“We keep coming back
and coming back
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven“
Friday, March 7, 2008
Friday March 7, 2008
Comments Off on Friday March 7, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Thursday February 28, 2008
What you mean “we”?
“After the credits, a close-up of a lottery list shows the winning numbers drawn in the Mexican National Lottery, dated February 14, 1925. The camera pulls back to the hands of a man holding a lottery ticket and comparing his number with the posted winners.”
— Review of
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
by Tim Dirks at filmsite.org
“One heart will
wear a valentine.”
— Sinatra
Comments Off on Thursday February 28, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Thursday February 21, 2008
Class
Galore
Galore
The New Yorker's Anthony Lane reviewing the new film "Jumper"–
"I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class."
The "Jumper" theme, teleportation, has been better developed by three other writers– Bester, Zelazny, and King–
"As a long-time fan of both Alfie Bester and Roger Zelazny, I was delighted to find this posthumous collaboration. Psychoshop is, I think, true to both authors' bodies of work. After all, Bester's influence on Zelazny is evident in a a number of works, most notably Eye of Cat with its dazzling experimental typography so reminiscent of what Bester had done in The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination."
— Amazon.com customer review
"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,' the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal."
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
|
From another "Jaunt-701"– Log24, Feb. 7:
The Football
Mandorla New York Lottery, 2008: "He pointed at the football "The |
"What happened?"
one of the scientists shouted….
"It's eternity in there,"
he said, and dropped dead….
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
As
for Ernst
Gombrich, see
his link in the
Log24 entries
of June 15,
2007.
for Ernst
Gombrich, see
his link in the
Log24 entries
of June 15,
2007.
Related material:
the previous entry.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Wednesday February 13, 2008
New York Times today–
“Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It“
“Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It“
Gala Premiere:
FOUR FOR
HEAVEN’S GATE
“My God, it’s
full of numbers!”
full of numbers!”
“This movie is….
the most scandalous
cinematic waste I have
ever seen, and remember,
I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon.”
Comments Off on Wednesday February 13, 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
Monday February 11, 2008
Monolith
“A shape of some kind
for something that
has no shape.”
— Roy Scheider
in “2010”
For further details,
click on the monolith.
See also the Keystone State’s
lottery numbers for Sunday–
Grammy night and the
date of Scheider’s death:
These numbers suggest
the following links.
For further details related
to death and religion, see
a version of the cheer
“1234, who are we for?”
For further details related
to Grammy night, see
6/17, 2007:
A selection from the
Stephen King Hymnal
“… it’s going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in
the scheme of things.”
— Anne McCaffrey,
Radcliffe ’47,
To Ride Pegasus
Comments Off on Monday February 11, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Thursday February 7, 2008
The Football
Mandorla
Mandorla
New York Lottery, 2008:
"He pointed at the football
on his desk. 'There it is.'"
— Glory Road
"The Rock" —
Goodspeed:
"I'll do my best."
Mason:
"Your best. Losers
always whine about
their best. Winners
go home and …."
"The
Wu Li
Masters know
that physicists are
doing more than
'discovering the endless
diversity of nature.' They
are dancing with Kali,
the Divine Mother of
Hindu mythology."
— Gary Zukav,
Harvard
'64
Comments Off on Thursday February 7, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Monday February 4, 2008
New York Lottery,
Super Bowl Sunday, 2008:
Super Bowl Sunday, 2008:
Susan Sontag,
“Against Interpretation“
“Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation.”
A Certain Code
Edward Gibbon on the Trinity:
“perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss”
Friedrich Nietzsche on the abyss:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
Frank Sinatra on narrative:
“You gotta be true to your code.”
The Lottery Code:
Log24, Feb. 27, 2007
Comments Off on Monday February 4, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Saturday January 26, 2008
Working Backward
Those who have followed the links here recently may appreciate a short story told by yesterday’s lottery numbers in Pennsylvania: mid-day 096, evening 513.
The “96” may be regarded as a reference to the age at death of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter (see yesterday morning’s links). The “513” may be regarded as a reference to the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry, 5:01, plus the twelve minutes discussed in that entry by presidential aide Richard Darman, who died yesterday.
These references may seem less fanciful in the light of other recent Log24 material: a verse quoted here on Jan. 18—
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
— Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
— Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867
— and a link on Jan. 19 to the following:
The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe:
and the Wardrobe:
|
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” |
Comments Off on Saturday January 26, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Monday January 21, 2008
Serious Numbers
Serious numbers will always be heard."
"When times are mysterious
Serious numbers will always be heard."
Recent events in world financial markets suggest a return to this topic, considered here on October 13, 2007.
That day's entry, on mathematics and theology, may be of use to those who are considering, as their next financial move, prayer.
That day's entry, on mathematics and theology, may be of use to those who are considering, as their next financial move, prayer.
Some related material:
- The review in the Jan. 22 New York Times of a book by mathematics vulgarizer John Allen Paulos refuting arguments for the existence of God.
- Arguments in a less controversial area– for and against the consistency of elementary number theory:
FOR: Kurt
Gödel, Steven H. Cullinane, and John Dawson (See Log24– Nov. 30 and Dec. 2, 2005– and "Gödel, Inconsistency, Provability, and Truth: An Exchange of Letters" (pdf), in the American Mathematical Society Notices of April 2006.)AGAINST: E. B. Davies, King's College London (See above.)
- André Weil: "God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."
- God: "605." (NY Lottery, mid-day Jan. 20, 2008) This can, of course, be interpreted as "6/05"– which is perhaps a reference to "God, the Devil, and a Bridge." Or perhaps not.
Comments Off on Monday January 21, 2008
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Christmas Tiger
Part I:
The Gauntlet
On Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism– an attack on, among others, Woodrow Wilson:
"'… at some point,' Goldberg writes, 'it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, "Enough is enough."'"
The Goldberg declaration is from a review in today's New York Times titled "Heil Woodrow!"
Part II:
Uncle Duke
Goes to Washington
Today's Doonesbury:
Part III:
A Holiday Tradition
Dialogue from the classic Capra film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"–
SUMMERS: When the country needs men up there who know and have courage as it never did before, he's just gonna decorate a chair and get himself honored.
DARRELL: Oh, but he'll vote! Sure. Just like his colleague tells him to.
DIZ: "Yes, sir," like a Christmas tiger. He'll nod his head and vote…
REPORTERS: "Yes."
DIZ: You're not a Senator! You're an honorary stooge! You ought to be shown up!
Part IV:
The Tigers of Princeton
The Christmas evening Pennsylvania Lottery 4-digit number was 0666, the Christian "number of the beast." For the beast itself, see the Dec. 3 Log24 entry "Santa's Polar Opposite?" with its link to a discussion of a metaphorical tiger at the South Pole. A more realistic version of the beast appeared in the news on Christmas evening.
Part V:
"Heil Woodrow!"
The Christmas number may also be interpreted as a reference to 6/6/6, the graduation date of the Class of 2006 at Princeton University.
Part V:
"Heil Woodrow!"
As noted above, this title from a book review in today's New York Times refers to Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States (1913-1921) and President of Princeton University (1902-1910).
A suitable heraldic emblem
to accompany the Goldberg Heil:
to accompany the Goldberg Heil:
For another heraldic emblem
related, if only in this journal,
to Princeton, see
Religious Symbolism
at Princeton:
Goldberg might prefer,
for his Heil,
the following variation:
|
Fahne, |
Dr. Mengele, |
Click on the Fahne (flag)
for further details.
Goldberg might also enjoy
Santa from Aaron Sorkin's
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday December 30, 2007
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Wednesday December 26, 2007
A Wonderful Life
Part I:
Language Games
on December 19:
Language Games
on December 19:
See also the noir entry on "Nightmare Alley" for Winter Solstice 2002, as well as a solstice-related commentary on I Ching Hexagram 41, Decrease. |
Part II:
Language Game
on Christmas Day
Pennsylvania Lottery
December 25, 2007:
Part III:
A Wonderful Life
The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas at mid-day paired the number of the I Ching Hexagram 41, "Decrease," with the number 2911, which may be interpreted as a reference to I Chronicles 29:11—
"Thine, O LORD is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all."
This verse is sometimes cited as influencing the Protestant conclusion of the Lord's Prayer:
"Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever" (Mt 6.13b; compare 1 Chr 29.11-13)….
This traditional epilogue to the Lord's prayer protects the petition for the coming of the kingdom from being understood as an exorcism, which we derive from the Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, which belonged at the time to the synagogical liturgy.
The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas evening paired 173 with the beastly number 0666. The latter number suggests that perhaps being "understood as an exorcism" might not, in this case, be such a bad thing. What, therefore, might "173" have to do with exorcism? A search in the context of the phrase "language games" yields a reference to Wittgenstein's Zettel, section 173:
From Charles L. Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard:
Language-
games give general guidelines of the application of language. Wittgenstein suggests that there are innumerably many language- games: innumerably many kinds of use of the components of language.24 The grammar of the language- game influences the possible relations of words, and things, within that game. But the players may modify the rules gradually. Some utterances within a given language- game are applications; others are 'grammatical remarks' or definitions of what is or should be possible. (Hence Wittgenstein's remark, 'Theology as grammar'25 – the grammar of religion.) The idea of the 'form of life' is a reminder about even more basic phenomena. It is clearly bound up with the idea of language. (Language and 'form of life' are explicitly connected in four of the five passages from the Investigations in which the term 'form of life' appears.) Just as grammar is subject to change through language-
uses, so 'form of life' is subject to change through changes in language. (The Copernican revolution is a paradigm case of this.) Nevertheless, 'form of life' expresses a deeper level of 'agreement.' It is the level of 'what has to be accepted, the given.'26 This is an agreement prior to agreement in opinions and decisions. Not everything can be doubted or judged at once. This suggests that 'form of life' does not denote static phenomena of fixed scope. Rather, it serves to remind us of the general need for context in our activity of meaning. But the context of our meaning is a constantly changing mosaic involving both broad strokes and fine-
grained distinctions. The more commonly understood point of the 'Private Language Argument' – concerning the root of meaning in something public – comes into play here. But it is important to show just what public phenomenon Wittgenstein has in mind. He remarks: 'Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.'27
- 24
- Investigations, sec. 23.
- 25
- Investigations, sec. 373; compare Zettel, sec. 717.
- 26
- Investigations, p. 226e.
- 27
- Zettel, sec. 173. The thought is expressed many times in similar words.
And from an earlier chapter of Creegan:
The 'possibility of religion' manifested itself in considerable reading of religious works, and this in a person who chose his reading matter very carefully. Drury's recollections include conversations about Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Johnson's Prayers, Karl Barth, and, many times, the New Testament, which Wittgenstein had clearly read often and thought about.25 Wittgenstein had also thought about what it would mean to be a Christian. Some time during the 1930s, he remarked to Drury: 'There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians.'26 In this context it is certainly worth noting that he had for a time said the Lord's Prayer each day.27
Wittgenstein's last words were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life!'28
- 25
- Drury (1981) 'Conversations with Wittgenstein,' in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, pp. 112ff.
- 26
- Drury, 'Conversations,' p. 130.
- 27
- Drury, 'Some notes,' p. 109.
- 28
- Reported by Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the doctor in whose house Wittgenstein was staying. Malcolm, Memoir, p. 81.
Part IV:
For more on the Christmas evening
number of the beast, see Dec. 3:
"Santa's Polar Opposite?" —
Comments Off on Wednesday December 26, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Saturday December 22, 2007
Yesterday
have it all or what?”
— The Washington Post,
Dec. 21, 2007
“What.”
“Gosh, does this movie
have it all or what?”
— The Washington Post,
Dec. 21, 2007
“What.”
Related material:
The five entries of 6/14.
Comments Off on Saturday December 22, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Tuesday November 20, 2007
Death on a Friday
and the
Magic of Numbers
Magic of Numbers
Above: PA Lottery on
Friday, November 16th,
the date of death
for noted leftist attorney
Victor Rabinowitz
“Mr. Rabinowitz was a member
of the Communist Party
from 1942 until the early 1960s,
he wrote in his memoir,
Unrepentant Leftist (1996).
He said the party
seemed the best vehicle
to fight for social justice.”
— The New York Times,
Nov. 20, 2007
Related material:
From the Harvard Crimson on Friday:
“Robert Scanlan, a professor of theater
who knew Beckett personally,
directed the plays….
He said that performing Beckett as part of
the New College Theatre’s inaugural series
represents an auspicious beginning.”
From Log24 on 4/19–
“Drama Workshop“–
a note of gratitude
from the Virginia Tech killer:
“Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ,
to inspire generations of the weak
and the defenseless people.”
“It’s not for me. For my children,
for my brothers and sisters…
I did it for them.”
Party on, Victor.
For further drama, see
Comments Off on Tuesday November 20, 2007
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Sunday November 18, 2007
For Martin Scorsese
on his birthday, from
the New York Lottery:
on his birthday, from
the New York Lottery:
Words and Music
Words:
In the Details
"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness became profound.
The players were becoming possessors
of 'a truth with implicit powers
of good and evil,' Gino Segrè writes
in Faust in Copenhagen…
And 'the devil… was in the details.'"
— George Johnson of
The New York Times,
quoted in Log24 on 6/23.
Music:
A Black Berry
"Her wall is filled with pictures,
she gets 'em one by one…."
Chuck Berry, quoted
in Log24 on 2/13.
Related material:
Yesterday's Log24 entry…
Comments Off on Sunday November 18, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday October 24, 2007
Adieu:
A Story for Dobbs
A Story for Dobbs
Internet Movie Database on screenwriter Lem Dobbs:
"Trivia:
Son of painter R.B. (Ron) Kitaj.
Took his pseudonym from the character Humphrey Bogart played
in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"
October 21 was the day
that R. B. Kitaj died.
For what Kitaj called
"midrashic glosses"
on the numbers and
the lucky sums, see
4/30, 5/12, and
Eight is a Gate.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling."
"He has come to be fascinated… by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs."
"There is no teacher
but the enemy."
— Orson Scott Card,
Ender's Game
Comments Off on Wednesday October 24, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Thursday October 18, 2007
WELSH (Sean Penn)
In this world a man himself is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one.
WITT (James Caviezel)
You’re wrong there, Top. I seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.
WELSH
(smiles)
Well, then you’ve seen things I never will.
From Log24, Sept. 13, 2007:
The De Niro numbers below
may be regarded as naming
the Feast of St. Michael
and All Angels and the
Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola.
Yesterday’s numbers,
for the Dalai Lama:
Comments Off on Thursday October 18, 2007
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Sunday September 30, 2007
Death on Yom Kippur
“William D. Rogers, a lawyer who helped plan the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ approach to Latin America and then served as a principal policymaker for the region during the Ford administration, died Sept. 22 near his home in Upperville, Va. He was 80.
Mr. Rogers, a devotee of fox hunting, died during a hunt after suffering a heart attack while riding his favorite horse, Isaiah, his son William said….
His son William said his father was declared dead almost immediately by a doctor participating in the fox hunt. An Episcopal priest was called, the hounds were collected and the hunters gathered for a short service on the spot.
‘One by one, they rode past him and tipped their hats,’ William said.”
— Douglas Martin and Sarah Abruzzese, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2007
“Enter the rock….”
— New American Standard Bible
Comments Off on Sunday September 30, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Monday September 24, 2007
Psalm from
the Underworld
the Underworld
I reserved the time slot of this entry, 1:06 (a reference to Epiphany), on Sept. 24 after encountering the following passages in
The New Yorker,
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007–
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007–
“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 reference to “numbering our days” recalled Saturday morning’s Yom Kippur entry on the days numbered 8/09 and 9/12. Here is another such entry, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Lottery:
For a midrash,
see last year’s
7/07 and 2/10
as well as
this year’s
7/07 and 2/10.
For another psalm
from the underworld
see Toy Soldiers.
Comments Off on Monday September 24, 2007
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Sunday September 23, 2007
Autumn Equinox–
5:51 AM EDT today.
5:51 AM EDT today.
On Stephen King’s
Birthday, 2001–
“to observe King’s birthday,
the High Holy Days,
the autumn equinox,
et cetera”
On Stephen King’s
Birthday, 2007-–
The Pennsylvania Lottery
numbers were 809 and 912.
For parts of a story
about these numbers,
see “Summer Reading“
(Aug. 7 – Sept. 22).
Comments Off on Sunday September 23, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Saturday September 22, 2007
Comments Off on Saturday September 22, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
Monday September 10, 2007
The Story Theory
of Truth —
of Truth —
“I’m a gun for hire,
I’m a saint, I’m a liar,
because there are no facts,
there is no truth,
just data to be manipulated.”
Data
The data in more poetic form:
Commentary:
23: See
The Prime Cut Gospel.
16: See
Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI.
Related material:
The remarks yesterday
of Harvard president
Drew G. Faust
to incoming freshmen.
Faust “encouraged
the incoming class
to explore Harvard’s
many opportunities.
‘Think of it as
a treasure room
of hidden objects
Harry discovers
at Hogwarts,’
Faust said.”
For a less Faustian approach,
see the Harvard-educated
philosopher Charles Hartshorne
at The Harvard Square Library
and the words of another
Harvard-educated Hartshorne:
“Whenever one
approaches a subject from
two different directions,
there is bound to be
an interesting theorem
expressing their relation.”
— Robin Hartshorne
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Wednesday August 22, 2007
6/6/6 Meets 8/14
Today’s Pennsylvania Lottery:
Related material:
The five entries ending
on August 9th with
The Amalfi Conjecture
and Log24, 8/14–
A Writer’s Reflections.
Comments Off on Wednesday August 22, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Wednesday August 1, 2007
“Let’s give ’em somethin’ to talk about,
A little mystery to figure out”
A little mystery to figure out”
(Scarlett Johansson singing on
Saturday Night Live, April 21, 2007)
A Midrash for Sid
Scene from “Scoop” (2006)
Clues:
Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber:
“Sid thinks you’re ready for
some of the smaller parts,”
April 22, 2007, 11:09 AM:
Teaching a Brick to Sing,
April 22, 2007, 8:31 PM:
Welcome to the Cave,
and, in conclusion…
Shadows in the Cave–
Today’s Pennsylvania lottery
and a midrash on
today’s lottery:
527 —
5/27, 2005:
Drama of the Diagonal,
Part Deux
and 168 —
December 25, 2005:
The Beauty of Klein’s
Simple Group
(of order 168).
Comments Off on Wednesday August 1, 2007
Wednesday August 1, 2007
August First,
8:00:14 AM:
8:00:14 AM:
Cheap Epiphany
|
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Restoring the Faith
By SELENA ROBERTS What good is a nadir if it's denied or ignored? What's the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can't buy a cheap epiphany? |
|
Pennsylvania Lottery on the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola: |
|
|
|
Restoring the Booze:
A Look at the 50's-
Another Epiphany:
Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989
(Click on image for background.)
Detail:
Related material:
Logos and Logic
and Diagon Alley.
"What a swell
party this is."
— adapted from
Cole Porter
Comments Off on Wednesday August 1, 2007
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Tuesday July 31, 2007
Joke
The Guardian, July 26,
on a work by the
late playwright
George Tabori:
“… inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. ‘Just two,’ says Jay. ‘The boy is bringing his own.’ Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.”
“When may we expect to have
something from you on the
esthetic question? he asked.”
— A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
|
July 11, 2003
New York State Lottery
7-11 Evening Number: 000.
Comments Off on Tuesday July 31, 2007
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Thursday July 26, 2007
The Varieties
of Religious Experience
of Religious Experience
|
57:
“The author takes the place of the omniscient narrator. He heightens the tension by using striking dialogue. To decrease the tension he uses some light forms of comedy, like the commands for the Dobermans of the little boy: ‘Ketchup’ for retreating, ‘Pickles’ for attacking, and ‘Mustard’ for killing.” |
|
225:
 |
Comments Off on Thursday July 26, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Wednesday July 18, 2007
Burning Bright
“What is real?”
— Pope Benedict XVI
in Brazil on May 13
— Pope Benedict XVI
in Brazil on May 13
Yesterday in
the Keystone State:
This suggests– via a search on “853-856” + “universals”– that we consult pages 853-856 in The Library of America’s William James: Writings 1902-1910.
Beginning on page 853 in this book, and ending on page 856, is an excerpt from a James address that the editor has titled…
The Tigers in India
“There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.
Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge, and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? ….
Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought…. At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here….
… The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers….
… In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be, and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields.
I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies….
Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes…. What now do we mean by ‘knowing’ such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?
… the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions.1“
The same volume also contains
James’s The Varieties of
Religious Experience.
James’s The Varieties of
Religious Experience.
“The Tigers in India” is
only a part of a 20-page
James address originally titled
“The Knowing of Things Together“
(my emphasis).
Comments Off on Wednesday July 18, 2007
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Thursday July 12, 2007
“Heaven was
kind of a hat
on the universe,
a lid that kept
everything underneath it
where it belonged.”
kind of a hat
on the universe,
a lid that kept
everything underneath it
where it belonged.”
— Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge
5/11:
“Going Up.”
— “Love at the
Five and Dime,”
by
Nanci Griffith
234:
Comments Off on Thursday July 12, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
Monday July 9, 2007
Harry Potter and
the Xbox 360
the Xbox 360
Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix for Xbox 360 “is based on the fifth book and is timed to coincide with the release of the movie of the same name…. The game consists of Harry walking around and talking to characters and performing spells and tasks in order to advance the plot. I jokingly considered calling this review ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Random Tasks Needed to Advance the Plot.'” —July 9 review at Digital Joystick
Today’s lottery numbers
in the Keystone State:
in the Keystone State:
Mid-day 220
Evening 034
Related material:
2/20 and
Hexagram 34 in the
box-style I Ching:
The Power
of the Great
Let us hope that Harry fans remember the meaning of Hexagram 34 (according to Richard Wilhelm)– “Perseverance furthers” and “That is truly great power which does not degenerate into mere force but remains inwardly united with the fundamental principles of right and of justice. When we understand this point– namely, that greatness and justice must be indissolubly united– we understand the true meaning of all that happens in heaven and on earth.”
Related material:
“If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts“
(continued) and
the four entries
that preceded it
on July 5-6, 2007
Comments Off on Monday July 9, 2007
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Tuesday July 3, 2007
The Ignorance
of Stanley Fish
of Stanley Fish
(continued from
June 18, 2002)
The “ignorance” referred to
is Fish’s ignorance of the
philosophical background
of the words
“particular” and “universal.”
“Postmodern Warfare:
The Ignorance of Our
Warrior Intellectuals,”
by Stanley Fish,
Harper’s Magazine,
July 2002, contains
the following passages:
The Ignorance of Our
Warrior Intellectuals,”
by Stanley Fish,
Harper’s Magazine,
July 2002, contains
the following passages:
“The deepest strain in a religion is the particular and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart, in the company of such pronouncements as ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’ Take the deepest strain of religion away… and what remains are the surface pieties– abstractions without substantive bite– to which everyone will assent because they are empty, insipid, and safe. It is this same preference for the vacuously general over the disturbingly particular that informs the attacks on college and university professors who spoke out in ways that led them to be branded as outcasts by those who were patrolling and monitoring the narrow boundaries of acceptable speech. Here one must be careful, for there are fools and knaves on all sides.”
“Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism.”
“What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike, postmodernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us of a mechanism for determining which of two or more fiercely held beliefs is true (which is not to deny the category of true belief, just the possibility of identifying it uncontroversially), strong religiosity because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have recourse and to the judgments of which all, who are not criminal or insane, would assent. The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is supposed to be the location of those standards and measures that belong to no one but apply to everyone. It is to be the location of the universal. The problem is not that there is no universal–the universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication.
What to do? Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest thing: you assert that your universal is the true one, even though your adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality–the desired public categories of condemnation–but to the fact, regrettable as it may be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the falseness of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right and that there is no generally accepted measure by which our rightness can be independently validated. That’s just the way it is, and we should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs (what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will descend, like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have uttered the true and secret word.”
From the public spheres
of the Pennsylvania Lottery:
105 —
“‘From your lips
to God’s ears,’
goes the old
Yiddish wish.
The writer, by contrast,
tries to read God’s lips
and pass along
the words….”
— Richard Powers
268 —
This is a page number
that appears, notably,
in my June 2002
journal entry on Fish,
and again in an entry,
“The Transcendent Signified,”
dated July 26, 2003,
that argues against
Fish’s school, postmodernism,
and in favor of what the pomos
call “logocentrism.”
Page 268
of Simon Blackburn’s Think
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1999):
“It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato’s (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called ‘postmodernism’ is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth.”
Fish may, if he wishes,
regard the particular
page number 268 as
delivered– five years late,
but such is philosophy–
by Groucho’s
winged messenger
in response to
Fish’s utterance of the
“true and secret word”–
namely, “universal.”
regard the particular
page number 268 as
delivered– five years late,
but such is philosophy–
by Groucho’s
winged messenger
in response to
Fish’s utterance of the
“true and secret word”–
namely, “universal.”
When not arguing politics,
Fish, though from
a Jewish background, is
said to be a Milton scholar.
Let us therefore hope he
is by now, or comes to be,
aware of the Christian
approach to universals–
an approach true to the
philosophical background
sketched in 1999 by
Blackburn and made
particular in a 1931 novel
by Charles Williams,
The Place of the Lion.
Comments Off on Tuesday July 3, 2007
Monday, July 2, 2007
Monday July 2, 2007
A figure like Ecclesiast/
Rugged and luminous,
chants in the dark/
A text that is an answer,
although obscure.
— Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven"
|
Time and Chance |
From 8/02
in 2005:
| 50 Years Ago on this date, poet Wallace Stevens died. Memorial: at the Wallace Stevens Concordance, enter center. |
Result:
| The Man with the Blue Guitar | |
|---|---|
| line 150 (xiii.6): | The heraldic center of the world |
| Human Arrangement | |
| line 13: | The center of transformations that |
| This Solitude of Cataracts | |
| line 18: | Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time. |
| A Primitive Like an Orb | |
| line 1 (i.1): | The essential poem at the center of things, |
| line 87 (xi.7): | At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave |
| Reply to Papini | |
| line 33 (ii.15): | And final. This is the center. The poet is |
| Study of Images II | |
| line 7: | As if the center of images had its |
| An Ordinary Evening in New Haven | |
| line 291 (xvii.3): | It fails. The strength at the center is serious. |
| line 371 (xxi.11): | At the center, the object of the will, this place, |
| Things of August | |
| line 154 (ix.18): | At the center of the unintelligible, |
| The Hermitage at the Center | |
| Title: | The Hermitage at the Center |
| Owl's Clover, The Old Woman and the Statue (OP) | |
| line 13 (ii.9): | At the center of the mass, the haunches low, |
| The Sail of Ulysses (OP) | |
| line 50 (iv.6): | The center of the self, the self |
| Someone Puts a Pineapple Together (NA) | |
| line 6 (i.6): | The angel at the center of this rind, |
| Of Ideal Time and Choice (NA) | |
| line 29: | At last, the center of resemblance, found |
| line 32: | Stand at the center of ideal time, |
For a text on today's
mid-day number, see
Comments Off on Monday July 2, 2007
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Sunday July 1, 2007
Mozart
by the Numbers
by the Numbers
2/21
A Superficial Beauty:
Structural Certainty:
| murphy plant, murphy grow, a maryamyria- | 10 | ||
| meliamurphies, in the lazily eye of his lapis, | 11 | ||
| |
12 | ||
 |
13 | ||
| |
14 | ||
| Uteralterance or | Vieus Von DVbLIn, ’twas one of dozedeams | 15 | |
| the Interplay of | a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under | 16 | |
| Bones in the | the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore | 17 | |
| Womb. | ground). 1 Given now ann linch you take enn | 18 | |
| all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical | 19 | ||
| expressions out of old Sare Isaac’s 2 universal | 20 | ||
| The Vortex. | of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna | 21 | |
| Spring of Sprung | like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re | 22 | |
| Verse. The Ver- | apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise. | 23 | |
| tex. | Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh | 24 | |
| leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to | 25 | ||
| the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens | 26 |
“Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest.” —Norman Lebrecht
Comments Off on Sunday July 1, 2007
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Saturday June 30, 2007
An Evening Star
for Rabbi Abraham Klausner,
a “father figure” according to
The New York Times.
The Times says Klausner
died at 92 on
The Times says Klausner
died at 92 on
Thursday, June 28, 2007:
Klausner was a rabbi
in Yonkers until his
retirement in 1989.
The evening number in
the New York Lottery
on the reported date of
Klausner’s death
was 514.
As in the previous entry,
this number may be
interpreted as the date 5/14.
A Log24 entry with that date:
|
Sunday, May 14, 2006 Today’s birthday: George Lucas, STAR WARS continued:
|
In the details:
the title character as follows:
|
“Joshua is no ordinary boy….
He’s exceptionally intelligent and frighteningly precocious. He has an angelic politeness and an easy cool that belie his young age…. Is it all a series of eerie coincidences or are they in the midst of an unimaginably evil mind? And could it be Joshua who, like his Biblical namesake, is bringing the house tumbling down around his family?” |
The “Biblical namesake” is the
Joshua of the Old Testament–
Joshua of the Old Testament–
source of the deeply flawed
“tumbling down” analogy.
In the New Testament,
there is of course also
a rather famous Joshua.
a rather famous Joshua.
“And the serpent’s eyes shine
as he wraps around the vine….”
Comments Off on Saturday June 30, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Thursday June 28, 2007
Real Numbers:
An Object Lesson
An Object Lesson
(continued from
AntiChristmas)
AntiChristmas)
A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"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'…."
— Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao's book:
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.
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:
Journal entry dated 5/14:
Journal entries dated 3/09:
Comments Off on Thursday June 28, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Wednesday June 27, 2007
Juneteenth Revisited:
A Long and Strange Day
Time and chance
yesterday:
A Long and Strange Day
Time and chance
yesterday:
Pennsylvania Lottery
June 26, 2007–
Mid-day 040
Evening 810
040:
A discussion of the work of Ralph Ellison:
"… why do you think he did not finish these novels? He wrote on them for many, many years– 40 years, I think."
"Yes, he worked for 40 years."
See Ellison's novel Juneteenth (New York Times review, 1999)
810:
"But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
turning and turning back
With the same terror,
into the deep thicket
Beside the highway,
at home in the dark thicket.
I say the wood within is the dark wood…."
John Baez, Diary, entry of June 22, 2007:
"On Tuesday the 19th….
I hiked down the completely dark but perfectly familiar gravel road with my suitcase in hand, listening to the forest creatures. But then, I couldn't find my parents' driveway! It was embarrassing: I could see their house perfectly well, off in the distance, but it was so darn dark I couldn't spot the driveway. It felt like a dream: after a long flight with many delays, one winds up walking to ones parents house, lost in a spooky forest….
… I sort of enjoy this kind of thing, as long as there's no real danger. It's also sort of scary. The well-lit grid of civilization slowly falls away, and you're out there alone in the night…
Anyway: I considered hiking straight through the woods to my parents' house, but I decided things were already interesting enough, so instead I called my mom and ask her to drive down the driveway a bit, just so I could see where it was. And so she did, and then it was obvious.
So, I got home shortly before midnight. A long and strange day. My dad was already in bed, but I said hi to him anyway."
Related material:
Comments Off on Wednesday June 27, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Tuesday June 12, 2007
Sky Fish
Illustration from
LOGOS
(May 17, 2007)
From an obituary in today's New York Times:
"Lee Nagrin, a noted Off Broadway performance artist… died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 78….
She formed her own company, the Sky Fish Ensemble, in 1979 and presented performance-art pieces that tended to unspool like fairy tales, filled with mysterious, archetypal imagery. Her own presence was mysterious, too, both on and off the stage, often conjuring up the sense of a keen-eyed, all-seeing, benign witch.
She created some of those images midperformance, as when she traced a landscape along brown paper that ringed the stage space of Silver Whale Gallery, where much of her work was performed.
For her last piece, 'Behind the Lid,' she collaborated with the puppeteer Basil Twist on a story in which a woman looks back on her life through a dream. Performances are this month at the Silver Whale."
LEE NAGRIN AND BASIL TWIST’S
BEHIND THE LID
Tuesday – Sunday @ 8PM
June 3rd – June 28th
Silver Whale Gallery
"Silver Whale Gallery (21 Bleecker Street) proudly announces the world premiere of BEHIND THE LID, a new play by playwright/performer Lee Nagrin and puppeteer/performer Basil Twist that chronicles a woman looking back on her life through a dream; her memories expand, open and reveal while an intimate audience of 18 will travel with her through this hand made world. Audience members are guided by a young familiar through this older woman's life and dreams. They experience layer upon layer of the life of an American artist – Lee Nagrin. Basil Twist creates the puppetry and performs.
Tickets for BEHIND THE LID are $40. To purchase tickets, please call Smarttix.com at 212-868-4444 or for more information visit www.leenagrin.com on the Internet."
From Log24
on June 7, the date
of Nagrin's death:
"… Packaging is unavoidable.
Facts rarely, if ever,
speak for themselves."
— Matthew C. Nisbet,
Assistant Professor
of "Communication,"
June 6, 2007
From the
New York Lottery
on June 7, the date
of Nagrin's death:
Another opening of
another show.
Comments Off on Tuesday June 12, 2007
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Sunday May 27, 2007
Random Number
The previous entry links back to May 18’s “Devil in the Details,” an entry quoting Peter Woit. Yesterday afternoon Woit, who sometimes writes on pure mathematics as well as physics, posted an entry on a talk said to be related to something called “the ABC-conjecture,” which has been called “the most important unsolved problem in diophantine analysis.” (Dorian Goldfeld, “Beyond the Last Theorem,” The Sciences, March/April 1996, 34-40)
On the ABC-conjecture in number theory:
“We hope to elucidate the beautiful connections between elliptic curves, modular forms and the ABC–conjecture.” —Dorian Goldfeld (pdf)
An Edinburgh postgraduate student on the conjecture:
“… abc brings us full circle to Fermat’s Last Theorem….” —Graeme Taylor at Everything2.com
I regret I can add nothing to Taylor’s admirable exposition and to Goldfeld’s “beautiful connections” except the following observation of a rather ugly connection.
The previous Log24 entry, from yesterday afternoon, related the May 18 “details” entry to Friday’s PA evening lottery number, 005. A followup seems (if only to honor the madcap tradition of John Nash) to be called for. The PA evening number yesterday evening, Saturday, was 443. Nash, in his younger days, might have been pleased to note that this number is associated (if only by coincidence) with a topic Woit mentioned earlier yesterday– Fermat’s famed conjecture:
— Page 443
in The Annals of Mathematics,
2nd Ser., Vol. 141, No. 3 (May, 1995)
This is the first page of a rather
famous paper by Andrew Wiles.
Such coincidences are, of course, anathema to believers in the religion of Scientism. But one such believer, Natalie Angier (yesterday morning’s entry), at least acknowledges the charm of “the atheist’s favorite Christmas movie, ‘Coincidence on 34th Street.'” (pdf)
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday May 27, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Saturday May 26, 2007
A Baffled Reader
A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):
“To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think),” … William Safire regarding “blogs”.
I still don’t know what you think. Yet … I try, try, try.
Here’s one thing that I think– today– based on my “Hate Speech for Harvard,” on “Devil in the Details” (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on
- last evening’s PA lottery number 005,
- the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
- the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:
Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07
Commentary on the cover
by the PA lottery
on 5/25/07
in the form of the
evening number, 005.
In the I Ching, this
is the number of
by the PA lottery
on 5/25/07
in the form of the
evening number, 005.
In the I Ching, this
is the number of
HSU:
WAITING
(NOURISHMENT)
See also the previous entry
and Natalie Angier’s sneer
at a politician’s call for
prayer, which, she
said, involved the
“assumption that prayer is
some sort of miracle
Vicks VapoRub.”
Detail from the
5/21/07 New Yorker:
THE IMAGE
Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of WAITING.
Thus the superior man
eats and drinks,
Is joyous and
of good cheer.
AMEN.
Comments Off on Saturday May 26, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday May 23, 2007
Strong Emergence Illustrated:
The Beauty Test
"There is no royal road
to geometry"
to geometry"
— Attributed to Euclid
There are, however, various non-royal roads. One of these is indicated by yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery numbers:
The mid-day number 515 may be taken as a reference to 5/15. (See the previous entry, "Angel in the Details," and 5/15.)
The evening number 062, in the context of Monday's entry "No Royal Roads" and yesterday's "Jewel in the Crown," may be regarded as naming a non-royal road to geometry: either U. S. 62, a major route from Mexico to Canada (home of the late geometer H.S.M. Coxeter), or a road less traveled– namely, page 62 in Coxeter's classic Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):
The illustration (and definition) is
of regular tessellations of the plane.
of regular tessellations of the plane.
This topic Coxeter offers as an
illustration of remarks by G. H. Hardy
that he quotes on the preceding page:
One might argue that such beauty is strongly emergent because of the "harmonious way" the parts fit together: the regularity (or fitting together) of the whole is not reducible to the regularity of the parts. (Regular triangles, squares, and hexagons fit together, but regular pentagons do not.)
The symmetries of these regular tessellations of the plane are less well suited as illustrations of emergence, since they are tied rather closely to symmetries of the component parts.
But the symmetries of regular tessellations of the sphere— i.e., of the five Platonic solids– do emerge strongly, being apparently independent of symmetries of the component parts.
Another example of strong emergence: a group of 322,560 transformations acting naturally on the 4×4 square grid— a much larger group than the group of 8 symmetries of each component (square) part.
The lottery numbers above also supply an example of strong emergence– one that nicely illustrates how it can be, in the words of Mark Bedau, "uncomfortably like magic."
(Those more comfortable with magic may note the resemblance of the central part of Coxeter's illustration to a magical counterpart– the Ojo de Dios of Mexico's Sierra Madre.)
Comments Off on Wednesday May 23, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Saturday May 12, 2007
Artistic Vision
Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers– mid-day 384, evening 952.
In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers.
First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters– "You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary." An example was given illustrating this saying. Here is another example:
Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary–
Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960–
Page 384: "Defender of the Faith"
Related Log24 entries:
"To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006,
and earlier Log24 entries from
that year's Halloween season
Page 952: "monolith"
Related Log24 entries:
"Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line"
(with the four entries that preceded it).
It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry– "Lonesome No More!"– was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis."
See also April 7, 2003:
April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."
"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim
Comments Off on Saturday May 12, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Friday May 11, 2007
In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary. This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”
Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 384
Evening 952
Mid-day 384
Evening 952
Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007). That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.
See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.
From that address:
“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”
Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–
Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007
There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.
“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”
From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:
“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952
See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“
Comments Off on Friday May 11, 2007
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Tuesday May 1, 2007
Today’s Commentary
by the Pennsylvania Lottery:
by the Pennsylvania Lottery:
Comments Off on Tuesday May 1, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Saturday April 28, 2007
Cubism
See last year’s
entries for 5/10 —
My Space
and for 2/23 —
Cubist Epiphany
“This is a crazy world and
the only way to enjoy it
is to treat it as a joke.”
— Robert A. Heinlein,
The Number of the Beast
Comments Off on Saturday April 28, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Friday April 27, 2007
Production Credits:
Thanks to the
Pennsylvania Lottery for
today's suggestion of links
to the dates 9/15 and 6/06–
— and to
Hermann Weyl
for the illustration
from 6/06 (D-Day)
underlying the
following "gold medal"
from 9/15, 2006:
.
Comments Off on Friday April 27, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Friday April 20, 2007
Speech
"… Bush spoke and answered audience questions for nearly 90 minutes inside East Grand Rapids High School in suburban Grand Rapids….
After leaving the school, Bush's motorcade stopped at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, where he stood silently for a few moments after placing a bouquet of white roses at Ford's burial site on the museum grounds. The 38th president, who grew up in Grand Rapids, died Dec. 26 at age 93."
Multispeech
For the meaning of the lottery icons
above, see this morning's entry and
an entry that it links to —
Time's Labyrinth continued —
of March 8, 2007.
above, see this morning's entry and
an entry that it links to —
Time's Labyrinth continued —
of March 8, 2007.
For the meaning of multispeech,
see the entries of
All Hallows' Eve, 2005:
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— A Wrinkle in Time
Comments Off on Friday April 20, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Wednesday April 18, 2007
Vigil
Andrew Russell, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech,
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Virginia Lottery, Tuesday, April 17, 2007
“I love those Bavarians… so meticulous.”
Click on images to enlarge.
Comments Off on Wednesday April 18, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Saturday April 14, 2007
Entertainment Tonight
“What is the spirit of the bayonet?”
— United States Army
training question, 1964
A partial answer
in two parts:
Part I —
Another question —
“Know the one about
the Demiurge and the
Abridgment of Hope?”
— Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise,
Knopf, 1981,
the final page, 439,
cited by page number
here this morning
Part II —
Today’s numbers, in
this morning’s context,
strongly suggest
a look at
A Flag for Sunrise,
by Robert Stone,
Knopf, 1981,
| page 431, and at Hexagram 34, |
The Power of the Great,
in the context of a
Log24 entry for
October 8, 2005.
“There is no teacher
but the enemy.“
— Orson Scott Card,
Ender’s Game
Related entertainment:
the previous entry
and the Vietnam memoir
Black Virgin Mountain.
Comments Off on Saturday April 14, 2007
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Tuesday April 3, 2007
Our Judeo-Christian
Heritage –
Lottery
Hermeneutics
Part I: Judeo
| The Lottery 12/9/06 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 036
See |
331
See 3/31— “square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.” |
| Pennsylvania | 602
See 6/02— Walter Benjamin |
111
See 1/11— “Related material:
|
Part II: Christian
| The Lottery 4/3/07 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 115
See 1/15— |
017
See
|
| Pennsylvania | 604
See |
714
See |
Related material:
It is perhaps relevant to
this Holy Week that the
date 6/04 (2006) above
refers to both the Christian
holy day of Pentecost and
to the day of the
facetious baccalaureate
of the Class of 2006 in
the University Chapel
at Princeton.
For further context for the
Log24 remarks of that same
date, see June 1-15, 2006.
Comments Off on Tuesday April 3, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Friday March 30, 2007
Rings
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
The headline for Edward Rothstein’s “Connections” column in The New York Times of Monday, March 26, 2007, was “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.”
Here is such a text.
|
The New York Lottery,
Friday, March 30, 2007: Mid-day 002 Evening 085 |
Continuing yesterday’s lottery meditation, let us examine today’s New York results in the light of Rothstein’s essay. The literary “ring” structure he describes is not immediately apparent in Friday’s numbers, although the mid-day number, 002– which in the I Ching signifies yin, the feminine, receptive principle– might be interpreted as referring to a ring of sorts.
Illustration from
an entry of
March 2, 2004
For the evening number, 085, see the list of page numbers in last year’s Log24 entry (cited here last night) for today’s date, March 30. Page 85, in the source cited here a year ago, begins…
“A random selection from Hopkins’s journal shows how the sun acts as a focus….”
See also last night’s picture:
Last night’s reference to last
year’s entry on this date provides,
like the last and first pages of
Finnegans Wake, an example
of literary “ring” structure.
year’s entry on this date provides,
like the last and first pages of
Finnegans Wake, an example
of literary “ring” structure.
Today’s New York evening number,
85, reinforces this “ring” reference.
For related material, see
an entry for Reba McEntire’s
birthday four years ago.
Comments Off on Friday March 30, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Wednesday March 28, 2007
Plato, God, Stories
Peter Woit’s latest weblog entry links to a discussion of Plato’s cave and the modular group, which in turn suggests a second look at an entry linked to, indirectly, at the end of Saturday’s Log24 entry: Natasha’s Dance. This leads to the following:
“To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.”
— Freeman Dyson, “Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight,” The New York Review of Books, issue dated five years ago today– March 28, 2002.
If Dyson’s “recognition” is correct, why should mind and intelligence not be woven into the fabric of the Pennsylvania Lottery?
The practiced reader of Log24 will have little difficulty in constructing a story based on these numbers. Briefly, the story is… 2/26 and 8/26. The way the story was written may “surpass our comprehension,” but the story itself need not.
Those more interested in the writing than the story may consult Edward Rothstein’s piece in the March 26 New York Times, “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.” There they will find a brief discussion of, appropriately, the Bible’s Book of Numbers.
Comments Off on Wednesday March 28, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Saturday March 10, 2007
The Logic of Dreams
From A Beautiful Mind–
“How could you,” began Mackey, “how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you…?”
Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. “Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
Ideas:
These numbers may, in the mad way so well portrayed by Sylvia Nasar in the above book, be regarded as telling a story… a story that should, of course, not be taken too seriously.
Friday’s New York numbers (midday 214, evening 711) suggest the dates 2/14 and 7/11. Clicking on these dates will lead the reader to Log24 entries featuring, among others, T. S. Eliot and Stephen King– two authors not unacquainted with the bizarre logic of dreams.
A link in the 7/11 entry leads to a remark of Noel Gray on Plato’s Meno and “graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave.”
Also Friday: an example of graphic austerity– indeed, Gray graphic austerity– in Log24:
This illustration refers to chess rather than to geometry, and to the mind of an addict rather than to that of a slave, but chess and geometry, like addiction and slavery, are not unrelated.
Friday’s Pennsylvania numbers, midday 429 and evening 038, suggest that the story includes, appropriately enough in view of the above Beautiful Mind excerpt, Mackey himself. The midday number suggests the date 4/29, which at Log24 leads to an entry in memory of Mackey.
(Related material: the Harvard Gazette of April 6, 2006, “Mathematician George W. Mackey, 90: Obituary“– “A memorial service will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church on April 29 at 2 p.m.“)
Friday’s Pennsylvania evening number 038 tells two other parts of the story involving Mackey…
As Mackey himself might hope, the number may be regarded as a reference to the 38 impressive pages of Varadarajan’s “Mackey Memorial Lecture” (pdf).
More in the spirit of Nash, 38 may also be taken as a reference to Harvard’s old postal address, Cambridge 38, and to the year, 1938, that Mackey entered graduate study at Harvard, having completed his undergraduate studies at what is now Rice University.
Returning to the concept of graphic austerity, we may further simplify the already abstract chessboard figure above to obtain an illustration that has been called both “the field of reason” and “the Garden of Apollo” by an architect, John Outram, discussing his work at Mackey’s undergraduate alma mater:
Let us hope that Mackey,
a devotee of reason,
is now enjoying the company
of Apollo rather than that of
Tom O’Bedlam:
For John Nash on his birthday:
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
Comments Off on Saturday March 10, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Tuesday February 27, 2007
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon
in “The Da Vinci Code”
in “The Da Vinci Code”
New York State Lottery
yesterday, Feb. 26, 2007:
Mid-day 206
Evening 888
For more on the artistic
significance of 206,
see 2/06.
yesterday, Feb. 26, 2007:
Mid-day 206
Evening 888
For more on the artistic
significance of 206,
see 2/06.
For more on the artistic
significance of 888, see
St. Bonaventure on the
Trinity at math16.com.
A trinity:
Click on picture for further details.
Comments Off on Tuesday February 27, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Sunday February 25, 2007
Devil's Night in Hollywood
Revisited
On the night of October 30-31, 1993, also known as Devil's Night, there was a full Hunter's Moon and the Pennsylvania Lottery number was 666.
— Steven H. Cullinane, 03/20/01
"Mystery surrounds the death of young actor River Phoenix…. The actor… was declared dead at 1:51 a.m. PT Sunday [Oct. 31, 1993]. Phoenix died about 50 minutes after collapsing in front of the Viper Room, a new club on the Sunset Strip…."
— Karen Thomas, USA Today, Monday, November 1, 1993
Related material:
The five Log24 entries
ending on Yom Kippur, 2006.
Comments Off on Sunday February 25, 2007
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Saturday February 3, 2007
Catholic Schools Week,
Jan. 28 – Feb. 3, 2007,
concludes:
Jan. 28 – Feb. 3, 2007,
concludes:
For 373, see
Miracle.
For 401, see 4/01:
April 1 at Noon.
“Feel lucky?
Well, do you?”
Comments Off on Saturday February 3, 2007
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Sunday December 31, 2006
Aesthetics of Evil
vs. Christ Church
“… the closing number
for Spielberg’s tribute
and the gala itself…
[is] the finale to
the opera ‘Candide,’
‘Make Our Garden Grow.'” on this year’s
Kennedy Center Honors
vs. Christ Church
“… the closing number
for Spielberg’s tribute
and the gala itself…
[is] the finale to
the opera ‘Candide,’
‘Make Our Garden Grow.'” on this year’s
Kennedy Center Honors
Wallace Stevens,
“Esthétique du Mal, XI”—
“We are not
At the centre of a diamond.”
The map shows the original
(pre-1846) diamond shape
of the District of Columbia.
For the relevance of the
closing number of “Candide”
to diamonds, see
the previous entry.
For the relevance of the
closing number of the
12/3/06 DC lottery, see
Theme and Variations.
For the relevance of the
earlier mid-day number,
see the conclusion of
“Esthétique du Mal” —
| “And out of what one sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live.” |
A search on the mid-day number
in the context of metaphysics
yields the following:
Related material:
“In ‘Esthétique du Mal,’ one of his later poems, Wallace Stevens considers existence from a variety of critical and philosophical perspectives, among them various moral, aesthetic, political, theological, and philosophic ‘epistemes’ that condition how humanity perceives and experiences the world. These epistemological ‘modes’ dictate how we live and perceive the world about us, providing preconceptions that shroud understanding and obfuscate ontological explanation. What Stevens accomplishes in ‘Esthétique du Mal‘ is to create a dialogue with various historical and philosophical ‘schools,’ systematically confronting and rejecting their perspectives, and creating a movement toward Martin Heidegger’s ‘aletheia’ to uncover the ontological substructure that exists beneath the individual’s experience in the world. This movement of ‘uncovering’ and exposing the nature of what it means ‘to be in the world’ is a journey to an ontological substructure that allows Stevens to arrive at a dynamic, ontological proof: that existence is full of ‘reverberating’ possibilities, not solitary and ‘univocal’ statements.”
— Conversations with the Dead:
The Ontological Substructure of
Wallace Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal“—
a 1999 Master’s thesis
For further remarks on
ontological substructure,
see A First Class Degree
(on a notable graduate of
Christ Church, Oxford).
Comments Off on Sunday December 31, 2006
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Saturday December 23, 2006
Black Mark
Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
|
Log24 on Monday,
Dec. 18, 2006: “I did a column in — Martin Gardner (pdf) “… the entire profession — Joan S. Birman (pdf)
Lottery on Friday,
Dec. 22, 2006:
 |
5/04, 2005:
Analysis of the structure
of a 2x2x2 cube
via trinities of
projective points
in a Fano plane.
projective points
in a Fano plane.
7/15, 2005:
“Art history was very personal
through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”
— Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives
of American Art
Also on 7/15, 2005,
a quotation on Usenet:
a quotation on Usenet:
“A set having three members is a
single thing wholly constituted by
its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine
of the Trinity as ‘three in one’
should be child’s play.”
— Max Black,
Caveats and Critiques:
Philosophical Essays in
Language, Logic, and Art
Comments Off on Saturday December 23, 2006
Friday, December 15, 2006
Friday December 15, 2006
Putting the
X
in Xmas
— C. S. Lewis
Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair, as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today’s New York Times. Let us hope that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved beyond these now– singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” rather than “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
|
“In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s cracked up to be. He manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that Borges’s narrator finds to be ‘infinitely richer’ than the original because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections, wrenched as it is from its proper time and context….”
[An artist’s version of a newspaper is]…. “a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between. In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas….” |
The Work:
Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):
| Borges, Menard’s Quixote, and The Harvard Crimson |
Mon., Dec. 11: 133 |
| Baudrillard (via a white Matrix) |
Sun., Dec. 10: 569 |
| Benjamin and a black view of life in “The Garden of Allah” |
Sat., Dec. 9: 602 |
Click on numbers
for commentary.
Borges and Benjamin are
referenced directly in the
commentary. For Baudrillard,
see Richard Hanley on
Baudrillard and The Matrix:
referenced directly in the
commentary. For Baudrillard,
see Richard Hanley on
Baudrillard and The Matrix:
“There is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already always reproducing itself.” –Jean Baudrillard
Related material:
Comments Off on Friday December 15, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Tuesday December 12, 2006
The State of Grace,
Author of Hamlet
Today’s Harvard Crimson:
Author of Hamlet
Today’s Harvard Crimson:
The texts in question are said
to be manuscripts of
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,”
and “The Library of Babel.”
The latter deals (like
“The Mountains of Pi“)
with literature that can
be seen as the result
of a random process–
such as the lottery in
another story by Borges.
A less sinister lottery
is that of Pennsylvania–
known to some as
“the Keystone State.”
I prefer to think of it as
“the State of Grace.”
Click on picture for details.
The “NITE” number 108 leads us
naturally to 1/08:
| Sunday, January 08, 2006
|
This (and yesterday’s “DAY” number 133)
suggests we consult page 133 of
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
of 1919. At the top of this
page we find…
suggests we consult page 133 of
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
of 1919. At the top of this
page we find…
“O day and night,
but this is wondrous strange!”
but this is wondrous strange!”
Another figure from 1/08,
St. Mary Magdalene, might,
adapting the words of Borges,
offer the following observation:
“Shakespeare’s text and the lottery’s
are verbally identical, but the second
is almost infinitely richer.
(More ambiguous, detractors will
say, but ambiguity is richness.)”
Related material: 11/22.
Comments Off on Tuesday December 12, 2006
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Librarian
on Nobel Prize Day
on Nobel Prize Day
"Time and chance
happeneth to them all."
— Ecclesiastes
The number 048
may be interpreted
as referring to…
"Function defined form,
expressed in a pure geometry
that the eye could easily grasp
in its entirety."
— J. G. Ballard on Modernism
(The Guardian, March 20, 2006)
"The greatest obstacle to discovery
is not ignorance —
it is the illusion of knowledge."
— Daniel J. Boorstin,
Librarian of Congress,
quoted in Beyond Geometry
Comments Off on Sunday December 10, 2006
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Librarian
"Like all men of the Library,
I have traveled in my youth."
— Jorge Luis Borges,
The Library of Babel
"Papá me mandó un artículo
de J. G. Ballard en el que
se refiere a cómo el lugar
de la muerte es central en
nuestra cultura contemporánea."
— Sonya Walger,
interview dated September 14
(Feast of the Triumph of the Cross),
Anno Domini 2006
Sonya Walger,
said to have been
born on D-Day,
the sixth of June,
in 1974
Walger's father is, like Borges,
from Argentina.
She "studied English Literature
at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where she received
a First Class degree…. "
"… un artículo de J. G. Ballard…."–
A Handful of Dust, by J. G. Ballard
(The Guardian, March 20, 2006):
"… The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.
Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about….
… modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line…
Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety."
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect
(Click on picture for details.)
— The Left Hand of God, by Adolf Holl
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday December 10, 2006
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Matrix:
Time and Chance
on the 90th Birthday
of Kirk Douglas,
star of
“The Garden of Allah“
| The Lottery 12/9/06 | Mid-day | Evening |
| New York | 036
See |
331
See 3/31— “square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.” |
| Pennsylvania | 602
See 6/02— Walter Benjamin |
111
See 1/11— “Related material: |
Comments Off on Sunday December 10, 2006
Monday, December 4, 2006
Monday December 4, 2006
180, 932 –
The Musical!
“You gotta be
true to your code.”
— Sinatra
JSTOR: A Theophany
The Musical!
“You gotta be
true to your code.”
— Sinatra
NY Lottery, 2006:
Dec. 3 Mid-day – 180
Dec. 3 Evening – 932
Yesterday’s entry suggested that
the date, December 3, might be
appropriate for some sort of
Broadway production.
Yesterday evening’s NY lottery
number, 932, suggests*
(via Google) that a visit to
the castle Wildeck
is in order.
This castle is now the home
of the Buchdruck-Museum
honoring Johannes Gutenberg.
For an appropriate Broadway
production, see today’s
New York Times:
Yesterday’s mid-day NY lottery
number, 180, suggests, in the
above context, the German term
Umkehrung. A casual web search
on this term (+ “reversal,”
then, refining the search,
+ “Theocritus”) leads
to the following material,
which I personally find of
much greater interest than
the above Broadway production.
(Such web searches are made
possible by a technological
revolution comparable to that
of Gutenberg… Broadway may
perhaps look forward to…
“Google! The Musical!“)
| Google Search 12/4/06 |
| Results 1 – 2 of about 14 for umkehrung theocritus. (0.07 seconds) |
JSTOR: Theocritus
| I12: on ‘transference’ by Theocritus of refined motifs to uncouth peasants, … is in reality a parody, a devastating ‘Umkehrung‘ of the real thing, … |
JSTOR: A Theophany
in Theocritus
| A THEOPHANY IN THEOCRITUS IN a masterly study of the language and motifs of … epithet I The completeness and precision of the Umkehrung (for this term cf. … |
* “ZSCHOPAU, a town in the kingdom of Saxony, on the left bank of the Zschopau…. It contains… a castle (Wildeck), built by the Emperor Henry I in 932.” —From the classic 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911)
(The date 932 may or may not be accurate, but still serves nicely as what has been called elsewhere “an instance of the fingerpost.”)
Comments Off on Monday December 4, 2006
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Wednesday November 22, 2006
Rock of Ages
“Who knows where madness lies?”
— Rhetorical question
in “Man of La Mancha”
(See previous entry.)
Using madness to
seek out madness, let us
consult today’s numbers…
Pennsylvania Lottery
Nov. 22, 2006:
Mid-day 487
Evening 814
The number 487 leads us to
page 487 in the
May 1977 PMLA,
“The Form of Carnival
in Under the Volcano“:
“The printing presses’ flywheel
marks the whirl of time*
that will split La Despedida….”
From Dana Grove,
A Rhetorical Analysis of
Under the Volcano,
page 92:
“… In this way, mystical as well as psychological dimensions are established. Later on, the two pass by a printer’s shop window and curiously stop to inspect, amidst wedding portraits and well in front of the revolving flywheel of the printing machines, ‘a photographic enlargement purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires.’ Significantly the picture is called ‘La Despedida,’ the Parting. Yvonne cannot help but see the symbolic significance of the photograph and wishes with all of her might ‘to heal the cleft rock’ just as she wishes to heal the divorce….”
Some method in this madness
is revealed by the evening
lottery number, 814, which
leads to an entry of 8/14:
is revealed by the evening
lottery number, 814, which
leads to an entry of 8/14:
“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term between
hip and square, seemed to be it.”
— Robert M. Pirsig
Rebecca Goldstein
The 8/14 entry also deals with
Rebecca Goldstein, who
seems to understand
such cleavage
very well.
(See also today’s previous entry.)
* Cf. Shakespeare’s “whirligig of time“
linked to in the previous entry.)
Comments Off on Wednesday November 22, 2006
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Sunday November 19, 2006
Signature
From AP’s “Today in History,” Nov. 19, 2006:
Today’s birthdays: … Actress-director Jodie Foster is 44….
Thought for Today: “My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.” –[Attributed to] Christopher Morley, American author and journalist (1890-1957).
A different story: Carl Sagan, Contact, Chapter 24– “The Artist’s Signature.”
Yet another story: The Pennsylvania lottery yesterday, November 18, 2006– mid-day 914, evening 945. For interpretations, see 9/14 (Feast of the Triumph of the Cross) and also the following “signature” (i.e., “denominator”):
Number theorists may prefer to
think of 945 as the smallest
odd abundant number
(Al-Baghdadi, ca. 980-1037).
Neither of these occurrences
of 945 in mathematics seems
particularly divine; perhaps there
are some other properties of
this number that make it more
credible as a divine signature–
other, that is, than its occurrence
in a lottery just in time for
Jodie Foster’s birthday.
Comments Off on Sunday November 19, 2006
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Wednesday November 15, 2006
"Many modern Grail stories have a root in the early romances of von Eschenbach….
They live from a Stone whose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called Lapsit exillis.
Click on picture for details.
For an interpretation
of 588, see
Guy Fawkes Day: Twilight Kingdom,
Grail: The Hermeneutics of Chance,
Camelot: The Legend Continues,
A Case for Indiana Jones,
Spots of Time Revisited.
For an interpretation
of 715, see
7/15, Ein Bild:
"Und was fur
ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?"
The number 588 above
is clearly a MacGuffin.
Whether it represents
any deeper reality is
an open question.
"It is a very difficult
philosophical question,
the question of
what 'random' is."
— Herbert Robbins, co-author
of What is Mathematics?
Comments Off on Wednesday November 15, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Monday November 13, 2006
Cognitive Blend:
Casino Royale
and
Time in the Rock
In today’s cognitive blend,
the role of Casino Royale
is played by the
Pennsylvania Lottery,
which points to 7/26,
Venus at St. Anne’s
(title of the closing chapter
of That Hideous Strength).
The role of
Time in the Rock
is played by a
Log24 entry of 3/29,
Diamond Theory in 1937.
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.“
Comments Off on Monday November 13, 2006
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Sunday November 12, 2006
Grace
Today in History, by
The Associated Press
Today in History, by
The Associated Press
On this date:
“In 1929, Grace Kelly–
the future movie star
and Princess of Monaco–
was born in Philadelphia.”
Today’s mid-day lottery
in the State of Grace:
361
Happy birthday.
No se puede vivir
sin amar.
Comments Off on Sunday November 12, 2006
Sunday November 12, 2006
The Height
of
Folly
of
Folly
An interpretation:
762 feet is the height
of Honolulu’s
Diamond Head.
2/06 is the date of
a Log24 entry quoting
Indiana Jones:
“Legend says that when the
stones are brought together
the diamonds inside of them
will glow.”
Related material:
“… in search of a
well-needed vacation,
he is unprepared for this
zany package tour
from Hell….”
— Library Journal review
of the David Lodge novel
Paradise News
well-needed vacation,
he is unprepared for this
zany package tour
from Hell….”
— Library Journal review
of the David Lodge novel
Paradise News
Comments Off on Sunday November 12, 2006
Sunday November 12, 2006
Instance
From a review by Adam White Scoville of Iain Pears's novel titled An Instance of the Fingerpost:
"Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion, as Pilate, Barabbas, Caiaphas, and Mary Magdalene might have told it. If so, it is sublimely done so that the realization gradually and unexpectedly dawns upon the reader. The title, taken from Sir Francis Bacon, suggests that at certain times, 'understanding stands suspended' and in that moment of clarity (somewhat like Wordsworth's 'spots of time,' I think), the answer will become apparent as if a fingerpost were pointing at the way."
Another instance:
The film "Barabbas" (1962) shown on Turner Classic Movies at 8 PM Friday, Nov. 10.
Compare and contrast–
- Barabbas emerging from prison as if from Plato's cave, and Barabbas's vision of Christ in blinding sunlight: "Flung into the sunlight, he stands blinking at a young man in white robes; is it merely the unaccustomed light that dazzles his eyes, or does he really see a radiance streaming from the young man's face?" —TIME Magazine, 1962
- 1 Peter 2 on Christ as the "living stone"
- The cover of the novel Stone 588 shown in Friday's 11:20 PM entry
The film is based on the novel by Par Lagerkvist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Lagerkvist novel may be of more enduring interest than Stone 588, but, as Friday's lottery numbers indicate, even lesser stories have their place.
Friday, November 10, 2006
Friday November 10, 2006
Today's
numbers:
numbers:
Today is the day that
Stanley found Livingstone.
Click on picture for details.
"Stone 588,
I presume?"
Related material:
This afternoon's entry
on color symmetry
and
Click on picture for details.
See, too, the following from
a Log24 entry of last Monday–
"To von Eschenbach, the Grail
was never really a material cup,
but a jewel like the
jewel in the lotus,
a symbol of enlightenment,
of something intangible
and always beyond reach."
— Arcadian Functor
was never really a material cup,
but a jewel like the
jewel in the lotus,
a symbol of enlightenment,
of something intangible
and always beyond reach."
— Arcadian Functor
— in this context:
"Philosophers ponder the idea
of identity: what it is to give
something a name
on Monday
and have it respond
to that name
on Friday…."
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
something a name
on Monday
and have it respond
to that name
on Friday…."
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
Comments Off on Friday November 10, 2006
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Tuesday November 7, 2006
may constitute winning
in another game.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Foundations of Mathematics,
rev. ed., MIT Press, 1978–
rev. ed., MIT Press, 1978–
Appendix III, paragraph 8,
said to have been written
on September 23, 1937
said to have been written
on September 23, 1937
For clues to interpreting
today’s Keystone State
mid-day lottery number,
023, see
The Prime Cut Gospel.
For clues to interpreting
today’s Keystone State
evening lottery number,
666, see
the “Apocalypse Now”
quotations on
All Saints’ Day, 2006.
Comments Off on Tuesday November 7, 2006
Sunday, November 5, 2006
Sunday November 5, 2006
Grail:
The Hermeneutics
of Chance
The Hermeneutics
of Chance
“… as Genevieve W. Foster has shown in her Jungian analysis, the eyes, the rose, and the star are equivalent to the ‘Grail’ of The Waste Land.”
— Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956
The Grail also appears in legend as a stone–
From a Nov. 6, 2006, entry in the New Zealand weblog Arcadian Functor:
“Many modern Grail stories have a root in the early romances of von Eschenbach….
They live from a Stone whose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called Lapsit exillis.
A search on “lapsit exillis” leads to “Cubic Stones from the Sky“…
These stones are often seen as the Holy Grail….
For 804, see
8/04 —
The Presbyterian Exorcist
(in part a tribute to
Wallace Stevens).
8/04 —
The Presbyterian Exorcist
(in part a tribute to
Wallace Stevens).
For 008 and a
“cubic stone,”
see
Christmas 2005.
A poetic connection between the star
of “The Hollow Men” and Christmas
is furnished by the remarks of
Wallace Stevens linked to in
the previous entry from
the word “information.”
Comments Off on Sunday November 5, 2006
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Tuesday October 31, 2006
To Announce a Faith
From 7/07, an art review from The New York Times:
Endgame Art?
It's Borrow, Sample and Multiply
in an Exhibition at Bard College
"The show has an endgame, end-time mood….
I would call all these strategies fear of form…. the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.
Fear of form above all means fear of compression– of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
— Roberta Smith
It is doubtful that Smith
would consider the
following "found" art an
example of originality.
would consider the
following "found" art an
example of originality.
It nevertheless does
"announce a faith."
"First for yourself"
Today's mid-day
Pennsylvania number:
707
See Log24 on 7/07
and the above review.
"Second, perhaps,
for the rest of us"
Today's evening
Pennsylvania number:
384
This number is an
example of what the
reviewer calls "compression"–
"an artistic focus that condenses
experiences, ideas and feelings
into something
whole, committed
and visually comprehensible."
"Experiences"
See (for instance)
Joan Didion's writings
(1160 pages, 2.35 pounds)
on "the shifting phantasmagoria
which is our actual experience."
"Ideas"
"Feelings"
See A Wrinkle in Time.
"Whole"
The automorphisms
of the tesseract
form a group
of order 384.
"Committed"
See the discussions of
groups of degree 16 in
R. D. Carmichael's classic
Introduction to the Theory
of Groups of Finite Order.
"Visually comprehensible"
See "Diamond Theory in 1937,"
an excerpt from which
is shown below.
The "faith" announced by
the above lottery numbers
on All Hallows' Eve is
perhaps that of the artist
Madeleine L'Engle:
Comments Off on Tuesday October 31, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
Monday October 30, 2006
From The Harvard Crimson,
Monday, October 30, 2006 6:09 AM
“Why is the Task Force on General Education afraid of teaching religion? True, their report did recommend a reason and faith requirement, but the committee has clearly shied away from teaching religious principles and has treated the study of religion itself with contempt….
In the general education report… there is no mention of the fundamental principles of religious thought, even though the general education report stresses that students are affected by religion and should think critically about it.”
Here is one approach
to religious thought–
Scientism— exemplified
by Harvard’s
Emperor of Math.
to religious thought–
Scientism— exemplified
by Harvard’s
Emperor of Math.
Screenshot of doctoryau.com
Here is a rather different
approach to religious thought–
|
Yesterday’s numbers
in the Empire State:
These suggest the
religious contemplation of Log24, 6/16– Hero of His Own Story— and of Log24, 6/30– Summers Revels Ended. |
For more on Harvard’s
real religion, Scientism,
and the political background
in which it thrives,
click on the picture below.
.
Comments Off on Monday October 30, 2006
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Sunday October 29, 2006
Decrease
(Readings for the
Halloween season)
Halloween season)
In 1692 on July 31, at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, Increase Mather reportedly "delivered a sermon… in Boston in which he posed the question… 'O what makes the difference between the devils in hell and the angels of heaven?'"
Increase, the father of Cotton Mather, was president of Harvard from June 27, 1692, to Sept. 6, 1701. His name is memorialized by Harvard's Mather House.
|
Locating Hell
"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
"We have come to where From a Harvard student's weblog: Heard in Mather I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal. I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves. " … one more line/ unravelling from the dark design/ spun by God and Cotton Mather" — Robert Lowell |
To honor Harvard's Oct. 28 founding,
here are yesterday's numbers from
the state of Grace (Kelly, of Philadelphia):
The Image
here are yesterday's numbers from
the state of Grace (Kelly, of Philadelphia):
Related material:
Log24 on 1/16,
and Hexagram 41,
Decrease
The Image
At the foot of the mountain, the lake:
The image of Decrease.
Thus the superior man controls his anger
And restrains his instincts.
This suggests thoughts of
the novel Cold Mountain
(see yesterday morning)
and the following from
Log24 on St. Luke's Day
this year:
|
Established in 1916, Montreat College is a private, Christian college located in a beautiful valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. |
"The valley spirit never dies…"
See also St. Luke's Day, 2004,
as well as a journal entry
prompted by both
the ignorant religion
of Harvard's past
and the ignorant scientism
of Harvard's present–
Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard.
This last may, of course, not
quite fit the description of
the superior man
controlling his anger
so wisely provided by
yesterday's lottery and
Hexagram 41.
Nobody's perfect.
Comments Off on Sunday October 29, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Thursday October 26, 2006
Hardy & Wright
“When he was taken to church
he amused himself by factorizing
the numbers of the hymns.”
— C. P. Snow, foreword to
A Mathematician’s Apology,
by G. H. Hardy
An application of
lottery hermeneutics:
420 –> 4/20 –>
Hall of Shame,
Easter Sunday,
April 20, 2003;
145 –> 5*29 –> 5/29 –>
The Rev. Wright may also
be interested in the following
Related material:
“Shem was a sham….”
(FW I.7, 170 and Log24 Oct. 13),
and The Hebrew Word Shem:
“When I teach introductory Hebrew, the first word I typically teach is the common noun SHEM . It’s pronounced exactly like our English word ‘shame,’ means almost exactly the opposite, and seems to me to be a key….” — Glen Penton
This word occurs, notably, in Psalm (or “hymn”) 145.
See http://scripturetext.com/psalms/145-1.htm:
thy name
shem (shame)
an appellation, as a mark or memorial of individuality; by implication honor, authority, character — + base, (in-)fame(-ous), named(-d), renown, report.
Update of 12:25 PM 10/26
from the online Crimson:
from the online Crimson:
Related material:
The Crimson Passion
Comments Off on Thursday October 26, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Tuesday October 24, 2006
Another illustration
of the previous entry's concept of
a "critical mass" of weblog entries,
a concept reflected in
the saying
"You can't win the lottery
if you don't buy a ticket."
of the previous entry's concept of
a "critical mass" of weblog entries,
a concept reflected in
the saying
"You can't win the lottery
if you don't buy a ticket."
Mathematics and Narrative:
A Two-Part Invention
Here are today's
numbers from the
Keystone State:
Here is an interpretation
of those numbers:
of those numbers:
8/21 — Mathematics:
"The geometrization conjecture, also known as Thurston's geometrization conjecture, concerns the geometric structure of compact 3-manifolds. The geometrization conjecture can be considered an analogue for 3-manifolds of the uniformization theorem for surfaces. It was proposed by William Thurston in the late 1970s. It 'includes' other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and the Thurston elliptization conjecture."
The second sentence, in bold type, was added on 8/21 by yours truly. No deep learning or original thought was required to make this important improvement in the article; the sentence was simply copied from the then-current version of the article on Grigori Perelman (who has, it seems, proved the geometrization conjecture).
This may serve as an example of the "mathematics" part of the above phrase "Mathematics and Narrative" — a phrase which served, with associated links, as the Log24 entry for 8/21.
7/23 — Narrative:
"Each step in the story is a work of art, and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination." –Freeman Dyson
This quotation appeared in the Log24 entry for 7/23, "Dance of the Numbers." What Dyson calls a "story" or "drama" is in fact mathematics. (Dyson calls the "steps" in the story "works of art," so it is clear that Dyson (a former student of G. H. Hardy) is discussing mathematical steps, not paragraphs in someone's account– perhaps a work of art, perhaps not– of mathematical history.) I personally regard the rhetorical trick of calling the steps leading to a mathematical result a "story" as contemptible vulgarization, but Dyson, as someone whose work (pdf) led to the particular result he is discussing, is entitled to dramatize it as he pleases.
For related material on mathematics, narrative, and vulgarization, click here.
The art of interpretation (applied above to a lottery) is relevant to narrative and perhaps also, in some sense, to the arts of mathematical research and exposition (if not to mathematics itself). This art is called hermeneutics.
For more on the subject, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Hans-Georg Gadamer, "the decisive figure in the development of twentieth-century hermeneutics."
See also the work of Msgr. Robert Sokolowski of the Catholic University of America, which includes
"Foreword" in Gian-Carlo Rota,
Indiscrete Thoughts,
Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag,
1996, xiii-xvii, and
"Gadamer's Theory of Hermeneutics" in
The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
edited by Lewis E. Hahn,
The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 24,
Chicago: Open Court Publishers,
1997, 223-34.
Comments Off on Tuesday October 24, 2006
Tuesday October 24, 2006
Critical Mass
Thanks to University Diaries for
yesterday's entry on Harvard:
"I wonder if there's just been a critical mass of creepy stories about Harvard in the last couple of years… A kind of piling on of nastiness and creepiness…"
See also the previous Log24 entry, on yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery, and this description of an experiment I remember fondly from my youth:
"The floor in a large room was covered with mouse traps that were 'cocked' and on each was placed a ping pong ball. At the key moment an additional ping pong ball was tossed out and triggered a single mouse trap to go off. The net result after the balls started bouncing was a classic chain reaction."
Comments Off on Tuesday October 24, 2006
Tuesday October 24, 2006
Robbing Peter
to Pay Paul
to Pay Paul
"Paul must not have been
talking about time
in a linear way."
— Sermon at Nassau Church,
Princeton, New Jersey,
Christmas Eve, 2004
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Sunday October 22, 2006
“A World of His Own”
Twilight Zone
Season 1, Episode 36
First aired: July 1, 1960
“The best Twilight Zone
twist ending ever?”
— Amazon.com
reviewer “Alexiel”
Here are the lottery
numbers in Pennsylvania
(state of Grace)
on Thursday, Oct. 19,
the day that
Phyllis Kirk died:
“I’ve got a little story*
you oughta know…”
— Sinatra
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Tuesday October 17, 2006
To Measure
the Changes
(continued from
“The Legacy Codes,”
Nov. 5-6, 2003)
From this morning’s
New York Times:
the Changes
(continued from
“The Legacy Codes,”
Nov. 5-6, 2003)
From this morning’s
New York Times:
Rick Friedman for
The New York Times
The New York Times
“The much-honored
mathematician
Shing-Tung Yau“
Numbers
from the
Keystone State
on October 16:
For interpretations
of 621, see 6/21’s
Beijing String and
Go with the Flow.
of 621, see 6/21’s
Beijing String and
Go with the Flow.
For an interpretation
of 596, see Wikipedia,
596 (nuclear test):
“596 is the codename of the
People’s Republic of China’s
first nuclear weapons test,
detonated on
October 16, 1964.”
Related material:
“‘In China he is a movie star,’ said Ronnie Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer and an old friend…. And last summer Dr. Yau played the part…. He ushered Stephen Hawking into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to kick off a meeting of some of the world’s leading physicists on string theory, and beamed as a poem he had written was performed by a music professor on the conference stage. It reads in part:
| Beautiful indeed is the source of truth. To measure the changes of time and space the smartest are nothing.” |
Comments Off on Tuesday October 17, 2006
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Thursday October 12, 2006
Miniature
This year’s winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature
has written a novel that
“uses the art of
miniature illumination,
much as Mann’s
Doctor Faustus
did music, to explore
a nation’s soul”
(John Updike in
The New Yorker).
For the explorer,
here is a
miniature story:
This story was published on
September 29, 2006,
the Feast of St. Michael
and All Angels.
For illumination of the story,
see Log24, Sept. 30, 2006.
The author is unknown.
Comments Off on Thursday October 12, 2006
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Wednesday October 11, 2006
Ticket Home
Lottery numbers:
Lottery numbers:
Mid-day 266
Evening 529
Related material:
The 266-Day Method
and
The Shining of May 29
(Wednesday, May 29, 2002) Commentary on Hexagram 29: — Richard Wilhelm, “How do we explain — Rhetorical question |
Comments Off on Wednesday October 11, 2006
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Tuesday October 10, 2006
Mate
 Orson Welles Welles died on |
“The crème de la crème
of the chess world in a show with everything
but Yul Brynner” |
New York Lottery,
mid-day on Yom Kippur,
October 2, 2006:
256.
Pennsylvania Lottery,
mid-day on the same day:
723.
For more on 256,
see Symmetries
and 7/23.
“It is a very difficult
philosophical question,
the question of
what ‘random’ is.”
— Herbert Robbins, co-author
of What is Mathematics?
Comments Off on Tuesday October 10, 2006
Friday, October 6, 2006
Friday October 6, 2006
Incipit
For the Amish Schoolchildren
For the Amish Schoolchildren
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
From Log24
on Monday, Oct. 2, 2006:
“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction“
Pennsylvania lottery,
mid-day on Friday, Oct. 6, 2006:
“331”
Related material: Log24, 3/31, 2006.
Comments Off on Friday October 6, 2006
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Saturday September 30, 2006
Quarter to Three
continued:
A Little Story
continued:
A Little Story
So make it one for my baby (8/19)
And one more for the road (7/13).
8/19:
7/13:
Comments Off on Saturday September 30, 2006
Friday, September 29, 2006
Friday September 29, 2006
Values
for the High Holy Days
for the High Holy Days
(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1. —holidays.net)
"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.
She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:
"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.
"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."
"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."
Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.
Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.
For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):
Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).
Illustration (see also yesterday evening):
Notes and frequency ratios
The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."
Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:
Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.
The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:
The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:
Click on picture for further details.
Comments Off on Friday September 29, 2006
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Thursday September 28, 2006
Grace Notes
Today’s evening lottery number in the state of Grace was 546… or, digit by digit,
Comments Off on Thursday September 28, 2006
Thursday September 28, 2006
Grace
Background on today’s noon entry:
- “Macau’s economy is based largely on tourism, namely gambling.” —Wikipedia
- The mid-day lottery today in the state of Grace: 313.
Background on today’s morning entry:
- Log24 on 3/13, 2006:
Note the… description
of Christmas Eve 1900,
and the remark that
“Ici, le jour, c’est comme
dans une église.” - Une église:
The American Cathedral in Paris.
Comments Off on Thursday September 28, 2006
Monday, September 11, 2006
Monday September 11, 2006
A Sermon for Sartre
A sequel to
Les Mots:
Les Nombres
“Words and numbers
are of equal value,
for, in the
cloak of knowledge,
one is warp
and the other woof.”
— The princesses
Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,
by Norton Juster, 1961
| Lotteries 9/11/06 |
Midday |
Evening |
| NY | 394 | 628 |
| PA | 527 | 916 |
“Time and chance
happeneth to them all.”
— Ecclesiastes 9:11
The numbers may be regarded
as coordinates in a map
of one spatial dimension
(a road dimension:
394 – Chautauqua, NY)
and of three
temporal dimensions
(birthday dimension 6/28,
Sartre dimension 5/27,
religious dimension 9/16).
This interpretation is of course
rather arbitrary, but so are most
interpretations.
Related material:
Sontag and Sartre this morning
and Sontag on Sunday.
Update of 1:29 AM 9/12:
“HASS-D”– Click here.
Comments Off on Monday September 11, 2006
Monday, September 4, 2006
Monday September 4, 2006
Happy Six
Click on picture
for details.
See also Saturday’s entry
and Sunday’s Pennsylvania
mid-day lottery:
666.
Related material:
(Monday, March 28, 2005),
the Log24 entries
for the following Friday
(April 1, 2005), and
the Pennsylvania lottery
evening number for that
Friday, April Fools’ Day:
666.
Today’s birthday:
the late Joan Aiken,
author of
The Shadow Guests.
(See Devil’s Night, 2005.)
Comments Off on Monday September 4, 2006
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Tuesday August 29, 2006
The Hand of Grace
"Only the hand of grace
can end the race"
"Have you tried 22 tonight?"
— Rick in Casablanca
Today's lottery in Pennsylvania
(state of Grace):
Mid-day 229, evening 119.
"… God to a nation
dealt that day's dear chance.
To man, that needs would worship
block or barren stone…."
— "To what serves Mortal Beauty?,"
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J.
"Cash it in, and don't come back."
Comments Off on Tuesday August 29, 2006
Monday, August 14, 2006
Monday August 14, 2006
| Cleavage Term
“… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes.”
For such building blocks, see
A Trinity for Rebecca (4/25/06) and yesterday’s lottery |
|
| In memory of Kermit Hall, college president, who died Sunday, August 13, 2006: Square
|
In memory of Duke Jordan, jazz pianist, who died Tuesday, August 8, 2006:
|
Square and hip may each have a place
in heaven; for a less pleasant destination,
see the previous entry.
__________________________________
* Update of 3 PM 8/14/06:
See Forrest Gump on God
in an Aug. 11 entry and
the related paper
| Renegotiating Chinese Identity: Between Local Group and National Ideology, by Kristen Parris:
The paper is found in Related material |
Comments Off on Monday August 14, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Thursday July 27, 2006
Real Numbers:
720,
513
(NY Lottery today)
“Was there really a cherubim
waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?”
— Madeleine L’Engle,
A Wind in the Door,
quoted at math16.com
7/20:
Real
5/13:
A Fold in Time
Comments Off on Thursday July 27, 2006
Thursday July 27, 2006
Number Sense
The NY lottery numbers for yesterday, 7/26, Jung's birthday, were 726 (mid-day) and 970 (evening).
We may view these numbers as representing the Jungian "sheep" and Freudian "goats" of yesterday's entry Partitions.
For the Jungian coincidence of 726 with 7/26, recall the NY lottery number 911 that was drawn on 9/11 exactly a year after the destruction of the World Trade Center. For more on this coincidence, see For Hemingway's Birthday: Mathematics and Narrative Continued (July 21, 2006).
For 970, Google reveals a strictly skeptical (i.e., like Freud, not Jung) meaning: 970 is the first page of the article "Sources of Mathematical Thinking," in Science, 7 May 1999: Vol. 284. no. 5416, pp. 970 – 974.
That article has been extensively cited in the scholarly literature on the psychology of mathematics. Its lead author, Stanislas Dehaene, has written a book, The Number Sense.
What sense, if any, is made by 726 and 970?
The mid-day number again (see Hemingway's birthday) illustrates the saying
"Time and chance happeneth to them all."
The evening number again illustrates the saying
"Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable."
— Steven H. Cullinane,
Zen and Language Games
These sayings may suit the religious outlook of Susan Blackmore, source (along with Matthew 25:31-46) of the sheep/goats partition in yesterday's entry on that topic. She herself, apparently a former sheep, is now a goat practicing Zen.
Update of later the same evening–
On Space, Time, Life, the Universe, and Everything:
Note that the "sheep" number 726 has a natural interpretation as a date– i.e., in terms of time, while the "goat" number 970 has an interpretation as a page number– i.e., in terms of space. Rooting, like Jesus and St. Matthew, for the sheep, we may interpret both of today's NY lottery results as dates, as in the next entry, Real Numbers. That entry may (or may not) pose (and/or answer) The Ultimate Question. Selah.
Comments Off on Thursday July 27, 2006
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Saturday July 22, 2006
Today’s Saint as
The Dark Lady:
The Dark Lady:
Mary Magdalene
(Portrait by Nikos Kazantzakis
and Martin Scorsese):
(Portrait by Nikos Kazantzakis
and Martin Scorsese):
“Magdalene lay on her back, stark naked, drenched in sweat, her raven-black hair spread out over the pillow and her arms entwined beneath her head. Her face was turned toward the wall and she was yawning. Wrestling with men on this bed since dawn had tired her out.”
— Nikos Kazantzakis,
The Last Temptation of Christ
Related material:
Time and Chance
(See yesterday’s entry.)
Time:
NY lottery mid-day today:
606
(See morning of 6/6.)
Chance:
NY lottery this evening:
017
(See Art Wars: Just Seventeen.)
Comments Off on Saturday July 22, 2006
Friday, July 21, 2006
Friday July 21, 2006
For Hemingway’s birthday:
Mathematics and Narrative, continued
“We know many little things about the relation between mathematics and narrative, but lack one big comprehensive insight.”
— John Allen Paulos (pdf)
“On Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2002– 9/11/02– the New York State lottery numbers were 911, an eerie coincidence that set many people to thinking or, perhaps more accurately, to not thinking.”
“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”
— Ecclesiastes 9:11
Comments Off on Friday July 21, 2006
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Thursday June 8, 2006
For the Clowns of Harvard
on Commencement Day,
a Reading from 2003’s
The Word in the Desert:
on Commencement Day,
a Reading from 2003’s
The Word in the Desert:
Today’s birthday: Harrison Ford is 61.
7-11 Evening Number: 000. From the conclusion of
“I know what ‘nothing’ means, |
Comments Off on Thursday June 8, 2006
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Wednesday May 3, 2006
Ontology Alignment
continued
continued
“Mathematics ushers one into the realm of abstraction and universality, grasped only through pure reason. Mathematics is the threshold we cross to pass into the ideal, the truly real.”
— Rebecca Goldstein,
Mathematics and
the Character of Tragedy
Pennsylvania Lottery:
The winning numbers
for Tuesday, May 2–
the feast of
St. Athanasius:
Mid-day 703
Evening 462
“You gotta be true to your code”
— Sinatra (see previous entry)
| Dewey Decimal Code:
703 The Arts: Related material: For the arts, see |
The numbers 703 and 462 are, in Goldstein’s phrase, “truly real.” However, their link to St. Athanasius and to the Spanish language is, as purveyors of fiction* say, “purely coincidental”– as is much of what makes life interesting.
“All persons living and dead are purely coincidental….”– Kurt Vonnegut, epigraph to Bagombo Snuff Box
* For instance,
David Auburn in Proof,
which also involves
Dewey decimal numbers
Comments Off on Wednesday May 3, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
Friday April 28, 2006
Poetry Month, continued
Was Heaven
Where You Thought?
Where You Thought?
A partial answer:
Yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery evening number was 432.
Poets and others who seek meaning in random numbers may, if they wish, consult page 432 of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. They may also, having studied the Log24 entries of Holy Saturday (April 15, 2006), consult page 432 of A Flag For Sunrise.
Those who prefer the dictionary method of interpreting random numbers may consult page 432 of Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition of 1960. This page has a special meaning for those aware that Aslan's How is "home to the deepest magic Narnia has ever known." (Everything2.com)
Comments Off on Friday April 28, 2006
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Saturday April 15, 2006
High Society
(See previous entry,
on Francis L. Kellogg)\
(See previous entry,
on Francis L. Kellogg)\
More bookmarks, in the spirit of
Hemingway rather than Fitzgerald,
from the date of Kellogg's death–
New York State lottery
on April 6, 2006:
Mid-day: 338
Evening: 323
From A Flag for Sunrise, page 338:
"She seemed, superficially, to have
thrown every grain of her energy
into the driving…. She was stone
beautiful, he thought; to his eye
outrageously and provocatively
beautiful…."
|
Related material:
Compare with Grace Kelly driving
Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief" and Frank Sinatra in "High Society." |
Those who prefer a different sort
of high may also prefer a different
page in A Flag for Sunrise: 323.
"He was very high, higher than he
had ever been. His thoughts
twisted off into spools,
arabesques, snatches of
music."
|
Related material:
"Harrowing," from |
Comments Off on Saturday April 15, 2006
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Saturday April 8, 2006
Story
There is one story
and one story only
That will prove
worth your telling….
— Robert Graves,
“To Juan at the Winter Solstice”
“To many, mathematicians have come to resemble an esoteric sect, whose members alone have access to secret otherworldly mysteries.
All of us who came to Mykonos believed that this is an unfortunate situation. Mathematics is an inseparable part of human culture, and should be viewed and treated as such. Our underlying assumption was that mathematical reasoning had something important in common with that quintessential human activity – story-telling. But what this means, and what kind of connections can be drawn between the two, remained to be sorted out.”
— Amir Alexander on
last summer’s Mykonos meeting
last summer’s Mykonos meeting
Flashback to
Harrison Ford’s birthday
a year earlier:
“He’s a Mad Scientist and
I’m his Beautiful Daughter.”
— Deety in Heinlein’s
The Number of the Beast.
“If you have ever loved a book
so much that you began to
believe that it continued on
in its own world
even after you put it down,
this book could be for you.”
— Jodi Russell, review of
Number of the Beast
These last two quotations
are from
Story Theory and
the Number of the Beast,
by Steven H. Cullinane on
December 21, 2001.
Related material:
See Lucky(?) Numbers,
yesterday’s Pennsylvania lottery,
and the previous entry.
Comments Off on Saturday April 8, 2006
Thursday, April 6, 2006
Thursday April 6, 2006
Harmony and Conciseness
“Problems are the poetry of chess.
They demand from the composer
the same virtues that characterize
all worthwhile art:
originality, invention,
harmony, conciseness,
complexity, and
splendid insincerity.”
Harmony:
Yesterday’s NY mid-day lottery: 456
Conciseness:
Yesterday’s NY evening lottery: 808
Comments Off on Thursday April 6, 2006
Sunday, April 2, 2006
Sunday April 2, 2006
Miracle
Looking for a Miracle:
The Beatification of John Paul II
Background:
| Preface:
Part I: Part II: |
Today’s lottery in the
State of Grace
(Kelly, of Philadelphia)–
Mid-day: 008
Evening: 373.
Done.
Comments Off on Sunday April 2, 2006
Friday, March 31, 2006
Friday March 31, 2006
Reason and Rhyme
"Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday…."
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
Related material:
and, from Monday,
March 27, 2006–
March 27, 2006–
Today's Pennsylvania lottery:
Mid-Day: 888
See today's noon entry
and Eight is a Gate.
Evening: 557
See
Dogma in the State of Grace,
Is Nothing Sacred?,
and, from page 557 of
Webster's
New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960:
"flower"
Birds, Beasts & Flowers
As performed by
Princess Grace of Monaco
Presented at
St James's Palace, London,
on 22nd November 1978
in the presence of Her Majesty,
Queen Elizabeth
The Queen Mother
St James's Palace, London,
on 22nd November 1978
in the presence of Her Majesty,
Queen Elizabeth
The Queen Mother
Comments Off on Friday March 31, 2006
Monday, March 27, 2006
Monday March 27, 2006
A Living Church
A skeptic’s remark:
“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”
— Xanga blogger “sejanus”
A reply from G. K. Chesterton
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2004):
“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”
Mid-day: 024
Evening: 672
Evening: 672
A meditation on
Sunday’s numbers —
24
The Star
of Venus
“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here….”
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra
From Log24, Oct. 23, 2002:
An excerpt from
Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel Glory Road —
|
“I have many names. What would you like to call me?” “Is one of them ‘Helen’?” She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?” “Is that one of your names?” “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ” ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!” |
Related material:
672 Astarte and
The Venerable Bede
(born in 672).
672 illustrated:
The Venerable Bede
and the Star of Venus
The 672 connection is, of course,
not a real connection
(in the sense of “sejanus” above)
but it is nevertheless
not without interest.
Postscript of 6 PM
A further note on the above
illustration of the 672 connection:
The late Buck Owens
(see previous entry for
Owens, Reba, and the
star of Venus)
once described
his TV series as
“a show of fat old men
and pretty young girls”
(today’s Washington Post).
A further note on
lottery hermeneutics:
Those who prefer to interpret
random numbers with the aid
of a dictionary
(as in Is Nothing Sacred?)
may be pleased to note that
“heehaw” occurs in Webster’s
New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960,
on page 672.
In today’s Washington Post,
Richard Harrington informs us that
“As a child, Owens worked cotton and
maize fields, taking the name Buck
from a well-liked mule….”
Comments Off on Monday March 27, 2006
Friday, March 17, 2006
Friday March 17, 2006
Dogma in the
State of Grace
State of Grace
“Words and numbers are of equal value,
for, in the cloak of knowledge,
one is warp and the other woof.”
— The princesses Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,
by Norton Juster, 1961
(From a Sermon for
St. Patrick’s Day, 2001)
The Pennsylvania midday lottery
on St. Patrick’s Day, 2006:
618.
Comparing, as in Philadelphia Stories, the Catholic style of Grace Kelly with the Protestant style of Katharine Hepburn, we conclude that Princess Rhyme might best be played by the former, Princess Reason by the latter.
Reason informs us that the lottery result “618” may be regarded as naming ” – 0.618,” the approximate value of the negative solution to the equation
x2 – x – 1 = 0
Following the advice of Clint Eastwood (on the “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” soundtrack CD) to “accentuate the positive,” Reason notes that the other, positive, solution to this equation, approximately 1.618, a number symbolized by the Greek letter “phi,” occurs in the following geometric diagram illustrating a construction of the pentagon:
For further enlightenment, we turn to Rhyme, who informs us that “618” may also be regarded as naming the date “6/18.” Consulting our notes, we find on 6/18, 2003, a reference to “claves,” Latin for “keys,” as in “claves regni caelorum.”
We may tarry at this date, pleased to find that the keys to the kingdom involve rational numbers, rather than the irrational ratios suggested, paradoxically, by Reason.
Or we may, with Miles Davis, prefer a more sensuous incarnation of the keys:
“… it’s going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in
the scheme of things.”
— Anne McCaffrey,
Radcliffe ’47,
To Ride Pegasus
Comments Off on Friday March 17, 2006
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Wednesday March 1, 2006
Deaconess
“Teach us to care and not to care.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday“
Related material:
Beth Israel Deaconess,
The House of God,
and, from Is Nothing Sacred?,
the following quotations–
“I know what ‘nothing’ means.”
— Joan Didion in
Play It As It Lays
“Nothing is random.”
— Mark Helprin in
Winter’s Tale
“692” — Pennsylvania lottery,
Ash Wednesday, 2000;
“hole” — Page 692,
Webster’s New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960
“This hospital, like every other,
is a hole in the universe
through which holiness
issues in blasts.
It blows both ways,
in and out of time.”
— Annie Dillard in
For the Time Being
(1999)
Comments Off on Wednesday March 1, 2006
Sunday, January 8, 2006
Sunday January 8, 2006
For Stephen Hawking’s Birthday
Epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos:
God does not play dice with the universe. –Albert Einstein
Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen. –Stephen Hawking
Today’s Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:
| 7/22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene. | |
| Page 399, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations of 1919. |
Comments Off on Sunday January 8, 2006
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Tuesday December 27, 2005
Dance of the Numbers
(continued)
(continued)
The Pennsylvania lottery
on St. Stephen's Day–
Midday: 105
Evening: 064
From a new
branch of theology,
lottery hermeneutics:
See Log24, 1/05,
Death and the Spirit,
and the 64 hexagrams of
the box-style I Ching.
From the Wikipedia
article on hermeneutics:
"One prominent theme which arises in contemporary philosophical hermeneutics (i.e., the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer) is a serious calling into question of scientism. Scientism is the more or less unquestioned belief in the supremacy of the natural sciences when it comes to serving as models of knowledge. By calling scientism into question, hermeneutics is arguing for the legitimacy of (among other things) aesthetic, literary, spiritual, and philosophical knowledge, alongside (but not instead of) scientific knowledge."
Amen.
(See also Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard.)
Comments Off on Tuesday December 27, 2005
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Tuesday December 6, 2005
Headline in today's New York Times:
'Year of Magical Thinking'
Headed for Broadway
which suggests…
Heaven, Hell,
and Hollywood
(continued)
"This could be Heaven
or this could be Hell."
— The Eagles, Hotel California
"There are no facts,
there is no truth–
just data to be manipulated."
— Don Henley, The Garden of Allah
Data:
The New York Lottery numbers
on Joan Didion's birthday,
Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, were
Since that day's Log24 entry,
Magical Thinking, interpreted
the previous day's (Sunday's)
NY lottery numbers as a date
and a page number, it seems
appropriate to do a follow-up.
Date 7/29:
See Log24, 7/29/05,
Anatomy of a Death:
Page 439:
See Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations, 1919, p. 439:
A man’s ingress into the world
is naked and bare,
His progress through the world
is trouble and care;
And lastly,
his egress out of the world,
is nobody knows where.
— John Edwin (1749-1790)
Related material:
The Log24 version of
"This Way to the Egress,"
Directions Out,
linked to in yesterday's
Magical Thinking.
Comments Off on Tuesday December 6, 2005
Monday, December 5, 2005
Monday December 5, 2005
The Associated Press on the Kennedy Center honors yesterday:
"Dancer Suzanne Farrell was feted by her former colleague at the New York City Ballet, Jacques d'Amboise. The company, led by George Balanchine, 'was the center of American ballet and she was the diamond in its crown,' d'Amboise said."
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, paraphrasing Horace, remarks in his Whitsun, 1939, preface to the new edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, "tamen usque recurret Apollo."
The New York Lottery yesterday:
The mid-day number was 926;
the evening number was 373.
For the significance of 926,
see 9/26 2002 and
Balanchine's Birthday.
For the significance of 373, see
Art Wars,
May 2, 2003,
White, Geometric, and Eternal,
Dec. 20, 2003,
Directions Out,
April 26, 2004,
Outside the World,
April 26, 2004,
The Last Minute,
Sept. 15, 2004,
and
Diamonds Are Forever,
Jan. 25, 2005.
See also the link
at the end of
yesterday's entry.
For related material that is
more personally linked to
Joan Didion, see
Log24, June 1-16, 2004.
Comments Off on Monday December 5, 2005
Thursday, November 3, 2005
Thursday November 3, 2005
Bond
USA Today on last night’s White House dinner:
“In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was ‘a reminder of the unique and enduring bond’ between the two countries.”
| From Log24, July 18, 2003:
The use of the word “idea” in my entries’ headlines yesterday was not accidental. It is related to an occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set of journal entries from May 9-12. The relevant passage on “ideas” is quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor: “That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an ‘Idea’ is. While Frost attempts to give Mark a ‘training in objectivity’ that will destroy in him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers what it means to under-stand.
This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument.” — “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things, November 1994 The old philosophical conflict between realism and nominalism can, it seems, have life-and-death consequences. I prefer Plato’s realism, with its “ideas,” such as the idea of seven-ness. A reductio ad absurdum of nominalism may be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Realism: “A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false….” The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives, dangerously stupid. |
The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was
007.
Related material:
Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs
Comments Off on Thursday November 3, 2005
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Wednesday October 26, 2005
Human Conflict
Number Five
(Album title, 10,000 Maniacs)37. The Family (The Clan)
Number Five
(Album title, 10,000 Maniacs)
This album contains
Planned Obsolescence:
science
is truth for life
watch religion fall obsolete
science
will be truth for life
technology as nature
science
truth for life
in fortran tongue the
answer
with wealth and prominence
man so near perfection
possession
it’s an absence of interim
secure no demurrer
defense against divine
defense against his true
image
human conflict number five
discovery
dissolved all illusion
mystery
destroyed with conclusion
and illusion never restored
any modern man can see
that religion is
obsolete
piety
obsolete
ritual
obsolete
martyrdom
obsolete
prophetic vision
obsolete
mysticism
obsolete
commitment
obsolete
sacrament
obsolete
revelation
obsolete
Secrets of the I Ching
(Album title, 10,000 Maniacs)
Time of this entry: 2:56:37
Question suggested by the
lottery in the state of Grace
(Kelly) on the night Sinatra died:
Answer: 37.
In other words…
37. The Family (The Clan)
For details, see Log24,
11 AM Sunday, October 16:
Comments Off on Wednesday October 26, 2005
Monday, September 19, 2005
Monday September 19, 2005
The Randomness
In yesterday’s New York Times, science writer George Johnson quoted a Buddhist:
“Though he professes to accept evolutionary theory, he recoils at one of its most basic tenets: that the mutations that provide the raw material for natural selection occur at random. Look deeply enough, he suggests, and the randomness will turn out to be complexity in disguise– ‘hidden causality,’ the Buddha’s smile. There you have it, Eastern religion’s version of intelligent design.”
— “The Universe in a Single Atom”: Reason and Faith
God’s Sermon:
The Randomness
| Sunday NY lottery 9/18/05 |
Sunday PA lottery 9/18/05 |
| Midday: 748 | Midday: 999 |
| Evening: 000 | Evening: 709 |
Gamblers, religious zealots, and the insane may interpret the above as utterances of Lady Luck, God, or The Conspiracy.
A Buddhist interpretation for the New York Times:
A Christian interpretation for the home state of Grace Kelly:
999 = “fullness,”
709 = 7/09 = “multitude,”
with “fullness” and “multitude”
as in the Log24 entry of
St. Luke’s Day, 2004.
709 = 7/09 = “multitude,”
with “fullness” and “multitude”
as in the Log24 entry of
St. Luke’s Day, 2004.
See also the previous entry,
Barging In.
Update of 7:11 PM EDT:
Barging In, Part II is on
Turner Movie Classics at 8 PM EDT.
Comments Off on Monday September 19, 2005
Friday, September 2, 2005
Friday September 2, 2005
Soap
Faith
Faith is an island in the setting sun
But proof, yes
Proof is the bottom line for everyone
— Paul Simon, “Proof”
This morning’s bottom line:
From Polya-Burnside Counting (pdf),
from today’s New York Times,
and from “related topics” in
article on Symmetry in Wikipedia:
From Polya-Burnside Counting (pdf),
from today’s New York Times,
and from “related topics” in
article on Symmetry in Wikipedia:
Raise your weary wings
against the rain, my baby
Wash your tangled curls
with gambler’s soap
— Paul Simon, “Proof”
against the rain, my baby
Wash your tangled curls
with gambler’s soap
— Paul Simon, “Proof”
Lottery numbers for
Pennsylvania, Sept. 1, 2005:
“Proof is the bottom line for everyone”–
Day = 120
“Faith is an island in the setting sun”–
Evening = 511
See also
Giving the Devil His Due.
Comments Off on Friday September 2, 2005