Log24

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

More-Nuanced Realities

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:32 pm

This evening's NY Times  wire:

Mabee reportedly died on December 18, 2014.

The cover of Harvard Design Magazine , Spring/Summer 2014:

See also Sigla (Dec. 22, 2014):
"Everyword for oneself but Code for us all."
— James Joyce in Scribbledehobble

What hath Joyce wrought?

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Obiter Dicta

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:58 pm

The title is a phrase from Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word —

"the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta ,
the words in passing, that give the game away"

The President on July 23, per USA TODAY

"And there’s a need, whether it is true or not,
there is a need to project a different picture."

Related material —

EVERY LAST EASTER EGG AND REFERENCE
IN EPISODE 6 OF HBO'S WATCHMEN
 .

Wikipedia — "For the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, 
Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson won the award
for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie,
or Dramatic Special for this episode."

Wikipedia on Lindelof

See also . . . The Bard of Teaneck —

"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound,
nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring
the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride,
vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.

Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."

—  Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
     Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005

Weingarten's remarks were quoted here  on that Sunday, along with
the following illustration —

Spear Daddy!

'The Deceivers'— A novel by Alfred Bester, author of 'The Stars My Destination

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Princeton Flashback

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From The Daily Princetonian  on May 29, 2015:

"… well, isn’t that what Reunions is all about?
  Making memories?"

"Try to remember the kind of September ."

From this  journal on May 29, 2015:

Openings

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:29 AM 

The film "Pawn Sacrificereportedly opened in Toronto 
on September 11, 2014. 

See as well Log24 posts of that day and Autistic Enchantment.

 

The Dark Horse Rises

Thursday, April 2, 2015

A Word…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:26 am

… in memory of Tom Koch, comedy writer for Bob and Ray,
who reportedly died at 89 on March 22 —

Nuanced

Part I: "Nuanced" in the recent post Metamorphosis
           (from March 22, the above date):  

 "We wanted the film to go through a very subtle
  and nuanced visual metamorphosis." 

— Nenad Cicin-Sain on The Time Being

Part II: Other instances of "nuanced" in this journal.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Metamorphosis

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

In memory of a film enthusiast who reportedly
died on February 23, 2015:

"We wanted the film to go through a very subtle
and nuanced visual metamorphosis." 

— Nenad Cicin-Sain on The Time Being

See also February 23, 2015 in this journal.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Unnecessary* Truth?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:26 pm

"There is no question about what arithmetic is for
or why it is supported. Society cannot proceed
without it. Addition, subtraction, multiplication,
division, percentages: though not all citizens can
deal fluently with all of them, we make the
assumption that they can when necessary.
Those who cannot are sometimes at a disadvantage.

Algebra, though, is another matter."

— Underwood Dudley in the Notices of the
American Mathematical Society
, May 2010
:
"What Is Mathematics For?" 

A less nuanced remark from the American
Mathematical Society (AMS) today—

"The answer to the recent Op-Ed piece
in The New York Times  entitled
'Is Algebra Necessary?'
is resoundingly YES!"

— Eric Friedlander, AMS president

* A review of philosophical terminology—

"The distinction between necessary truth
and contingent truth is a version of Leibniz 's 
distinction between truths of reason and truths
of fact. A necessary truth must be true and
could not be false, whatever way the world is. 
It is true in itself. A contingent truth, on the other 
hand, depends upon the empirical world and might 
have been false had the world been different." 

— The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The Dick Code

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"Eighteenth century theories of language were often presented as genealogies; instead of looking to the functions or operations of language to describe its 'nature,' they appealed to the story of its origins (with more or less literalist intentions.) The interest in an original 'revealed' language began much earlier, however. Leibniz, for example, searched for a primitive root-language which he felt could be discovered through research into etymology, and asserted that this ur-text, whether its signifiers were natural or conventional, would be composed of rational relations worthy of its original author, or Author, that is, God. He also toyed with the notion that hieroglyphics might be a philosophical language, a kind of meaningful mathematics, whose revelations would be exact and necessary. The debate over the origins of language— and the status of hieroglyphics— as it played out in the eighteenth century was linked to a dispute over metaphor, conceived as a 'primitive' mode of expression which preceded and was less nuanced and precise than the 'arbitrary' modern European languages. What is essential here is not the specifics of the debate on the origins of language (although this would certainly add much to the present inquiry) but rather the link that was thus constituted between hieroglyphics, the primitive ('the savage and the poet speak only in hieroglyphics') and the idea of an archaic language as an original archive of meanings which pre-exists Man and his derivative or arbitrary tongues."

— "This Extreme and Difficult Sense of Spectacular Representation: Antonin Artaud's Ontology of 'Live'," by Deborah Levitt

ANY CHARACTER HERE

^

ANY CHARACTER HERE

"In several programming languages, such as C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, and Python, a caret (^) is used to denote the bitwise XOR operator. This is not used outside of programming contexts because it is too easily confused with other uses of the caret." —Wikipedia article on Exclusive Or

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110713-CaretEncryptionQuestion.jpg

See also the above date, July 7, 2010, in this journal.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110713-PKDwithCat-200w.jpg
Philip K. Dick, author of the novel
on which the Harrison Ford film
"Blade Runner" (1982) was based.

"You'd never know it, but buddy
          I'm a kind of poet."

Sunday, October 2, 2005

Sunday October 2, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens

Readings for today:

At the Wallace Stevens online concordance, search for X and for primitive.

In the e-book edition of Bester's  The Deceivers,  search for X.

    "We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,

The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air."

Wallace Stevens,
Oct. 2, 1879 – Aug. 2, 1955,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
IX.1-18, from The Auroras of Autumn,
Knopf, NY (1950)

Related material:

(Added Monday, Oct. 3, 8:45 AM)

"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.

Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."

Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
    Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005

Presenting…

Spear Daddy!

 

'The Deceivers'— A novel by Alfred Bester, author of 'The Stars My Destination

Continuing Bester's Maori theme,
students from Cullinane College:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051003-Enlarge.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051003-CC2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(See Literature and Geography.)
 

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

Tuesday December 3, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:45 pm

Symmetry, Invariance, and Objectivity

The book Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, by Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books issue dated June 27, 2002.

On page 76 of this book, published by Harvard University Press in 2001, Nozick writes:

"An objective fact is invariant under various transformations. It is this invariance that constitutes something as an objective truth…."

Compare this with Hermann Weyl's definition in his classic Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 1952, page 132):

"Objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms."

It has finally been pointed out in the Review, by a professor at Göttingen, that Nozick's book should have included Weyl's definition.

I pointed this out on June 10, 2002.

For a survey of material on this topic, see this Google search on "nozick invariances weyl" (without the quotes).

Nozick's omitting Weyl's definition amounts to blatant plagiarism of an idea.

Of course, including Weyl's definition would have required Nozick to discuss seriously the concept of groups of automorphisms. Such a discussion would not have been compatible with the current level of philosophical discussion at Harvard, which apparently seldom rises above the level of cocktail-party chatter.

A similarly low level of discourse is found in the essay "Geometrical Creatures," by Jim Holt, also in the issue of the New York Review of Books dated December 19, 2002. Holt at least writes well, and includes (if only in parentheses) a remark that is highly relevant to the Nozick-vs.-Weyl discussion of invariance elsewhere in the Review:

"All the geometries ever imagined turn out to be variations on a single theme: how certain properties of a space remain unchanged when its points get rearranged."  (p. 69)

This is perhaps suitable for intelligent but ignorant adolescents; even they, however, should be given some historical background. Holt is talking here about the Erlangen program of Felix Christian Klein, and should say so. For a more sophisticated and nuanced discussion, see this web page on Klein's Erlangen Program, apparently by Jean-Pierre Marquis, Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal. For more by Marquis, see my later entry for today, "From the Erlangen Program to Category Theory."

Powered by WordPress