"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118
One interpretation of the mystic numbers revealed by the Lottery yesterday—
981 as the final page* of David Foster Wallace's famed novel Infinite Jest …
275 as a page in Wallace's non-fiction book about infinity Everything and More …
Gregory Chaitin points out that this is nonsense …
As noted elsewhere in this journal, I have a different concept of "math's absolute
Prince of Darkness"— and, indeed, of a "quest for Omega." (See posts of May 2010.)
Yesterday's numbers indicate a different struggle between darkness and light—
Light —
Darkness —
* From infinitesummer.org/archives/168 — "A note about editions:
As it turns out, all (physical) editions of Infinite Jest have 981 pages:
the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc.
A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who
were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent."
“At any time, God can cancel a life. ‘So teach us to number our days,’ as the King James Version has it, ‘that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’….
The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as ‘Hell,’ even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words ‘victory’ and ‘rescue’ as translations of yeshu’ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded ‘salvation.’ And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: ‘So teach us to number our days.’”
General Boulanger
That the General was 'reactionary' and that the C of C bureaucracy had a 'defiant residue' of Boulangism, continues the characterization of the organization for which the Chums 'work'.
See p. 543 above, regarding a 2007 book in which Boulanger is called the 'father of fascism'.
timbres fictifs
French: fictive postage stamps. Cf "Lot 49".
Yes, stamps mean something in Pynchon's works; here, it seems important that these stamps are characterized as frauds.
transform
A mathematical operation that "maps" a relation from one domain to another.
Here, "Belgian Congo" maps to "Balkan Penninsula". By 1912, everyone at Yz-le-Bans would be familiar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness , if not with other descriptions of the atrocities of exploitation of indigenous people in Congo. The conversation here and to follow describes the dawning realization of the imperialist exploitation of Eastern Europe by European powers. (Zora Neale Hurston famously commented that Hitler did in Europe what Europeans had been doing in Africa for a century. Cf. The Hereros sections in V .). It begins with railroads and "other straight line" constructions.
The themes of ATD might also "map" to current events in another warzone, where a contemporary Great Game is being played out.
common in dreams
Such as Frank's and Reef's. And/or, dreams require interpretation.
This afternoon's online New York Times reviews "The Tree of Life," a film that opens tomorrow.
With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication “The Tree of Life” ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them. In this case a boy, in whispered voice-over, speaks directly to God, whose responses are characteristically oblique, conveyed by the rustling of wind in trees or the play of shadows on a bedroom wall. Where are you? the boy wants to know, and lurking within this question is another: What am I doing here?
Persistent answers… Perhaps conveyed by wind, perhaps by shadows, perhaps by the New York Lottery.
For the nihilist alternative— the universe arose by chance out of nothing and all is meaningless— see Stephen Hawking and Jennifer Ouellette.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares
his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence
Stephen Hawking dismisses belief in God in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.
Photograph: Solar & Heliospheric Observatory/Discovery Channel
What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"
The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.
You've said there is no reason to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper. Is our existence all down to luck?
Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.
So here we are….
New York Lottery today, May 16… Midday 374, Evening 430.
See also the Turner Classic Movies film now playing.
489 as the number of a page in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
with verses that suggested to one author the following questions:
"How can one express one's sense of the ground of things?
What is the structure of Being itself…?" — Thomas Jensen Hines
886 as a number applied recently to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins
with the notable phrase "the unchanging register of change"
Rapist gets 20 years after justice system finally believes his victims
Published Date: 06 May 2011
By Rhiannon Edward
A SCOTTISH care home worker who groomed and raped teenage girls for more than a decade has been jailed for 20 years.
James Boyes abused a string of underage girls at Frant Court care home in Frant, East Sussex, during the 1980s and 1990s, leaving one so traumatised she is still being treated in a secure mental hospital….
The last New York Lottery number
of Women's History Month 2011 was 146.
"…every answer involves as much of history
and mythology as Joyce can cram into
remarks which are ostensibly about
popular entertainment…."
James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake:
A Study of Literary Allusions
in James Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE,
Southern Illinois University Press,
Carbondale and Edwardsville
(1959. Arcturus Books Edition 1974), p. 146.
The midday 987 may be interpreted as "…nine, eight, seven, …."—
"The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w.,
was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for
the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond . He put it into
the launch scene to heighten the suspense.
'It is another of my damned "touches,"' Fritz Lang said."
392 Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This "fall" consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter's words to our first parents: "You will be like God." The devil "has sinned from the beginning"; he is "a liar and the father of lies."
946 After confessing "the holy catholic Church," the Apostles' Creed adds "the communion of saints." In a certain sense this article is a further explanation of the preceding: "What is the Church if not the assembly of all the saints?" The communion of saints is the Church.
Today's funeral Mass for Sargent Shriver,
tonight's review in the New York TImes of a singer
from the Kollege of Musical Knowledge,
and today's New York lottery numbers suggest the following links—
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , October 2002, p. 563:
“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns. Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications. Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things. These explorations led to… [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story ).”
– David W. Henderson, Cornell University
For a different perspective on Toy Story , see the Dec. 29 post.
Other entertainments — The novel Infinite Jest and two versions of "Heeere's Johnny !" —
Another story told in the movie is how this girl was about to be destroyed by the evil guys only to find “the father” standing over her after she blacked out and he “saved her”. The father’s disk contains all the information about everything in the grid, so in a sense the father is omniscient. Clearly the father is a stand in for the Biblical God since he creates a whole universe and is omniscient (and by some of the actions he performs in the movie, he seems omnipotent as well). I don’t think the Christian parallels are all in my head.
There is some sketchy theology that occurs that might be in my head, though. The “real world” outside of the grid seems to be a symbol for heaven. If this is true, it presents a very interesting theological point.
See also today's New York midday lottery number, 596, as it appears in a search
for "legacy code" in this journal. It is China's code for its first nuclear test.
Today's evening New York number is less alarming — 401, suggesting the date
4/01 — i.e., April Fools' Day.
Page 282 of Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics , Volume 2,
edited by James Hastings, John Alexander Selbie, and Louis Herbert Gray,
New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910 —
"Philosophy seeks not absolute first principles, nor yet purely immediate insights,
but the self-mediation of the system of truth, and an insight into this self-mediation.
Axioms, in the language of modern theory, are best defined, neither as certainties
nor as absolutely first principles, but as those principles which are used as the first
in a special theory.
LITERATURE — A complete view of the literature of the problems
regarding axioms is impossible, since the topic is connected with all
the fundamental philosophical issues…. JOSIAH ROYCE"
Suggested by the evening number, 297, and by Amy Adams (see previous post) —
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 evening number on Dec. 1 (the
beginning of Hanukkah) was 840. See also the number
840 in the final post (July 20, 2002) of a search for Solomon's Cube.
CBR: “Big Time” is this title of this new era of “Amazing Spider-Man.” Why choose that title? What exactly is it referring to?
DAN SLOTT: “Big Time” refers to more than “Amazing Spider-Man,” it also refers to other Spider-Projects: “Astonishing Spider-Man/Iron Man,” the new Norman Osborn mini, and the all-new “Spider-Girl!” With “Amazing,” “Big Time” takes on a lot of meanings. In this book, everything is bigger: bigger stakes for Peter Parker, bigger threats for Spider-Man, and a much bigger comic. We are expanding to 30 pages of material, twice a month!
As for yesterday's evening NY lottery number 919, see 9/19.
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—
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—
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 Logic114, 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—
* 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.
Wagner star Peter Hofmann died yesterday, November 30. The above obituary,
together with the NY Lottery numbers for the end of November and
the remarks on Nietzsche in this journal Sunday morning, suggest
the following readings from Nietzsche's The Will to Power—
Introduction (for National Novel Writing Month)—
"He [Nietzsche's "great man"] would rather lie than tell the truth,
because lying requires more spirit and will."
Details (according to the lottery numbers)—
For deeper background, see the life of the Will to Power translator, Anthony Ludovici.
From “Epilogue,” in Robert Lowell’s Day by Day , 1977:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
….
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination….
From "Deus ex Machina and the Aesthetics of Proof"
(Alan J. Cainin The Mathematical Intelligencer * of September 2010, pdf)—
Deus ex Machina
In a narrative, a deus is unsatisfying for two reasons. The
first is that any future attempt to build tension is undercut if
the author establishes that a difficulty can be resolved by a
deus. The second reason—more important for the purposes
of this essay—is that the deus does not fit with the internal
structure of the story. There is no reason internal to the
story why the deus should intervene at that moment.
* It seems Santa has delivered an early gift — free online access to all issues of the Intelligencer .
** Teaser headline in the original version at Xanga.com
At the end of "Three Days of the Condor," Cliff Robertson asks Robert Redford, "How do you know they'll print it?"
One possible answer: "They always print… the lottery."
The New York Lottery on Saturday, November 20, 2010: Midday 704, Evening 687.
Here 704 suggests 7/04, the Fourth of July, which in turn suggests this journal's post on that date about random numbers and universal wisdom.
Moving further up on the front page of today's New York Times—
"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing…. The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”— A worried professor at Harvard Medical School
For that new generation… Live from New York, it's Universal Wisdom! — In other words, 687!
Returning to the lottery hermeneutics (look it up, dudes) of July 4th, we note that a rather arcane and archaic procedure on a Windows PC keyboard— "Num Lock + Alt + 687"— produces the symbol known as a right guillemet — ». This mark, which can stand for "fast forward," may symbolize to the old Slow-Forward Generation the fears of the Harvard professor for the new Differently-Wired Generation.
Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität.
Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935.
Hrsg. von Iso Kern. 1973. lxx + 742 pp.
HB. ISBN 90-247-5030-X
"The moment, of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no duration, the light in eternal descent, not the result of conscious thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not from some Divine source then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism were sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the watchful scavengers of Epiphany."
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
-- Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Canto IV of "It Must Change"
"On Monday morning, 9 March, after visiting the Mayor of Rome and the Municipal Council on the Capitoline Hill, the Holy Father spoke to the Romans who gathered in the square outside the Senatorial Palace…
'… a verse by Ovid, the great Latin poet, springs to mind. In one of his elegies he encouraged the Romans of his time with these words:
"Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti."
"Hold out and persist:
you have got through
far more difficult situations."
The symmetry of the yin-yang symbol, of the diamond-theorem symbol, and of Brown's Illuminati Diamond is also apparent in yesterday's midday New York lottery number (see above).
"Humanity's fascination with numbers is ancient and complex. Our present relationship with numbers reveals both a highly developed tool and a highly developed user, working together to measure, create, and predict both ourselves and the world around us. But like every symbiotic couple, the tool we would like to believe is separate from us (and thus objective) is actually an intricate reflection of our thoughts, interests, and capabilities."
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society…. He purred a chuckle. “My place. If you want to come, I’ll show you.” “Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?” “That’s what the locals call it. It’s really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole.” “Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?” “No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor.”
The Pennsylvania Lottery
yesterday, April 24, 2008:
He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette’s expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say “Yes” or “No,” mostly “No,” when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person.
Nicolas Cage's character, an astrophysicist, looks at a chart (written 50 years earlier by a child) with a colleague and points out a chronologically correct prediction of the date and number of dead in world wide tragedies over the last fifty years, and his colleague's response is "Systems that find meaning in numbers are a dime a dozen. Why? Because people see what they want to see." Well that would be a pretty neat trick. You could build a career on that in a Vegas showroom.
Film Title:Next Based on the 1954 short story
"The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick
Release Date: April 27, 2007
About the Film:
Nicolas Cage stars as Cris Johnson, a Las Vegas magician with a secret gift that is both a blessing and a curse: He has the uncanny ability to tell you what happens next.
Related material from this journal on the release date of "Next"— April 27, 2007—
Production Credits:
Thanks to the
Pennsylvania Lottery for
today’s suggestion of links
to the dates 9/15 and 6/06–
A movie “starts with the locale, with the environment that people live in, how they move within that environment.” Sometimes that environment has to be built.
“I’m all for construction, because we’re dealing with the magic of movies,” he told Variety in 2008. “And I always feel that if you build it, you build it for the dream rather than the actuality."
“Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband’s. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski’s that ‘different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.’ With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed.”
The hermeneutics of the NY midday 440 is more difficult. A Google search suggests that a Log24 post for Epiphany 2004, "720 in the Book," might yield a clue to the 440 riddle.
This afternoon's post, Point Omega continued, concerned the New York Lottery numbers for yesterday evening and midday today.
A footnote to that post—
Today's evening New York Lottery number was 664.
In the spirit of the theological content of this afternoon's post—
Today's evening NY number 664 may or may not refer to the year of the Synod of Whitby.
That Synod was about reconciling the customs of Rome with the customs of Iona.
A somewhat relevant link from the Language Game post referred to in this afternoon's post was on the word "selving." This link, now broken, referred to a paper hosted by, as it happens, Iona College. The following is a link to a cached copy of that paper—
"….mirando il punto
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti "
– Dante, Paradiso, XVII, 17-18
“The symbol is used throughout the entire book
in place of such phrases as ‘Q.E.D.’ or
‘This completes the proof of the theorem’
to signal the end of a proof.”
The date of Mariani's poem, 24 August 2002, leads to a post in this journal
related to Mariani's "Loyola's Company" and to "that language only
light and diamonds know."
The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word."
"Princeton's Baccalaureate service is an end-of-the-year ceremony focused on members of the senior class. It includes prayers and readings from various religious and philosophical traditions."
Using Google today, you may have noticed that something feels slightly different — the look and feel of our search results have changed! Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout.
“317 is a prime, not because we think so,
or because our minds are shaped in one way
rather than another, but because it is so,
because mathematical reality is built that way.”
Tim Holland, who was widely considered the world’s greatest backgammon player during that ancient board game’s modern heyday, in the 1960s and ’70s, died on March 10 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 79. <<more>>
Scholars speak in sixteen ways of the state of the soul after death. They say that it has form or is formless; has and has not form, or neither has nor has not form; it is finite or infinite; or both or neither; it has one mode of consciousness or several; has limited consciousness or infinite; is happy or miserable; or both or neither.
He does go on to say that such speculation is unprofitable; but bear with me for a moment.
With logical constructs such as “has and has not form, or neither has nor has not form”, it is perhaps a little difficult to see what is going on. But, while I hesitate to disagree with the Compassionate One, I think there are more than sixteen possibilities described here: how many?
One could argue here that the numbers of choices should be multiplied, not added; there are 4 choices for form, 4 for finiteness, 2 for modes of consciousness, 2 for finiteness of consciousness, and 4 for happiness, total 28 = 256. (You may wish to consider whether all 256 are really possible.)
Some personal reminiscences from 1982
suggested the following notes on
yesterday’s thought from Arthur C. Clarke–
“Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.”
“‘Abracadabra’ is a well-recognized song recorded by the Steve Miller Band.
Released as the main single from Abracadabra in June 1982, it became a number-one hit on the United States Billboard Hot 100 chart, and also hit number two on the UK charts. It followed Survivor‘s ‘Eye of the Tiger‘ (from Rocky III ) on the Hot 100….” –Wikipedia
Advanced Technology:
MST 682 Advanced Topics in
Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM)
An overview of the components of CIM Enterprise, System Design, Material Handling, Materials Requirement Planning (MRP), Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII), Manufacturing Database and Management, Expert Systems for Manufacturing. Two hours of lecture and two hours of laboratory per week. Prerequisites: An undergraduate course in CAD or CAM or CIM, or consent of instructor. —SUNY Institute of Technology
“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”
“Speedy” is the browser name supplied to the server. The link is to a Columbus Day, 2003, entry with the song phrase “spinnin’ wheel, spinnin’ true.” The time is Eastern Daylight.
“He was born as Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Jewish family in London. In his publications he was called I. J. Good. He studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938. He did research work under G.H. Hardy and Besicovitch before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his doctorate.
At Bletchley Park, he was initially in Hut 8 under the supervision of Alan Turing…”
Wikipedia states that “I. J. Good’s vanity car license plate, hinting at his spylike wartime work, was ‘007 IJG’…. He played chess to county standard, and helped to popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist (he had learned the rules from Turing). In 1965, he described a concept similar to today’s meaning of technological singularity, in that it included in it the advent of superhuman intelligence:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make….
The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
Will: Do you like apples? Clark: Yeah. Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?
The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–
Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
-- Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Canto IV of "It Must Change"
The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.
“So fearsome was Dr. Schwartz’s early reputation as a mathematician that when John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize winning mathematician and economist, learned that he was attempting to solve an extremely challenging mathematical problem…. he became agitated, apparently fearing Dr. Schwartz might beat him to a solution, said Sylvia Nasar, author of ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ a biography of Nash.”
“His background in mathematical algorithms led Dr. Schwartz to develop an early programming language…. The language would later influence the designer of the Python programming language, widely used by programmers today.” —NY Times
“Treatment of Autistic Schizophrenic Children with LSD-25 and UML-491“–
“Autistic schizophrenic children present challenging and baffling problems in treatment…. Many of the children have been followed subsequently into later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood…. Meanwhile, a new group of young autistic children are always available for new treatment endeavors as the new modes become available.”*
Dr. Schwartz died on Monday, birthday of Tom Wolfe — who wrote The Painted Word.
1/16: “It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side.” –Andrew Wyeth
Related material: The previous five entries.
* by Lauretta Bender, M.D., Lothar Goldschmidt, M.D., and D.V. Siva Sankar, Ph.D., in Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry, 1962, 4, 170-177.
"… an epoch-making event so generally ignored that we have to be reminded of it at every moment. The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered… the space… of classical perspective and geometry…."
— Page 25 of The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991)
This suggests, for those who prefer Harvard's past glories to its current state, a different Raum from the Zeit 1910.
“… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….
Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
— President Obama yesterday
It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish. Related meditations:
A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.
A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.
Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:
742.
Taking a hint from another entry on Weil, this may be regarded as a reference to The Oxford Book of English Verse (1919 edition):
Selection 742 in that book comports well with this jounal’s recent meditations on death and Brooklyn:
“In time, his carefree lifestyle began to upset the early Christians, who saw his earthy temptations as a manifestation of the Devil. Who would’ve thought that the horny old goat would become the blueprint for popular conceptions of Satan– cloven hooves, horns and all?”
Hymn 605 thus supplies a reference to the devil mentioned by Weil in the entry of 6/05.
It, together with Hymn 742 of a year later, may be regarded as a divine response to a weblog entry yesterday from the Greater Wasilla Area on listening to the inauguration:
“… thus far, I have not heard any priests of Apollo, nor of any other God, issuing any auguries.”
Neither have I, but hearing is only one of the senses.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter.”
PA midday 007, evening 628 NY midday 153, evening 069 Experienced readers of this journal will have little difficulty interpreting these results, except for 153. For that enigmatic number, see Object Lesson.
See also the entries of this date two years ago: Grace and Casino Royale.
"In a game of chess, the knight's move is unique because it alone goes around corners. In this way, it combines the continuity of a set sequence with the discontinuity of an unpredictable turn in the middle. This meaningful combination of continuity and discontinuity in an otherwise linear set of possibilities has led some to refer to the creative act of discovery in any field of research as a 'knight's move' in intelligence."
"Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey 'haunts time like a ghost.'"
"'Knight's move thinking' is a psychiatric term describing a thought disorder where in speech the usual logical sequence of ideas is lost, the sufferer jumping from one idea to another with no apparent connection. It is most commonly found in schizophrenia."
“All relevant objective truths are born and die as absurdities. They come into being as the monstrous claim of an inspired rebel and pass away with the eccentricity of a superstitious crank.”
Samuel Calmin Kohs, the designer (but not the originator) of the above intelligence test, would likely disapprove of the "Aryan Youth types" mentioned in passing by a film reviewer in today's New York Times. (See below.) The Aryan Youth would also likely disapprove of Dr. Kohs.
"… 'Momma’s Man' is a touchingly true film, part weepie, part comedy, about the agonies of navigating that slippery slope called adulthood. It was written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, a native New Yorker who has set his modestly scaled movie with a heart the size of the Ritz in the same downtown warren where he was raised. Being a child of the avant-garde as well as an A student, he cast his parents, the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and the artist Flo Jacobs, as the puzzled progenitors of his centerpiece, a wayward son of bohemia….
In American movies, growing up tends to be a job for either Aryan Youth types or the oddballs and outsiders…."
"… I think that the deeper opportunity, the greater opportunity film can offer us is as an exercise of the mind. But an exercise, I hate to use the word, I won't say 'soul,' I won't say 'soul' and I won't say 'spirit,' but that it can really put our deepest psychological existence through stuff. It can be a powerful exercise. It can make us think, but I don't mean think about this and think about that. The very, very process of powerful thinking, in a way that it can afford, is I think very, very valuable. I basically think that the mind is not complete yet, that we are working on creating the mind. Okay. And that the higher function of art for me is its contribution to the making of mind."
“Leonard Mlodinow has had, to speak informally, a pretty random career….
A far more sober instance of randomness, however, underpins his new book, The Drunkard’s Walk. And it’s not hard to see it as a sort of Rosebud, explaining why the author finds unpredictability so compelling.”
Another sort of Rosebud– C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy:
“… A Mathematician’s Apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again.”
Perhaps in the afterlife Hardy, an expert on the theory of numbers, does again enjoy such powers. If so, his comments on the following would be of interest:
New York Lottery today: Mid-day 006 (the first perfect number) Evening 568 (an apparently random number)
Hardy, when taken to church as a child, passed the time by factorizing hymn numbers. This suggests we note that 568 equals 8 times 71. A check of Wikipedia on the prime number 71 reveals that it is related to 568 in another way: 568 is is the sum of the primes less than 71–
Clearly it is false that the sum of the primes less than a prime p is, in general, a multiple of p, since (2 + 3 + 5) is not a multiple of 7. The sum of primes less than an integer x is, however, of some interest.
See The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences,
A046731, Sum of primes < 10^n, as well as A006880, Number of primes < 10^n.
According to an amateur* mathematician named Cino Hilliard, “a very important relationship exists” between the sum of primes less than x and the prime counting function Pi(x) which is the number of primes less than x—
(Sum of primes less than x) ~ Pi(x^2).
Whether this apparent relationship is, in fact, “very important,” or merely a straightforward consequence of other number-theoretical facts, is not obvious (to those of us not expert in number theory) from Google searches. Perhaps Hardy can clear this question up for those who will, by luck or grace, meet him in the next world.
* For some background, see a profile and user group messages here and here and here.
For related material, see “Goodbye and Hello” from 9/08, 2003 and “Requiem for a Storyteller” from 9/08, 2007, as well as “Raiders of the Lost Stone” from 6/23, 2007 and “George Carlin Dies” from 6/23, 2008.
Yesterday's entry discussed T.E. Hulme— a co-founder, with Ezra Pound, of the Imagist school of poetry. Recent entries on randomness, using the New York Lottery as a source of examples, together with Hulme's approach to poetry discussed yesterday, suggest the following meditation– what Charles Cameron might call a "bead game."
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. [….]
The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: —
"The apparition of these
faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a
wet, black bough."
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant† when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.
"… all translations exist on an axis. Indeed, they exist in a manifold of many axes intersecting. One axis is that of foreignness and familiarity. One axis is that of structural mimicry, another of melodic mimicry. And one axis is that of semantic fidelity."
Goodman's use of the word "manifold" here is of course poetic, not mathematical.
Part III:
New York Lottery, mid-day on July 7, 2008: 771.
Part IV:
A Google search on manifold 771 reveals that 771 is, according to Google's scanners, an alternate form (a "translation," via structural mimicry) of a script version of the letter M. (See Part V below.)
Part V:
Long version of a
one-image poem —
"Random apparition:
manifold translated."
This poem summarizes the
relationship (See Part IV above) of
the (apparently) random number 771
to the rather non-random concept of
a linear manifold:
[Such lines and planes have not
been, in mathematical language,
"translated."]
— Paul R. Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces,
Princeton University Press, 1948
Short version of the
above one-image poem —
771:
* Gaudier-Brzeska created the artifact shown on the cover of Solid Objects, a work of literary theory by Douglas Mao. For more on that artifact and on the New York Lottery, see Sermon for St. Peter's Day. "It is not in the premise that reality/ Is a solid…." –Wallace Stevens
"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.
'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'
He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street– that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.
'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves– like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'
Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"
“A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a spectacular one….”
[506] You don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re doing, who you are.
Translator’s note:
506 The state of this line in the MSS has driven editors to despair; in particular, the first of the things Pentheus is said not to know is, in Greek, “what you are living,” which seems doubtful Greek. Many emendations have been proposed; I accept here DODDS’s emendation, but I have a feeling we’re missing something.
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao's book:
I have more confidence
that God is to be found
in the Ping Pong balls of
the New York Lottery….
These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible– if only in
the context of my own
personal experience.
June 28, 2008:
These numbers can, of course,
be interpreted as symbols of
the dates 6/29 and 5/30.
The following poem of Emily Dickinson is quoted here in memory of John Watson Foster Dulles, a scholar of Brazilian history who died at 95 on June 23. He was the eldest son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a nephew of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, brother of Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles, and a grandson of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles, author of The True Church.
I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.
Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
"But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?"
‡ Lower case in honor of
Peter O'Toole, star of
the film version of The Ruling Class.
(This film, together with
O'Toole's My Favorite Year,
may be regarded as epitomizing
Hollywood's Jesus for Jews.)
Those who prefer
less randomness
in their religion
may consult O'Toole's
more famous film work
involving Islam,
as well as
the following structure
discussed here on the date of Persson's death:
Today’s New York Times has an obituary of Henry Chadwick, an Anglican priest and expert on church history who believed strongly in ecumenism.
Church history and ecumenism may interest few Americans, who have not recently suffered the sort of conflicts familiar to Northern Ireland.
Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on the matter.
From a statement of “the five points of Calvinism”–
Irresistible Grace
“‘Irresistible grace’ refers to the grace of regeneration by which God effectually calls His elect inwardly, converting them to Himself, and quickening them from spiritual death to spiritual life. Regeneration is the sovereign and immediate work of the Holy Spirit….”
Calvinism is, of course, a deeply serious and powerful approach to spiritual matters.
The above two Philadelphia stories have met in a different vision of Grace:
Click image for a (much) larger version.
This tableau, in the larger version showing details in the background buildings, seems to me an apt, if more Calvinist and less Catholic, version of what Paul Simon, in his Graceland album, has memorably called “angels in the architecture.”
Let us hope that the late Henry Chadwick now has a place among such angels.
Readers of the previous entry who wish to practice their pardes may contemplate the following:
The evening 563 may, as in other recent entries, be interpreted as a page number in Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995). From that page:
“He brings out the mandala he found. ‘What’s it mean?’ [….] Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night….”
(As for today’s New York Lottery midday number 007, see (for instance) Edward Rothstein in today’s New York Timeson paradise, and also Tom Stoppard on heaven as “just a lying rhyme” for seven.)
Thus the ancient kings made music
In order to honor merit,
And offered it with splendor
To the Supreme Deity,
Inviting their ancestors to be present.
When, at the beginning of summer, thunder– electrical energy– comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music; they elevated and regulated it. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men. It fell to music to glorify the virtues of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen. In the temple men drew near to God with music and pantomimes (out of this later the theater developed). Religious feeling for the Creator of the world was united with the most sacred of human feelings, that of reverence for the ancestors. The ancestors were invited to these divine services as guests of the Ruler of Heaven and as representatives of humanity in the higher regions. This uniting of the human past with the Divinity in solemn moments of religious inspiration established the bond between God and man. The ruler who revered the Divinity in revering his ancestors became thereby the Son of Heaven, in whom the heavenly and the earthly world met in mystical contact. These ideas are the final summation of Chinese culture. Confucius has said of the great sacrifice at which these rites were performed: "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand."
— Richard Wilhelm, commentary
on Hexagram 16 of the I Ching
«L’ordre pèse toujours à l’individu. Le désordre lui fait désirer la police ou la mort. Ce sont deux circonstances extrêmes où la nature humaine n’est pas à l’aise. L’individu recherche une époque tout agréable, où il soit le plus libre et le plus aidé. Il la trouve vers le commencement de la fin d’un système social. Alors, entre l’ordre et le désordre, règne un moment délicieux. Tout le bien possible que procure l’arrangement des pouvoirs et des devoirs étant acquis, c’est maintenant que l’on peut jouir des premiers relâchements de ce système. Les institutions tiennent encore. Elles sont grandes et imposantes. Mais sans que rien de visible soit altéré en elles, elles n’ont guère plus que cette belle présence; leurs vertus se sont toutes produites; leur avenir est secrètement épuisé; leur caractère n’est plus sacré, ou bien il n’est plus que sacré; la critique et le mépris les exténuent et les vident de toute valeur prochaine. Le corps social perd doucement son lendemain. C’est l’heure de la jouissance et de la consommation générale.»
* D. E. Koshland Jr. passed away on 23 July 2007. He was a professor of biochemistry and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1965. He served as Science's editor-in-chief from 1985 to 1995.
What can a non-scientist add?
Perhaps the Log24 entries for
the date of Koshland's death:
“The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You…. A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.
He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don’t mean too much, he knows that’s what haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.
Then there’s this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees and
286”
What are we to make of this enigmatic 286? (No fair peeking at page 287.)
One possible meaning, given The Archivist‘s claim that “existence is infinitely cross-referenced”–
“Both Freud and Proust speak of the autobiographical [my italics] memory, and it is only with regard to this memory that the striking phenomenon of childhood amnesia and the less obvious difficulty of recovering any past experience may be observed.”
A description in Gravity’s Rainbow of prewar Berlin as “white and geometric” suggested, in combination with a reference elsewhere to “the eternal,” a citation of the following illustration of the concept “white, geometric, and eternal”–
For more on the mathematical significance of this figure, see (for instance) Happy Birthday, Hassler Whitney, and Combinatorics of Coxeter Groups, by Anders Björner and Francesco Brenti, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 231, Springer, New York, 2005.
This book is reviewed in the current issue (July 2008) of the above-mentioned Providence Bulletin.
The review in the Bulletin discusses reflection groups in continuous spaces.
“He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: ‘Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady’s ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'”
How the ancient crystal skull Synergy came to the Western World…
This skull first came to light when it was acquired about two and a half decades ago by a European businessman and avid hiker, as he traveled around Central and South America. He acquired the skull from a very old native man, in a tiny village in the Andes, near the borders of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. He was just passing through, and had come upon the small settlement while looking for a place to stay for the night. He wandered into the village and was greeted with smiles and an invitation to share a meal.
This gentleman, George, speaks several languages, and he usually has at least a few words in common with most of the people he meets in his travels– enough to get by, anyway. Although he didn’t speak the same language as most of the people in this isolated village, there was an instant connection between them, and they managed with the smattering of Spanish and Portuguese that a few of them knew. In need of shelter for the night, George was offered a spot for his sleeping bag, near the fire, in the dwelling of an elderly man.
After a peaceful evening in the old man’s company, George gratefully accepted a simple breakfast and got ready to take his leave. As he thanked the man for his generous hospitality, the elder led George to an old chest. Opening the crumbling wooden lid, he took out the crystal skull, touched it reverently, and handed it to George. Awed by an artifact of such obvious antiquity, beauty and value, yet uncertain what he was expected to do with it, George tried to hand it back. But the old man urged it upon him, making it clear that he was to take it with him.
Curious about the history of such a thing, George tried to find out what the villagers knew about it. One young fellow explained in halting Spanish that the skull had come into the possession of a much loved Catholic nun, in Peru. She was quite old when she died in the early 1800’s, and she had given it to the old man’s “Grandfather” when he was just a boy. (Note: It’s hard to say if this was really the man’s grandfather, or just the honorary title that many natives use to designate an ancestor or revered relative.) The nun told the boy and his father that the skull was “an inheritance from a lost civilization” and, like the Christian cross, it was a symbol of the transcendence of Soul over death. She said that it carried the message of immortal life and the illumination that we may discover when we lose our fear of death. She gave it to the boy and his father, asking them to safeguard it until the “right” person came to get it– and share its message with the world. It had been brought to that land from “somewhere else” and needed to wait until the right person could help it to continue its journey. “Your heart will know the person,” she said.
“… ‘Supercholita’ tiene sobre todo una clara vocación divulgadora de la cultura andina. No en vano Valdez recibió su primer premio por explicar mediante este personaje cómo se cocina el ‘chuño,’ una típica patata deshidratada muy consumida en el altiplano boliviano.”
Chapter II: “gazing on the symmetry of a lady’s ankle”
From “Sinatra: A Man and His Music, Part II” (reshown. prior to “It Happened in Brooklyn,” by Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, May 11, 2008):
astragalo-, astragal- (Greek: anklebone, talus ball of ankle joint; dice, die [the Greeks made these from ankle bones])
astragalomancy, astragyromancy
Divination with dice, knuckle bones, stones, small pieces of wood, or ankle bones which were marked with letters, symbols, or dots. Using dice for divination is a form of astragalomancy.
“In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today.”
With The Time of Our Time (1998) Norman Mailer has archetypalized himself and in the seven years since publication, within which films Fear and Loathing in …
From an unattributed
"editorial review" of The Time of Our Time at Amazon.com:
"Surely this sense of himself
as the republic's recording angel
accounts for the structure
of Mailer's anthology…."
"… In her half sleep
the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the
only man that could ever reach her was the son of a
preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was
up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted
pony let the spinning wheel spin.
By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for
170
even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."
The number 411 from
this evening's New York Lottery
may thus be regarded as naming the
"exact point in space and time"
sought in the above passage.
For a related midrash
on the meaning of the
passage's page number, see the previous entry.
For a more plausible
recording angel,
see Sinatra's birthday, December 12, 2002.
Google searches suggested by
Sunday's PA lottery numbers
(mid-day 170, evening 144)
and by the above
figure of Kate Beckinsale
pointing to an instance of
the number 144 —
"By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for
170
even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."
“At any time, God can cancel a life. ‘So teach us to number our days,’ as the King James Version has it, ‘that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’….
The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as ‘Hell,’ even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words ‘victory’ and ‘rescue’ as translations of yeshu’ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded ‘salvation.’ And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: ‘So teach us to number our days.'”
The center referred
to in that film is the
same generic "center"
displayed at Harvard
and in the above mandorla: not the
Harvard Women's
Center, but rather thewomen's center.
… frame "writing" within his own writing in order to destabilize the locus of his authorial voice and to promote a textual confusion that doubly displaces … links.jstor.org/… – Similar pages
He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette's expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say "Yes" or "No," mostly "No," when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person.
On April 16, the Pope’s birthday, the evening lottery number in Pennsylvania was 441. The Log24 entries of April 17 and April 18 supplied commentaries based on 441’s incarnation as a page number in an edition of Heidegger’s writings. Here is a related commentary on a different incarnation of 441. (For a context that includes both today’s commentary and those of April 17 and 18, see Gian-Carlo Rota– a Heidegger scholar as well as a mathematician– on mathematical Lichtung.)
From R. D. Carmichael, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order (Boston, Ginn and Co., 1937)– an exercise from the final page, 441, of the final chapter, “Tactical Configurations”–
“23. Let G be a multiply transitive group of degree n whose degree of transitivity is k; and let G have the property that a set S of m elements exists in G such that when k of the elements S are changed by a permutation of G into k of these elements, then all these m elements are permuted among themselves; moreover, let G have the property P, namely, that the identity is the only element in G which leaves fixed the n – m elements not in S. Then show that G permutes the m elements S into
n(n -1) … (n – k + 1) ____________________
m(m – 1) … (m – k + 1)
sets of m elements each, these sets forming a configuration having the property that any (whatever) set of k elements appears in one and just one of these sets of m elements each. Discuss necessary conditions on m, n, k in order that the foregoing conditions may be realized. Exhibit groups illustrating the theorem.”
Revelation for April 16, 2008 — day of the Pennsylvania Clinton-Obama debate and of the Pope’s birthday —
The Pennsylvania Lottery:
Make of this revelation what you will.
My own interpretations: the Lichtung of 4/13 and the Dickung of page 441 of Heidegger’s Basic Writings, where the terms Lichtung and Dickung are described.
A search for the evening number, 332, in Log24 yields a rather famous line from Sophocles…
Sophocles, Antigone, edited by Mark Griffith, Cambridge University Press, 1999:
“Many things are formidable (deina) and none is more formidable (deinoteron) than man.”
— Antigone, lines 332-333, in Valdis Leinieks, The Plays of Sophokles, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1982, p. 62
Continuing the search within Antigone for the mid-day number, 874, we find…
“Power (kratos), for one who is concerned with power (kratos), is in no way to be transgressed.”
— Antigone, lines 873-874, Leinieks, op. cit. p. 69
Both passages from Sophocles seem not unrelated to yesterday’s entry for the Ides of March and to last night’s opening routine on “Saturday Night Live.”
is used throughout the entire book
(Photo from 
