Log24

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Equality Manifestos: Thomas Jefferson vs. Barry Mazur et al.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:59 pm

"These are not the examples most of us want to follow."

— Julian Hanna in The Atlantic , June 24, 2014.

Sunday, July 24, 2022

The Manifestation Manifesto

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:58 pm

Some may prefer their own, less collective, manifestations.

Magic Mikes Continues:

"I get no kick from champagne…." — Cole Porter

But . . .

See too another item with the BRC "Waking Dreams" date —

The editor/author in that  Oct. 14, 2021, post is Russ Kick.

Monday, January 6, 2020

A 2020 Manifesto

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:33 pm

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

The 7/11 Manifesto

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:07 pm

See 7/11, 2006.

Related material — Dabblers in the Collective Unconscious.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Plan 9 Manifesto

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 pm

"Arnheim was a particularly important source
for Norway's principal architectural theorist,
Christian Norberg-Schulz."

— Andrew Peter Steen, University of Queensland
doctoral thesis, 2015

See

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."

— Katherine Neville, The Magic Circle

Saturday, September 22, 2018

The Venturi Manifesto

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Venturi reportedly died on Tuesday, September 18.*

See also this journal on that date.

* Fact check:

Friday, August 24, 2018

The Wandelweiser Manifesto

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:35 pm

Or:  Signpost of Change

From a cartoon graveyard

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180824-Outre_Tinkering-NYer-Aug-27-2018-issue-p84.jpg

Backstory

Alex Ross on Wandelweiser, September 2016

Friday, July 22, 2016

The Four-Group Manifesto

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

'Four Forms Make a Universe,' by Bernd Schmeikal, April 2015

"The four base units commute and satisfy
the multiplication table of the Klein 4 group."

— Bernd Schmeikal, article accepted
    for publication on 11 April 2015

See also Log24 on 11 April 2015 (Orthodox Holy Saturday).

Friday, February 26, 2016

A Manifesto for Mira

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

From the February 2016 article in the previous post —

"Over a century has passed since the publication,
in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro  on 20 February 1909,
of a frontpage article by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti which
came to be known as the Manifesto of Futurism ."

This suggests a review of the 20 February 2009  posts now tagged

"A Modernist Manifesto ."

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

The Lindbergh Manifesto

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:24 am

"Creation is the birth of something, and
something cannot come from nothing."

— Photographer Peter Lindbergh at his website

From a biography of Lindbergh —

" it took Lindbergh awhile to find his true métier.
Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1944….
Barely out of his teens, he became a painter who
embraced conceptual art and — for reasons he
has since forgotten — adopted the professional
name « Sultan. »   Lindbergh was a few years
short of his 30th birthday when he turned to
photography."

— "The Man Who Loves Women," by Pamela Young,
Toronto Globe & Mail , September 19, 1996

A Lindbergh work (at right below) from his conceptual-art days —

For a connection between the above work by Paul Talman and the
above "Mono Type 1" of Lindbergh, see…

Saturday, April 11, 2015

The Starbird Manifesto

"But what was supposed to be the source of a compound's
authority? Why, the same as that of all new religious movements:
direct access to the godhead, which in this case was Creativity."

— Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

"Creativity is not a matter of magical inspiration."

— Burger and Starbird, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking  (2012) 

Video published on Oct 19, 2012

"In this fifth of five videos, mathematics professor
Michael Starbird talks about the fifth element
in his new book, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking ,
co-authored with Williams College professor
Edward B. Burger." 

For more on the Starbird manifesto, see Princeton University Press.

An excerpt —

See also a post for Abel's Birthday, 2011 —  
Midnight in Oslo — and a four-elements image from
the Jan. 26, 2010, post Symbology —

Logo for 'Elements of Finite Geometry'.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Halloween Manifestos, 2013:

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Here and at Catholics for Classical Education.

See also Tom Wolfe on manifestos —

Wolfe on manifestos in 'From Bauhaus to Our House'

— and part of an interesting Sept. 2, 2014, manifesto by
Common Core supporter Keith Devlin:

“Graduate students of mathematics are introduced to further
assumptions (about handling the infinite, and various other issues),
equally reasonable and useful, and in accord both with our everyday
intuitions (insofar as they are relevant) and with the rest of
mainstream mathematics. And on the basis of those assumptions,
you can prove that

1 + 2 + 3 + … = –1/12.

That’s right, the sum of all the natural numbers equals –1/12.

This result is so much in-your-face, that people whose mathematics
education stopped at the undergraduate level (if they got that far)
typically say it is wrong. It’s not. Just as with the 0.999… example,
where we had to construct a proper meaning for an infinite decimal
expansion before we could determine what its value is, so to we
have to define what that infinite sum means. ….”

For a correction to Devlin’s remarks, see a physics professor’s weblog post —

“From a strictly mathematical point of view,
the equation 1+2+3+4+ … = -1/12 is incorrect,
and involves confusing the Dirichlet series with
the zeta function.”  — Greg Gbur, May 25, 2010

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

February Mojo

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:18 pm

A 1911 essay by T. E. Hulme,
"Romanticism and Classicism" —

"There is a general tendency to think that verse means
little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion.
People say: 'But how can you have verse without sentiment?'
You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival
to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death
of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap
caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should
have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry
is utterly inconceivable to them."

A 1961 reaction against Hulme,
"Against Dryness" —

"Against the consolations of form, the clean crystalline
work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the
destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic
idea of character.

Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is
destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination."

— Iris Murdoch, January 1961

Opening the Way —

For instances of character and imagination,
see this  journal on February 8 and February 9.

See also the previous post and . . .

Academics may prefer "The Eureka Manifesto" —

From the MANIFESTO link in the Breakthrough Prize page above —

Our Mission . . . Should We Choose to Accept It

Friday, February 16, 2024

Ocean’s Twin Primes:  11 and 13… Bridesmaids for 12?

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:12 am

"A dark illimitable Ocean" — John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II

"All is number" — Attributed to Pythagoras

"For a fraction of a second, Phocan senses
one more act of standing-in or substitution
at work here; the presence, veiled, redacted,
of a coupling unconsummated, of a bride
uncaptured—too young, a child almost—
exiting the frame
."

  — The Making of Incarnation

From the MANIFESTO link in the Breakthrough Prize page above —

Our Mission . . . Should We Choose to Accept It

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Geometry and Art

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:54 am

AI-assisted report on "Cullinane Diamond Theorem discovery" —

Cullinane Diamond Theorem discovery

The full  story of how the theorem was discovered is actually
a bit more interesting.  See Art Space, a post of May 7, 2017,
and The Lindbergh Manifesto, a post of May 19, 2015.

"The discovery of the Cullinane Diamond Theorem is a testament
to the power of mathematical abstraction and its ability to reveal
deep connections and symmetries in seemingly simple structures."

I thank Bing for that favorable review.

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Beach Song for Sister Simone

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:12 pm

Today's "Mrs. Davis" episode ends with Sister Simone
on a beach being sung to by a beachgoer choir.

This bizarre plot twist suggests some other images —

Also from March 8, 2020 —

The above Puchner remarks on the Communist Manifesto featured 
a banner at the top crediting "California State University, Chico."

More recently, from this  journal —

Besides "Mrs. Davis," this post was suggested by . . .

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/
is-multiculturalism-an-oxymoron-on-martin-puchners-culture/
.

Friday, February 17, 2023

Old PUP, New Tricks

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:50 pm

Monday, February 6, 2023

Interality Studies

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:26 pm
 

You, Xi-lin; Zhang, Peter. "Interality in Heidegger." 
The Free Library , April 1, 2015.  
. . . .

The term "interology" is meant as an interventional alternative to traditional Western ontology. The idea is to help shift people's attention and preoccupation from subjects, objects, and entities to the interzones, intervals, voids, constitutive grounds, relational fields, interpellative assemblages, rhizomes, and nothingness that lie between, outside, or beyond the so-called subjects, objects, and entities; from being to nothing, interbeing, and becoming; from self-identicalness to relationality, chance encounters, and new possibilities of life; from "to be" to "and … and … and …" (to borrow Deleuze's language); from the actual to the virtual; and so on. As such, the term wills nothing short of a paradigm shift. Unlike other "logoi," which have their "objects of study," interology studies interality, which is a non-object, a no-thing that in-forms and constitutes the objects and things studied by other logoi.
. . . .

Some remarks from this  journal on April 1, 2015 —

Manifest O

Tags:  

— m759 @ 4:44 AM April 1, 2015

The title was suggested by
http://benmarcus.com/smallwork/manifesto/.

The "O" of the title stands for the octahedral  group.

See the following, from http://finitegeometry.org/sc/map.html —

83-06-21 An invariance of symmetry The diamond theorem on a 4x4x4 cube, and a sketch of the proof.
83-10-01 Portrait of O  A table of the octahedral group O using the 24 patterns from the 2×2 case of the diamond theorem.
83-10-16 Study of O  A different way of looking at the octahedral group, using cubes that illustrate the 2x2x2 case of the diamond theorem.
84-09-15 Diamonds and whirls Block designs of a different sort — graphic figures on cubes. See also the University of Exeter page on the octahedral group O.

The above site, finitegeometry.org/sc, illustrates how the symmetry
of various visual patterns is explained by what Zhang calls "interality."

Monday, July 25, 2022

Narratives in the Multiverse of Madness

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:53 am

Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics
by Nina Engelhardt
(Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture)

From a review by Johann A. Makowsky in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society,
November 2020, pp. 1589-1595 —

"Engelhardt’s goal in this study is to put the interplay
between fiction and mathematical conceptualizations
of the world into its historical context. She sees her work
as a beginning for further studies on the role of mathematics,
not only modern, in fiction in the wider field of literature and
science. It is fair to say that in her book Nina Engelhardt does
succeed in giving us an inspiring tour d’horizon of this interplay."

Another such tour —


 

On the title of Westworld Season 4 Episode 5, "Zhuangzi" —

A song for Teddy: "Across my dreams, with nets of wonder . . ."

See Zhuangzi also in the 2022 Black Rock CIty manifesto, "Waking Dreams" . . . 

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Annals of Iconic Simplicity

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:16 pm

The New York Times today has an obituary for
Kevin Lippert, the founder and publisher of
Princeton Architectural Press, who reportedly
died at 63 on March 29, 2022.

“'There was a space between the academic,
theory-heavy M.I.T. Press and the coffeetableism
of Rizzoli,' Mr. Lamster wrote, adding that
Princeton Architectural Press would fill the gap
with 'the voice of the young practitioner.'

Mr. Lippert championed emerging architects.
He published Steven Holl’s seminal architectural
manifesto, 'Anchoring,' in 1989, and wrote the
introduction to the book of the same name.
Mr. Holl, in a tribute to Mr. Lippert on his website,
called him 'a committed intellectual and impresario
for the culture of architecture.'”

— Katharine Q. Seelye, April 17, 2022, 2:21 p.m. ET

From the cited tribute to Lippert on Holl's website —

"An excerpt from his publisher’s foreword to Anchoring 

In its iconic simplicity, his work seems to be about
the language of architecture, not in the allusive sense
used by postmodernists nor in the paradigmatic sense
used by so-called 'deconstructivists' but at the level of
essences of tropes and morphs He is the only
American architect of his generation to be directly
influenced by the main lines in modern philosophy and
music, that is to say, by the line leading from Husserl
through to Heidegger and by separate achievements
of Bartok and Schonberg .
"

Actually, although the above "iconic simplicity" passage,
up to the ellipsis after "morphs,"  is  from the foreword
by Lippert, the references that follow the ellipsis — to
Husserl, Heidegger, Bartok, and Schonberg — are not
from Lippert's foreword, but from the introduction  by
one Kenneth Frampton

From Google Books:

Bibliographic data —

Another architectural memorial, from the reported date of Lippert's death —

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Design Notes

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:15 am

From a book by Schultz, who reportedly died on Sept. 28:

Seeking continues (in this case, seeking the source) . . .

 

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Melbourne Noir Continues

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:13 am

The previous post's link to posts tagged March 8, 2018,
suggests a look at recent thoughts by a Melbourne academic:

Manifesto in Green and Red

Saturday, November 9, 2019

Wall

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:34 am
 

"Nor again will I pretend that, as Bacon asserts, `the pleasure and delight of knowledge and learning far surpasseth all other in nature'. This is too much the language of a salesman crying his own wares. The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections; and therefore, especially in the season of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is likely enough to be neglected and lightly esteemed in comparison with other pursuits offering much stronger immediate attractions. But the pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the years go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say `my mind to me a kingdom is'; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall."

– A.E. Housman, Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Latin,
University College, London, 1892
, as quoted at . . .

http://spenceralley.blogspot.com/2016/01/
housman-manifesto.html

Sunday, June 2, 2019

The Art of Lying

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:13 pm

(Continued … See “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?” by Mario Vargas Llosa, 
New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984.)

"A non-fiction writer must have the freedom
to imagine the facts they [sic ] use."

Sure they must.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Architectural Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:20 pm

For the late Robert Venturi, who reportedly died on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018.

See also The Venturi Manifesto (Log24, Sept. 22, 2018).

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Annals of Critical Epistemology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:36 pm

"But unlike many who left the Communist Party, I turned left
rather than right, and returned—or rather turned for the first time—
to a critical examination of Marx's work. I found—and still find—
that his analysis of capitalism, which for me is the heart of his work,
provides the best starting point, the best critical tools, with which—
suitably developed—to understand contemporary capitalism.
I remind you that this year is also the sesquicentennial of the
Communist Manifesto , a document that still haunts the capitalist world."

— From "Autobiographical Reflections," a talk given on June 5, 1998, by
John Stachel at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin
on the occasion of a workshop honoring his 70th birthday, 
"Space-Time, Quantum Entanglement and Critical Epistemology."

From a passage by Stachel quoted in the previous post

From the source for Stachel's remarks on Weyl and coordinatization —

Note that Stachel distorted Weyl's text by replacing Weyl's word 
"symbols" with the word "quantities." —

This replacement makes no sense if the coordinates in question
are drawn from a Galois field — a field not of quantities , but rather
of algebraic symbols .

"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Sunday Dinner Crumbs

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 pm

From posts now tagged “Memory-History-Geometry” —

“… even the dogs under the table
eat the children’s crumbs.” — Mark 7:28

From a 2015 post

“… Kansas and Harvard officially met
as Kansas wrestled the unsuspecting Harvard
to the ground in a headlock.”

Harvard Heart of Gold , by Dustin Aguilar,
quoted here on April 24, 2015

For the dogs under the table, a note from that same date —

See as well Tom Wolfe on manifestos
and “the creative spirit.”

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Grammar and Patterns

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:00 pm

"May, / The months [sic ] of understanding" — Wallace Stevens

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Grammar

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

Related material 

The Lindbergh Manifesto and The Leibniz Medal.

 

"If pure mathematics does spring from sub-conscious intuitions— already deep-structured as are grammatical patterns in the transformational-generative theory of language?— if the algebraic operation arises from wholly internalized pattern-weaving, how then can it, at so many points, mesh with, correspond to, the material forms of the world?"

— Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation
(Gifford Lectures, 1990). (Kindle Locations 2494-2496).
Open Road Media. Kindle Edition. 

Good question.

See Bedtime Story (Sept. 1, 2016).

Friday, August 26, 2016

SPECTER

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:29 pm

Who you gonna call?

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Convergence

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 pm

Continued from Halloween Manifestos 2013 and from Poster —

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Grammar

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Related material:  The Lindbergh Manifesto and The Leibniz Medal.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Or a Martian?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

See also Cruz and the Coeur d'Alene Manifesto

Saturday, February 27, 2016

All Over Again

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 pm

The previous three posts —

— suggest a review of a post from April 11, 2015:

Michael Starbird on Mathematics —

In Starbird's philosophical fable, the "fifth element" is change .
See also the recent post White Mischief.

Friday, February 26, 2016

The Manifest O

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

"The Manifesto of Futurism  Revisited" —     

Related material — "Manifesto" in this  journal — 
                                 more specifically, "Manifest O."

The phrase GET SPIKED BY EMAIL* above suggests a review of
"Something in the Way She Moves" and "Marissa and the Dropbox."

See also

Marissa Mayer, not amused

* "Get spiked in your inbox every Friday for free."

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Symmetry Framed

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:26 pm

The cover of the K. O. Friedrichs book From Pythagoras to Einstein 
shown in the previous post suggests a review (click the Log24 
images for webpages where they can be manipulated) ….

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110209-SymFrameBWPage.gif

The "more sophisticated" link in the first image above
leads to a webpage by Alexander Bogomolny
"Pythagoras' Theorem by Tessellation," that says
"This is a subtle and beautiful proof."

Bogomolny refers us to the Friedrichs book, from which one of
the illustrations of the proof by tessellation is as follows —

For a quite different use of superposition, see
The Lindbergh Manifesto (May 19, 2015).

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Starbird

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Illustration from The New York Times  of the
book discussed in today's noon post , subtitled

Four Big Ideas and How
They Made the Modern World  —

Related enumerative rhetoric:  The Starbird Manifesto.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

The Space of Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

In memory of a woman who died on August 5th:

An excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s

“Nostalgic Technology:
Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto” —

For further remarks on art and technology,
see posts tagged Stevens Owl.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Conceptual Art for Basel

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The previous post's link to The Lindbergh Manifesto
and Thursday's post on Basel-born artist Wolf Barth 
suggest the following —

See as well a June 14 New York Times
piece on Art Basel.

The logo of the University of Basel 

suggests a review of The Holy Field —

 .

Rahmenprogramm

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

'Wim Wenders and Peter Lindbergh in Conversation'

See also Wenders and Lindbergh in this journal.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Manifest O

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:44 am

The title was suggested by
http://benmarcus.com/smallwork/manifesto/.

The "O" of the title stands for the octahedral  group.

See the following, from http://finitegeometry.org/sc/map.html —

83-06-21 An invariance of symmetry The diamond theorem on a 4x4x4 cube, and a sketch of the proof.
83-10-01 Portrait of O  A table of the octahedral group O using the 24 patterns from the 2×2 case of the diamond theorem.
83-10-16 Study of O  A different way of looking at the octahedral group, using cubes that illustrate the 2x2x2 case of the diamond theorem.
84-09-15 Diamonds and whirls Block designs of a different sort — graphic figures on cubes. See also the University of Exeter page on the octahedral group O.

Friday, September 5, 2014

Flashback

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:16 am

The date at the end of yesterday’s noon post was May 25, 2010.
This, together with Keith Devlin’s Twitter page today, suggests
a review of that date.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Moses Supposes

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:13 am

See also

Spelling Bee:
Manifesto I vs. Manifesto II—

I   The Commonist Manifesto
II  The Anti-Commonist Manifesto

Google's Choice:

IMAGE- 'Manifestos'- Google's preferred spelling

The People's Choice:

IMAGE- 'Manifestoes'- The People's Spelling Choice, according to search results

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The Case of the Missing Smile

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

In today's online New York Times , Roger Cohen quotes a manifesto—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110726-CohenNYT.jpg

A more complete excerpt—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110726-Excerpt.jpg

Note that Cohen omits the concluding punctuation—
three exclamation points and a smile emoticon

!!!:-)

(Compare and contrast with the smile of Hannibal Lecter.)

Related material from this  journal on the following day, Flag Day, June 14

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110612-SquareOfOpposition.jpg

 

Note that the structure of the central flag above
is not unlike that of the skull and crossbones flag.

See also the remark of author Siri Hustvedt (of Norwegian-American
                      background) that was quoted here Sunday.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Awake in Seattle

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm

From University Book Store, Seattle, Washington—

http://www.log24.com/noindex-pdf/110407-GarberAndShields.jpg

Related material—

The Use and Abuse
of Donnie Darko

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110407-SourceCodeTrailer.jpg

Scene from a film based on the old SF story 'Mimsy Were the Borogoves'

From a page on Reality Hunger: A Manifesto  at DavidShields.com—

"The book's epigraph is a statement from Picasso: 'All art is theft.'"

Update of 3 PM EDT April 7—

"… we get inspiration from everywhere, and there's a bright line between inspiration and slavish imitation. (I was going to throw in the Picasso quote 'All art is theft' here, but I've looked that up in both the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, just in case) and in the new Yale Book of Quotations, and can't find it. So I'll just have to steal without the glamour of Picasso having said it was okay.)"

Weblog post by Erin McKean

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Evocation*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 am

"Epistulae ad familiares" (adfamiliares for short) at livejournal.com

"Prefatory notes evoke a Republic of Letters— or at least an academic support group— in which the writer claims membership. In fact, they often describe something much more tenuous, the group of those who the author wishes had read his work, offered him references, or at least given him the time of day. Hence they retain something of the literary— not to say fictional— quality of traditional poets' prayers." (Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History)

P.S. This book rules.  Why did I wait so long to read it?

* See a definition. See also this  journal's previous post, Patterns in the Carpets. As for "those who the author wishes had read his work," see a quotation from an author mentioned in that post, Greg Egan, that seems relevant to the suicide outside Harvard's Memorial Church last Saturday during the morning Yom Kippur service—

… The word "transhumanism" (or, even worse, "posthumanism") sounds like a suicide note for the species, which effectively renders it a political suicide note for any movement by that name. No doubt there are people prepared to spend 90% of their time and energy explaining that they didn't intend  any negative connotations, but this is not one of those cases where other people will be to blame if "transhumanists" are reviled as the enemies of humanity on purely linguistic grounds. It's no use people proclaiming "Please, read my 1,000-page manifesto, don't just look at one word!"….

— Greg Egan on April 23, 2008,** at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club

Related material— A livejournal note on the Memorial Church suicide, nihilism, and a "final crux."

** Footnote to a footnote— See also Log24 on April 23, 2008— Shakespeare's birthday.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Monday December 1, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Pictures at
an Exhibition

Day Without Art:

Day Without Art logo: X'd-out frame

and therefore…

Art:

Art logo: frame not X'd out

From Braque's birthday, 2006:

"The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives."

— Georges Braque,
   Reflections on Painting, 1917

Those who wish to follow Braque's advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:

Carmichael on groups, exercise, p. 440
Hint: See the following
construction of a tesseract:
 
Point, line, square, cube, tesseract
From a page by Bryan Clair

For a different view
of the square and cube
see yesterday's entry
Abstraction and Faith.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Thursday January 3, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:01 pm
Context-Sensitive Theology
continued:

The Revelation Game 
 
New Year’s reading for
the tigers of Princeton

 
Two reviews from the February 2008 Notices of the American Mathematical Society:

From a review of

A Certain Ambiguity
(A Mathematical Novel)

by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal
Princeton University Press
Hardcover, US$27.95, 281 pages —

“From the Habermas-Lyotard debate (see [1] for an introduction) to the Sokal hoax ([4]), to recent atheist manifestos on the bestseller lists (e.g., [2]) the question of foundations for intellectual thought and especially for intellectual debate has never been more critical or urgent.”

[1] M. Bérubé, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education, W. W. Norton, 2006.
[2] S. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, Knopf, 2006.
[4] A. Sokal and P. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Picador, 1999.

Danny Calegari of Caltech

Also in the February Notices– a review of a book, Superior Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know?, in which the author

“.. 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….

In the ‘Revelation Game,’ for example,
the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB’s existence
2) P can not believe in SB’s existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself….

… [and] goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best… to worst…. The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?”

The answer is what one might expect from the American Mathematical Society:

“… the dominant strategy for both is when SB does not reveal Himself and P does not believe in His existence.”

Other strategies are, of course, possible. See last year’s entries.

See also
the life of John Nash,

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080103-BeautifulMind.jpg

for whom the above
equilibrium is named.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Tuesday November 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 am
Death on a Friday

and the
Magic of Numbers

PA Lottery Friday, Nov. 16, 2007: Midday 717, Evening 419

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:

7/17,
4/19,
and
 Friday.

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.”

Manifesto of Cho  

Party on, Victor.

For further drama, see

The Crimson Passion.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Thursday June 7, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:15 pm
Framing
truth

On "framing" and "spin"
in journalism:

"… Packaging is unavoidable.
Facts rarely, if ever, 
  speak for themselves."

Matthew C. Nisbet,  
Assistant Professor
  of "Communication,"
June 6, 2007

If they could, they might
say "We was framed!"

Facts cannot, of course,
speak for themselves
to those who do not
understand their language.

Example:

A picture that appeared in
Log24 on June 7, 2005:

Natural Transformation

Click for details.

Attempt to
frame the picture:

Analogies

"A functor is an analogy."
— Anonymous

  The best mathematicians "see
analogies between analogies."
Banach, according to Ulam 

For further details,
click on the link
"Analogies" above.

See also the analogies in
the previous entry.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Monday April 23, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am
Understanding Media
continued from Nov. 28, 2003

Ben Brantley in this morning's New York Times:

"Television mows down a titan in 'Frost/Nixon,' the briskly entertaining new play by Peter Morgan* about the 1977 face-off between its title characters, the British talk show host (as in David) and the former American president (as in Richard M.)….

Structured as a prize fight between two starkly ambitious men in professional crisis, 'Frost/Nixon' makes it clear that the competitor who controls the camera reaps the spoils."

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070423-Langella.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

Another application of this
"control the camera" philosophy:
the multimedia manifesto of
the Virginia Tech author of
"Richard McBeef"

(a play excerpted above).
 
The New York Times on the author
  (of "Frost/Nixon," not of "Richard McBeef")–
 
"[The author] had a particularly difficult time connecting with his peers… due in large part to the language barrier, which made communication with classmates nearly impossible. Though standing apart from the pack can at times be a deeply troubling experience for a youngster, it provided the imaginative [author] with a unique perspective not afforded to the vast majority of his peers."
 

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Saturday May 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

ART WARS continued…

A Fold in Time

From May 13, Braque’s birthday, 2003:


Braque


Above: Braque and tesseract

“The senses deform, the mind forms.  Work to perfect the mind.  There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.”

— Georges Braque, Reflections on Painting, 1917

Those who wish to follow Braque’s advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Carmichael440ex.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Hint: See the above picture of
Braque and the construction of
a tesseract.

Related material:

Storyline and Time Fold
(both of Oct. 10, 2003),
and the following–

“Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, ‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t exist until it’s folded– or it’s a story without a book.'”

Cynthia Zarin on Madeleine L’Engle,
“The Storyteller,” in The New Yorker,
issue dated April 12, 2004

Friday, May 20, 2005

Friday May 20, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:20 pm

The Shining of Apollo

"Plato's most significant passage may be found in Phaedrus 265b: 'And we made four divisions of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods, saying that prophecy was inspired by Apollo, the mystic madness by Dionysos, the poetic by the Muses, and the madness of love […] by Aphrodite and Eros' (trans. by H.N. Fowler, in the Loeb Classical Library)."

Saverio Marchignoli, note on section 20, paragraphs 115-119, of the Discourse on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate) (1486) by Pico della Mirandola, considered the "Manifesto of the Renaissance."

Related material:
A Mass for Lucero,
The Shining of May 29,
Shining Forth,
Sermon for St. Patrick's Day, and the phrase
Diamond Struck by the Sun.

Friday, February 14, 2003

Friday February 14, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am

Matrix Theory

“At the heart of The Matrix, buried under layers of cinema craft, is a meditation on the difference between essence and appearance. It’s a trip into Plato’s cave.”

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto

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