Log24

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Sabato Tombstone

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:28 pm

IMAGE- Sabato on his own tombstone in 'Angel of Darkness'

Related material:
  (Click images for details) —

IMAGE- The number 11 formed by twin switchblades, '12 Angry Men'

Exhibit B

IMAGE- Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor

  IMAGE- Hexagram 11: PEACE
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star

Monday, May 13, 2019

“The Eyes of Orson Welles”…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:49 pm

is a TCM special at 8 PM ET this evening.

A snow-globe phrase from April 28 —

Bauble, Babel . . . Bubble —

Images including Plato's diamond on a tombstone

The "bubble" cited above —

For more metaphysical accounting, see
The Church of Synchronology.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Graphical Interfaces

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:52 am

Thacker reportedly died on Monday, June 12, 2017.

This journal on that date —

Images including Plato's diamond on a tombstone

Thacker retired from Microsoft in February.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Gamers

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

A search for Gamers in this journal yields

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Tombstones.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

This is not unrelated to the title of a 2008 
book by Jeremy Gray:

Plato's Ghost:
The Modernist Transformation
of Mathematics
.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Christmas Ornaments

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:29 pm

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm

(Continued from August 13. See also Coxeter Graveyard.)

Coxeter exhuming Geometry

Here the tombstone says
"GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."

In the geometry of Plato illustrated below,
"the figure of eight [square] feet" is not , at this point
in the dialogue, the diamond in Jowett's picture.

An 1892 figure by Jowett illustrating Plato's Meno

Jowett's picture is nonetheless of interest for
its resemblance to a figure drawn some decades later
by the Toronto geometer H. S. M. Coxeter.

A similar 1950 figure by Coxeter illustrating a tesseract

For a less scholarly, but equally confusing, view of the number 8,
see The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Thing Itself

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:29 am

Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker  magazine—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111020-Derrida.GIF

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111020-Topia122.GIF

Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—

"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"

A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…

Coxeter exhuming Geometry

Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."

A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Tombstones.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.

The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .

The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—

The Diamond Star

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110905-StellaOctangulaView.jpg

See Configurations and Squares.

That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero  from March 28, 2003.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Philosopher’s Stone

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:30 pm

Happy Ending

Part I —
Plato's
Tombstone

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

Part II
Star and Diamond
United

IMAGE- The Diamond Star

(See previous post and
a note on design.)

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Bright Star (continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

From Epiphany 2010

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word."

– Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Pennsylvania Lottery yesterday—

Saturday, June 26, 2010: Midday 846, Evening 106

Interpretation—

Context:
Yesterday's morning post, Plato's Logos
Yesterday's evening post, Bold and Brilliant Emergence

Poem 846, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
"bird-song at morning and star-shine at night"

Poem 106, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
" All labourers draw home at even"

The number 106 may also be read as 1/06, the date of Epiphany.

Posts on Epiphany 2010—

9:00 AM    Epiphany Revisited
12:00 PM  Brightness at Noon
9:00 PM    The Difference

Related material—

Plato's
Tombstone

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Wednesday April 30, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds
and Sacred Heart

PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

Related material:

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

and
a film by Julie Taymor,
Across the Universe:

Across the Universe DVD

Detail of the
Strawberry Fields Forever
Sacred Heart:

Strawberry Fields Sacred Heart from 'Across the Universe'


A song:

Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor

Shinin’ like a diamond,
she had tombstones
in her eyes.

Album “The Dark,”
by Guy Clark

For related tombstones,
see May 16-19, 2006,
and April 19, 2008.

Further background:
Art Wars for
Red October.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Thursday November 29, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
A Long Story

 
From today's online NY Times:
Obituaries in the News
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Published: [Wednesday]
November 28, 2007
Filed at 11:10 p.m. ET

Gennie DeWeese

 

BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) — Gennie DeWeese, an artist known for her landscape paintings and woodblock prints whose works are displayed at museums across the Northwest, died Monday [November 26, 2007]. She was 86.

 

DeWeese died at her studio south of Bozeman. Dahl Funeral Chapel confirmed her death.

 

Her first oil painting was of her dog, done when she was 12 years old.

 

In 1995, DeWeese received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Montana State University, and she received the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts.

Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

(April 1974) —

"The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they’re unique in that they’ve stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told. The Church of Reason that I talked about was founded on their graves. It’s supported today by their graves. And when you dig deep into its foundations you come across ghosts."

I look at my watch. It’s after two. "It’s a long story," I say.

"You should write all this down," Gennie says.


Quod erat
demonstrandum.

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

For more information,
click on the black monolith.

Related material:

In the Details
and
Deep Beauty.

Friday, July 6, 2007

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:26 am
Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil

continued from
Midsummer Night

“The voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy client, a man on trial for murder: ‘Now, you know how dead time works. Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin’ evil….'”


— Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice,”
The New York Times, March 20, 1994


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Coxeter.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

In Other Game News:

“In June, bloggers speculated that the Xbox 360 return problem was getting so severe that the company was running out of ‘coffins,’ or special return-shipping boxes Microsoft provides to gamers with dead consoles. ‘We’ll make sure we have plenty of boxes to go back and forth,’ Bach said in an interview.”

The picture of
“Coxeter Exhuming Geometry”
suggests the following
illustration, based
in part on
 Plato’s poem to Aster:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Tombstones.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

Thursday’s last entry

and

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050310-hex.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sex and Art
in a
Chinese Poem

The proportions of
the above rectangle
may suggest to some
a coffin; they are
meant to suggest
a monolith.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Wednesday May 17, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:29 am

Tombstone

From today's New York Times:

Obituary

"Jiri Frel, a mercurial and eccentric curator who helped build the J. Paul Getty Museum into a major center for Greek and Roman art but resigned after revelations about unscrupulous acquisition practices, died on April 29. He was 82…. a well-regarded expert in Greek tombstones…."

News story

"ATHENS, May 16 — After four hours of talks here with the Greek culture minister, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles said Tuesday that he would press for the return of some of the Getty's most prized ancient artifacts to Greece…. Greece is seeking the repatriation of a… tombstone…."

From a photo accompanying the obituary:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060517-Window.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Museum
window

 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060517-StarAndDiamond.bmp” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

To Aster, from Plato

Asteras eisathreis, Aster emos.
Eithe genoimen ouranos,
'os pollois ommasin eis se blepo.

You gaze at stars, my Star.
Would that I were born the starry sky,
that I with many eyes might gaze at you.

Related material:

Log24 entries of Dec. 31, 2002

Why Me?

Plato's Diamond

The Halmos Tombstone

Friday, September 17, 2004

Friday September 17, 2004

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

God is in…
The Details

From an entry for Aug. 19, 2003 on
conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:

Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest.

Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.

Pope

Nicholi

Old
Testament
Logos

New
Testament
Logos

For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at

Cut-the-Knot.org.

For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at

The Institute for Advanced Study.

On Harvard and psychiatry: see

The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras

(February 24, 2004)

This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Harvard philosophy so eloquently described by Alston Chase in his study of Harvard and the making of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.  Kaczynski's time at Harvard overlapped slightly with mine, so I may have seen him in Cambridge at some point.  Chase writes that at Harvard, the Unabomber "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) 'there is no logical justification for morality.'" I was less impressed by Harvard positivism, although I did benefit from a course in symbolic logic from Quine.  At that time– the early 60's– little remained at Harvard of what Robert Stone has called "our secret culture," that of the founding Puritans– exemplified by Cotton and Increase Mather.

From Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise:

"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone.  It's a wonderful thing– or it was.  It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless.  It was a stranger to pity.  And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."

Some traces of that culture:

A web page
in Australia:

A contemporary
Boston author:

Click on pictures for details.

A more appealing view of faith was offered by PBS on Wednesday night, the beginning of this year's High Holy Days:

Armand Nicholi: But how can you believe something that you don't think is true, I mean, certainly, an intelligent person can't embrace something that they don't think is true — that there's something about us that would object to that.

 

Jeremy Fraiberg: Well, the answer is, they probably do believe it's true.

Armand Nicholi: But how do they get there? See, that's why both Freud and Lewis was very interested in that one basic question. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? And how do we answer that question? And how do we arrive at the answer of that question?

Michael Shermer: Well, in a way this is an empirical question, right? Either there is or there isn't.

Armand Nicholi: Exactly.

Michael Shermer: And either we can figure it out or we can't, and therefore, you just take the leap of faith or you don't.

Armand Nicholi: Yeah, now how can we figure it out?

Winifred Gallagher: I think something that was perhaps not as common in their day as is common now — this idea that we're acting as if belief and unbelief were two really radically black and white different things, and I think for most people, there's a very — it's a very fuzzy line, so that —

Margaret Klenck: It's always a struggle.

Winifred Gallagher: Rather than — I think there's some days I believe, and some days I don't believe so much, or maybe some days I don't believe at all.

Doug Holladay: Some hours.

Winifred Gallagher: It's a, it's a process. And I think for me the big developmental step in my spiritual life was that — in some way that I can't understand or explain that God is right here right now all the time, everywhere.

Armand Nicholi: How do you experience that?

Winifred Gallagher: I experience it through a glass darkly, I experience it in little bursts. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's always true, and sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can't. Or sometimes I remember that it's true, and then everything is in Technicolor. And then most of the time it's not, and I have to go on faith until the next time I can perhaps see it again. I think of a divine reality, an ultimate reality, uh, would be my definition of God.

Winifred
Gallagher

Sangaku

Gallagher seemed to be the only participant in the PBS discussion that came close to the Montessori ideals of conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity.  Dr. Montessori intended these as ideals for teachers, but they seem also to be excellent religious values.  Just as the willow-tombstone seems suited to Geoffrey Hill's style, the Pythagorean sangaku pictured above seems appropriate to the admirable Gallagher.

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