Log24

… 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.

"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

"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

^

"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

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

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."