See Maniac Monday in this journal and .…
Related reading: "Where credit is due."
(In memory of Will Alsop and Bill Gold)
Related material: Alice, a Log24 post of Nov. 12 (11/12), 2017.
From the Feast of St. Nicholas last year —
Related cutural artifacts: Maniac the series, and Maniac the book.
"When things go bonkers, you have to adapt." — From "Furiosa" (2024)
See as well this journal on the day of Helgason's death.
For some, yesterday was just another Maniac Monday.
Today being Tuesday suggests a Belgium-related search
in this journal . . .
From a search in this journal for "Schmeikal" —
Schmeikal Bio https://keplerspaceinstitute.com/project/volume-9-number-1/ [Spring 2020] [Page 7] — Introduction by the Editors We have been blessed throughout the publication history of the Journal of Space Philosophy, beginning in 2012, with the volunteer service of 42 professionals in the Space community to act as reviewers and consultants to our authors. They have been listed in the final article of each published issue. We are proud to announce with this letter the addition of our latest Senior Consultant, Dr. Bernd Anton Schmeikal. [Image of Dr. Schmeikal] This Letter to the Editor is about Dr. Schmeikal. Bernd Anton Schmeikal, born May 15, 1946, is a retired freelancer in research and development, qualified in Sociology with a treatise about cultural time reversal. He is a real maverick, still believing that social life can be based on openness and honesty. As a PhD philosopher from Vienna, with a typical mathematical physics background, he entered the Trace Analysis Group of the UA1 Experiment at CERN, under the leadership of Walter Thirring, in 1965. This was in the foundation phase of the Institute for High Energy Physics (HEPhy) at the Austrian Academy of Science. He has always been busy solving fundamental problems concerning the unity of matter and space-time, the origin of the HEPhy standard model, and the phenomenology of relativistic quantum mechanics. In the Sociology Department of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS Vienna), he helped James Samuel Coleman to conceive his mathematics of collective action as a cybernetic system, and he gave the process of internalization of 7 ………………. End of page 7 [Page 8] — Journal of Space Philosophy 9, No. 1 (Spring 2020) collective values an exact shape. He implemented many transdisciplinary research projects for governmental and non-governmental organizations, universities, and non-university institutions, and several times he introduced new views and methods. He founded an international work stream that, for the first time, worked under the name of the Biofield Laboratory (BILAB). Although close to fringe science and electromedicine, the work of BILAB had a considerable similarity to the Biological Computer Laboratory run earlier by Heinz von Foerster. Lately, he has applied Foerster’s idea of a universal relevance of hyperbolic distributions (Zipf’s law) in social science to the labor market. This signifies a last contribution to the research program of the Wiener Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM) under the sponsorship of the Austrian Federal Presidential Candidate Rudolf Hundstorfer. Dr. Schmeikal is convinced that a unity of science and culture can be achieved, but that this demands more than one Einstein. Consequently, he sought cooperation with Louis Kauffman and Joel Isaacson. Dr. Bernd Schmeikal’s review and evaluation of Joel Isaacson and Louis Kauffman’s Recursive Distinctioning (aka “Nature’s Cosmic Intelligence”) research and papers, published in the first issue of the JSP, Fall 2012, again in the Special JSP Issue on Recursive Distinctioning, Spring 2016, and again in the Fall 2017 issue, are very valuable contributions to this forefront science investigation of Nature’s Cosmic Intelligence. Dr. Schmeikal, University of Vienna Professor in mathematics, linguistics, and physics is one of the world’s distinguished scholars for this special field of universe autonomous intelligence. He begins his abstract with the statement: “This paper investigates a universal creative system,” and ends it with “That is to say, our universe may be a representation of Isaacson’s system, and entertainingly, with his US Patent specification 4,286,330, 1981, it seems he has patented creation.” Reports on the four annual KSI-sponsored Conferences for Recursive Distinctioning, to date, can be found in JSP publications. Dr. Schmeikal’s latest book publication is Nuclear Time Travel and the Alien Mind, published by Nova Science Publishers, New York. In 119 pages, Dr. Schmeikal tells the historic story of unidentified objects, and the knowns and unknowns of advanced space-time warping time-travel technology. He includes a September 24, 1947 top secret letter of President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense Forrestal, authorizing research into these matters, but confining ultimate disposition to be solely under the Office of the President. Dr. Schmeikal’s discussions of the impacts of the extraterrestrial mind on past Earth events give a research variable as we attempt to understand and predict future outcomes of attempts at improving humanity’s prospects (see Yehezkel Dror, JSP, Summer 2015 and Kepler Space Institute, book publication, 2019) as we humans proceed with exploring, developing and building human Space settlements. Bob Krone and Gordon Arthur Founding and Current Editors, Journal of Space Philosophy April 15, 2020 8 …………………………… [End of page 8] |
Tom McCarthy today on a new novel about von Neumann at Los Alamos:
"Beyond its mid-20th-century viewfinder, though, it quickly becomes clear that what The Maniac is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection." "Amid — or, more aptly, beneath — the panoply of brilliant men in The Maniac , women function as bit players. At Los Alamos they’re even called 'computers,' since they carry out the secondary, workaday calculations that are then fed upward for male geniuses to work their magic on. But does von Neumann really deserve the title 'Father of Computers,' granted him here by his first wife, Mariette Kovesi? Doesn’t Ada Lovelace have a prior claim as their mother?" |
"As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil,
of technological modernity to reveal the underlying
symbolic structures of human experience,
The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories
one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual
motion machine." — Amazon.com description
of a novel published on All Souls' Day (Dia de los
Muertos), 2021.
The McCarthy novel is mentioned in The New York Times today —
For a simpler perpetual motion machine, see T. S. Eliot's "Chinese jar."
Lines
"Listen to the wind blow, down comes the night
Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies"
— Fleetwood Mac, "The Chain"
Shadows
Related YouTube and Log24 date: Sept. 27, 2018 —
Today's Google Doodle honors a Chinese-American photographer
who reportedly died on January 27, 2021.
From his dies natalis (birth into heaven, in the Catholic tradition) —
See as well some background on a Chinese-related cube.
Related search results —
From a different Adelson, in a Log24 post from 2003 —
Related geometric entertainment —
From a Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal article yesterday on
"the sold-out 10,000 Maniacs 40th anniversary concert at
The Reg Lenna Center Saturday" —
" 'The theater has a special place in our hearts. It’s played
a big part in my life,' Gustafson said.
Before being known as The Reg Lenna Center for The Arts,
it was formerly known as The Palace Theater. He recalled
watching movies there as a child…."
This, and the band's name, suggest some memories perhaps
better suited to the cinematic philosophy behind "Plan 9 from
Outer Space."
"With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series
The above 3×3 Tablet of Ahkmenrah image comes from
a Log24 search for the finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(3) that
was, in turn, suggested by last night's post "Making Space."
See as well a mysterious document from a website in Slovenia
that mentions a 3×3 array "relating to nine halls of a mythical
palace where rites were performed in the 1st century AD" —
Related vocabulary —
See as well the word facet in this journal.
Analogously, one might write . . .
A Hiroshima cube consists of 6 faces ,
each with 4 squares called facets ,
for a total of 24 facets. . . ."
(See Aitchison's Octads , a post of Feb. 19, 2020.)
Click image to enlarge. Background: Posts tagged 'Aitchison.'"
"In the fantasy, Owen is still working on his Rubik’s Cube.
Finally, he finishes — he’s put together all 6 sides."
— "Maniac" Season 1, Episode 9 recap: ‘Utangatta’
by Cynthia Vinney at showsnob.com, Oct. 9, 2018
Related material —
See also Exploded in this journal.
"If this weren't a public situation, I'd be tempted to get into this on a
psychiatric level." — Christopher Alexander to Peter Eisenman, 1982
Scene from the sequel to Unbreakable and Split —
Not to mention elevation .
For the late Robert Venturi, who reportedly died on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018.
See also The Venturi Manifesto (Log24, Sept. 22, 2018).
Found today in an Internet image search, from the website of
an anonymous amateur mathematics enthusiast —
Forming Gray codes in the eightfold cube with the eight
I Ching trigrams (bagua ) —
This journal on Nov. 7, 2016 —
A different sort of cube, from the makers of the recent
Netflix miniseries "Maniac" —
See also Rubik in this journal.
See also "Eternal Recreation" (Christmas Eve, 2012).
On the new Netflix series "Maniac" —
"The treatment Owen and Annie sign up for promises to fix
its subjects’ brains with just three little pills—A, B, and C—
administered one after another over the span of three days.
The first forces you to relive your trauma;
the second exposes your blind spots; and
the third pill forces a confrontation."
— Kara Weisenstein at vice.com, Sept. 26, 2018, 12:19 PM
See also, from Log24 earlier …
A. Monday — Mathematics as Art
B. Tuesday — Trinity and Denkraum Revisited
C. Wednesday — Trinity Tale
of Woody Allen's philosopher …
"Deadline reports that Stone is finalizing a deal
to star in Maniac , a 30-minute television series with
her former Superbad castmate Jonah Hill.
The project, a dark comedy, will be directed by
True Detective alum Cary Fukunaga and is based
on a 2014 Norwegian series about a mental-institution
patient living out a fantasy life in his dreams."
See as well the previous post and Jews Telling Stories.
Update of 11:07 PM ET —
From Variety today — "Hill and Stone would also make their
TV producing debut as the two stars are attached to exec produce
with … Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar and Doug Wald …."
"The problem is having a solid business plan and knowing what
you're doing, whether it's a movie, a TV series or a company."
— Steve Golin in The Hollywood Reporter , Sept. 4, 2013
Peter Schjeldahl in the current (Dec. 14) New Yorker :
The phrase “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by a
British art historian, Roger Cardinal, to translate
the sense of “art brut ,” which Dubuffet had
considered rendering as art “raw,” “uncouth,” “crude,”
or “in the rough.” But the term misses the full thrust
of Dubuffet’s elevation of “people uncontaminated
by artistic culture,” as he called them. He aspired not
to make outsiders respectable but to destroy the
complacency of insiders. He disqualified even tribal
and folk artists, and spirited amateurs like Henri
Rousseau, for being captive to one tradition or another.
Art brut must be sui generis, from the hands and minds
of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries,
builders of strange myths.”
The literary art of Fritz Leiber and Stephen King seems to
fit this definition.
Somewhat less brut — the literary art of Plato.
A non-literary illustration:
Time as "a moving
image of eternity.”
— Plato
A sermon for the father of Kal-El.
See also related material in this journal
on Vegas and on Maniacs.
(American Mathematical Society Feb. 2008
review of Steven Brams’s Superior Beings:
If They Exist, How Would We Know?)
(pdf, 15 megabytes)
"Brams does not attempt to prove or disprove God. He uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios….
Each player also has a primary and secondary goal. For the Person, the primary goal is to have his belief (or non-belief) confirmed by evidence (or lack thereof). The secondary goal is to 'prefer to believe in SB’s existence.' For the Supreme Being, the primary goal is to have P believe in His existence, while the secondary goal is to not reveal Himself. These goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best (4) to worst (1). We end up with a matrix as follows (the first number in the parentheses represents the SB's ranking for that box; the second number represents P's ranking):
Analogously:
Lotteries on Bloomsday, June 16, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
Mid-day (No belief) |
418
No belief, |
064
Revelation |
Evening (Belief) |
709
Belief without |
198
|
The holy image
denoting belief and revelation
may be interpreted as
a black hole or as a
symbol by James Joyce:
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Chapter 17 |
Mystic River Song
continued from June 18: From the Harvard
A Stone for Mystic River, 2003
Related material: Human Conflict This album contains
"Planned Obsolescence": any modern man can see piety Folk are humpin' "By all means accept the invitation to hell, should it come. It will not take you far– from Cambridge to hell is only a step; or at most a hop, skip, and jump. But now you are evading– you are dodging the issue…. after all, Cambridge is hell enough." — Great Circle, a 1933 novel by Conrad Aiken (father of Joan Aiken, who wrote The Shadow Guests)
|
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
Skeptics’ Anniversary
From AP’s “Today in History” for Oct. 28:
In 1636, Harvard College was founded in Massachusetts.”
In the spring of 1960, Harvard sent to all incoming freshmen a reading list consisting, as I recall, of two books:
1. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner (Dover, 1957), and
2. A book on evolution, whose title I do not recall. Perhaps it was Apes, Angels, and Victorians, by William Irvine (McGraw-Hill, 1955).
I found in later years that Gardner was not to be trusted (certainly not on the subject of mathematics– he never had even one college course in the subject). Darwin, however, still seems eminently reasonable.
For my own views on the religion of Scientism advocated by many at Harvard and by those who admire Gardner, see
For a musical version of some related views, see
For an update on the religion of Scientism, see yesterday’s Newsday:
“The congress coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Council for Secular Humanism, the arm of the center dedicated to promoting a nonreligious philosophy.”
The word “nonreligious” here should, since Scientism itself amounts to a religion, be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.
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…
For details, see Log24,
11 AM Sunday, October 16:
Fountainhead
Dominique and
Dominique
A blog entry on The Fountainhead,
a 1949 film featuring archltect
Howard Roark and his patroness,
Dominique Francon,
and a web page on
architecture patroness
Dominique de Menil,
who, with her husband,
commissioned
a house in Houston
in 1948 from
architect Philip Johnson.
Related material:
“Architecture is a dangerous profession,
because it is a poisonous mixture
of impotence and omnipotence,
in the sense that the architect
almost invariably harbors
megalomaniacal dreams
that depend upon others,
and upon circumstances,
to impose and
to realize those
fantasies and dreams.”
— Rem Koolhaas,
Conversations With Students,
quoted at http://www.treyf.com
ZZ
“Numbers and Names,
Wording and Words”
by Eugen Jost
From time to time we take our pen in hand
And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet
Their meaning is at everyone’s command;
It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.
But if a savage or a moon-man came
And found a page, a furrowed runic field,
And curiously studied lines and frame:
How strange would be the world that they revealed.
A magic gallery of oddities.
He would see A and B as man and beast,
As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes,
Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,
Like prints of ravens’ feet upon the snow.
He’d hop about with them, fly to and fro,
And see a thousand worlds of might-have-been
Hidden within the black and frozen symbols,
Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin.
He’d see the way love burns and anguish trembles,
He’d wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weep
Because beyond this cipher’s cross-barred keep
He’d see the world in all its aimless passion,
Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols,
And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion.
He’d think: each sign all others so resembles
That love of life and death, or lust and anguish,
Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish …
Until at last the savage with a sound
Of mortal terror lights and stirs a fire,
Chants and beats his brow against the ground
And consecrates the writing to his pyre.
Perhaps before his consciousness is drowned
In slumber there will come to him some sense
Of how this world of magic fraudulence,
This horror utterly behind endurance,
Has vanished as if it had never been.
He’ll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again.
— Hermann Hesse (1943),
“Buchstaben” from Das Glasperlenspiel,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston
See also the previous entry,
on the dream
of El Pato-lógico.
Center of Time
Am I…. your fantasy girl Machine ballerina? |
From the |
“The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather’ him into ‘the artifice of eternity’— presumably into ‘monuments of unageing intellect,’ immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.”
— Karl Parker, Yeats’ Two Byzantiums
“I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album ‘99.9° F.’ It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say i’m not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega.”
— Nicholson Baker, interview
For some real monuments of unageing intellect, see “Geometrie” in the weblog of Andrea for February 10, 2003.
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