Log24

Friday, January 26, 2024

For London Werewolves: Steppenwolf and the Moon Knights

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:31 am

Thursday, September 28, 2023

Orwell’s Up and In  in Paris and London

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

See the previous post and London Bondage.

Thursday, September 7, 2023

Going to London: John Adams’ Harmonielehre at Trafalgar Square

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:42 pm

For the relentlessly artsy-fartsy at the Santa Fe Institute…

Continued from remarks on Schoenberg on March 10, 2001 —

"First movement from John Adams’ Harmonielehre  conducted by
Sir Simon Rattle, performed at BMW Classics, which took place
in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, 10 June 2023." — YouTube

Also on 10 June 2023 —

Friday, February 3, 2023

Nevermore Academy Meets the London School

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:03 am

"Intended for a white European male audience, the sensual
reclining nude belongs to a long artistic tradition."

— The Courtauld Gallery on Gaugin's "Nevermore" (1897)

"After decades abroad, Mr Doig has returned again to London.
On February 10th he opens a new exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery ….
The Courtauld is also the home of Britain’s finest Impressionist collection,
and some of the paintings in the new show recall and respond to those works.
A depiction of an alpinist by Mr Doig speaks to Paul Cézanne’s view of
Lake Annecy, a tropical bather . . . gestures at Paul Gauguin’s nude
'Nevermore'."

— https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/02/02/
look-closely-at-peter-doigs-paintings-then-look-again

The London School of Economics has a more direct approach to art —

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Of London Bondage . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:48 pm

Continues.

In 2007, April 30 — Walpurgisnacht — was the
release date of the "Back to Black" single . . .

A related music venue —

A related map —

This post was suggested by . . .

Saturday, March 6, 2021

London Humor

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:40 pm

Related posts —
Euclid Alone  and  Of  London Bondage

Monday, September 14, 2020

Shades (Of London Bondage continues)

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:59 am

Loitering in Lara’s dressing room, she tries on
the faux-bondage harness she picked up in London….”

See as well . . .

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Of London Bondage

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:38 pm

"After years in hiding, latex fashion re-emerged in the late 1950s,
thanks to the British designer John Sutcliffe, who created the world’s
first catsuit – the prototype rubber-fetish garment. …

The 1960s British spy series The Avengers was monumental
in bringing rubberwear to the masses. The show’s feminist heroine,
Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg), was styled in a latex, Sutcliffe-
inspired catsuit. With Peel as a media archetype, latex’s second-skin
look wasn’t just sexy, it was superhuman.

Sutcliffe capitalised on the obsession with his products, and founded
AtomAge Magazine in 1972. The periodical, filled with artful and erotic
bondage imagery, gained a huge following among fetishists, and made
quite the splash on London’s progressive fashion scene. "

By Cassidy George, bbc.com, 8th January 2020

See also an image from a Log24 post  on that date a year earlier—

Sunday, December 4, 2016

London Recessional

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:01 pm

Jack London on Kipling —

Also for "Recessional."

Monday, April 4, 2016

Noon for London

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(A sequel to today's earlier posts Cube for Berlin and Midnight for Paris.)

See London in this journal.

That search yields

“The more intellectual, less physical,
the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object,
the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison
the mind has to keep making
between the whole and the parts,
the parts and the whole.”

— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins , 
ed. by Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959),
as quoted by Philip A. Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament 

(From the post The Inscape of 24, April 24, 2014. The 14 blocks in
the design S(3, 4, 8) of today's previous post are analogous to the 759
blocks in the design S(5, 8, 24).)

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The London Piracy Project

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:25 pm

My work has been pirated by an artist in London.

An organization there, AND Publishing, sponsors what it calls
"The Piracy Project." The artist's piracy was a contribution
to the project.

The above material now reflects the following update:

UPDATE of June 21, 2011, 10:00 PM ET:

The organization's weblog (a post for 19th June)
has now been updated, and this  post, which originally
discussed that weblog, has been altered to reflect the
changes that were made at AND Publishing's weblog.

In this  weblog, changes have been made to correct my
earlier incorrect statements that the Piracy Project was
sponsored by the art school where it takes place.
It was not. The organization has informed me that

"AND Publishing is not sponsored by the art school.
We are an independent artist's publishing house,
kindly hosted by the art school. While we are offered
office space on campus, our program and website
are funded, directed and managed by ourselves –
we are an independent entity running an
autonomous program."

As this post originally stated…

The web pages from the site finitegeometry.org/sc that
the artist, Steve Richards, copied as part of his contribution to
the AND Publishing Piracy Project have had the author's name,
Steven H. Cullinane, and the date of composition systematically removed.

See a sample (jpg, 2.1 MB).

Here is some background on Richards.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Gilded Cage Meets Crimson Abyss

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:54 pm

"… as if into a crimson abyss …." —

Thursday, January 25, 2024

The Much-Needed Gap

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:22 am
 

Prospero's Children  was first published by HarperCollins,
London, in 1999. A statement by the publisher provides
an instance of the famous "much-needed gap." —

"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children 
steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
  and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld , and
is destined to become a modern classic."

"… as if into a crimson abyss …." —

Related material in this  journal:  Weaveworld.

Friday, November 17, 2023

“Design is How It Works” — Steve Jobs

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:37 pm

In memory of a graphic-design figure who reportedly died
on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023 — images from a post on that date

"The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description . . . . "
— T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the
Philosophy of Art
, ed. Herbert Read. London and New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. First published 1924.

Classicism Continued: An Apotheosis of Modernity

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:34 pm
 

From Chapter 23, "Poetry," by Adam Parkes, in
A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture,
edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar,
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture,
© 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Writing in 1910–11, the English poet and critic T. E. Hulme claimed that the two major traditions in poetry, romanticism and classicism, were as different as a well and a bucket. According to the romantic party, Hulme explained, humankind is “intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance”; that is, our nature is “a well, a reservoir full of possibilities.” For the classical party, however, human nature is “like a bucket”; it is “intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent” (Hulme 1987: 117). But it was not only that romanticism and classicism were as dissimilar as a well and a bucket; their contents were different, too. To draw water from the well of romanticism was, in effect, to pour a “pot of treacle over the dinner table,” while the classical bucket was more likely to be full of little stones – or jewels, perhaps. Romanticism, in Hulme’s view, was the result of displaced religious fervor; it represented the return of religious instincts that the “perverted rhetoric of Rationalism” had suppressed, so that “concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience” (Hulme 1987: 118). Classicism, by contrast, traded in dry goods – dry, hard goods, to be precise.

Hulme left little doubt as to which side he was on. “It is essential to prove,” he argued, “that beauty may be in small, dry things. The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. . . . I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming” (Hulme 1987: 131–3). If by “dry, hard, classical verse” Hulme meant poems looking like the fragments of Sappho, he didn’t have to wait long to see his prophecy fulfilled.

The hard sand breaks,
and the grains of it
are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it,
the wind,

228

playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.

So wrote Hilda Doolittle in “Hermes of the Ways,” the first poem that she signed “H. D., Imagiste” at the behest of her fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. From Pound’s perspective, the Imagist movement that he co-founded in 1912 with H. D. and the English poet Richard Aldington was finished well before the First World War began in August 1914; throughout this war-torn decade, however, Imagism continued to spawn the poetry of “small, dry things” whose coming Hulme had predicted a few years before.

Indeed, modernist poets weren’t content merely to break down the extended heroic narratives – the “spilt religion,” as Hulme put it – of their treacly nineteenthcentury predecessors; they insisted on breaking down small things into ever-smaller particles and subparticles. This logic of disintegration is clearly at work in poems like “Hermes of the Ways,” where each line is metrically unique, creating a sense of perpetual freshness – an apotheosis of modernity, as it were.

REFERENCE

Hulme, T. E. (1987). Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published 1924.

Compare and contrast:

Jeremy Gray,
Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics,
Princeton University Press, first edition Sept. 22, 2008

"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body of ideas,
having little or no outward reference, placing considerable emphasis
on formal aspects of the work and maintaining a complicated—
indeed, anxious— rather than a naïve relationship with the
day-to-day world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based group
that has a high sense of the seriousness and value of what it is
trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."

(Quoted at the webpage Solomon's Cube.)

Friday, September 29, 2023

Cock Tail

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:32 am

Brian Harley in Mate in Two Moves:

“It is quite true that variation play is, in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred, the soul of a problem, or (to put it more 
materially) the main course of the solver’s banquet, but 
the Key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings, and
if it fails in piquancy the following dinner is not so
satisfactory as it should be.”

(London, Bell & Sons.  First edition, 1931.)

TikTok cock video by sarockaiello 9/13/2023

Related art from the 9/25 Log24 post  Harvardwood Suggests

The musical accompaniment to the TikTok cock is by Village People.
Related news from yesterday —

The Village Voice founder reportedly died on Wednesday, September 27, 2023.

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Former-Day Saint

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:03 am

"Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?" — Updike

The actor who played "Illya Kuryakin" reportedly died yesterday —

" David Keith McCallum Jr. was born on Sept. 19, 1933, into
a musical family in Glasgow. His father was the first violinist
for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London; his mother,
Dorothy Dorman, was a cellist. He would later tell interviewers
that his Scotch Presbyterian upbringing had left him emotionally
circumscribed.

'We Scots, we tend to be awfully tight inside,' he told TV Guide
in 1965. 'It has hurt me as an actor to be so — so naturally restricted.' "

— Leslie Kaufman in The New York Times

This  journal on McCallum's 90th birthday — Sept. 19, 2023 —

"You take the high road and . . . ."

Friday, July 7, 2023

CORE

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:10 pm

The "CORE" reference in the previous post yields, via a search . . .

Within this thesis there are 19 references to the name "Cullinane"
and to my own work, cited as . . .

Cullinane, Steven H., ‘The Diamond Theorem’ (1979)
<http://diamondtheorem.com>
[accessed 6 May 2019]

––– ‘Geometry of the I Ching’ (1989)
<http://finitegeometry.org/sc/64/iching.html
[accessed 6 May 2019].

Monday, June 5, 2023

Vienna Requiem

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

"You put the lime in the coconut . . ."

Truth, Beauty, and The Good

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man 

I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach 

Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of
cities with which they are associated. 

 

Friday, June 2, 2023

Reichenbach’s Fell Swoop

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:18 pm

See The Eightfold Cube  and . . .

Truth, Beauty, and The Good

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man 

I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach 

Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of
cities with which they are associated. 

 

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

British Combinatorics 2023

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:35 pm

"Martin told us about his work on machine learning…."

Peter J. Cameron reports on last week's (May 10 and 11)
London Combinatorics Colloquia 2023.

Related material — Boolean Functions in this journal and in a book
from May 16, 2011 . . .

Some historical background on machine learning —

https://tripleampersand.org/kernelled-connections-perceptron-diagram/ .

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Annals of Journalism

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:27 pm

Update of 12:31 PM ET —

The time  of this post, 12:27 PM ET,
suggests a 12/27 flashback:

Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.

related literary remark —

"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark  set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."

— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book reviewnot  of Dark Materials.

Friday, March 31, 2023

For Sixteen Vestal Virgins — Data and Metadata

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:03 pm

Data:

"The rockers said via their record label:

'It is with the deepest sadness that we must
announce the passing of the lyricist Keith Reid,
who died suddenly on 23 March 2023,
in hospital in London. He had been receiving
cancer treatment for the past couple of years.

Keith was the co-founder and lyricist for the band
Procol Harum, notably penning their biggest hit
A Whiter Shade of Pale, which contains some of
the most enigmatic lyrics of all time.' " 

— https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/
breaking-procol-harums-keith-reid-29586101

Metadata:

A note from Log24 on the above March 23 date

The above Del Shannon upload date
was November 1, 2021 — All Saints' Day.

Synchronicity check —

Friday, January 13, 2023

LMS Gresham

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:08 pm
 

Mathematical Structures

Posted on 13/01/2023 by Peter Cameron

My last major job at Queen Mary University of London more than ten years ago was designing and presenting a new first-semester first-year module to be taken by all students on mathematics programmes or joint programmes involving mathematics. I discussed it in my LMS-Gresham lecture.

 

LMS


 

 Gresham

"… seeds having fallen on barren rock, as it were" . . .

See today's previous Log24 post.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

How the Darkness Gets In

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:20 pm
 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUDOLF CARNAP 

EDITED BY PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP
Open Court Publishing Co.
Copyright © 1963 by The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc. 

. . . .
In Princeton I had some interesting talks with Einstein….
. . . .
Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now
worried him seriously. He explained that the
experience of the Now means something special
for man, something essentially different from
the past and the future, but that this important
difference does not and cannot occur within physics.
That this experience cannot be grasped by science
seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable
resignation. I remarked that all that occurs objectively
can be described in science; on the one hand the
temporal sequence of events is described in physics;
and, on the other hand, the peculiarities of man's
experiences with respect to time, including his different
attitude towards past, present, and future, can be
described and (in principle) explained in psychology.
But Einstein thought that these
scientific descriptions 
cannot possibly
satisfy our human needs; that there is
something essential about the Now
which is just outside 
of the realm of science.
We both agreed that this was not a question of a defect
for which science could be blamed, as Bergson thought.
I did not wish to press the point, because I wanted
primarily to understand his personal attitude to the
problem rather than to clarify the theoretical situation.
But I definitely had the impression that Einstein's
thinking on this point involved a lack of distinction
between experience and knowledge. Since science
in principle can say all that can be said, there is no
unanswerable question left. But though there is no
theoretical question left, there is still the common human
emotional experience, which is sometimes disturbing
for special psychological reasons. 

See also . . .

The extraordinary consequences of Einstein’s universe:
Relativity shatters our experience of time

9th January 2023

By Michael David Silberstein 

"Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College
and co-athor [sic] of Emergence in Context:
A treatise of twentry
[sic] first-century natural philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 2022)."

"… the experience that there is something special about
the character of the present moment. This is what presumably
lead [sic] Einstein to say that

'there is something essential about the Now
which is just outside the realm of science.' "

Silberstein does not give any source for his quotation.
But see the passage from Carnap above.

I do not recommend taking Carnap's — or Silberstein's —
word for anything.

The source of Silberstein's remarks is a publication of an 
organization called "Institute of Art and Ideas," or IAI.

Wikipedia on that organization:

"The IAI is responsible for organising the bi-annual festival 
HowTheLightGetsIn, the biggest philosophy and music
festival in the world* aimed at 'tackling the dearth of philosophy
in daily life,' in addition to monthly IAI Live events."

* Maya Oppenheim (7 September 2021):
"HowTheLightGetsIn: The world's largest philosophy
and music festival to ask life's big questions
."
The Independent.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

The Forms of Being

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:25 pm

"If the window is this matrix of ambi- or multivalence,
and the bars of the windows-the grid-are what help us
to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are themselves 
the symbol of the symbolist work of art. They function as
the multilevel representation through which the work of art
can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."

Page 59, Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," MIT Press,
October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64

Related material —

Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.

A related literary remark —

"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark  set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."

— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book review, not  of Dark Materials.

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Area 15 Revisited: The In-Folding

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:41 pm

"All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

— T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942)

For seekers of a "crazy Christmas knot" —

The commercial logo below may be viewed as
three in-folded Y-shaped orange forked tongues.

See also this journal on the above opening date — July 23, 2021:

'The Power Of The Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts,' by Rudolf Arnheim

Cover illustration:

Spies returning from the land of
Canaan with a cluster of grapes.

Colored woodcut from
Biblia Sacra Germanica ,
Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1483.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

"What happens in Canaan, stays in Canaan."

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Drum Machine

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:18 pm

"A struggling music producer sells his soul to a 1970s drum machine."

— Summary of a short film by Kevin Ignatius, "Hook Man."

The music producer pawns his current drum device 
and acquires a demonic 1970s machine.


Artistic symbolism —

The 16-pad device at left may be viewed by enthusiasts of ekphrasis
as a Galois tesseract, and the machine at right as the voice of
Hal Foster, an art theorist who graduated from Princeton in 1977.

For an example of Foster's prose style, see
the current London Review of Books.

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Modal Diamond Box

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:54 am
 

A  mnemonic  from a course titled
Galois Connections and Modal Logics“—

“Traditionally, there are two modalities, namely,
possibility and necessity. The basic modal operators
are usually written box (square) for necessarily
and diamond (diamond) for possibly.
Then, for example, diamondP  can be read as
‘it is possibly the case that P .'”

See also Intensional Semantics , lecture notes
by Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim, MIT,
Spring 2007 edition—

“The diamond  symbol for possibility is due to C.I. Lewis, first introduced in Lewis & Langford (1932), but he made no use of a symbol for the dual combination ¬¬. The dual symbol  was later devised by F.B. Fitch and first appeared in print in 1946 in a paper by his doctoral student Barcan (1946). See footnote 425 of Hughes & Cresswell (1968). Another notation one finds is L for necessity and M for possibility, the latter from the German möglich  ‘possible.’”

Barcan, Ruth C.: 1946. “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication.” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11(1): 1–16. URL http://www.jstor.org/pss/2269159.

Hughes, G.E. & Cresswell, M.J.: 1968. An Introduction to Modal Logic. London: Methuen.

Lewis, Clarence Irving & Langford, Cooper Harold: 1932. Symbolic Logic. New York: Century.

For less rigorous remarks, search Log24 for Modal Diamond Box.

Saturday, July 23, 2022

Myth Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:40 pm

From the new URL mythspace.org, which forwards to . . .

http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=mythspace

From Middlemarch  (1871-2), by George Eliot, Ch. III —

"Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton's 'affable archangel;' and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or speedy work."

See also the term correspondence  in this journal.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Occupy Space  Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:33 am

Alternate Title —

Types of Ambiguity:
The Circle in the Triangle,
the Singer in the Song.

From an excellent June 17 Wall Street Journal  review of a new
Isaac Bashevis Singer book from Princeton University Press

" 'Old Truths and New Clichés,' a collection of 19
prose articles, most appearing in English for the
first time, reveals that Singer was as consummate
an essayist as he was a teller of tales." — Benjamin Balint 

From a search in this  journal for Singer

Related material —

From a post of June 2, "Self-Enclosing" —

"… the self-enclosing processes by which late 20th-century
American academics established and secured their status
(you painfully develop a thesis in competition with your peers,
then you keep on elaborating it until you die)."

— Colin Burrow in the June 9, 2022 issue 
of London Review of Books

Affine transformation of 'magic' squares and triangles: the triangle Lo Shu 

From the December 14, 2021, post Notes on Lines —

Triangle (percussion instrument)

The triangle, a percussion instrument that was
featured prominently in the Tom Stoppard play
"Every Good Boy Deserves Favour."

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

A Triangle of Sadness

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:58 am

 The title refers to this year's
 Cannes Film Festival winner.

Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, and Yehoshua

Related material:

From a post of June 2, "Self-Enclosing" —

"… the self-enclosing processes by which late 20th-century
American academics established and secured their status
(you painfully develop a thesis in competition with your peers,
then you keep on elaborating it until you die)."

— Colin Burrow in the June 9, 2022 issue 
of London Review of Books

From a post of June 13, "The Theater Game" —

From a post of June 12, "Triangle.graphics, 2012-2022" —

Affine transformation of 'magic' squares and triangles: the triangle Lo Shu 

Thursday, February 10, 2022

“Kimi, Siri. Siri, Kimi.”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:35 pm

From "Siri + Wechsler" in this journal —

For Little Man Tate —

IMAGE- Wechsler block-design cubes and related WAIS-R manual

Related material — Wechsler in this journal and
an earlier Siri Hustvedt art novel, from 2003 —

Mark and Lucille, Bill and Violet, Al and Regina,
etc., etc., etc. —

IMAGE- Siri Hustvedt on the name 'Wechsler' in 'What I Loved'

Related material —

Monday, January 17, 2022

Prime Matter

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:17 pm

IMAGE- Excerpt from 'The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas' by John F. Wippel

Ian J. Thompson7 Dec. 2009

Quantum mechanics describes the probabilities of actual outcomes in terms of a wave function, or at least of a quantum state of amplitudes that varies with time. The public always asks what the wave function is , or what the amplitudes are amplitudes of . Usually, we reply that the amplitudes are ‘probability amplitudes’, or that the wave function is a ‘probability wave function’, but neither answer is ontologically satisfying since probabilities are numbers , not stuff . We have already rehearsed the objections to the natural world being made out of numbers, as these are pure forms. In fact, ‘waves’, ‘amplitudes’ and ‘probabilities’ are all  forms, and none of them can be substances. So, what are quantum objects made of: what stuff ?

According to Heisenberg [6], the quantum probability waves are “a quantitative formulation of the concept of ‘dynamis’, possibility, or in the later Latin version, ‘potentia’, in Aristotle’s philosophy. The concept of events not determined in a peremptory manner, but that the possibility or ‘tendency’ for an event to take place has a kind of reality—a certain intermediate layer of reality, halfway between the massive reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the idea or the image—this concept plays a decisive role in Aristotle’s philosophy. In modern quantum theory this concept takes on a new form; it is formulated quantitatively as probability and subjected to mathematically expressible laws of nature.” Unfortunately Heisenberg does not develop this interpretation much beyond the sort of generality of the above statements, and the concept of ‘potentiality’ remains awkwardly isolated from much of his other thought on this subject [7]. It is unclear even what he means by ‘potentia’.

Reference

Heisenberg, W. 1961 On Modern Physics , London: Orion Press.

Notes

[6] W. Heisenberg, ‘Planck’s discovery and the philosophical problems of atomic physics’, pp. 3-20 in Heisenberg (1961).

[7] Heisenberg, for example, brings into his thought on quantum physics the Kantian phenomena/noumena distinction, as well as some of Bohr’s ideas on ‘complementarity’ in experimental arrangements.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Data for the Blob:

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 pm

"As Above, So Below"

Saturday, September 18, 2021

In memory of Sir Clive Sinclair…

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:36 pm

… who reportedly "died at home in London on Thursday morning" —

From a Log24 post of May 25, 2005

"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.

Friday, September 3, 2021

“The Home Cube, Where the Couple Reside”

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:12 pm

From the post "Games" of Jan. 31, 2021 —

“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to
learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the
I Ching  into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed.
‘Go ahead and try’, he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out.
Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.
But I doubt the gardener would succeed in incorporating
the world in his bamboo grove’ ” (P. 139).

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) .
Translated by Richard and Clara Winston ( London, Vintage, 2000).

Friday, July 23, 2021

Art Direction

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:47 pm

'The Power Of The Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts,' by Rudolf Arnheim

Cover illustration:

Spies returning from the land of
Canaan with a cluster of grapes.

Colored woodcut from
Biblia Sacra Germanica ,
Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1483.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

'Spies returning from the land of Canaan with a cluster of grapes,' Biblia Sacra Germanica

Villa Francke

Monday, April 5, 2021

For Your Consideration

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:23 pm

. . . And then there’s Abigail  Spencer . . . .

A line for von Braun in “Timeless” S1 E4 —

“But sometimes I hit London.”

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Gap Dance

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:40 pm

“Plato and Hegel always recognized the importance of the  gap:
they invoke the gap (the opening, the separation, the division)
and they put it to work. The inescapable gaps that cannot  be bridged,
that cannot  be filled, play a central role in Derrida’s thought and in
our response to his death. The gaps in Derrida’s work resist the  gap;
they swerve, deviate and wander (écarter ) – gaps move . When someone
or something takes pre-cedence  (goes first, goes before, goes on ahead
and gives up its place ) a gap is opened. There (are) only gaps, the gaps
that Jacques Derrida has left behind him and  in front of him: the
pre-cedence of gaps. This tracing of gaps (écarts ) is a preface to an
impossible  mourning, a mourning that one must at once avoid and
affirm. It keeps returning to Derrida’s Dissemination  (1972)….”

— Page vii of The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida ,
by Sean Gaston (Continuum Books, London/New York, 2006)

Later in the same book —

Friday, March 19, 2021

Another Scarlet Witch

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:04 am

Also on 25th October 2006 —

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Time Class

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:44 pm

The two most recent posts today on Kate Beckinsale’s Instagram:

Sunday, March 7, 2021

Nighttown Humor*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:07 am

“The hallucinatory, Joycean night-town through which
Pig and Runt roam is effectively conjured . . . .”

The New York Times

“An dat liddle baba he look righ inta me, yeah.”

Disco Pigs script

* As opposed to London Humor . . .

“Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?”

Disco Pigs star Elaine Cassidy in a later entertainment:

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Games

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:33 pm

The ivory-tower games of the previous post, Space Poetics,
suggest a review of Hesse on the I Ching

“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to
learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the
I Ching  into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed.
‘Go ahead and try’, he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out.
Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.
But I doubt the gardener would succeed in incorporating
the world in his bamboo grove’ ” (P. 139).

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) .
Translated by Richard and Clara Winston ( London, Vintage, 2000).

The above passage is as quoted and cited in

“Language Games in the Ivory Tower:
Comparing the Philosophical Investigations  with
Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ,”
by Georgina Edwards
First published: 13 December 2019,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9752.12389 .

The cited publication date was also the date of death for
a Harvard classmate of mine.  As an alumnus of Phillips Andover,
he might have preferred Oliver Wendell Holmes to Hesse.

Saturday, January 2, 2021

Onward and Upward with the Arts

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:45 pm

An older “Methodist hymnbook” apparently had 1026  hymns —
The Methodist Hymn Book,
Illustrated with Biography, History,
Incident, and Anecdote ,
by George John Stevenson.
Second edition, London, Charles H. Kelly, 1894 —

Hymn 834 — I seek Thy kingdom first
Hymn 625 — Out of the depth of self-despair
Hymn 910 — God of truth, and power, and grace
Hymn 842 — Father, I know that all my life
Hymn 366 — I soon shall hear thy quick’ning voice

The 1933 Methodist Hymn Book  has the above-mentioned 984  hymns.
In that  book, the above numbers refer to . . .

834 — Above the clear blue sky
625 — I to the hills will lift mine eyes
910 — These things shall be: a loftier race
842 — Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild
366 — Jesus! Redeemer, Saviour, Lord

I prefer the list from the older book.

Friday, October 30, 2020

Rare Shells and Stratagems

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:15 am

Patricia Lockwood quoting Nabokov —

‘I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water
with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible
upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which
to my confused adversary was all ooze and
squid-cloud.’ Conceptions of space, dimension,
movement, strategy.

London Review of Books ,
Vol. 42 No. 21 · 5 November 2020

Related images —

From this journal on October 26:

From this journal this morning:

A dancer forms a heart shape with her hands. Finishing the gesture,
she recovers the point missing from the bottom of the above shield . . .

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Space X File

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

"Sometimes I hit London."

— Saying ascribed to Wernher von Braun

Inscribed Carpenter's Square:

In Latin, NORMA

Friday, May 8, 2020

Production Values

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:53 pm

From Log24 on August 30, 2013

Portrait, in the 2013 film Oblivion , of  a 2005 graduate
of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art —

London derrière.

From a 2015 film viewed last night —

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Notes for a Wake

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:52 am

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Puzzle Pictures

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:27 pm
 

A doodle from 2012’s  Feast of the Epiphany

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120106-CathyHull-Hillman-Detail.jpg

A doodle based on a post for Twelfth Night, 2003

IMAGE- Quilt blocks- Devil's Claws and Yankee Puzzle

IMAGE- 'Yankee Doodle went to London' with musical notes

Friday, January 10, 2020

In Memoriam: Mike Resnick

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

Science fiction author Mike Resnick "died very early today,
January 10, 2020, a little after midnight," his daughter wrote,
according to a Heavy.com article dated "Jan 9, 2020 at 11:07 am."

That date of death accordingly should be "January 9, 2020." 
But perhaps the saying "print the legend" is relevant here. 

For related fiction, see Resnick's The Dark Lady  in this journal
and

"There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night."

[Link added.]

According to quoteinvestigator.com, this is from the
December 19, 1923, Punch, or The London Charivari ,
Volume 165, "Relativity" (Limerick), page 591, column 1.

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Dialogue

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:09 pm

Saturday, November 9, 2019

Wall

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:34 am
 

"Nor again will I pretend that, as Bacon asserts, `the pleasure and delight of knowledge and learning far surpasseth all other in nature'. This is too much the language of a salesman crying his own wares. The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections; and therefore, especially in the season of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is likely enough to be neglected and lightly esteemed in comparison with other pursuits offering much stronger immediate attractions. But the pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the years go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say `my mind to me a kingdom is'; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall."

– A.E. Housman, Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Latin,
University College, London, 1892
, as quoted at . . .

http://spenceralley.blogspot.com/2016/01/
housman-manifesto.html

Friday, July 12, 2019

Holloway Today

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

"The area is home to many artists and people who work in
 the media, including many journalists, writers and professionals 
working in film and television." — Wikipedia

Tusen takk to My Square Lady —

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Fire on the Water

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:13 pm

Related literary remarks from The Crimson Abyss 
(a Log24 post of March 29, 2017) —

Prospero's Children  was first published by HarperCollins,
London, in 1999. A statement by the publisher provides
an instance of the famous "much-needed gap." —

"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children 
steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
  and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld , and
is destined to become a modern classic."

Related imagery from The Crimson Abyss —

See as well posts of June 6, 2004, and May 22, 2004.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

“Crossword Omen” Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:14 pm

An image from earlier Log24 posts tagged Crossword Omen

Portrait, in the 2013 film Oblivion , of  a 2005 graduate
of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art —

London derrière.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Cavell’s Matrix

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 am

From an obituary for Stanley Cavell, Harvard philosopher
who reportedly died at 91 on Tuesday,  June 19:

The London Review of Books  weblog yesterday —

"Michael Wood reviewed [Cavell’s] 
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow  in 2005:

'The ordinary slips away from us. If we ignore it, we lose it.
If we look at it closely, it becomes extraordinary, the way
words or names become strange if we keep staring at them.
The very notion turns into a baffling riddle.' "

See also, in this  journal, Tuesday morning's Ici vient M. Jordan  and
this  morning's previous post.

Update of 3:24 AM from my RSS feed —

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Sometimes Function Follows Form

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:45 pm

Function —

Follows —

Form —

Related material: Eight years ago today, Eliza Doolittle Day 2010.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

A Titan of the Field

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:45 am
 

On the late Cambridge astronomer Donald Lynden-Bell —

"As an academic at a time when students listened and lecturers lectured, he had the disconcerting habit of instead picking on a random undergraduate and testing them on the topic. One former student, now a professor, remembered how he would 'ask on-the-spot questions while announcing that his daughter would solve these problems at the breakfast table'.

He got away with it because he was genuinely interested in the work of his colleagues and students, and came to be viewed with great affection by them. He also got away with it because he was well established as a titan of the field."

The London Times  on Feb. 8, 2018, at 5 PM (British time)

Related material —

Two Log24 posts from yesteday, Art Wars and The Void.

See as well the field GF(9)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120220-CoxeterFig10.jpg

and the 3×3 grid as a symbol of Apollo
    (an Olympian rather than a Titan) —

 .

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Portland News

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

An obituary from this afternoon suggests a review of
a Log24 post from last year — 

See also today's earlier post Once in a Lullaby and yesterday's
London Daily Mail — "Kristen Stewart Cuts a Cool Figure" —

.

Monday, August 7, 2017

Putting the “Times” in “New York Times”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:30 pm

 

See also Noon for London in this  journal on the
above "Starting to See Pictures" upload date in 2016.

For a tale about that date, April 4, see today's  noon post.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

A Circle of Influence

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

In memory of Doris Lessing and Clancy Sigal

". . . along with [R. D.] Laing they formed 'a circle
of almost incestuous mutual influence
. . . ."

— Sam Roberts, The New York Times , July 21 obituary of Sigal

"Thus I would wish to emphasize that
our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often
the abdication of ecstasy,
the betrayal of our true potentialities,
that many of us are only too successful
in acquiring a false self
to adapt to false realities.

But let it stand.
This was the work of an old young man.
If I am older, I am now also younger."

— R. D. Laing, London, September 1964,
preface to the Pelican edition of 
The Divided Self: An Existential Study
in Sanity and Madness  
(Penguin Books, 1965)
 

"My Back Pages," by Bob Dylan, Verse 3 —

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Un-thought of, though, somehow

[Refrain]
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

— From an album released August 8, 1964

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Art’s Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

The Crimson Abyss

"And as the characters in the meme twitch into the abyss
that is the sky, this meme will disappear into whatever
internet abyss swallowed MySpace."

—Staff writer Kamila Czachorowski, Harvard Crimson , March 29

1984

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

2010

Logo design for Stack Exchange Math by Jin Yang
 

Recent posts now tagged Crimson Abyss suggest
the above logo be viewed in light of a certain page 29

"… as if into a crimson abyss …." —

Update of 9 PM ET March 29, 2017:

Prospero's Children  was first published by HarperCollins,
London, in 1999. A statement by the publisher provides
an instance of the famous "much-needed gap." —

"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children 
steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
  and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld , and
is destined to become a modern classic."

Related imagery —

See also "Hexagram 64 in Context" (Log24, March 16, 2017).

Monday, January 30, 2017

Devotional Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:16 pm

Quotations by and for an artist who reportedly died
on Sunday, January 15, 2017 —

"What drives my vision is a need to locate
a 'genetically felt' devotional space
in which a simultaneous multiplicity
of disparate realities coexists."

— The late Ciel Bergman, in her webpage
     "Artist's Statement"

"Once a registered nurse who worked in a hospital
psychiatric ward, Ms. Bergman was a struggling
single mom of two when she couldn’t resist the pull
of her art. In 1969, she entered a painting in the
Jack London Invitational, an art contest in Oakland,
and won first prize. This compelled her to enroll at
the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned
her master of fine arts with honors in painting."

Sam Whiting in the San Francisco Chronicle

See also Oakland in this journal and
"Only a peculiar can enter a time loop."

"The peculiar kind of 'identity' that is attributed to
apparently altogether heterogeneous 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."

— Ernst Cassirer, quoted here on
     Midsummer Eve (St. John's Eve), 2010

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Complexity to Simplicity

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

Cézanne "showed how it was possible to pass
from the complexity of the appearance of things
to the geometrical simplicity which design demands."

— Roger Fry in the catalogue for the 1910 London 
exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists,"
according to

See also A Roger Fry Reader 
(edited by Christopher Reed,
University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Thursday, October 6, 2016

A Labyrinth for Octavio

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

The title refers to the previous post.

From Middlemarch  (1871-2), by George Eliot, Ch. III —

"Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton's 'affable archangel;' and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or speedy work."

See also the term correspondence  in this journal.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Elegance

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Detail from the cover of the 1967 first issue of London's OZ magazine —

Other OZ news in Tuesday evening's online New York Times

"Well, I tried to make it Sunday …" — America lyrics

Thursday, May 19, 2016

I have seen it, I have seen it!

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:28 am

The title is a quote from Sir Galahad in
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Immediately following these words

Note also posts on The Hourglass Code .

This  post was suggested by an album cover 
mentioned in tonight's New York Times  story 
on the May 11 death at 73 in London of one
David King , a graphic designer and design historian — 

"For the third Hendrix album, 'Electric Ladyland,'
Mr. King commissioned a photograph of 19
nude women, in various sizes and shapes, which
he intended as a rebuttal to the Playboy image of
women. In the United States, it was regarded as
risqué and was replaced with a head shot of Hendrix."

— William Grimes

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Blackboard Jungle Continues

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

Images from a post titled For Stephen King

IMAGE- Long division, yellow chalk, 12977 divided by 23

IMAGE- From a Lawrence Block mystery 'A Stab in the Dark'- 'There was a problem in long division worked out in yellow chalk on the blackboard' and 'You wanted a picture'-Lynn London

Related images —

"Pray for the grace of accuracy" — Robert Lowell

Monday, March 14, 2016

Sausage Party* Humor

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

On Seth Rogen —

"He has described his parents, who met in Israel 
on a kibbutz, as 'radical Jewish socialists.' [a"

Wikipedia

* "The film will have its world premiere at the 
South by Southwest Film Festival on March 14, 2016. [b] "

Wikipedia

Notes from Wikipedia —

a.  Patterson, John (September 14, 2007). "Comedy's new centre of gravity"
    The Guardian  (London: Guardian News and Media Limited).

b.  D'Alessandro, Anthony (March 1, 2016). 
     "Sony Is Throwing A ‘Sausage Party’ At SXSW…". Deadline.com. 

Monday, December 7, 2015

Wittgenstein Illustrated

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:17 pm

From "AMNESIA: VARIOUS, LUMINOUS, FIXED,"
An exhibition by Joseph Kosuth at
Sprüth Magers Gallery London,
NOVEMBER 26 2014 – FEBRUARY 14 2015 —

This journal, NOVEMBER 26 2014 –

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:00 PM 

Mathematics:  Galois-Plane Models.

Narrative: "The Dreaming Jewels."

This journal, FEBRUARY 14 2015 —

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

The Virgin’s Island

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:42 am

From Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies 
(London and New York, Macmillan and Co., 1872 edition, p. 13) —

The title of this post, "The Virgin's Island," suggests one possible answer
to the following question

Philosopher Jerry Fodor parodied Wittgenstein with
a page of elaborations on Michael Frayn’s own parody,
'Wittgenstein on Fog-like Sensations,' of which this
is the best:

'I can’t see a thing in this fog.'  Which  thing?

David Auerbach at Slate.com yesterday
 

The Virgin's Island:

Two frames from the Jodie Foster film "Contact"—

Related material — Welcome to Noplace (Log24 on June 10, 2015).

Friday, August 7, 2015

Anschauliche Geometrie

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason ,
translated by Norman Kemp Smith,
London, Macmillan, 1929, p. 92 —

"Without sensibility no object 
would be given to us, 
without reflection no object 
would be thought.
Concepts without percepts are empty,
percepts without concepts are blind.
"

Another version

"Without sensibility no object
would be given to us,
without understanding no object
would be thought.
Thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind.
"

From the original —

"Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns
kein Gegenstand gegeben,
und ohne Verstand
keiner gedacht werden.
Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer,
Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.
"

 Immanuel Kant 

Kritik der reinen Vernunft
   I. Transzendentale Elementarlehre
      Zweiter Teil. Die transzendentale Logik
          Einleitung. Idee einer transzendentalen Logik

Related remarks on mathematics —

In memory of the late Ernest E. Shult, some less classical remarks —

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Traveling Salesmen

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

    Click the above image for the IMDb page from which it is taken.

Peter J. Cameron today:

"Course material associated with Jack Edmonds’ lectures
can be found here."

See also High Concept (Jan. 21, 2015) —

Image from the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman" 

— and another eye in a triangle 

From the Log24 post Prize (June 7, 2015)

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Core Values

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:20 am

"Yankee Doodle went to London" — Song lyric

  November Man

Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”

— The Missing ART   (Log24, November 7th, 2014)

ART —

"Faculty Approve Theater Concentration, Affirmation
of Integrity" — Recent Harvard Crimson  headline

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Brit Award

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:06 am

"The Brit Awards are the British equivalent
of the American Grammy Awards." — Wikipedia 

Detail of an image from yesterday's 5:30 PM ET post:

Related material:

From a review: "Imagine 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'
set in 20th-century London, and then imagine it
written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies
but in Dante and the things of the spirit, and you
might begin to get a picture of Charles Williams's
novel Many Dimensions ."

See also Solomon's Seal (July 26, 2012).

Friday, November 14, 2014

Another Opening, Another Show

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 pm

“What happens when you mix the brilliant wit of Noel Coward
with the intricate plotting of Agatha Christie? Set during a
weekend in an English country manor in 1932, Death by Design
is a delightful and mysterious ‘mash-up’ of two of the greatest
English writers of all time. Edward Bennett, a playwright, and
his wife Sorel Bennett, an actress, flee London and head to
Cookham after a disastrous opening night. But various guests
arrive unexpectedly….”

Samuel French (theatrical publisher) on a play that
opened in Houston on September 9, 2011.

Related material:

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Diabolically Complex Riddle

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

Steve Chawkins in the Los Angeles Times
Friday, September 26, 2014, 12:09 PM LA time —

"Tom Tombrello, a Caltech physics professor for more than
50 years and an inspiration for freshmen who had to grapple
with diabolically complex riddles to enter his legendary class
on scientific thinking [Physics 11], has died. He was 78.

Tombrello collapsed Tuesday [Sept. 23, 2014] on a bus
between terminals at London's Heathrow airport, his wife,
Stephanie, said. The cause of his death has not yet been determined….

… Tombrello accepted only a handful of students for each year's
session of Physics 11."

How many students is a handful?

Related material from this journal on the day of the professor's death:

Thursday, May 15, 2014

“You’re in my place.”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm

The title is a line from a preview of the new
film “The Double,” starring Jesse Eisenberg:

Related lines from T. S. Eliot:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

For the Perplexed

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:48 pm

From a New York Times  obituary by Bruce Weber tonight—

Charles Marowitz, Director and Playwright, Dies at 82

“There are two kinds of bafflement in the theater: the kind that fascinates as it perplexes, and the kind that just perplexes,” he wrote in The Times in 1969 in an essay about Mr. Shepard’s play “La Turista,” which had recently opened in London. “If a play doesn’t make quick sense, but enters into some kind of dialogue with our subconscious, we tend to admit it to that lounge where we entertain interesting-albeit-unfamiliar strangers.

“If it only baffles, there are several courses open to us: we can assume it is ‘above our heads’ or directed ‘to some other kind of person,’ or regretfully conclude that it confuses us because it is itself confused. However, the fear of being proved wrong is so great today that almost every new work which isn’t patently drivel gets the benefit of the doubt.”

 Another play by Sam Shepard mentioned in the obituary suggests a review of…

Thursday, April 24, 2014

The Inscape of 24

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

“The more intellectual, less physical, the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object, the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison the mind has to keep making between
the whole and the parts, the parts and the whole.”

— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins ,
edited by Humphry House, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 126, as quoted by Philip A.
Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament 

Related material from All Saints’ Day in 2012:

Talk pointing out that R. T. Curtis's 1974 construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24) is taken from Turyn.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Narratives

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

Or: The Confessions of Nat Tate

“A convincing lie is, in its own way, a tiny, perfect narrative.”
— William Boyd, “A Short History of the Short Story” (2006)

“A novel written in the first-person singular has certain powerful
narrative advantages, especially when it takes the form of a ‘confession.'”
— William Boyd, “Memoir of a Plagiarist” (1994)

IMAGE- 'Siri Hustvedt Interview: Fakes and Fiction'

IMAGE- 'Siri Hustvedt Interview: Fakes and Fiction'

From a Log24 post yesterday —

For Little Man Tate —

IMAGE- Wechsler block-design cubes and related WAIS-R manual

Related material — Wechsler in this journal and an earlier Siri Hustvedt
art novel, from 2003 —

Mark and Lucille, Bill and Violet, Al and Regina, etc., etc., etc. —

IMAGE- Siri Hustvedt on the name 'Wechsler' in 'What I Loved'

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Blockheads continues

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

For Little Man Tate —

Related material — Wechsler in this journal.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Obiter Dictum

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The title is both a legal phrase and a phrase
used by Tom Wolfe in his writings on art.

See, too, the pattern of nine triangular half-squares
arranged in a 3×3 square used in the logo of  the
Jean Stephen art galleries in Minneapolis…

IMAGE - Former location of Jean Stephen art galleries

… and in a print at the Tate in London  (click to enlarge)—

See as well an obit of the print’s artist, Justin Knowles, who reportedly died
on Feb. 24, 2004.

Some instances of that date in this journal are related to Knowles’s aesthetics.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

ART WARS (continued)

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

A sequel to Friday afternoon's Diamond Star

Diamond Star —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110905-StellaOctangulaView.jpg

Log24 on January 7, 2012 —

A doodle from this year's [2012’s]  Feast of the Epiphany

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120106-CathyHull-Hillman-Detail.jpg

A doodle based on today's previous post and on
a post for Twelfth Night, 2003

IMAGE- Quilt blocks- Devil's Claws and Yankee Puzzle

IMAGE- 'Yankee Doodle went to London' with musical notes

Context — All posts tagged "Eden."

Friday, January 31, 2014

Diamond Star

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From The Diamond and the Star ,  by John Warden*
(London, Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd.,  June 1, 2009) —

(The quotation is from Kipling's "The Conundrum of the Workshops.")

IMAGE- The Devil's question - 'It's pretty, but is it Art?'

Answer — Some would say "Yes."

Part I: From a search for "Diamond Star" in this journal —

The Diamond Star

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110905-StellaOctangulaView.jpg

Part II: From the Facebook photos of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche—

* Obituary link, added at 10:45 PM ET Jan. 31 after reading  a publisher's note 
  saying that "The author sadly died before the book was published."

  Perhaps sadly, perhaps not.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

ART WARS

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

Continued from Pensée  (Feb. 10, 2012).*

Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker  of Dec. 2, 2013—

" When one speaks of Zwirner the gallerist, one is speaking
as much of a handful of women in their forties who have been
with the gallery fifteen or more years. Zwirner has made them
partners, meaning, he says, that they 'will participate in profits
as the gallery does well.' They are Angela Choon, who runs the
London gallery; Hanna Schouwink, from Holland; Bellatrix Hubert,
from France; and Kristine Bell, from outside Buffalo. Seeing them
all together, at an opening or a dinner, brings to mind David
Carradine’s gang of glamorous assassins in 'Kill Bill.' " 

See also the previous post, on An Object of Beauty.

* For some related art, see Square Round.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Structure and Character

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

(Continued from May 4, 2013)

"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"

Warren Zevon

"It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses,
Has broken her spell."

— D. H. Lawrence in a poem on a London blackout
during a bombing raid in 1917. See also today's previous
posts, Down Under and Howl.

Backstory— Recall, from history's nightmare on this date,
the Battle of Borodino and the second  London Blitz.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

The Crossword Omen

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:48 am

August 30, 11:01 AM  Comment-Worthy

August 30, 12:00 PM  Hymn

August 30, 7:20 PM  Her

August 31, 8:23 PM  What Where

September 1, 5:48 AM  The Crossword Omen —

IMAGE- Crossword Nexus site, with top photo of word 'OMEN,' giving 'BUM' as the leading possible answer to the clue 'London derriere'

Related material: A critic's remarks on the missing character "Bum"
in Beckett's play "What Where" and Rimbaud on the vowel "U"—

(Click to enlarge.)

Friday, August 30, 2013

Her

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

(A sequel to today's noon post, Hymn)

Portrait, in the 2013 film Oblivion , of  a 2005 graduate
of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art —

London derrière.

Hymn

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

Londonderry Air

"By recalling the past and freezing the present
he could open the gates of time…."

— Mark Helprin,  In Sunlight and in Shadow

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Immersion

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

      Part of a New York Times  banner ad last night—

IMAGE- 'Fashion Week: Immerse Yourself'

     (Fashion week dates 2012 — 
     New York Sept. 6-13, London Sept. 14-18,
     Milan Sept. 19-25, Paris Sept. 25-Oct. 3.)

     Some related prose suggested by a link in
     last night's Log24 post

The theory, he had explained, was that the persona
was a four-dimensional figure, a tessaract in space,
the elementals Fire, Earth, Air, and Water permutating
and pervolving upon themselves, making a cruciform
(in three-space projection) figure of equal lines and
ninety degree angles.

The Gameplayers of Zan , a novel by M. A. Foster

IMAGE- Immersion in a fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

      See also, if you can find a copy, Jeff Riggenbach's 
      "Science Fiction as Will and Idea," Riverside Quarterly 
       Vol. 5, No. 3 (whole number 19, August 1972, ed. by
       Leland Sapiro et al.), 168-177.

      Some background—
      Tuesday's Simple Skill and 4D Ambassador,
      as well as Now What? from May 23, 2012.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Hey

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The end of the beginning of the London Games 
suggests other games —

Shadows (July 14) —

IMAGE- G. H. Hardy around 1900, strongly resembling Paul McCartney

A Game of Shadows — "You know my methods."

Related religious material —

The Feast of Saint  Jude,  2011.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Shard

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:32 am

A post suggested by an article on The Shard of London
in this morning's Wall Street Journal—

IMAGE- Video, 'Unknown. Liam Neeson Tribute,' 3:27 of 3:54, Hand with Shard

As for the "Personal Jesus" song that accompanies the above video tribute,
listen to Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan in recent Narnia  films
and consider the saying of C. S. Lewis that Aslan is not a tame  lion.

Here Lewis may, if one likes, be regarded as the "inkling" of Heidegger
in last night's post—

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Play and Interplay

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The last paragraph of the previous post
(as updated at about 7:20 PM today)
suggests a search for the phrase
"play and interplay" that yields…

"He had accepted the world as the world,
but now he was comprehending the
organization of it, the play and interplay
of force and matter."

Martin Eden  by Jack London

This in turn suggests a review of the film "Queen to Play" —

(Background: Nabokov + Patterns.)

The review announces showings of the film at Clark University
in Worcester, Mass., on Sunday, October 30, 2011.

See also this journal on that date— "The Idea Idea"— and
references to a knight figure from today's  date in 1985.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Heralds of Light

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am

On Harvard's Memorial Church in 2007—

"John Harvard left no male heir to carry on the Harvard family name. Instead, the naming of the College in his honor was the undying legacy that his friends decided to grant to him. In so doing, they were saying to every succeeding generation that this was the kind of man whom they wanted others to emulate, whose spirit of courage, self-sacrifice and generosity embodied the very best of what they hoped Harvard College should become. 

On November 4, 2007, the gift of a tablet was presented to Harvard Memorial Church by the dean of Southwark Cathedral, London, the Rev. Colin Slee, and Emmanuel College, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Harvard's baptism. This, along with a combined brief exhibit called 'Heralds of Light,' which consisted in part of showing John Harvard's baptismal page from the Southwark records and his Emmanuel College signature— brought over for the occasion from England by Southwark and Emmanuel representatives—was about all the attention that Harvard University could muster to remember the 400th birthday of its namesake."

— Arseny James Melnick (A.M., Harvard University, 1977),
     personal website on John Harvard

Related material from the entertainment world—

Phoenix Senior: "As the plaque reads, this is John Harvard,
founder of Harvard University in 1638. It's also called
the Statue of Three Lies. What are the three lies?"

— "The Social Network"

Also on November 4, 2007—

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Salvation for Gopnik

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 am

Yesterday afternoon's post Universals Revisited linked
(indirectly) to an article in the current New Yorker  on
the Book of Revelation —

"The Big Reveal: Why Does the Bible End That Way?"

The connection in that post between universals and Revelation
may have eluded readers unfamiliar with a novel by
Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion  (London, Gollancz, 1931).

The article's author, Adam Gopnik, appears in the following
Google Book Search, which may or may not help such readers.

Should Gopnik desire further information on Williams and salvation,
he may consult Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence
and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams
 ,
by Dennis L. Weeks (American University Studies: Series 4, English
Language and Literature. Vol. 125), XV + 117 pp., Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

The ninth item in the above search refers to a boxed set
of the seven novels themselves—

.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Hegel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:08 pm

Those impressed by George Steiner's remark on Hegel in the previous post may consult…

(Click to enlarge.)

(The Christian Examiner.  Volume LXXX. New Series, Volume I.  January, March, May, 1866.
New York: James Miller, Publisher, 522, Broadway.  Boston: Walker, Fuller, & Co.

No. CCLIV, Art. IV.– THE SECRET OF HEGEL.
By C. C. Everett, pp. 196-207.

A review of…

The Secret of Hegel, being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter.
By James Hutchinson Sterling. In two volumes.
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green. 1865. 8vo, 2 vols.)

On Hegel, from the review—

"He starts not from the beginning, but from the heart, of the world.
There never was a time when this pure Being— which, in its
undivided absoluteness, is indistinguishable from nothing;
as pure, unbroken light is indistinguishable from darkness—

was by itself alone; but this absolute Being is yet the foundation
and the groundwork of whatever is."

For more on Hegel's logic, see Marxists.org.

See also Steiner on chess and Lenin in The New Yorker
(September 7, 1968, page 133).

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Closure

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

Christopher Hitchens on J. K. Rowling—

“We must not let in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot remarked in another connection, and the wish to have everything clarified is eventually self-defeating in its own terms. In her correct determination to bring down the curtain decisively, Rowling has gone further than she should, and given us not so much a happy ending as an ending which suggests that evil has actually been defeated (you should forgive the expression) for good.

Greater authors— Arthur Conan Doyle most notably— have been in the same dilemma when seeking closure. And, like Conan Doyle, Rowling has won imperishable renown for giving us an identifiable hero and a fine caricature of a villain, and for making a fictional bit of King’s Cross station as luminous as a certain address on nearby Baker Street. It is given to few authors to create a world apart, and to populate it as well as illustrate it in the mind.

"A fictional bit of King's Cross Station"—

Throughout the series, Harry has traveled to King's Cross Station, either to depart for Hogwarts or return to London on the Hogwarts Express. The station has always symbolized the crossroad between the Muggle world and the Wizarding realm and Harry's constant shuffling between, and his conflict with, the two extremes. As Harry now finds himself at a transition point between life and death, it is purely to be expected that he would see it within his own mind as a simulacrum of that station. And though Dumbledore assures Harry that he (Harry) is not actually dead, it seems Harry can choose that option if he so wishes. Harry has literally and figuratively been stripped bare, and must decide either to board a train that will transport him to the "other side", or return to the living world…. — Wikibooks.org

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Paranoia Strikes Deep

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

Tens of Millions of Smartphones Come With Spyware
Preinstalled, Security Analyst Says

Published December 01, 2011 – FoxNews.com

For details, see comments at YouTube.

Related entertainment—

1. Tara Fitzgerald in "New World Disorder" (1999)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111201-NewWorldDisorder-TaraFitzgerald.jpg

We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more

2. Tara Fitzgerald in "Broken Glass" (2011)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111201-TaraFitgerald-BrokenGlass.jpg

And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale

Procol Harum song at beginning and end of "The Net" (1995)

“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,
quoted here on Kristallnacht 2011

See also, from "The Net"—

Decompiling Wolfenstein

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111201-DecompilingWolfenstein.jpg

"In Wolfenstein 3D , the player assumes the role of an American soldier
of Polish descent… attempting to escape from the Nazi stronghold of
Castle Wolfenstein." — Wikipedia

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

For Galois

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

Tue Oct 25, 2011 08:26 AM [London time]
from the weblog of Peter Cameron

Today is Évariste Galois’ 200th birthday.

The event will be celebrated with the publication of a new transcription
and translation of Galois’ works (edited by Peter M. Neumann)
by the European Mathematical Society. The announcement is here.

Cameron's further remarks are also of interest.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Sequel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

From post 4017 in this journal (do not click links)—

"Thanks to University Diaries  for an entry on Clancy Martin,
a philosophy professor in the 'show me' state, and his experiences with AA."

Neither link in this quote works anymore.
See instead Martin in the London Review of Books .

Lottery hermeneutics, however, still seems usable.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111006-NYlottery.jpg

Today's midday NY lottery "163" may be taken as a sequel
to both the page number "162" in today's noon post

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111006-HumboldtsGift-PenguinUSA1996-P163.jpg

Humboldt's Gift , page 163 (Penguin Classics, 1996)

— and a sequel to University Diaries ' meditation today on the Nobel literature prize,
which includes a quote from the winner:

"At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel.
Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows…. It is I! It is I!"

Tomas Tranströmer, "The Name"

As for the evening NY numbers 014 and 5785, see Hexagram 14,
Not Even Wrong , and 5/7/85.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Opening Act

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am

A Log24 post yesterday morning referred to a Neil Young song.

That song could, it turns out, be regarded as an opening act for a musician who died in London early this  morning—

AP story— … Spokesman Mick Houghton said Wednesday that [Bert] Jansch died early Wednesday morning….

Jansch was a founding member of the British folk group Pentangle and had inspired a generation of rock and folk guitarists with his acoustic mastery….

Houghton says his final solo performances were opening for Canadian rocker Neil Young earlier this year.

In memoriam "Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming…"

Background… The Pentangle in Sir Gawain  and The Lyke-Wake Dirge performed by Pentangle.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Relativity Problem Revisited

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

A footnote was added to Finite Relativity

Background:

Weyl on what he calls the relativity problem

IMAGE- Weyl in 1949 on the relativity problem

“The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time.”

– Hermann Weyl, 1949, “Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research

“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them.”

– Hermann Weyl, 1946, The Classical Groups , Princeton University Press, p. 16

…. A note of Feb. 20, 1986, supplied an example of such coordinatizations in finite geometry. In that note, the group of mediating transformations acted directly on  coordinates within a 4×4 array. When the 4×4 array is embedded in a 4×6 array, a larger and more interesting group, M 24 (containing the original group), acts on the larger array.  There is no obvious solution to Weyl’s relativity problem for M 24.  That is, there is no obvious way* to apply exactly 24 distinct transformable coordinate-sets (or symbol-strings ) to the 24 array elements in such a way that the natural group of mediating transformations of the 24 symbol-strings is M 24. ….

Footnote of Sept. 20, 2011:

* R.T. Curtis has, it seems, a non-obvious way that involves strings of seven symbols.  His abstract for a 1990 paper says that in his construction “The generators of M 24 are defined… as permutations of twenty-four 7-cycles in the action of PSL2(7) on seven letters….”

See “Geometric Interpretations of the ‘Natural’ Generators of the Mathieu groups,” by R.T. Curtis,  Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society  (1990), Vol. 107, Issue 01, pp. 19-26. (Rec. Jan. 3, 1989, revised Feb. 3, 1989.) This paper was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.

Some related articles by Curtis:

R.T. Curtis, “Natural Constructions of the Mathieu groups,” Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc.  (1989), Vol. 106, pp. 423-429

R.T. Curtis. “Symmetric Presentations I: Introduction, with Particular Reference to the Mathieu groups M 12  and M 24” In Proceedings of 1990 LMS Durham Conference ‘Groups, Combinatorics and Geometry’  (eds. M. W. Liebeck and J. Saxl),  London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Series 165, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 380–396

R.T. Curtis, “A Survey of Symmetric Generation of Sporadic Simple Groups,” in The Atlas of Finite Groups: Ten Years On , (eds. R.T. Curtis and R.A. Wilson), London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Series 249, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 39–57

Monday, August 8, 2011

Diamond Theory vs. Story Theory (continued)

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

Some background

Richard J. Trudeau, a mathematics professor and Unitarian minister, published in 1987 a book, The Non-Euclidean Revolution , that opposes what he calls the Story Theory of truth [i.e., Quine, nominalism, postmodernism] to what he calls the traditional Diamond Theory of truth [i.e., Plato, realism, the Roman Catholic Church]. This opposition goes back to the medieval "problem of universals" debated by scholastic philosophers.

(Trudeau may never have heard of, and at any rate did not mention, an earlier 1976 monograph on geometry, "Diamond Theory," whose subject and title are relevant.)

From yesterday's Sunday morning New York Times

"Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and 'news stories' that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories…."

Drew Westen, professor at Emory University

From May 22, 2009

Poster for 'Diamonds' miniseries on ABC starting May 24, 2009

The above ad is by
  Diane Robertson Design—

Credit for 'Diamonds' miniseries poster: Diane Robertson Design, London

Diamond from last night’s
Log24 entry, with
four colored pencils from
Diane Robertson Design:

Diamond-shaped face of Durer's 'Melencolia I' solid, with  four colored pencils from Diane Robertson Design
 
See also
A Four-Color Theorem.

For further details, see Saturday's correspondences
and a diamond-related story from this afternoon's
online New York Times.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Crossing the Bridge

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:23 pm

Continued from July 15th

  Monstrance

 

In memory of painter Lucian Freud,
who died last night in London.

IMAGE- Detail of obit photo for game show artist

"Just a flesh wound."  — The Black Knight

For related material, see Crossing the Bridge
 and this morning's post  The Race.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Wittgenstein’s Diamond

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

Philosophical Investigations  (1953)

97. Thought is surrounded by a halo.
—Its essence, logic, presents an order,
in fact the a priori order of the world:
that is, the order of possibilities * ,
which must be common to both world and thought.
But this order, it seems, must be
utterly simple . It is prior  to all experience,
must run through all experience;
no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it
——It must rather be of the purest crystal.
But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction;
but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete,
as it were the hardest  thing there is
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus  No. 5.5563).

— Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe

5.5563

All propositions of our colloquial language
are actually, just as they are, logically completely in order.
That simple thing which we ought to give here is not
a model of the truth but the complete truth itself.

(Our problems are not abstract but perhaps
the most concrete that there are.)

97. Das Denken ist mit einem Nimbus umgeben.
—Sein Wesen, die Logik, stellt eine Ordnung dar,
und zwar die Ordnung a priori der Welt,
d.i. die Ordnung der Möglichkeiten ,
die Welt und Denken gemeinsam sein muß.
Diese Ordnung aber, scheint es, muß
höchst einfach  sein. Sie ist vor  aller Erfahrung;
muß sich durch die ganze Erfahrung hindurchziehen;
ihr selbst darf keine erfahrungsmäßige Trübe oder Unsicherheit anhaften.
——Sie muß vielmehr vom reinsten Kristall sein.
Dieser Kristall aber erscheint nicht als eine Abstraktion;
sondern als etwas Konkretes, ja als das Konkreteste,
gleichsam Härteste . (Log. Phil. Abh.  No. 5.5563.)

See also

Related language in Łukasiewicz (1937)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101127-LukasiewiczAdamantine.jpg

* Updates of 9:29 PM ET July 10, 2011—

A  mnemonic  from a course titled “Galois Connections and Modal Logics“—

“Traditionally, there are two modalities, namely, possibility and necessity.
The basic modal operators are usually written box (square) for necessarily
and diamond (diamond) for possibly. Then, for example, diamondP  can be read as
‘it is possibly the case that P .'”

See also Intensional Semantics , lecture notes by Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim, MIT, Spring 2007 edition—

“The diamond symbol for possibility is due to C.I. Lewis, first introduced in Lewis & Langford (1932), but he made no use of a symbol for the dual combination ¬¬. The dual symbol was later devised by F.B. Fitch and first appeared in print in 1946 in a paper by his doctoral student Barcan (1946). See footnote 425 of Hughes & Cresswell (1968). Another notation one finds is L for necessity and M for possibility, the latter from the German möglich  ‘possible.’”

Barcan, Ruth C.: 1946. “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication.” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11(1): 1–16. URL http://www.jstor.org/pss/2269159.

Hughes, G.E. & Cresswell, M.J.: 1968. An Introduction to Modal Logic. London: Methuen.

Lewis, Clarence Irving & Langford, Cooper Harold: 1932. Symbolic Logic. New York: Century.

Friday, June 24, 2011

The Cube

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

IMAGE- 'The Stars My Destination' (with cover slightly changed)

Click the above image for some background.

Related material:
Skateboard legend Andy Kessler,
this morning's The Gleaming,
and But Sometimes I Hit London.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

ART WARS continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:06 pm

This evening's New York Times  obituaries—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110622-NYTobits720PM.jpg

A work of art suggested by the first and third items above—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110614-TarantinoCar.jpg

I prefer a work of art that is structurally similar—

IMAGE- The Klein group as art

and is related to a picture, Portrait of O, from October 1, 1983—

IMAGE- A work by Cullinane pirated by artist Steve RIchards in his contribution to London's 'Piracy Project'

For a recent unexpected Web appearance of Portrait of O,
aee Abracadabra from the midnight of June 18-19.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Longest Day Continues

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:32 pm

The AND Publishing weblog page referred to in
a Sunday post has been changed to reflect the
source— my finite-geometry website— of pages
copied and altered by London artist Steve Richards
that are a large part of his contribution to the
AND Publishing Piracy Project.

The new version is as follows—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110621-ANDblog19thJune.jpg

Note, however, that the cover page is a figure titled
by Richards "metalibrarianship" that has nothing
whatever to do with the concepts in the pages he copied
from my site, finitegeometry.org/sc.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110621-SteveRichardsCoverPage.jpg

Other pages within Richards's contribution to the
Piracy Project are similarly completely unrelated to
the content of my own site, which deals with geometry.

The image on the cover page also appears, it turns out,
on a website called intertwining.org.

At that site, it occurs in the following resume item:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110621-NiteckiLogo.jpg

The links in the resume item do not work,
but some background is available at a page titled
"Circularity, Practicality and Philosophy of Librarianship, or
The Making of 'The Nitecki Trilogy'"
by Joanne Twining.

Other images in Richards's contribution to the Piracy Project also occur
in Twining's webpage "Dimensional Advances for Information Architecture."

I never heard of Twining or Nitecki before I encountered Richards's
Piracy Project contribution, and I do not wish to be associated
again in any way with Twining, with Nitecki, or with Richards.

Truth, Beauty, Bullshit

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:16 pm

This post is for the Stonehenge solstice crowd, who might,
like the London artist Steve Richards, confuse bullshit
with scholarship and inspire the same confusion
in others.

IMAGE- Motto of Forgotten Books, with pirated quotation from Shakespeare that might be appropriate for London's 'Piracy Project'

The image, apparently an epigraph put there
by the author, is from the Forgotten Books edition
of Cassirer's Substance and Function:
And Einstein's Theory of Relativity
.

This is a scanned copy of the 1923 original.
The egg-figure above, however, is from the publisher's
prefatory notes and not  from the original.

A check of other Forgotten Books publications
shows that the motto and the Bacon
attribution are those of Forgotten Books and
not  of the authors they reprint — in particular,
not  of Ernst Cassirer, who would probably
be dismayed to have this nonsense associated
with his work.

Why nonsense? The attribution to Francis Bacon is
false. The lines are from "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
by William Shakespeare.

Vorspiel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:19 am

This post was suggested by a book advertised
above A. Whitney Ellsworth's obituary in tonight's 
online New York Times .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110621-Vorspiel.jpg

See also the following illustrations—

From this journal on June 1, 2008:

Click for background

Permutahedron for the symmetric group on four elements

From artist Steve Richards on January 14, 2010:

Click to enlarge

IMAGE- Interview with Steve Richards, who later contributed to London's 'Piracy Project'

Piracy Project

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:02 am

Recent piracy of my work as part of a London art project suggests the following.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110620-PirateWithParrotSm.jpg

           From http://www.trussel.com/rls/rlsgb1.htm

The 2011 Long John Silver Award for academic piracy
goes to ….

Hermann Weyl, for the remark on objectivity and invariance
in his classic work Symmetry  that skillfully pirated
the much earlier work of philosopher Ernst Cassirer.

And the 2011 Parrot Award for adept academic idea-lifting
goes to …

Richard Evan Schwartz of Brown University, for his
use, without citation, of Cullinane’s work illustrating
Weyl’s “relativity problem” in a finite-geometry context.

For further details, click on the above names.

Monday, June 20, 2011

The Search for Invariants

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:29 am

The title of a recent contribution to a London art-related "Piracy Project" begins with the phrase "The Search for Invariants."

A search for that phrase  elsewhere yields a notable 1944* paper by Ernst Cassirer, "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception."

Page 20: "It is a process of objectification, the characteristic nature
and tendency of which finds expression in the formation of invariants."

Cassirer's concepts seem related to Weyl's famous remark that

“Objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms.”
Symmetry  (Princeton University Press, 1952, page 132)

See also this journal on June 23, 2010— "Group Theory and Philosophy"— as well as some Math Forum remarks on Cassirer and Weyl.

Update of 6 to 7:50 PM June 20, 2011—

Weyl's 1952 remark seems to echo remarks in 1910 and 1921 by Cassirer.
See Cassirer in 1910 and 1921 on Objectivity.

Another source on Cassirer, invariance, and objectivity—

The conclusion of Maja Lovrenov's 
"The Role of Invariance in Cassirer’s Interpretation of the Theory of Relativity"—

"… physical theories prove to be theories of invariants
with regard to certain groups of transformations and
it is exactly the invariance that secures the objectivity
of a physical theory."

— SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 42 (2/2006), pp. 233–241

A search in Weyl's Symmetry  for any reference to Ernst Cassirer yields no results.

* Published in French in 1938.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Sunday, March 27, 2011

A Many-Sided Theory

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:48 pm

On this date 106 years ago…

Prefatory note from Hudson's classic Kummer's Quartic Surface ,
Cambridge University Press, 1905—

RONALD WILLIAM HENRY TURNBULL HUDSON would have
been twenty-nine years old in July of this year; educated at
St Paul's School, London, and at St John's College, Cambridge,
he obtained the highest honours in the public examinations of the
University, in 1898, 1899, 1900; was elected a Fellow of St John's
College in 1900; became a Lecturer in Mathematics at University
College, Liverpool, in 1902; was D.Sc. in the University of London
in 1903; and died, as the result of a fall while climbing in Wales,
in the early autumn of 1904….

A many-sided theory such as that of this volume is
generally to be won only by the work of many lives;
one who held so firmly the faith that the time is well spent
could ill be spared.

— H. F. Baker, 27 March 1905

For some more recent remarks related to the theory, see
Defining Configurations and its updates, March 20-27, 2011.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Caesarian

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am

The Dreidel Is Cast

The Nietzschean phrase "ruling and Caesarian spirits" occurred in yesterday morning's post "Novel Ending."

That post was followed yesterday morning by a post marking, instead, a beginning— that of Hanukkah 2010. That Jewish holiday, whose name means "dedication," commemorates the (re)dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC.

The holiday is celebrated with, among other things, the Jewish version of a die—  the dreidel . Note the similarity of the dreidel  to an illustration of The Stone*  on the cover of the 2001 Eerdmans edition of  Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions

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

For mathematics related to the dreidel , see Ivars Peterson's column on this date fourteen years ago.
For mathematics related (if only poetically) to The Stone , see "Solomon's Cube" in this journal.

Here is the opening of Many Dimensions

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

For a fanciful linkage of the dreidel 's concept of chance to The Stone 's concept of invariant law, note that the New York Lottery yesterday evening (the beginning of Hanukkah) was 840. See also the number 840 in the final post (July 20, 2002) of the "Solomon's Cube" search.

Some further holiday meditations on a beginning—

Today, on the first full day of Hanukkah, we may or may not choose to mark another beginning— that of George Frederick James Temple, who was born in London on this date in 1901. Temple, a mathematician, was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1951-1953. From his MacTutor biography

"In 1981 (at the age of 80) he published a book on the history of mathematics. This book 100 years of mathematics (1981) took him ten years to write and deals with, in his own words:-

those branches of mathematics in which I had been personally involved.

He declared that it was his last mathematics book, and entered the Benedictine Order as a monk. He was ordained in 1983 and entered Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight. However he could not stop doing mathematics and when he died he left a manuscript on the foundations of mathematics. He claims:-

The purpose of this investigation is to carry out the primary part of Hilbert's programme, i.e. to establish the consistency of set theory, abstract arithmetic and propositional logic and the method used is to construct a new and fundamental theory from which these theories can be deduced."

For a brief review of Temple's last work, see the note by Martin Hyland in "Fundamental Mathematical Theories," by George Temple, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, Vol. 354, No. 1714 (Aug. 15, 1996), pp. 1941-1967.

The following remarks by Hyland are of more general interest—

"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical and mathematical motivation. In the first case one tries to convince with a telling conceptual story; in the second one relies more on the elegance of some emergent mathematical structure. If there is a tradition in logic it favours the former, but I have a sneaking affection for the latter. Of course the distinction is not so clear cut. Elegant mathematics will of itself tell a tale, and one with the merit of simplicity. This may carry philosophical weight. But that cannot be guaranteed: in the end one cannot escape the need to form a judgement of significance."

— J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf)
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 114, 2002, 43-78.

Here Hyland appears to be discussing semantic ("philosophical," or conceptual) and syntactic ("mathematical," or structural) approaches to proof theory. Some other remarks along these lines, from the late Gian-Carlo Rota

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

    (Click to enlarge.)

See also "Galois Connections" at alpheccar.org and "The Galois Connection Between Syntax and Semantics" at logicmatters.net.

* Williams's novel says the letters of The Stone  are those of the Tetragrammaton— i.e., Yod, He, Vau, He  (cf. p. 26 of the 2001 Eerdmans edition). But the letters on the 2001 edition's cover Stone  include the three-pronged letter Shin , also found on the dreidel .  What esoteric religious meaning is implied by this, I do not know.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Talking Rot at Harvard

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:16 am

"…as Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stated in his Fall 2006 address to the Harvard freshman class, being able to tell if a man is 'talking rot' is the ultimate goal of a liberal arts education."

— Yelena S. Mironova ’12 in The Harvard Crimson  yesterday

Is Mironova talking rot? Apparently not, since Knowles did, it seems, use that phrase in such an address. (See an alleged transcript of his remarks by someone at Facebook identifying herself as Van Le, Harvard '10)

Was Knowles talking rot? Perhaps, since the alleged transcript of his remarks indicates he attributed the phrase to a 1914 lecture by one J. A. Smith, a philosopher at Oxford,  but did not give a source for his quotation.

A Google web search for more accurate information yields no exact source. There are two notable hearsay sources—

The weblog Fairing's Parish  on August 16, 2009, gives a version attributed to Smith in More Christmas Crackers  by John Julius Norwich. (The hardcover first edition of this book was published by Viking on Oct. 14, 1991, according to Amazon.co.uk.)

An earlier book in the Christmas Crackers  series was cited as a Smith source by Michael M. Thomas at Forbes.com on Oct. 24, 2008

"I happened upon Professor Smith long years ago, in the 1980 edition of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker  [sic ]…."

The weblog Laudator Temporis Acti  of Michael Gilleland on August 29, 2004, says…

The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29….

Some further bibliographic notes on the Jahanbegloo book—

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Isaiah Berlin en toutes libertés: entretiens avec Isaiah Berlin  (Paris, 1991: Éditions du Félin); repr. in its original English form as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London, 1992: Peter Halban; New York, 1992: Scribner’s; London, 1993: Phoenix; 2nd ed., London, 2007: Halban); excerpted in Jewish Quarterly  38 No 3 (Autumn 1991), 15–26, Jewish Chronicle,  7 February 1992, Literary Supplement, ii, Guardian,  7 March 1992, 23, and (as ‘Philosophy and Life: An Interview’) New York Review of Books,  28 May 1992, 46–54; trans. Chinese (both scripts), German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish (complete and in part, by different translators)

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/interviews/index.html

A Google books  search yields some starting points for a paper chase that might, given library resources like Harvard's, finally nail down the rot quote.

Try smith oxford "talking rot".

The best citation I can find online is not very good. See The Oxford Book of Oxford  (first edition 1978, new edition 2002), edited by Jan (formerly James) Morris, who gives as her source "J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, opening a lecture course in 1914 (quoted by Harold Macmillan in The Times, 1965)." This does not indicate whether Macmillan was quoting Smith from memory or from a written or printed record. Only the latter would clear Macmillan (and all subsequent purveyors of the alleged Smith quote who did not attribute it to Macmillan) from the suspicion of talking rot.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Wittgenstein, 1935

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:20 am

http://www.wittgen-cam.ac.uk/biogre9.html

1935

With the expiry of his five-year Research Fellowship at Trinity College Wittgenstein was faced once more with the problem of loss of career. Accordingly he planned a journey to the Soviet Union, to find out whether he could find a suitable post there. Wittgenstein’s constant quest for the right career was not, as it is often misunderstood, a flight from himself. Rather, it was a search for the right place, a being at one with himself: Return him [Man] to his rightful element and everything will unfold and appear as healthy. (MS 125)

Since 1933/34 he had been taking lessons in Russian from the philosopher Fanja Pascal, initially with Francis Skinner. In June he asked Keynes for an introduction to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiski. He sought contacts in two places above all, at the Northern Institute in Leningrad and the Institute for National Minorities in Moscow, writing to Keynes on 6 July: These Institutes, as I am told, deal with people who want to go to the ‘colonies’ the newly colonized parts at the periphery of the U. S. S. R. (Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore)

On 12 September Wittgenstein arrived in Leningrad. There he met the author and educator Guryevich at the Northern Institute, then an autonomous faculty of Leningrad University. On the evening of the following day he travelled on to Moscow, arriving there on the morning of the 14th. Here he had contacts with various western Europeans and Americans, including the correspondent of the Daily Worker, Pat Sloane. Most of his discussions, however, were with scientists, for example the young mathematician Yanovskaya and the philosopher Yushevich from Moscow University, who were both close to so-called Mach Marxism and the Vienna Circle. He was invited by the philosopher Tatiana Nikolayeva Gornstein, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to teach philosophy at Leningrad University. He traveled to Kazakhstan, where he was offered a chair at the famous university where Tolstoy once studied. On 1 October he was back in Cambridge. The trip was shorter than planned, and it appears that he had given up the idea of settling in Russia.

His friend Gilbert Pattison, who picked him up from the ship on his return, recalled that Wittgenstein’s view was that he could not live there himself: One could live there, but only if one kept in mind the whole time that one could never speak one’s mind. … It is as though one were to spend the rest of one’s life in an army, any army, and that is a rather difficult thing for people who are educated. (Interview with Pattison)

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