Log24

From the Associated Press today —

"It's a magic wonderland," said Miriam Leibowitz,
a Jerusalem resident, as she reached a snow-filled
city park with her family. "In the middle of Jerusalem
we felt like we're in Switzerland."

Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles , 18.5.9.5. e,  p. 1181 :

Pour mettre la joie à son comble, j’ajoute que le dénommé Saavedra
semble avoir disparu de la circulation sans plus laisser aucune trace….
Du coup, l’histoire prend des allures de sombre intrigue policière.

Man of La Mancha :  

"Who knows where madness lies?"

An author quoted here at 10 PM ET Monday, Nov. 24, 2014 :

And then there is author Dan McGirt :

For those who prefer drama to mathematics:

See also Magic + Flute in this journal.

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”

— Katherine Neville, The Magic Circle

See also Arcade Fire in this journal.

“Lord knows when the cold wind blows
it’ll turn your head around.”

— James Taylor, “Fire and Rain”

Ricky Jay’s head turns around in “The Amazing Maleeni,”
episode 8 of season 7 of “The X-Files.”

“It was the middle of summer, but
the cold wind blew in full force.”

— David Kushner, Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids  

(Quoted here in House of Cards, June 11, 2014,
a post on magic, cards, and Multnomah County.)

Related material:

Recent posts on artist Otto Piene and the Whiskey Bar song,
as well as the following Multnomah County story from yesterday’s
online NY Times :

“What was this Frankenstein he was creating?”
— David Kushner, Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids

Happy birthday, Gene Wilder.

See last night’s pentagram photo and a post from May 13, 2012.

That post links to a little-known video of a 1972 film.
A speech from the film was used by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche as a
voice-over in her  2011 golden-ratio video (with pentagrams) that she
exhibited along with a large, wall-filling copy of some of my own work.
The speech (see video below) is clearly nonsense.

The patterns* Lyche copied are not.

“Who are you, anyway?” 

— Question at 00:41 of 15:00, Rainbow Bridge (Part 5 of 9)
at YouTube, addressed to Baron Bingen as “Mr. Rabbit”

* Patterns exhibited again later, apparently without the Lyche pentagram video.
It turns out, by the way, that Lyche created that video by superimposing
audio from the above “Rainbow Bridge” film onto a section of Disney’s 1959
“Donald in Mathmagic Land” (see 7:17 to 8:57 of the 27:33 Disney video).

For those disappointed by the cancellation
of this evening’s Black Mass at Harvard,
here is a somewhat less exciting substitute.

See also Peter J. Cameron + Magic.

From a New York Times  obituary by Bruce Weber tonight—

Charles Marowitz, Director and Playwright, Dies at 82

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

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

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

• “From the Witch Ball,” a post from May 2,
  the reported date of Marowitz’s death
• “Two Satanic Majesties Request All-Devouring Fame,”
  a NY Times  review from October 9, 2006
• This  journal on that date— October 9, 2006—
  “Art Wars: To Apollo.”

For John Milton at the Cervecería XX —

• Bingo in this journal, as well as
• Black Mass and 
• “The Platonic Heritage in Under the Volcano“
  (Studies in Canadian Literature, v. 3, no. 1, 1978)

Related material: Peter J. Cameron on Bertrand Russell
in A Midnight Exorcism.

Katy Perry in her new "Dark Horse" video—

"So you wanna play with magic.
Boy you should know what you're fallin' for.
Baby do you dare to do this?"

Bill Murray in Ghostbusters —

"Is this a trick question?"

Review —

From a Jan. 20, 2011, Emory University press release —
"Finite formula found for partition numbers" —

"We found a function, that we call P, that is like
a magical oracle," Ono says. "I can take any number,
plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions
of that number. P does not return gruesome numbers
with infinitely many decimal places. It's the finite,
algebraic formula that we have all been looking for."

Some may prefer Chinese  oracles.

… Continues.  See today's MAA news story about magic,
    mystery, and the upcoming Joint Mathematics Meetings.

The New York Times  this evening has a story
on "A Piece of Work," an avant-garde production
at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) that is to open
Wednesday.

A background check on Annie Dorsen, the production's 
author-director, yields the following remarks on a video
promoting a show titled "Magical"—

"This video is sent us by the company for promotion
of their show in Bergen the 15. and 16. of April 2011.
Excerpt from the program:

Do magic and feminism go together? Anne Juren, the
French choreographer living in Vienna, and Annie
Dorsen, the New York based director, attempt to prove
that it can: it’s alchemical, it’s political and it works."

Related material:  This journal eight years ago today, and
the Log24 posts from the dates, April 15-16, 2011, of the
"Magical" production in Bergen, Norway.

Happy birthday, Julie Taymor.

This post was suggested by…

1.  Movie reviews links on the NY Times  online front page—

2.  "When Death tells a story…" in this journal

3.  A search for "Recognition" in this journal
     (suggested by Terence Cave's Recognitions ,
      mentioned in a post of October 31.)

4.  The play "Magic," by G. K. Chesterton

5.  The following posts —

The post itself  consists simply of the title,
together with the above items that suggested
the title.

Scene I:

"Pinter's particular usage of reverse chronology 
in structuring the plot is innovative…."

— Wikipedia on the play "Betrayal," a version of which
    opens tonight

Scene II:

Reverse Chronology in Wikipedia —

"As a hypothetical example, if the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk 
was told using reverse chronology, the opening scene would depict
Jack chopping the beanstalk down and killing the giant. The next
scene would feature Jack being discovered by the giant and climbing
down the beanstalk in fear of his life. Later, we would see Jack running
into the man with the infamous magic beans, then, at the end of the film,
being sent off by his mother to sell the cow."

Scene III:

Dialogue for Scene III — 

"Sell the damn cow, Jack."

Epilogue:  Jack + Jill.

The previous post described briefly a  2002 
book on magic and religion, Golems of Gotham .

For a Sunday New York Times  review,  click here.

"Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail.
You would never have thought it when you read
his story—if I did myself, it was both more and
less than thinking. Perhaps you will read the
book again from this point of view. And perhaps
you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge
and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest
reward, for which not only the foolish hero but
the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the
chapter called 'Snow'…."

— Thomas Mann, "The Making of
     The Magic Mountain "

In related entertainment news…

Click image for some backstory.

Mann's tale is set in Davos, Switzerland.
See also Mayer  at Davos.

See also Back Space and Shift Lock .

Arthur C. Clarke—

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"The HP/Autonomy  Debacle," by John C. Dvorak at pcmag.com on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012—

"The whole Autonomy  thing was weird since the company seemed to be performing magic. On co-founder Michael Richard Lynch's Wikipedia page, the company is described as 'a leader in the area of computer understanding of unstructured information, an area which is becoming known as meaning-based computing .'

I do not know how gullible HP's board of directors is, but when I see the sudden emergence of something called 'meaning-based computing,' the alarms sound and the bullcrap meter begins to tag the red line."

A story by Terence K. Huwe in Online  magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2011, defines meaning-based computing (MBC), discusses Autonomy , and llnks to…

John Markoff in The New York Times , March 4, 2011— 

"Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people— who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing 'digital anomalies' that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds 'call me' moments— those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter."

For example…

Yesterday's online Los Angeles Times  
on a film that inspired recent protests in Cairo—

The film… was shown on June 23
to an audience of less than 10
at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard,
a source familiar with the screening said….
The screening was at The Vine Theater,
which rents itself out for private screenings,
said one person involved in the theater.

An image from this journal on that same day, June 23—

    Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

For some background on the symbol, see Damnation Morning.

See also Don Henley's Hollywood hymn "Garden of Allah."

Update of 8 PM Sept. 13, 2012—

Other sources give the film's screening date not as June 23,
2012, but rather as June 30, 2012. (BBC News, LAWEEKLY blogs)

The following post from this journal on that  date may or
may not have some religious relevance.

Frogs:

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time."

— Freeman Dyson (See July 22, 2011)

A Rhetorical Question:

Robert Osserman in 2004—

"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….

Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"

A Rhetorical Answer:

Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"

Related material:

• "Decomposition" in this journal 
• "What is Truth (continued)," May 1, 2012
• The Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT)
• Remarks on SAT by Stanislav Busygin
• A related remark on complexity by Busygin
• Hashtag #sexyface and the Empty Chair

"… to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic"

— The aim of the artist, according to Thomas Wolfe 

Related entertainment—

High-minded— Many Dimensions .

Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube .

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

The New York Times  today—
 "Reality and our perception of it are incommensurate…."

The above New York Times Wire  item from 3:35 PM ET today
mentions two topics touched on in today's earlier Log24 post
Bowling in Diagon Alley— magic (implied by the title) and
incommensurability. The connection in that post
between the two topics is the diagonal  of a square.

The  wire item shows one detail from a Times  illustration
of the linked article— a blindfolded woman.

Another detail from the same illustration—

Hands-on Wand Work

See also remarks on Magic in this journal and on Harry Potter.

I dislike both topics.

In memory of Paul Sussman, author of archaeological 
mystery novels about Egypt—

Sussman's last novel, not yet published, was

The Labyrinth of Osiris .

Sussman, 45, reportedly died suddenly on May 31, 2012.

A perhaps relevant thought—

"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical 
ultraomnipotence."

– e. e. cummings, 1944

“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one  of us
 gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”

— American adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest , 1956

From "The Onto-theological Origin of Play:
Heraclitus and Plato," by Yücel Dursun, in
Lingua ac Communitas  Vol 17 (October 2007)—

"Heraclitus’s Aion and His Transformations

 The saying is as follows:

αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων·
παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη

(Aion is a child playing draughts;
the kingship is the child’s)

(Krell 1972: 64).*

 * KRELL, David Farrell.
   “Towards an Ontology of Play:
   Eugen Fink’s Notion of Spiel,”
   Research in Phenomemology ,
   2, 1972: 63-93.

This is the translation of the fragment in Greek by Krell.
There are many versions of the translation of the fragment….."

See also Child's Play and Froebel's Magic Box.

Update of May 5— For some background
from the date May 4 seven years ago, see
The Fano Plane Revisualized.

For some background on the word "aion,"
see that word in this journal.

"… he continued to make brief appearances
  on the show, including the one this past 
  New Year's Eve.* "

— Bruce Weber, New York Times

"The only stars Clark coveted
  for his show in those early years
  but could not get were
  the Beatles and Ricky Nelson…."

— Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times

"I don't know why you say goodbye"

"There was … magic in the air"

* The link is to another eve, Bridget's .

For Women's History Month—

The Beam of Pink Light

From a post linked to on Lyxe's upload date, Feb. 6, 2012—

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

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

See also the NY Lottery for St. Luke's Day, 2011, publication date
of the new edition of Philip K. Dick's VALIS  quoted above.

Maureen Dowd's NY Times  column today is on exorcism.

Related material— This morning's update at the end of 
yesterday morning's Valentine's Day post Notable Transitions.

See also another post for St. Valentine — The Ninth Configuration.

From "Elegy to the Void," by Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books , issue dated Nov. 24, 2011—

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote in The White Album . Blue Nights  is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale. The book has, instead, an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No.

Blue Nights  is a sequel of sorts to The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion's story of the year following the death on December 30th, 2003, of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.

Related material:

For some context, see

1. Cosmic Banditos in this journal,
2. the Fall 1997 newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Study,
3. and Oppenheimer's Aria.

For a different link to that aria, see a journal entry dated December 28, 2003.
(Click link, scroll down.)

The Catholic Encyclopedia on Mind—

"If we are told that the explanation of a page of a newspaper is to be found in the contact of the paper with a plate of set types, we are still compelled to ask how the particular arrangement of the types came about, and we are certain that the sufficient explanation ultimately rests in the action of mind or intelligent being."

Or not so certain—

"These capacities for conscious deliberation, rational thinking and self-control are not magical abilities.  They need not belong to immaterial souls outside the realm of scientific understanding (indeed, since we don’t know how souls are supposed to work, souls would not help to explain these capacities).  Rather, these are the sorts of cognitive capacities that psychologists and neuroscientists are well positioned to study."

— "The Stone" column in yesterday's online New York Times

See also the Catholic Encyclopedia on Soul.

Magic Time!

           For fans of Douglas Adams and St. Augustine

Update of 2:20 AM June 13:

For the midday "042" as a reference to Adams, see Wikipedia. The "828" may be interpreted as a reference to St. Augustine's feast day, 8/28… or, for the more secularly minded, a reference to the time 8:28 PM (to go with the evening "0845" as a reference to 8:45 PM). For further details, see Times of the Times . The midday "7286" is more difficult. See midnight's Broadway Cinderella.

Literary remarks for Maundy Thursday—

      — C. P. Snow, foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology

Related material—

Emory University press release of January 20th, 2011:

"In 1937, Hans Rademacher found an exact formula for calculating partition values. While the method was a big improvement over Euler's exact formula, it required adding together infinitely many numbers that have infinitely many decimal places. 'These numbers are gruesome,' Ono says….

… The final eureka moment occurred near another Georgia landmark: Spaghetti Junction. Ono and Jan Bruinier were stuck in traffic near the notorious Atlanta interchange. While chatting in the car, they hit upon a way to overcome the infinite complexity of Rademacher's method. They went on to prove a formula that requires only finitely many simple numbers.

'We found a function, that we call P, that is like a magical oracle,' Ono says. 'I can take any number, plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions of that number….'"

See also this journal on April 15 and a Google Groups [sage-devel] thread, Ono-Bruinier partition formula. That thread started on April 15 and was last updated this morning.

Picture by Robert Vickrey.
Vickrey died Sunday.
See Sunday School.

Last night's Saturday Night Live —

Related material— See  Cleavage.

Background— Yesterday evening's Star Quality as well as earlier posts on Horseness and Mysteries of Faith.

From Rough Magic , starring Russell Crowe and Bridget Fonda (1995)—

Bridget brought her rabbits,
There was magic in the air…

— Adapted from "Garden Party"—

Can't please everyone, so you
Got to please yourself.

From The Chronicles of Narnia, Voyage of the Dawn Treader—

"… Sometimes, perhaps, I am a little impatient, waiting for the day
when they can be governed by wisdom instead of this rough magic."

"All in good time, Coriakin," said Aslan.

"Yes, all in very good time, Sir," was the answer.

From Another Manic Monday (Feb. 21)—

We are now at the Year of the Rabbit —

(Click images for sources.)

The Year of Magical Realism

"The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames,
a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
(as in The Garden of Forking Paths )."

—Wikipedia on One Hundred Years of Solitude

One year ago today, in "Deconstructing Alice"—

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." –Yogi Berra

Happy birthday to Gabriel García Márquez.

Quotation from an obituary on page A24 of the New York edition of today's New York TImes—

“Even Gods Must Die.”

Related material from Log24 on the day this classical singer of India died
and on the following day—