Also on the above Berlin date —
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
|
Saturday, October 1, 2022
Mexican Beach Bum Glam
Monday, February 15, 2021
Philosophy for Emma Stone
From a post of August 30, 2015 —
“… recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
‘At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit.’ “
And at times, non-bullshit is required.
BS from The New York Times Friday on the mathematical fields
known as topology and analysis in the 1960s —
“The two fields seemed to be nearly irremediably divided,
because topology twists objects around, and analysis
needs them to be rigid.”
Some less ignorant remarks from 1986:
The above Gauss-Bonnet theorem (ca. 1848) is explained in a talk titled
“Analysis Meets Topology” labeled with the above Emma Stone date —
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Lines
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Bullshit Studies
The essay excerpted in last night's post on structuralism
is of value as part of a sustained attack by the late
Robert de Marrais on the damned nonsense of the late
French literary theorist Jacques Derrida—
Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets:
Deploying the Glass Bead Game
Part I: Ministrations Concerning Silliness, or:
Is “Interdisciplinary Thought” an Oxymoron?
Part II: Canonical Collage-oscopes, or:
Claude in Jacques’ Trap? Not What It Sounds Like!
Part III: Grooving on the Sly with Klein Groups
Part IV: Claude’s Kaleidoscope . . . and Carl’s
Part V: Spelling the Tree, from Aleph to Tav
(While Not Forgetting to Shin)
The response of de Marrais to Derrida's oeuvre nicely
exemplifies the maxim of Norman Mailer that
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Incommensurables
(Continued from Midsummer Eve)
"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer, March 3, 1992, PBS transcript
"Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 1962, as quoted in The Enneagram of Paradigm Shifting
"In the spiritual traditions from which Jung borrowed the term, it is not the SYMMETRY of mandalas that is all-important, as Jung later led us to believe. It is their capacity to reveal the asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry."
I have little respect for Enneagram enthusiasts, but they do at times illustrate Mailer's maxim.
My own interests are in the purely mathematical properties of the number nine, as well as those of the next square, sixteen.
Those who prefer bullshit may investigate non-mathematical properties of sixteen by doing a Google image search on MBTI.
For bullshit involving nine, see (for instance) Einsatz in this journal.
For non-bullshit involving nine, sixteen, and "asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry," see Monday's Mapping Problem continued. (The nine occurs there as the symmetric figures in the lower right nine-sixteenths of the triangular analogs diagram.)
For non-bullshit involving psychological and philosophical terminology, see James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology .
In particular, see Hillman's "An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit."
Friday, October 12, 2007
Friday October 12, 2007
A Harvard Education
in a Sentence:
“At times, bullshit can
only be countered
with superior bullshit.”
Illustration from
today’s Crimson:
| Nobel Laureate Morrison Reads at Opening Event By ALEXANDER B. COHN Friday, October 12, 2007 3:17 AM From the reserved elegance of Memorial Church to the sweeping grandeur of Sanders Theatre, the Harvard community honored 28th University President Drew G. Faust with two festive events on the eve of her inauguration. |
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Thursday October 11, 2007
suggested by the recent
Princeton symposium
"Deep Beauty"
1. From my childhood:
"You remind me of a man."
"What man?"
"The man with the power."
"What power?"
"The power of hoodoo."
"Hoodoo?"
"You do."
"Do what?
"Remind me of a man…."
— Dialogue from
"The Bachelor and the
Bobby-Soxer" (1947)
2. From later years:
"When I was a little boy,
(when I was just a boy)
and the Devil would
call my name
(when I was just a boy)
I'd say 'now who do,
who do you think
you're fooling?'"
"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer
(See A Harvard Education
in a Sentence.)
A description of caveman life
translated from German —
|
John von |
"Soon Freud, soon mourning,
(Language courtesy of |
Picture of von Neumann courtesy of
Princeton University Library
More from Rhymin' Simon–
"Oh, my mama loves,
she loves me,
she get down on her knees
and hug me
like she loves me
like a rock.
She rocks me
like the rock of ages"
Related material:
The previous Log24 entries
of Oct. 7-11, 2007, and
the five Log24 entries
ending with "Toy Soldiers"
(Valentine's Day, 2003).
See also
"Taking Christ to the Movies,"
by Anna Megill, Princeton '06.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Saturday July 21, 2007
Death of a Nominalist
“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.” –Ernest Hemingway
(The Hemingway quotation is from the AP’s “Today in History” on July 21, 2007; for the context, see Death in the Afternoon.)
Today seems as good a day as any for noting the death of an author previously discussed in Log24 on January 29, 2007, and January 31, 2007.
Joseph Goguen died on July 3, 2006. (I learned of his death only after the entries of January 2007 were written. They still hold.)
Goguen’s death may be viewed in the context of the ongoing war between the realism of Plato and the nominalism of the sophists. (See, for instance, Log24 on August 10-15, 2004, and on July 3-5, 2007.)
Joseph A. Goguen, “Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology” (pdf):
“Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve. For example, Euclid wrote, ‘The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.’ Similarly, the ‘situations’ in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated– perhaps too sophisticated), are considered to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally considered judgements.5 The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as scientific study or engineering design, for the heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view, all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course, this does not mean that they are not useful.”
5 The “types” of situation theory are even further removed from concrete reality.
[23] Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT (Bradford), 1983.
[24] Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Harvard, 1965. In 6 volumes; see especially Volume 2: Elements of Logic.
From Log24 on the date of Goguen’s death:
Requiem for a clown:
“At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit.”
This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer’s birth. Also quoted on that date:
Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also thoughts of God.
Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those of God….
Whether the above excerpt– from Hans Christian Oersted‘s The Soul in Nature (1852)– is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Wednesday January 31, 2007
“At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit.”
— Norman Mailer
“It may be that universal history is the
history of the different intonations
given a handful of metaphors.”
— Jorge Luis Borges (1951),
“The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,”
in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
— Joseph A. Goguen, “Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology” (pdf)
Goguen does not give a source for this alleged “thoughts of God” statement.
A Web search for the source leads only to A Mathematical Journey, by Stanley Gudder, who apparently also attributes the saying to Euclid.
Neither Goguen nor Gudder seems to have had any interest in the accuracy of the Euclid attribution.
Talk of “nature” and “God” seems unlikely from Euclid, a pre-Christian Greek whose pure mathematics has (as G. H. Hardy might be happy to point out) little to do with either.
Loose talk about God’s thoughts has also been attributed to Kepler and Einstein… and we all know about Stephen Hawking.
Gudder may have been misquoting some other author’s blather about Kepler. Another possible source of the “thoughts of God” phrase is Hans Christian Oersted. The following is from Oersted’s The Soul in Nature—
“Sophia. Nothing of importance; though indeed I had one question on my lips when the conversion took the last turn. When you alluded to the idea, that the Reason manifested in Nature is infallible, while ours is fallible, should you not rather have said, that our Reason accords with that of Nature, as that in the voice of Nature with ours?
Alfred. Each of these interpretations may be justified by the idea to which it applies, whether we start from ourselves or external nature. There are yet other ways of expressing it; for instance, the laws of Nature are the thoughts of Nature.
Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also thoughts of God.
Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those of God; I therefore beg you will not proceed to [sic] fast.”
Oersted also allegedly said that “The Universe is a manifestation of an Infinite Reason and the laws of Nature are the thoughts of God.” This remark was found (via Google book search) in an obscure journal that does not give a precise source for the words it attributes to Oersted.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Friday December 29, 2006
of Christ Church
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
Click on picture for details.
Today is the feast
of St. Thomas Becket.
In his honor, a meditation
on tools and causation:
— Review by H. Allen Orr in
The New York Review of Books,
Vol. 54, No. 1, January 11, 2007
"An odd extension"–
Wolpert's title is, of course,
from Lewis Carroll.
Related material:
"It's a poor sort of memory
that only works backwards."
— Through the Looking-Glass
An event at the Kennedy Center
broadcast on
December 26, 2006
(St. Steven's Day):
from the conclusion to
(Log24, Aug. 22, 2005):
"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer
"The concept of possible worlds dates back to at least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
— Voltaire
"We symbolize
logical necessity
with the box 
)
and logical possibility
with the diamond 
)."
"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
a necessary being…."
— Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
Regius Professor of Divinity,
Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)
For further details,
click on the
Christ Church diamond.
Monday, July 3, 2006
Monday July 3, 2006
Into the Sunset, Part I:
Into the Sunset, Part II:
Requiem for a clown:
“At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit.”
See also 10/13.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Monday August 22, 2005
Part I: Mathematics and Narrative
Apostolos Doxiadis on last month's conference on "mathematics and narrative"–
Doxiadis is describing how talks by two noted mathematicians were related to
"… a sense of a 'general theory bubbling up' at the meeting… a general theory of the deeper relationship of mathematics to narrative…. "
Doxiadis says both talks had "a big hole in the middle."
"Both began by saying something like: 'I believe there is an important connection between story and mathematical thinking. So, my talk has two parts. [In one part] I’ll tell you a few things about proofs. [And in the other part] I’ll tell you about stories.' …. And in both talks it was in fact implied by a variation of the post hoc propter hoc, the principle of consecutiveness implying causality, that the two parts of the lectures were intimately related, the one somehow led directly to the other."
"And the hole?"
"This was exactly at the point of the link… [connecting math and narrative]… There is this very well-known Sidney Harris cartoon… where two huge arrays of formulas on a blackboard are connected by the sentence ‘THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.’ And one of the two mathematicians standing before it points at this and tells the other: ‘I think you should be more explicit here at step two.’ Both… talks were one half fascinating expositions of lay narratology– in fact, I was exhilarated to hear the two most purely narratological talks at the meeting coming from number theorists!– and one half a discussion of a purely mathematical kind, the two parts separated by a conjunction roughly synonymous to ‘this is very similar to this.’ But the similarity was not clearly explained: the hole, you see, the ‘miracle.’ Of course, both [speakers]… are brilliant men, and honest too, and so they were very clear about the location of the hole, they did not try to fool us by saying that there was no hole where there was one."
"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer
Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:
"The concept of possible worlds dates back to a least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."
Background:
Modal Logic in Wikipedia
Possible Worlds in Wikipedia
Possible-Worlds Theory, by Marie-Laure Ryan
(entry for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory)
'…It is told that, when the Merciful One made the worlds, first of all He created that Stone and gave it to the Divine One whom the Jews call Shekinah, and as she gazed upon it the universes arose and had being.'"
— Many Dimensions, by Charles Williams, 1931 (Eerdmans paperback, April 1979, pp. 43-44)
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
— Aion, by C. G. Jung, 1951 (Princeton paperback, 1979, p. 236)
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
|
"We symbolize
logical necessity with the box )and logical possibility with the diamond ).
"The possibilia that exist,
— Michael Sudduth, |
Friday, November 5, 2004
Friday November 5, 2004
A Harvard Education
in a Sentence
Harvard alumnus Norman Mailer:
“At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit.“
For Harvard bullshit, see
The Crimson Passion.
For superior bullshit, see
Shrine of the Holy Whapping.