Log24

Quivering Antennae

This  journal on that date —

From yesterday's 2 PM post —

From "Inception" —

Paraphrase of remarks by "Inception" director Christopher Nolan
at Princeton on June 1, 2015 —

"If you have built castles in the air, 
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.”

— Henry David Thoreau

The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic 
The I Ching .

For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical  symbols …

A lyric by Ira Gershwin —

A cinematic "T" —

See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega: 

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

The title pun is from a letter about Google's new parent
company, named "Alphabet" by its founders.

Related material:  Alpha and Omega in this journal.

Do you know where your watch is?

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

From the recent film "Interstellar" —

"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."

— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega

Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles , 18.5.9.5. e,  p. 1181 :

Pour mettre la joie à son comble, j’ajoute que le dénommé Saavedra
semble avoir disparu de la circulation sans plus laisser aucune trace….
Du coup, l’histoire prend des allures de sombre intrigue policière.

Man of La Mancha :  

"Who knows where madness lies?"

An author quoted here at 10 PM ET Monday, Nov. 24, 2014 :

And then there is author Dan McGirt :

"We tried to create new realities overnight,
careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans
in memorability and repeatability."

… Our Most Important Product …

"Omega is as real  as we need it to be."

— Burt Lancaster in Sam Peckinpah's last film

To Feb. 11, 2012:

“News and Traffic. Sports and Weather. These were his acid terms
for the life he’d left behind, more than two years of living with
the tight minds that made the war. It was all background noise,
he said, waving a hand. He liked to wave a hand in dismissal.”

— DeLillo, Don (2010-02-02), Point Omega 

Send in the Clowns.   (Click to enlarge.)

The above flashback was suggested by Lev Grossman’s verb “trafficked”
in yesterday’s posts, and by the song lyric “show us the way to
the next little girl.”

“… which is our actual experience” — Joan Didion

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“This is a divorce case that was before us on an earlier occasion.”

Wild:

From the director of The Wild Bunch —

Brady:

From The New York Times —

Dialogue from “The Osterman Weekend”—

01:57:22  “Why did he make us try to believe Omega existed?”
01:57:25    ….
01:57:26  “The existence of Omega has not been disproved.
01:57:28  Don’t you understand that?
01:57:31  Omega is as real  as we need it to be.”

See also Omega elsewhere in this journal.

Update of 9:15 PM ET —

… Continues.

"24 Hour Psycho" at the Museum of Modern Art in the novel
Point Omega  is illustrated in a New York Times  review—

Related material — Today's 1 PM post and… 

See also yesterday's  1 PM post.

For the first two words of the title, 
see the previous post.

For the third word, see a review of the recent film "Hitchcock"
about the director and Janet Leigh during the filming of "Psycho"—

Hopkins' Hitchcock more or less eats out of Janet's hand
when she feeds him candy corn during a drive together
(the reference is to the candy Norman Bates is devouring
when he's interviewed by Martin Balsam's detective).

A story that demands the blended talents of Hitchcock and of
Mel Brooks to do it justice:

See also a 2010 New York Times  review of
DeLillo's novel Point Omega . The review is titled,
without any other reference to L'Engle's classic tale
of the same name, "A Wrinkle in Time."

Related material: The Crosswicks Curse.

“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one  of us
 gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”

— American adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest , 1956

From "The Onto-theological Origin of Play:
Heraclitus and Plato," by Yücel Dursun, in
Lingua ac Communitas  Vol 17 (October 2007)—

"Heraclitus’s Aion and His Transformations

 The saying is as follows:

αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων·
παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη

(Aion is a child playing draughts;
the kingship is the child’s)

(Krell 1972: 64).*

 * KRELL, David Farrell.
   “Towards an Ontology of Play:
   Eugen Fink’s Notion of Spiel,”
   Research in Phenomemology ,
   2, 1972: 63-93.

This is the translation of the fragment in Greek by Krell.
There are many versions of the translation of the fragment….."

See also Child's Play and Froebel's Magic Box.

Update of May 5— For some background
from the date May 4 seven years ago, see
The Fano Plane Revisualized.

For some background on the word "aion,"
see that word in this journal.

Review of DeLillo's novel Point Omega—

"One difference between art and entertainment has to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so that you’re challenged to re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so that you don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all except, perhaps, the adrenalin rush before dazzling spectacle. Although, of course, there can be myriad gradations between the former and latter, in their starkest articulation we’re talking about the distance between, say, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest  and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol…."

— Lance Olsen, March 1, 2010, in The Quarterly Conversation

Robert Hughes on fast and slow art—

"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game."

– Speech of June 1, 2004

Log24 on art speeds—

A Study in Art Education (June 15, 2007)

Twenty-four (March 13, 2011)

(Continued)

From Winning—

"In the desert you can remember your name,
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."

— America

COLLEGE OF THE DESERT
Minutes — Organization Meeting
11:00 a.m., Saturday, July 1, 1961—

15. Preparation of College Seal:

By unanimous consent preparation of a College
Seal to contain the following features was
authorized: A likeness of the Library building
set in a matrix of date palms, backed by
a mountain skyline and rising sun; before
the Library an open book, the Greek symbol
Alpha on one page and Omega on the other;
the Latin Lux et Veritas, College of the
Desert, and 1958 to be imprinted within or
around the periphery of the seal.

From the website http://geofhagopian.net/ of
Geoff Hagopian, Professor of Mathematics,
College of the Desert—

Note that this version of the seal contains
an Aleph  and Omega instead of Alpha and Omega.

From another Hagopian website, another seal.

For Fischer's fellow database enthusiast Codd, see Cross-Referenced (April 24, 2003).

For Birtel's fellow pseudoscience enthusiast Frank Tipler, see the artist's comment linked to in Romancing the Omega (April 19, 2011)—

"Omega Point" is a term used by mathematical physicist Frank Tipler for what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics."

— Josefine Lyche, 2009

Related material—

Yesterday, 3:33 PM, in this journal— "Time for you to see the field"— and…

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury , opening paragraph of part two, "June Second, 1910"—

"When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly, and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

See also Willard Van Orman Quine in this journal on August 15, 2009—

"A tale told by an idiot"— and such a tale—

A Meditation on the NY Lottery of May 29

Yesterday's NY Lottery— Midday 981, Evening 275.

As noted in yesterday  morning's linked-to post,
The Shining of May 29…

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118

One interpretation of the mystic numbers revealed by the Lottery yesterday—

981 as the final page* of David Foster Wallace's famed novel Infinite Jest …

275 as a page in Wallace's non-fiction book about infinity Everything and More …

  Gregory Chaitin points out that this is nonsense …

As noted elsewhere in this journal, I have a different concept of "math's absolute
Prince of Darkness"— and, indeed, of a "quest for Omega." (See posts of May 2010.)

Yesterday's numbers indicate a different struggle between darkness and light—

Light —

Darkness —

* From infinitesummer.org/archives/168 — "A note about editions:
As it turns out, all (physical) editions of Infinite  Jest  have 981 pages:
the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc.
A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who
were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent."

From this evening's online New York Times—

See also Don DeLillo's Point Omega , a novel published on Groundhog Day, 2010.

Commentary on Revelation 6:8—

And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him.

Related material:

Death toll climbs to 394 in Indonesian tsunami

See also, in this journal, Pale Rider  and Hereafter.

In the Details

This afternoon's post, Point Omega continued, concerned the New York Lottery numbers for yesterday evening and midday today.

A footnote to that post—

Today's evening New York Lottery number was 664.

In the spirit of the theological content of this afternoon's post—

Today's evening NY number 664 may or may not refer to the year of the Synod of Whitby.

That Synod was about reconciling the customs of Rome with the customs of Iona.

A somewhat relevant link from the Language Game post referred to in this afternoon's post was on the word "selving." This link, now broken, referred to a paper hosted by, as it happens, Iona College. The following is a link to a cached copy of that paper—

"The Story of the Self: The Self of the Story," by James E. Giles (Religion and Intellectual Life, Fall 1986— Volume 4, Number 1, pages 105-112)

"Throughout history mystics and philosophers have sought a compact key to universal wisdom…."

— Charles H. Bennett, "On Random and Hard-to-Describe Numbers," 1979.

Bennett was writing about Gregory Chaitin's concept of an "Omega number."

(See Thursday's "Omega at Eight" and Friday's "The Girl Who Fixed the Omega.")

Here is a different Omega number — Alt 234.

Related material: