric Greek world produced new ways of living and thought, as exemplified by Heraclitus, so too does the post-bellum world of Cold Mountain, as exemplified by Inman and Ada; their struggle, and the novel’s tension, speak to and about all those caught between two worlds, epic and philosophic, whether driven by love or strife.”

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Sunday October 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 am
The Dipolar God

Steven H. Cullinane, 'The Line'

"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word…."

— Wallace Stevens,
   "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

Yesterday's meditation ("Simon's Shema") on the interpenetration of opposites continues:

Part I: The Jewel in the Lotus

"The fundamental conception of Tantric Buddhist metaphysics, namely, yuganaddha, signifies the coincidence of opposites.  It is symbolized by the conjugal embrace (maithuna or kama-kala) of a god and goddess or a Buddha and his consort (signifying karuna and sunyata or upaya and prajna, respectively), also commonly depicted in Tantric Buddhist iconography as the union of vajra (diamond sceptre) and padme (lotus flower).  Thus, yuganaddha essentially means the interpenetration of opposites or dipolar fusion, and is a fundamental restatement of Hua-yen theoretic structures."

— p. 148 in "Part II: A Whiteheadian Process Critique of Hua-yen Buddhism," in Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration (SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy), by Steve Odin, State University of New York Press, 1982

Part II: The Dipolar God

And on p. 163 of Odin, op. cit., in "Part III: Theology of the Deep Unconscious: A Reconstruction of Process Theology," in the section titled "Whitehead's Dipolar God as the Collective Unconscious"–

"An effort is made to transpose Whitehead's theory of the dipolar God into the terms of the collective unconscious, so that now the dipolar God is to be comprehended not as a transcendent deity, but the deepest dimension and highest potentiality of one's own psyche."

Part III: Piled High and Deep

Odin obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook in 1980. (See curriculum vitae (pdf).)

For an academic review of Odin's book, see David Applebaum, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34 (1984), pp. 107-108.

It is perhaps worth noting, in light of the final footnote of Mark D. Brimblecombe's Ph.D. thesis "Dipolarity and God" quoted yesterday, that "tantra" is said to mean "loom." For some less-academic background on the Tantric iconography Odin describes, see the webpage "Love and Passion in Tantric Buddhist Art." For a fiction combining love and passion with the word "loom" in a religious context, see Clive Barker's Weaveworld.  This fiction– which is, if not "supreme" in the Wallace Stevens sense, at least entertaining– may correspond to some aspects of the deep Jungian psychological reality discussed by Odin.

Happy Birthday,
Hannah Arendt

(Oct. 14, 1906-
Dec. 4, 1975)

OPPOSITES:

Hannah (Arendt) and Martin (Heidegger) as portrayed in a play of that name

Actors portraying
Arendt and Heidegger

Click on image for details.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Wednesday August 22, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am
The Enchanted Twilight

The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 21, 2007

GENEVA: British-born author Magdalen Nabb, whose crime novels about a quirky Italian investigator were acclaimed by her idol Georges Simenon, has died, her Swiss publishing house said Tuesday. She was 60.

Nabb, who also wrote stories for children and young adults, died of a stroke on Saturday [August 18, 2007] in Florence, Italy, where she had lived and worked since 1975, said Diogenes Verlag AG of Zurich….

Nabb published 13 books for children and young adults, including “The Enchanted Horse,” “Twilight Ghost” and the “Josie Smith” series about a “girl who always has plenty of ideas.”

See also, from the
date of Nabb’s death,

Happy Birthday,
Robert Redford:
 A Concrete Universal
.

No matter how it’s done,
you won’t like it.

— Robert Redford to     
  Robert M. Pirsig in Lila 

Material related to
Twilight Ghost:

Logos and Epiphany
and
Fire Chaplain.

“A twilight ghost doesn’t come to
frighten people, though it might
want to tell them something.
A twilight ghost is just
     a kind of long lost memory….”

Magdalen Nabb

Monday, August 20, 2007

Monday August 20, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:01 am
An Epiphany
for Stephen King

From the front page of this
morning's online New York Times:

New York Times, 7:42 AM Aug. 20, 2007

In the details:

Stephen B. King, a Hallmark Cards creative director

Stephen B. King,
a Hallmark creative director,
with some of the new
greeting cards based
 on topical themes and humor.

From yesterday's Log24 entry:

Hallmark Card logo

When you care enough
to send the very best…

From a llnk to Aug. 1
in yesterday's entry:

Epiphany

Geometry of the I Ching (Box Style)

Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989

(Click on image for background.)

Detail:

Detail of Box Style I Ching: Hexagram 14.

Related material:
Logos and Logic 
 and Diagon Alley.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Wednesday August 1, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am
August First,
8:00:14 AM:

Cheap Epiphany

SPORTS OF THE TIMES

Restoring the Faith
After Hitting the Bottom

By SELENA ROBERTS
The New York Times
Published: August 1, 2007

What good is a nadir if it's denied or ignored? What's the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can't buy a cheap epiphany?

 

Pennsylvania Lottery
on the Feast of
St. Ignatius Loyola:
 
PA Lottery July 31, 2007 - Mid-day 215, Evening 298

Restoring the Booze:
A Look at the 50's-

Grace and Bing in the Fifties

Another Epiphany:

Geometry of the I Ching (Box Style)

Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989

(Click on image for background.)

Detail:

Detail of Box Style I Ching: Hexagram 14.

Related material:
Logos and Logic 
 and Diagon Alley.

"What a swell
  party this is."

— adapted from
     Cole Porter 

Friday, June 22, 2007

Friday June 22, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 pm
Encounter at Harvard–   

Logos: Tree of Knowledge and Burning Bush

Related material:

(Click to enlarge)

Harvard Crimson: Dean Gross resigns

Dean Gross also appears in

The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Saturday June 16, 2007

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

Obituaries in the News

Published: June 16, 2007,
in The New York Times

Filed at 7:10 a.m. ET

Samuel Isaac Weissman

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Samuel Isaac Weissman, a professor and chemist who helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, has died. He was 94.

Weissman died Tuesday [June 12]….

From Log24
 on Tuesday,
June 12:

Sky Fish

Sky Fish - A Logo for Philip K. Dick

Illustration from
LOGOS
(May 17, 2007)

From today's
New York Times
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070616-Twist.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Photo by Richard Termine

Scene from "Behind the Lid"

(See the Log24 entries from
June 12, the date of
Weissman's death.)

From Ben Brantley's
review of "Behind the Lid,"
a quote from the author:

"Her life, her voice says,
was devoted to discovering
'the inside on the outside,
  the outside on the inside.'"

Related material:

Julie Taymor

"They did it from
the inside to the outside.
And from the outside to the in.
And that profoundly
moved me then. It was…
it was the most important thing
that I ever experienced."

Wallace Stevens

Professor Eucalyptus said,
"The search/ For reality
is as momentous as/
  The search for God."
It is the philosopher's search/
  For an interior made exterior/
  And the poet's search
for the same exterior
made/ Interior….

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Tuesday June 12, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Sky Fish

Sky Fish - A Logo for Philip K. Dick

Illustration from
LOGOS
(May 17, 2007)

From an obituary in today's New York Times:

"Lee Nagrin, a noted Off Broadway performance artist… died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 78….

She formed her own company, the Sky Fish Ensemble, in 1979 and presented performance-art pieces that tended to unspool like fairy tales, filled with mysterious, archetypal imagery. Her own presence was mysterious, too, both on and off the stage, often conjuring up the sense of a keen-eyed, all-seeing, benign witch.

She created some of those images midperformance, as when she traced a landscape along brown paper that ringed the stage space of Silver Whale Gallery, where much of her work was performed.

For her last piece, 'Behind the Lid,' she collaborated with the puppeteer Basil Twist on a story in which a woman looks back on her life through a dream. Performances are this month at the Silver Whale."

LEE NAGRIN AND BASIL TWIST’S
BEHIND THE LID

Tuesday – Sunday @ 8PM
June 3rd – June 28th
Silver Whale Gallery

"Silver Whale Gallery (21 Bleecker Street) proudly announces the world premiere of BEHIND THE LID, a new play by playwright/performer Lee Nagrin and puppeteer/performer Basil Twist that chronicles a woman looking back on her life through a dream; her memories expand, open and reveal while an intimate audience of 18 will travel with her through this hand made world. Audience members are guided by a young familiar through this older woman's life and dreams. They experience layer upon layer of the life of an American artist – Lee Nagrin. Basil Twist creates the puppetry and performs.

Tickets for BEHIND THE LID are $40. To purchase tickets, please call Smarttix.com at 212-868-4444 or for more information visit www.leenagrin.com on the Internet."

From Log24
on June 7, the date
of Nagrin's death
:

"… Packaging is unavoidable.
Facts rarely, if ever, 
  speak for themselves."

Matthew C. Nisbet,  
Assistant Professor
  of "Communication,"
June 6, 2007

From the
New York Lottery
on June 7, the date
of Nagrin's death:

Mid-day: 603
Evening: 805

Another opening of
another show.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Monday June 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am
Continued from June 7

Second Billing, Part III:

Philosophy of
Communication

Obituaries: Richard Rorty, Ousmane Sembene

Pictures are more accessible
than words. See Logos
(May 17) and Torbellino
(June 10), as well as
the entries for June 8,
the date of Rorty's death.

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