Log24

Friday, April 8, 2016

Space Cross

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

For George Orwell

Illustration from a book on mathematics —

This illustrates the Galois space  AG(4,2).

For some related spaces, see a note from 1984.

"There is  such a thing as a space cross."
— Saying adapted from a young-adult novel

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Adventures in Story Space* . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:21 pm

In memory of an editor/author who reportedly died on September 12 . . .

Vide  an anthology he edited that was published on November 1, 2013,
and two Log24 posts from that date —

Colorful Tale  (11/1/2013)

See the title phrase in this journal.
See also posts from last August tagged Storyville.

Orange and Black at the White House  (11/1/2013)

See Josh Lederman's AP story on this year's
colorful White House Halloween decorations.
Orange and black are also the Princeton colors.
See as well The Crosswicks Curse.

* "Story space" is a phrase from Log24 on September 12.

Friday, April 23, 2021

Cross Examination

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:21 am

Related examinations: Space Cross and Wittgenstein’s Picture.

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Space Force

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:08 pm

New Yorker  video  today, at 14:00-14:25 —

“What’s good about KenKen, and Sudoku, and crosswords,
all of those puzzles like that, is that they have grids to be filled in,
empty squares. I think there is something about human nature
that we want to fill up spaces. And if you’re a puzzle person,
or almost anybody, and you see an empty grid, you want to
put something in those spaces. It gives a feeling of satisfaction
that you don’t get often in life and that really feels good.”

— Will Shortz, New York Times  puzzle editor

“I can’t get no… satisfaction….” — The Rolling Stones

The New Yorker  recently restarted the Weiner story,
which includes —

“… the fall of 2017, when he began a twenty-one-month
prison sentence for sexting with a minor.”

“You want to put something in those spaces.”

— Will Shortz, New York Times  puzzle editor

Yes, you do.

Weiner is now with a Brooklyn countertops company called IceStone.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Space X File

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

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

"Sometimes I hit London."

— Saying ascribed to Wernher von Braun

Inscribed Carpenter's Square:

In Latin, NORMA

Monday, July 8, 2019

Exploring Schoolgirl Space

See also "Quantum Tesseract Theorem" and "The Crosswicks Curse."

Saturday, August 4, 2018

Triple Cross

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:57 pm

(Continued)

See also

This post was suggested by Log24 remarks on May 4, 2014,
the date of Garrett Lisi's Twitter post announcing the opening
of his Pacific Science Institute (see previous post).

Friday, June 23, 2017

A Kind of Cross* Continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Click image for a midrash.

* See previous post.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Art and Space…

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

Continues, in memory of chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi,
who reportedly died at 85 yesterday in Switzerland —

IMAGE- Spielfeld (1982-83), by Wolf Barth

The coloring of the 4×4 "base" in the above image
suggests St. Bridget's cross.

From this journal on St. Bridget's Day this year —

"Possible title: 

A new graphic approach 
to an old geometric approach
to a new combinatorial approach
to an old algebraic approach
to M24
"

The narrative leap from image to date may be regarded as
an example of "knight's move" thinking.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Bodies for Crosses

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

The saying of poet Mary Karr that
"there is a body  on the cross in my church,"
together with the crosses of the previous post
suggests a synchronicity check of the
date  discussed in that post —

“Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands”

— Adrienne Rich in “The Diamond Cutters” (1955)

Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —

IMAGE- Richard Kiley in 'Blackboard Jungle,' with grids and broken records

Space crosses, simple and not-so-simple

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Space Invocation

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

Handbook of Combinatorics, 1995- 'Invoke your favorite characterization of AG(4,2)....'

   Consider the space AG(4,2) invoked . See last night's Space Cross.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Gray Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:17 pm

(Continued from Palm Sunday)

From Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” —

Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
Will serve you best, unless you overdo it,
Watching your step too narrowly, refusing
To specify a world, shrinking your purview
To a tight vision of your inching shoes—
Which may, as soon you come to think, be crossing
An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
What you must manage is to bring to mind
A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak
Champaign at dead November’s end, its grass
As dry as lichen, and its lichens grey….

See also —

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Secular Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

This morning's previous post, on sacred space,
linked to "Positively White Cube Revisited,"
an article by one Simon Sheikh.

Sheikh writes well, but he seems to be a disciple
of the damned Marxist lunatic Louis Althusser.

As Pynchon put it in Gravity's Rainbow ,
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."

In this case, a video starring Sheikh on the exhibition "All That Fits"
suggests, by its filming date (May 27, 2011),  a Maltese  cross.

"The stuff that dreams are made of." — Bogart

IMAGE- 'Maltese Falcon' clip uploaded Oct. 25, 2012

(See also Oct. 25, 2012.)

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

The Crosswicks Curse

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

(Continued)

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract." —A novel from Crosswicks

Related material from a 1905 graduate of Princeton,
"The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group," is now available
at Internet Archive (1 download thus far).

The 3-space paper is relevant because of the
connection of the group it describes to the
"super, overarching" group of the tesseract.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Occupy Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:28 pm

(Continued from Seize the Dia,  April 6)

Two chess games by Fischer, against two brothers—

1956: "In this game, Fischer (playing Black) demonstrates
noteworthy innovation and improvisation." — Wikipedia

1963: "Fischer [playing Black] had engineered a brilliantly
disguised trap for him and … he had fallen into it." — NY Times

See also this evening's Times  obituaries and The Unfolding.

Some context:  The Crosswicks Curse.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

The Crosswicks Curse

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Continues.

From the prologue to the new Joyce Carol Oates
novel Accursed

"This journey I undertake with such anticipation
is not one of geographical space but one of Time—
for it is the year 1905 that is my destination.

1905!—the very year of the Curse."

Today's previous post supplied a fanciful link
between the Crosswicks Curse of Oates and
the Crosswicks tesseract  of Madeleine L'Engle.

The Crosswicks Curse according to L'Engle
in her classic 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time —

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

A tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube that
(as pointed out by Coxeter in 1950) may also 
be viewed as a 4×4 array (with opposite edges
identified).

Meanwhile, back in 1905

For more details, see how the Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads occur naturally
in the diamond theorem model of the 35 lines of the 15-point projective
Galois space PG(3,2).

See also Conwell in this journal and George Macfeely Conwell in the
honors list of the Princeton Class of 1905.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Galois Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 pm

(Continued)

The previous post suggests two sayings:

"There is  such a thing as a Galois space."

— Adapted from Madeleine L'Engle

"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."

Thomas Pynchon

Illustrations—

(Click to enlarge.)

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Coordinatizing the Deathly Hallows

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:59 pm

See as well, in this journal, Deathly HallowsRelativity Problem, and Space Cross.

A related quote "This is not mathematics; this is theology."

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Babble On

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

Symbology for Tom Hanks and for a Latin teacher
who reportedly died on Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018 —

Click the image below to search Log24 for "green fields."

See also Space Cross.

Monday, December 18, 2017

Wheelwright and the Dance

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

The page preceding that of yesterday's post  Wheelwright and the Wheel —

See also a Log24 search for 
"Four Quartets" + "Four Elements".

A graphic approach to this concept:

"The Bounded Space" —

'Space Cross' from the Cullinane diamond theorem

"The Fire, Air, Earth, and Water" —

Logo for 'Elements of Finite Geometry'

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Detail for Hopkins

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Detail from the previous post

See Space Cross in this journal.

See also Anthony Hopkins' new film
"Transformers: The Last Knight" and
 

Friday, June 10, 2016

High Concept

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

(Continued)

Orwell Meets Waugh

'Space Cross' from the Cullinane diamond theorem

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Synchronicity Check

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:29 pm

The book quoted in the previous post, Attack of the Copula Spiders,
was reportedly published on March 27, 2012.

For the Church of Synchronology

The above icon may be viewed as a simplified version
of the image described in the April 8 post Space Cross.

Thursday, October 20, 2022

In Hoc Signo

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:38 pm

This post was suggested by a Google search today.

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Watchmen Squid Game: Pronoun Trouble

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:05 am

"… Wade’s entire life is built around the squid attack. In the episode’s opening, we see that 34 years ago, young Wade was at a carnival in Hoboken, New Jersey, proselytizing as a Jehovah’s Witness when the squid emitted a psychic blast that killed three million people in the New York area. Just before the attack, a girl led him into a house of mirrors, feigning interest in hooking up with him in order to steal his clothes, leaving him naked and humiliated in the fairground attraction. But the cruel prank also saved his life, as mirrors can apparently repel the squid's psychic blast."

Related literary remarks —

"It may have been by chance, and it may have had the side effect of being easy to read, but this way of putting a novel together offered a bridge between the miniaturist in Doerr and the seeker of world-spanning connections. He could focus on the details of every piece in the narrative, but there was pleasure, too, in placing them against each other. Sometimes he would lay out all these micro chapters on the floor so he could see them and discover the resonances between characters across space and time.

'That’s the real joy,' Doerr said, 'the visceral pleasure that comes from taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.'"

— "A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 20, 2021, Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing His Readers To Higher Ground." 

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Cock Tale for Rikki

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:50 pm

With apologies to those readers unable to follow knight moves .

The Queen's Gambit , by Walter Tevis,
published Feb. 1983

“Would you care for a cocktail?” he asked pleasantly.
She looked around her at 
the quiet restaurant,
at the people eating lunch, at the 
table with desserts
near the velvet rope at the entrance to 
the dining room.
“A Gibson,” she said. “On the rocks.”

Omni  July 1982

"A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision
as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard,
infinite and perfectly transparent."

Steely Dan, 1974 —

"'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' is a single
released in 1974 by rock/jazz rock group Steely Dan
and the opening track of their third album Pretzel Logic .
It was the most successful single of the group's career,
peaking at number 4 on the Billboard  Hot 100 in
the summer of 1974." — Wikipedia

Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves , 1931—

The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”

See as well my post "Introduction to Cyberspace" (May 26, 2020).

 

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

The Shop on the Corner

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:38 am

George Steiner on chess —

"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."

— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.

In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .

At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's  Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —

… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned 
and began looking.  Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the 
cover of Time  and Newsweek :
he was running for Pres
ident . . . . 

. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After  the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…

      She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did  take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was.  One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do.  The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had. 

      Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.

***

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Structure and Mutability . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:33 pm

Continues.

See a Log24 search for Beadgame Space.

This  post might be regarded as a sort of “checked cell”
for the above concepts listed as tags . . .

Related material from a Log24 search for Structuralism

IMAGE- Stella Octangula and Claude Levi-Strauss

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Social Logic

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:16 am
 

Friday, March 10, 2017

The Transformers

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 PM 

"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of an  achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards, an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who earn their living by transformation — as opposed to the mere reproduction — of symbols, such as writers, designers, and academics."

— The Social Logic of Space ,
     by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
     Cambridge University Press, 1984

For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .

Saturday, June 29, 2019

That’s “Merry” … And Quite Contrary

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:59 pm

"John Horton Conway is a cross between
Archimedes, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí." 

The Guardian  paraphrasing Siobhan Roberts, 
                    

John Horton Conway and his Leech lattice doodle
in The Guardian . Photo: Hollandse Hoogte/Eyevine.

. . . .

"In junior school, one of Conway’s teachers had nicknamed him 'Mary'.
He was a delicate, effeminate creature. Being Mary made his life
absolute hell until he moved on to secondary school, at Liverpool’s
Holt High School for Boys. Soon after term began, the headmaster
called each boy into his office and asked what he planned to do with
his life. John said he wanted to read mathematics at Cambridge.
Instead of 'Mary' he became known as 'The Prof'. These nicknames
confirmed Conway as a terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware
of his own suffering."  — Siobhan Roberts, loc. cit.

From the previous post

See as well this  journal on the above Guardian  date —

 

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Scope Resolution

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

Wikipedia on a programming term

The scope resolution operator helps to identify
and specify the context to which an identifier refers,
particularly by specifying a namespace. The specific
uses vary across different programming languages
with the notions of scoping.  In many languages
the scope resolution operator is written

 "::".

In a completely different context, these four dots might represent
a geometric object  — the four-point plane .

Sunday, November 4, 2018

“Look Up” — The Breakthrough Prize* Theme This Evening

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:45 pm

Looking up images for "The Space Theory of Truth" this evening —

Detail  (from the post "Logos" of Oct. 14)

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=53323

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Accio Watson

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:08 pm
 

Interview by Alice Lloyd George [AMLG] at techcrunch.com 
on April 17, 2017 —
. . . .

In an interview for Flux, I sat down with Natalya Bailey [NB], the co-founder and CEO of Accion Systems. 
. . . .

AMLG: When you talk about aliens I think of one of my favorite books by Carl Sagan  —  Contact. I don’t know if you ever watched the movie or read the book, but I picture you like Ellie in that film. She’s this brilliant scientist and stumbles across something big.

NB: I’ve definitely seen it. I’m currently making my way through Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos again.

AMLG: I love the original Cosmos. I’m a huge Carl Sagan fan, I love his voice, he’s so inspiring to listen to. Talking about books, I know you’re an avid reader. Did any books in particular influence you or your path to building Accion?

NB: Well I’m a gigantic Harry Potter fan and a lot of things around Accion are named after various aspects of Harry Potter, including the name Accion itself.

AMLG: Is that the Accio spell? The beckoning spell?

NB: Yes exactly. My co-founder and I were g-chatting late one night on a weekend and looking through a glossary of Harry Potter spells trying to name the company. Accio, the summoning spell, if you add an “N” to the end of it, it becomes a concatenation between “accelerate” and “ion,” which is what we do. That’s the official story of how we named the company, but really it was from the glossary of spells.

Related material — The Orbit Stabilizer Theorem.
See also the above date — April 17, 2017 —
in posts tagged Art Space.

Monday, June 4, 2018

The Trinity Stone Defined

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:56 pm

“Unsheathe your dagger definitions.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

The “triple cross” link in the previous post referenced the eightfold cube
as a structure that might be called the trinity stone .

An Approach to Symmetric Generation of the Simple Group of Order 168

Some small Galois spaces (the Cullinane models)

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Something to Behold

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:45 pm

From a review of a Joyce Carol Oates novel
at firstthings.com on August 23, 2013 —

"Though the Curse is eventually exorcised,
it is through an act of wit and guile,
not an act of repentance or reconciliation.
And so we may wonder if Oates has put this story
to rest, or if it simply lays dormant. A twenty-first
century eruption of the 'Crosswicks Curse
would be something to behold." [Link added.]

Related material —

A film version of A Wrinkle in Time

The Hamilton watch from "Interstellar" (2014) —

See also a post, Vacant Space, from 8/23/13 (the date
of the above review), and posts tagged Space Writer.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Word and Image: Backstory for James Spader

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:14 pm

Actor James Spader in a 2014 interview

". . . my father taught English. My mother taught art . . . ."

Detail of part of a text by Magritte (1929) that appeared  
without attribution in the online New York Times  today —

See also, from a search for the phrase "Word and Image"
in this  journal —

The Philosophers' Stone as originally
illustrated in The New York Times 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100518-TheStoneNYT.jpg .

Related images —

Juliette Binoche in 'Blue'  The
 24 2x2 Cullinane Kaleidoscope animated images

See as well a Log24 search for "Philosophers' Stone"
and remarks related to the Magritte pictures above 
in the post Story of March 13, 2014.

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Easter Fantasy

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

From this journal at midnight (12 AM ET) on April 4

Related material —

From the weblog of Ready Player One  author Ernest Cline —

"Recently, a lot of people have asked me if a real person
inspired the character of James Halliday, the eccentric
billionaire video game designer in my book. Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak are both mentioned in the text,
because their world changing partnership inspired the
relationship between James Halliday and Ogden Morrow,
with Morrow being a charismatic tech industry leader like
Jobs, and Halliday being the computer geek genius of the
duo like Woz. But the character of James Halliday was
inspired by two other very different people.

As I told Wired magazine earlier this year, from the
beginning, I envisioned James Halliday’s personality as
a cross between Howard Hughes and Richard Garriott.
If I had to break it down mathematically, I’d estimate that
about 15% of Halliday’s character was inspired by
Howard Hughes (the crazy reclusive millionaire part), with
most of the other 85% being inspired by Richard Garriott."

Mrs.  Garriott

See as well Log24 posts tagged "Space Writer"
and the classic tune "Midnight at the Oasis."

Monday, February 12, 2018

Art Wars

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:55 am

'In the end the space itself is the star'— Gia Kourlas

See also Krauss Cross.

Friday, March 10, 2017

The Transformers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards, 
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who 
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"

The Social Logic of Space ,
     by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
     Cambridge University Press, 1984

For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .

Related material —

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Edwin Schlossberg, 'Still Changes Through Structure' text piece

Exhibit C:

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Warp and Woof

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Space —

Space structure —

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  figure appears in remarks on
the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).

Space shuttle —

Related ethnic remarks —

As opposed to Michael  Larsen —

Funny, you don't look  Danish.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Voids

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:24 pm

From mathematician Izabella Laba today —

From Harry T. Antrim’s 1967 thesis on Eliot —

“That words can be made to reach across the void
left by the disappearance of God (and hence of all
Absolutes) and thereby reestablish some basis of
relation with forms existing outside the subjective
and ego-centered self has been one of the chief
concerns of the first half of the twentieth century.”

And then there is the Snow White void  —

A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of a 2x2x2 array
of cubes —

The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Kummer and Dirac

From "Projective Geometry and PT-Symmetric Dirac Hamiltonian,"
Y. Jack Ng  and H. van Dam, 
Physics Letters B , Volume 673, Issue 3,
23 March 2009, Pages 237–239

(http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2579v2, last revised Feb. 20, 2009)

" Studies of spin-½ theories in the framework of projective geometry
have been undertaken before. See, e.g., Ref. [4]. 1 "

1 These papers are rather mathematical and technical.
The authors of the first two papers discuss the Dirac equation
in terms of the Plucker-Klein correspondence between lines of
a three-dimensional projective space and points of a quadric
in a five-dimensional projective space. The last paper shows
that the Dirac equation bears a certain relation to Kummer’s
surface, viz., the structure of the Dirac ring of matrices is 
related to that of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . ."

[4]

O. Veblen
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA , 19 (1933), p. 503
Full Text via CrossRef

E.M. Bruins
Proc. Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. , 52 (1949), p. 1135

F.C. Taylor Jr., Master thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (1968), unpublished


A remark of my own on the structure of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . .

See that structure in this  journal, for instance —

See as well yesterday morning's post.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Accolades for the Soundtrack

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:36 pm

"Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie." — Pascal

(Quoted here in The Search for Finite Space on Mon., Feb. 8, 2016.)

From phys.org today

Accolades poured in from across the science world, as experts hailed a discovery that will help mankind better understand the universe.

"This expands hugely the way we can observe the cosmos, and the kinds of physics and astrophysics we can do," said professor Sheila Rowan, Director of the University of Glasgow's Institute for Gravitational Research.

Abhay Ashtekar, director of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at Penn State University, described the discovery as "breathtaking" and said it "will stand out among the major achievements of the 21st-century science."

"We can now listen to the universe rather than just look at it," said Professor B S Sathyaprakash of Cardiff University. "This window turns on the soundtrack for the universe."

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Source

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

"In ancient Greece, 9 was the number of
the Muses, patron goddesses of the arts.
They were the daughters of Mnemosyne ('memory'),
the source of imagination, which in turn is
the carrier of archetypal, elementary ideas to
artistic realization in the field of space-time."

— Joseph Campbell in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

In memoriam:

 See also Raiders of the Lost Well and…

 The Eliot Omen 


Ground plan for a game of Noughts and Crosses

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Contest

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Once again, Harvard defeats Holy Cross.

IMAGE- Joseph Campbell, 'The Inner Reaches of Outer Space,' meditation on the number nine, the Goddess, and the Angelus

See also a related remark by Norman Mailer, and Plan 9 in this journal.

Presumably the Holy Cross defeat will please art theorist Rosalind Krauss (below).

(Click to enlarge.)

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Midnight in the Garden…

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

Continues.

The growth of consciousness is everything…
the seed of awareness sending its roots
across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways,
spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider
or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake.
The biggest wars are the wars of thought.”

— Fritz Leiber, “The Oldest Soldier” (1960)

Update of 10 PM Saturday, June 14, 2014:
The first link above now leads to Log24 posts tagged
“Consciousness Growth.”  This tag is used only to select
specific posts in this journal.  It should not  be seen as
related to any material of the sort one can find in
a Web search for “growth of consciousness.”

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Thursday with the Nashes

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:00 pm

“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow

“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”

— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic

Midrashim for Rebecca: 

The Diamond Theory vs.  the Story Theory (of truth)

Story Theory and the Number of the Beast

The Palm Sunday post “Gray Space”

For those who prefer the diamond theory of truth,
a “precise mathematical” view of a Gray code —

IMAGE- Six-bit binary and Gray codes

For those who prefer the story theory of truth,
Thursday with the Nashes —

The actors who portrayed Mr. and Mrs. John Nash in
‘A Beautiful Mind’ now portray Mr. and Mrs. Noah…

IMAGE- At UMC.org, the actors who portrayed Mr. and Mrs. John Nash in 'A Beautiful Mind' now portray Mr. and Mrs. Noah.

Monday, March 31, 2014

For Women’s History Month

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 am

“…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, ‘The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.'”

— Fritz Leiber, “The Oldest Soldier” (1960)

“And that’s the snake.” — Jill Clayburgh in “It’s My Turn” (1980)

Backstory — “For Daedalus,” May 26, 2009.

For a more up-to-date look at Burroway, see a
Chicago Tribune  story of March 21, 2014.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Being’s Road

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

For the late Julie Harris —

By slow and carefully modulated steps Bradford's narrative
has brought his community of separatists to the place he
calls Cape Harbor… where, face-to-face with the bleak
and wintry reduction that is his image for American space,
he finds himself stopped, able to do nothing but come to
an astonished pause. The final step, that of imaginative
crossing into the land that lies before them, remains
beyond the power of narrative to take. Narrative falters, and
finding his journey advanced to an "odd Fork in Being's Road"
and himself nothing so much as an "empty spirit / In vacant
space" (to adopt apt phrases from Dickinson and Stevens…),
Bradford requires the sublime if he is to continue moving
forward: separation becomes exaltation as it becomes
manifest that only an influx 
of "the Spirit of God and His
grace" can have permitted the community to survive its
passage to the limit depicted.

— David Laurence, "William Bradford's American Sublime,"
PMLA , Vol. 102, No. 1, 1987, pp. 55-65

Saturday, July 20, 2013

She Was a Hunter, Not a Witch

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Iron Cross, continued )

IMAGE- Obits for a White House reporter and for a recipient of the Iron Cross

"… and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Tag (Part II)

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

(Continued from yesterday evening)

Madeleine L'Engle in The Irrational Season
(1977), Chapter 9:

"After A Wrinkle in Time  was finally published,
it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked
disembodied brain, was called 'It' because It
stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth
which involves the whole of us, heart as well as
mind.  That acronym had never occurred to me. 
I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT
does not have a heart or soul.  And I did not
understand consciously at the time of writing
that the intellect, when it is not informed by
the heart, is evil."

You're…  IT.

Related material: Mathematics as a Post-Communist Activity.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

See Snakes on a Projective Plane  by Andrew Spann (Sept. 26, 2006):

'Snakes on a Plane' cartoon

Click image for some related posts.

"…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, 'The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.' "

— Fritz Leiber, Changewar , page 22

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Star Wars

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 am

IMAGE- Rudolf Koch's version of the 'double cross' symbol

  Source: Rudolf KochThe Book of Signs

The American Mathematical Society
(AMS) yesterday:

Lars Hörmander (1931-2012)
Friday November 30th 2012

Hörmander, who received a Fields Medal in 1962,
died November 25 at the age of 81. …

more »

Some related material:

See also posts on Damnation Morning and, from the
date of Hörmander's death,

Thursday, November 22, 2012

The Red Line vs. the Red Eye

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am

Arthur C. Clarke

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"The HP/Autonomy  Debacle," by John C. Dvorak at pcmag.com on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012—

"The whole Autonomy  thing was weird since the company seemed to be performing magic. On co-founder Michael Richard Lynch's Wikipedia page, the company is described as 'a leader in the area of computer understanding of unstructured information, an area which is becoming known as meaning-based computing .'

I do not know how gullible HP's board of directors is, but when I see the sudden emergence of something called 'meaning-based computing,' the alarms sound and the bullcrap meter begins to tag the red line."

A story by Terence K. Huwe in Online  magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2011, defines meaning-based computing (MBC), discusses Autonomy , and llnks to…

John Markoff in The New York Times , March 4, 2011— 

"Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people— who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing 'digital anomalies' that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds 'call me' moments— those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter."

For example

IMAGE- HAL reading lips in '2001: A Space Odyssey'

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Simple Skill

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:18 am

But with good Will
To show our simple skill…

( Continued from Midsummer Eve, 1993 )

The "Black Diamond" search from Holy Cross Day 
leads to Talk Amongst Yourselves, which in turn
leads to PyrE in the Book, with Alfred Bester's
version of "Will and Idea."

This phrase may be regarded as a version of 
Schopenhauer's "Will and Representation."

Related material—

"Schopenhauer's notion of the will comes from the Kantian thing-in-itself, which Kant believed to be the fundamental reality behind the representation that provided the matter of perception, but lacked form. Kant believed that space, time, causation, and many other similar phenomena belonged properly to the form imposed on the world by the human mind in order to create the representation, and these factors were absent from the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer pointed out that anything outside of time and space could not be differentiated, so the thing-in-itself must be one and all things that exist, including human beings, must be part of this fundamental unity. Our inner-experience must be a manifestation of the noumenal realm and the will is the inner kernel* of every being. All knowledge gained of objects is seen as self-referential, as we recognize the same will in other things as is inside us." —Wikipedia

* "Die Schrecken des Todes beruhen großentheils auf dem falschen Schein, daß jetzt das Ich verschwinde, und die Welt bleibe, Vielmehr aber ist das Gegentheil wahr: die Welt verschwindet; hingegen der innerste Kern des Ich, der Träger und Hervorbringer jenes Subjekts, in dessen Vorstellung allein die Welt ihr Daseyn hatte, beharrt." 

— Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , Kapitel 41

Added Nov. 16, 2012, a translation by E. F. J. Payne—

"The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence."

THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION

by Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne
In two volumes
© 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.
© 1958 by The Falcon's Wing Press

Volume Two: Supplements to the Fourth Book, 
XLI. On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Midsummer Noon

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

Geometry Simplified

Image-- The Three-Point Line: A Finite Projective Space
(a projective space)

The above finite projective space
is the simplest nontrivial example
of a Galois geometry (i.e., a finite
geometry with coordinates in a
finite (that is, Galois) field.)

The vertical (Euclidean) line represents a
(Galois) point, as does the horizontal line
and also the vertical-and-horizontal
cross that represents the first two points'
binary sum (i.e., symmetric difference,
if the lines are regarded as sets).

Homogeneous coordinates for the
points of this line —

(1,0), (0,1), (1,1).

Here 0 and 1 stand for the elements
of the two-element Galois field GF(2).

The 3-point line is the projective space
corresponding to the affine space
(a plane, not a line) with four points —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100624-The4PointPlane.bmp
(an affine space)

The (Galois) points of this affine plane are
not the single and combined (Euclidean)
line segments that play the role of
points in the 3-point projective line,
but rather the four subsquares
that the line segments separate.

For further details, see Galois Geometry.

There are, of course, also the trivial
two-point affine space and the corresponding
trivial one-point projective space —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100624-TrivialSpaces.bmp

Here again, the points of the affine space are
represented by squares, and the point of the
projective space is represented by a line segment
separating the affine-space squares.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Types of Ambiguity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 am

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
(1974)—

Chapter One

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

Note—

“We note that the phrase ‘instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry’ is mere fatuousness. If there is an idea here, degenerate, mere, and geometry  in concert do not fix it. They bat at it like a kitten at a piece of loose thread.”

— Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction  (Dragon Press, 1977), page 110 of revised edition, Wesleyan University Press, 2009

(For the phrase mere geometry  elsewhere, see a note of April 22. The apparently flat figures in that note’s illustration “Galois Affine Geometry” may be regarded as degenerate  views of cubes.)

Later in the Le Guin novel—

“… The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, ‘Number the Indisputable,’ as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct– in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to prove it– the Saeba variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence– the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days. and indeed these last ten years– really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.”

Related material—

Time Fold, Halloween 2005, and May and Zan.

See also The Devil and Wallace Stevens

“In a letter to Harriet Monroe, written December 23, 1926, Stevens refers to the Sapphic fragment that invokes the genius of evening: ‘Evening star that bringest back all that lightsome Dawn hath scattered afar, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the child home to the mother.’ Christmas, writes Stevens, ‘is like Sappho’s evening: it brings us all home to the fold’ (Letters of Wallace Stevens, 248).”

— “The Archangel of Evening,” Chapter 5 of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous, by Barbara M. Fisher, The University Press of Virginia, 1990

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Mass Communication

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:11 am

Suggested by the phrase "graphic resonance"
in last night's post

From Type and Image: The Language of Graphic Design,
by Philip B. Meggs, published by Wiley, 1992,
"Chapter Four: Graphic Resonance"–

"In Chapter One, graphic resonance  was defined as a term borrowed from music. It means a reverberation or echo, a subtle quality…. Graphic designers bring a resonance to visual communications through… color, shape, texture, and the interrelations between forms in space. Mass communication is given an aesthetic dimension…."

For instance…



http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100331-Design.gif

 

 

Graphic design
from yesterday



http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100331-Monstrance3.jpg

 

 

Monstrance

Elaine Woo in today's LA Times  on the death yesterday of a famous teacher–

"Escalante's dramatic success raised public consciousness of what it took to be not just a good teacher but a great one. One of the most astute analyses of his classroom style came from the actor who shadowed him for days before portraying him in 'Stand and Deliver.'

'He's the most stylized man I've ever come across,' Olmos, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance, told the New York Times  in 1988. 'He had three basic personalities– teacher, father-friend and street-gang equal– and he would juggle them, shift in an instant. . . . He's one of the greatest calculated entertainers.'"

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Mysteries of Faith

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

From today's NY Times

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100216-NYTobits.jpg

Obituaries for mystery authors
Ralph McInerny and Dick Francis

From the date (Jan. 29) of McInerny's death–

"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.'"

Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (Walpurgisnacht, 2008), by Barbara Johnson

From the date (Feb. 14) of Francis's death–

2x2x2 cube

The EIghtfold Cube

The "something missing" in the above figure is an eighth cube, hidden behind the others pictured.

This eighth cube is not, as Johnson would have it, a void and "vanishing point," but is instead the "still point" of T.S. Eliot. (See the epigraph to the chapter on automorphism groups in Parallelisms of Complete Designs, by Peter J. Cameron. See also related material in this journal.) The automorphism group here is of course the order-168 simple group of Felix Christian Klein.

For a connection to horses, see
a March 31, 2004, post
commemorating the birth of Descartes
  and the death of Coxeter–

Putting Descartes Before Dehors

     Binary coordinates for a 4x2 array  Chess knight formed by a Singer 7-cycle

For a more Protestant meditation,
see The Cross of Descartes

Descartes

Descartes's Cross

"I've been the front end of a horse
and the rear end. The front end is better."
— Old vaudeville joke

For further details, click on
the image below–

Quine and Derrida at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Conceptual Art

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am

The Plane of Time

From tomorrow's NY Times Book Review, Geoff Dyer's review of DeLillo's new novel Point Omega is now online

"The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project '24 Hour Psycho' (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-­minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of 'the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,' 'Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.' Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece— what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time— that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the 'radically altered plane of time': 'The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.'

This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix 'conceptual.'"

Related material:

Steering a Space-Plane
(February 2, 2003)

Holly Day
(February 3, 2010)

Attitude Adjustment
(February 3, 2010)

Stephen Savage illustration for 2/2/03 NYT review of 'A Box of Matches'

Cover illustration by Stephen Savage,
NY Times Book Review,
Feb. 2 (Candlemas), 2003

“We live the time that a match flickers.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson, Aes Triplex

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Out of What Chaos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:28 pm

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

Out of What Chaos, a novel by Lee Oser

"This book is more or less what one would expect if Walker Percy wrote about a cynical rock musician who converts to Catholicism, and then Nabokov added some of his verbal pyrotechnics, and then Buster Keaton and the Marquis de Sade and Lionel Trilling inserted a few extra passages. It is a loving and yet appalled description of the underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest. And it is a convincing representation of someone very, very smart."

Matt Greenfield in The Valve

"If Evelyn Waugh had lived amid the American Northwest rock music scene, he might have written a book like this."

–Anonymous Amazon.com reviewer

A possible source for Oser's title–

"…Lytton Strachey described Pope's theme as 'civilization illumined by animosity; such was the passionate and complicated material from which he wove his patterns of balanced precision and polished clarity.' But out of what chaos did that clarity and precision come!"

Authors at Work, by  Herman W. Liebert and Robert H. Taylor, New York, Grolier Club, 1957, p. 16

Related material:

Unthought Known

Pearl Jam 'Backspacer' album released Sept. 20, 2009

and the

Catholic Analyst's Couch, White Cube Gallery, 2002

White Cube Gallery, 2002

Friday, May 22, 2009

Friday May 22, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am
Steiner System

New York Times
banner this morning:

NYT banner, 9:21 AM Friday, May 22, 2009-- Ears are ads for HSBC.

Click to enlarge.

Related material from
July 11, 2008:

HSBC logo with framed version

The HSBC Logo Designer —

Henry Steiner

Henry Steiner, designerHe is an internationally recognized corporate identity consultant. Based in Hong Kong, his work for clients such as HongkongBank, IBM and Unilever is a major influence in Pacific Rim design.

Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club.

His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995).

Yaneff.com

 

Charles Taylor,
"Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
  (Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477):

 

"… the object sets up
 a kind of frame or space or field
   within which there can be epiphany."

 

Related material suggested by
an ad last night on
ABC's Ugly Betty season finale:

Poster for 'Diamonds' miniseries on ABC starting May 24, 2009

Credit for 'Diamonds' miniseries poster: Diane Robertson Design, London

Diamond from last night's
Log24 entry, with
four colored pencils from
Diane Robertson Design:

Diamond-shaped face of Durer's 'Melencolia I' solid, with  four colored pencils from Diane Robertson Design
 
See also
A Four-Color Theorem.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Friday February 20, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 pm
A Kind of Cross

Descartes portrait

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."

— Thomas Pynchon in  
Gravity's Rainbow

Descartes's Cross

Click for source.

Related material:

A memorial service
held at 2 PM today at the
U.S. Space & Rocket Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, and
 today's previous entry.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Wednesday February 18, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:30 am

Raiders of
the Lost Well

“The challenge is to
keep high standards of
scholarship while maintaining
showmanship as well.”

— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized “The Vatican Collections,” a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.

The next day, “The Last Templar,” starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.

Mira Sorvino in 'The Last Templar'
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure, the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”

The New York Times

Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:

Mira Sorvino at the Church of the Lost Well in 'The Last Templar'

One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start.”

— Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today

Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine’s Day:

'Enlarge' symbol from USA Today

“Stephanie started at the Voice of America as an intern in 1991. She left briefly to attend film school in London in 2000. Although she didn’t finish, she has always wanted to be a film school dropout, so now she’s living one of her dreams.

Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley.”

“She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese.”
VOA

As is Mira Sorvino.

Chinese character for 'well' and I Ching Hexagram 48, 'The Well'

Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino’s fictional archaeologist in
“The Last Templar,” prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
“well” symbol to a cross
(or a thick “+” sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.

In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora’s Box.

(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)

Rosalind Krauss

Krauss

Greek Cross, adapted from painting by Ad Reinhardt

The Krauss Cross

Friday, July 11, 2008

Friday July 11, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
AND MORE LOGOS:

"Serious numbers will
always be heard."
Paul Simon  

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-DowLg.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-NYSE.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-HSBClogo.jpg

The HSBC Logo Designer —

Henry Steiner

He is an internationally recognized corporate identity consultant. Based in Hong Kong, his work for clients such as HongkongBank, IBM and Unilever is a major influence in Pacific Rim design.

Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club.

His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995).

Yaneff.com

 

Related material
from the past

Wittgenstein and Fly from Fly-Bottle

Fly from Fly Bottle:

Graphic structures from Diamond Theory and from Kyocera logo

Charles Taylor,
"Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
  (Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —

"… the object sets up
 a kind of frame or space or field
   within which there can be epiphany."

Related material
from today —

Escape from a
  cartoon graveyard:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080711-BabyBlues.jpg

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Sunday June 1, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:14 pm
Yet Another
Cartoon Graveyard

The conclusion of yesterday’s commentary on the May 30-31 Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:

“The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You…. A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.

He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don’t mean too much, he knows that’s what haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

Then there’s this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees and

286”

What are we to make of this enigmatic 286? (No fair peeking at page 287.)

One possible meaning, given The Archivists claim that “existence is infinitely cross-referenced”–

Page 286 of Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis: On the Conflict of Human Development and the Psychology of Creativity (first published in 1959), Hillsdale NJ and London, The Analytic Press, 2001 (chapter– “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia”):

“Both Freud and Proust speak of the autobiographical [my italics] memory, and it is only with regard to this memory that the striking phenomenon of childhood amnesia and the less obvious difficulty of recovering any past experience may be observed.”

The concluding “summer afternoon of lilacs and bees” suggests that 286 may also be a chance allusion to the golden afternoon of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. (Cf. St. Sarah’s Day, 2008)

Some may find the Disney afternoon charming; others may see it as yet another of Paul Simon’s dreaded cartoon graveyards.

More tastefully, there is poem 286 in the 1919 Oxford Book of English Verse– “Love.”

For a midrash on this poem, see Simone Weil, who became acquainted with the poem by chance:

“I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence.”

— Simone Weil, letter of about May 15, 1942

Weil’s brother André might prefer Providence (source of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.)

Andre Weil and his sister Simone, summer of 1922(Photo from Providence)

 

Related material:


Log24, December 20, 2003–
White, Geometric, and Eternal

A description in Gravity’s Rainbow of prewar Berlin as “white and geometric”  suggested, in combination with a reference elsewhere to “the eternal,” a citation of the following illustration of the concept “white, geometric, and eternal”–

For more on the mathematical significance of this figure, see (for instance) Happy Birthday, Hassler Whitney, and Combinatorics of Coxeter Groups, by Anders Björner and Francesco Brenti, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 231, Springer, New York, 2005.

This book is reviewed in the current issue (July 2008) of the above-mentioned Providence Bulletin.

The review in the Bulletin discusses reflection groups in continuous spaces.

For a more elementary approach, see Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry and Knight Moves: The Relativity Theory of Kindergarten Blocks.

See also a commentary on
the phrase “as a little child.”

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Thursday May 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am
The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art

I Ching hexagram 54: The Marrying Maiden

Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT

Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080522-Irelandslide1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
New York Times, May 22, 2008    

THE IMAGE

Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.

Another version of
the image:

Images of time and eternity in memory of Michelangelo
See 2/22/08
and  4/19/08.


Related material:

Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times

“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”

Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:

“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”

An archetypal image

THE SPACE:

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

A non-archetypal image

THE ART:

Jack in the Box, by Natasha Wescoat

Natasha Wescoat, 2004
See also Epiphany 2008:

How the eightfold cube works

“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54

Lear’s fool:

 …. Now thou art an 0
without a figure. I am better
than thou art, now. I am a fool;
thou art nothing….

“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done.  Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known.  It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”

The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

* For a different, Jungian, alter ego, see Irish Fourplay (Jan. 31, 2003) and “Outside the Box,” a New York Times review of O’Doherty’s art (featuring a St. Bridget’s Cross) by Bridget L. Goodbody dated April 25, 2007. See also Log24 on that date.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Monday May 5, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:07 am
Lottery Sermon

"And take upon's
the mystery of things
 as if we were God's spies"
King Lear  

PA Lottery Sunday, May 4, 2008: mid-day 170, evening 144

From Log24 on Aug. 19, 2003
and on Ash Wednesday, 2004:
a reviewer on
An Instance of the Fingerpost::

"Perhaps we are meant to
see the story as a cubist
   retelling of the crucifixion."

From Log24 on
Michaelmas 2007:

Kate Beckinsale (in 'Pearl Harbor') pointing to an instance of the number 144

Google searches suggested by
Sunday's PA lottery numbers
(mid-day 170, evening 144)
and by the above
figure of Kate Beckinsale
pointing to an instance of
the number 144 —

Click to enlarge:

Search for the meaning of 170 and 144, the PA lottery numbers of Sunday, May 4, 2008

Related material:

Beckinsale in another film
(See At the Crossroads,
Log24, Dec. 8, 2006):

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow  
 
Kate Beckinsale in Underworld: Evolution

 

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)
 
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.

"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."

— Review of  
Faust in Copenhagen

From the conclusion of
Joan Didion's 1970 novel
  Play It As It Lays

Cover of 'Play It As It Lays'

"I know what 'nothing' means,
and keep on playing."

From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) —

Page 170:

"By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for

170  

even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."

"The page numbers
are generally reliable."

Michaelmas 2007   

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Sunday March 2, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Practical Magic

Halloween 2005:

“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

Margaret Wertheim with fellow tesseract authors

Several voices:

Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
,

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and

Madeleine L’Engle and husband.

From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:

Wertheim's 'Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,' page 200
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”

Madeleine L’Engle   

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Sunday February 17, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:15 am
Big Time

Log24 on Feb. 13:

New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It
"

"We've lost the plot!"
Slipstream


Nicole Kidman in 'The Human Stain' at VideoSpider.tv

Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's
"Damnation Morning," 1959

Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"….

Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

Fritz Leiber's 'Spider' symbol

Bordered version
of the sigil

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a plus sign.  It looked permanent….

… "Here is how it stacks up:  You've bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent…."

"It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning me.  "Call it an empire or a power if you like.  So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist.  It has agents everywhere, literally.  Space and time are no barriers to it.  Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past.  It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees."

"I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor.

She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name."

"Which is?" I asked.

"The Spiders," she said.

That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly.  I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me– something like that.

She watched me.  "You might call it the Double Cross," she suggested, "if that seems better."

Related material:
the previous entry.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Thursday October 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
The Nobel Prize
in Literature

this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.

Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007

Art History, 1955: Scenes from Bad Day at Black Rock

Background from 1947:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071011-Cleavage.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Further details:

WheelThe image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code
:

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”

— Robinson Jeffers

From Holy Saturday, 2004:

The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it.  The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.  Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down.  It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage!  Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)

Comment by Stephen Spender:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to Under the Volcano


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


William Golding:

 “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.  His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. 

‘What are you doing out here all alone?  Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.  Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’

Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.

‘Pig’s head on a stick.’

‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head.  For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.  ‘You knew, didn’t you?  I’m part of you?  Close, close, close!’ “


“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”

Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004

Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see

Rock of Ages

(St. Cecilia’s Day, 2006).

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Tuesday July 31, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am

Joke

From July 28:

The Guardian, July 26,
on a work by the
late playwright
 George Tabori:

“… inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. ‘Just two,’ says Jay. ‘The boy is bringing his own.’ Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.”

“When may we expect to have
something from you on the
  esthetic question? he asked.”

A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man

             From The Gag

Seven – Eleven Dice 

Throw a seven or eleven every time. Set consists of a pair of regular dice and another set that can’t miss. A product of the S. S. Adams Company. Make your friends and family laugh with this great prank!

 July 11, 2003
New York State Lottery

7-11 Evening Number: 000.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Sunday May 20, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:00 am
Plato and Shakespeare:
Solid and Central

"I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX

From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):
 

"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps."
— Willard Van Orman Quine, 1948, "On What There Is," reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, 1980

"The Consul could feel his glance at Hugh becoming a cold look of hatred. Keeping his eyes fixed gimlet-like upon him he saw him as he had appeared that morning, smiling, the razor edge keen in sunlight. But now he was advancing as if to decapitate him."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947, Ch. 10

 

"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
Hamlet

Coxeter: King of Infinite Space

Coxeter exhuming geometry

From today's newspaper:

Dilbert on space, existence, and the dead

Notes:

For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.

For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006
.

For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
 "hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"

For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.

Friday, December 29, 2006

Friday December 29, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:01 am
Tools
of Christ Church

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon

Cover of Thomas, by Shelley Mydans: Sword and its shadow, a cross

Click on picture for details.

Today is the feast
of St. Thomas Becket.

In his honor, a meditation
on tools and causation:

"Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief. While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs. Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that 'this storm was sent by God because we sinned.' While Wolpert's attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find religion more puzzling than absorbing."

Review by H. Allen Orr in
The New York Review of Books,
Vol. 54, No. 1, January 11, 2007    


"An odd extension"–

Wolpert's title is, of course,
from Lewis Carroll.

Related material:

"It's a poor sort of memory
that only works backwards."
Through the Looking-Glass

An event at the Kennedy Center
broadcast on
December 26, 2006
(St. Steven's Day):

"Conductor John Williams, a 2004 Honoree, says, 'Steven, sharing our 34-year collaboration has been a great privilege for me. It's been an inspiration to watch you dream your dreams, nurture them and make them grow. And, in the process, entertain and edify billions of people around the world. Tonight we'd like to salute you, musically, with a piece that expresses that spirit beautifully … It was written by Leonard Bernstein, a 1980 Kennedy Center Honoree who was, incidentally, the first composer to be performed in this hall.' Backed by The United States Army Chorus and The Choral Arts Society, soprano Harolyn Blackwell and tenor Gregory Turay sing the closing number for Spielberg's tribute and the gala itself. It's the finale to the opera 'Candide,' 'Make Our Garden Grow,' and Williams conducts."

CBS press release

See also the following,
from the conclusion to

"Mathematics and Narrative"

(Log24, Aug. 22, 2005):

Diamond on cover of Narrative Form, by Suzanne Keen

"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
   with superior bullshit."
Norman Mailer

Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:

    "The concept of possible worlds dates back to at least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds.  Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
    Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
— Voltaire

"We symbolize
logical necessity
with the box (box.gif (75 bytes))
and logical possibility
with the diamond (diamond.gif (82 bytes))."

Keith Allen Korcz 

Diamond in a square

"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
     a necessary being…."

Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
 Regius Professor of Divinity,
  Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)

For further details,
click on the
Christ Church diamond.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Sunday November 26, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am
The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/SmallSpaces.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material from March 2004:
Anschaulichkeit (3/16) and
Readings for St. Patrick’s Day.

“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Saturday August 19, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:28 pm
Metaphysical
Wonderlands

"With no means to verify its truth, superstring theory, in the words of Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, may turn out to be 'a kind of metaphysical wonderland.' Yet it is being pursued as vigorously as ever, its critics complain, treated as the only game in town."

— "The Inelegant Universe," by George Johnson, in the Sept. 2006 Scientific American

Some may prefer metaphysics of a different sort:

"To enter Cervantes’s world, we cross a threshold that is Shakespearean and quixotic into a metaphysical wonderland where time expands to become space and vast vaulted distances bend back on themselves, where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle back and forth in the great loom of the artist’s imagination."

As wonderlands go, I personally prefer Clive Barker's Weaveworld.
 

Friday, January 27, 2006

Friday January 27, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:25 am

Mozart, 2006

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

— Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)

From the center:

“‘Mozart, 1935’ immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevens’s critics, to find ‘his particular celebration out of tune today’ on his own if necessary; and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maas’s ‘respect for his magnificent rhetoric’ at least halfway across from right to left.”

— Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211

From the left:

Norman Lebrecht on this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27, 1756):

   “… Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward….
   … Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak….
   …  He lacked the rage of justice that pushed Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive….
   … Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration….
   … The bandwaggon of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941….
   …  In this orgy of simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich– a composer of true courage and historical significance– is being shunted to the sidelines, celebrated by the few.
    Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters.”
     
The left seems little changed since 1935.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Monday January 23, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 pm

In Defense of Hilbert
(On His Birthday)


Michael Harris (Log24, July 25 and 26, 2003) in a recent essay, Why Mathematics? You Might Ask (pdf), to appear in the forthcoming Princeton Companion to Mathematics:

“Mathematicians can… claim to be the first postmodernists: compare an art critic’s definition of postmodernism– ‘meaning is suspended in favor of a game involving free-floating signs’– with Hilbert’s definition of mathematics as ‘a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.'”

Harris adds in a footnote:

“… the Hilbert quotation is easy to find but is probably apocryphal, which doesn’t make it any less significant.”

If the quotation is probably apocryphal, Harris should not have called it “Hilbert’s definition.”

For a much more scholarly approach to the concepts behind the alleged quotation, see Richard Zach, Hilbert’s Program Then and Now (pdf):

[Weyl, 1925] described Hilbert’s project as replacing meaningful mathematics by a meaningless game of formulas. He noted that Hilbert wanted to ‘secure not truth, but the consistency of analysis’ and suggested a criticism that echoes an earlier one by Frege: Why should we take consistency of a formal system of mathematics as a reason to believe in the truth of the pre-formal mathematics it codifies? Is Hilbert’s meaningless inventory of formulas not just ‘the bloodless ghost of analysis’?”

Some of Zach’s references:

[Ramsey, 1926] Frank P. Ramsey. Mathematical logic. The Mathematical Gazette, 13:185-94, 1926. Reprinted in [Ramsey, 1990, 225-244].

[Ramsey, 1990] Frank P. Ramsey. Philosophical Papers, D. H. Mellor, editor. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990

From Frank Plumpton Ramsey’s Philosophical Papers, as cited above, page 231:

“… I must say something of the system of Hilbert and his followers…. regarding higher mathematics as the manipulation of meaningless symbols according to fixed rules….
Mathematics proper is thus regarded as a sort of game, played with meaningless marks on paper rather like noughts and crosses; but besides this there will be another subject called metamathematics, which is not meaningless, but consists of real assertions about mathematics, telling us that this or that formula can or cannot be obtained from the axioms according to the rules of deduction….
Now, whatever else a mathematician is doing, he is certainly making marks on paper, and so this point of view consists of nothing but the truth; but it is hard to suppose it the whole truth.”

[Weyl, 1925] Hermann Weyl. Die heutige Erkenntnislage in der Mathematik. Symposion, 1:1-23, 1925. Reprinted in: [Weyl, 1968, 511-42]. English translation in: [Mancosu, 1998a, 123-42]….

[Weyl, 1968] Hermann Weyl. Gesammelte Abhandlungen, volume 1, K. Chandrasekharan, editor. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1968.

[Mancosu, 1998a] Paolo Mancosu, editor. From Brouwer to Hilbert. The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

From Hermann Weyl, “Section V: Hilbert’s Symbolic Mathematics,” in Weyl’s “The Current Epistemogical Situation in Mathematics,” pp. 123-142 in Mancosu, op. cit.:

“What Hilbert wants to secure is not the truth, but the consistency of the old analysis.  This would, at least, explain that historic phenomenon of the unanimity amongst all the workers in the vineyard of analysis.
To furnish the consistency proof, he has first of all to formalize mathematics.  In the same way in which the contentual meaning of concepts such as “point, plane, between,” etc. in real space was unimportant in geometrical axiomatics in which all interest was focused on the logical connection of the geometrical concepts and statements, one must eliminate here even more thoroughly any meaning, even the purely logical one.  The statements become meaningless figures built up from signs.  Mathematics is no longer knowledge but a game of formulae, ruled by certain conventions, which is very well comparable to the game of chess.  Corresponding to the chess pieces we have a limited stock of signs in mathematics, and an arbitrary configuration of the pieces on the board corresponds to the composition of a formula out of the signs.  One or a few formulae are taken to be axioms; their counterpart is the prescribed configuration of the pieces at the beginning of a game of chess.  And in the same way in which here a configuration occurring in a game is transformed into the next one by making a move that must satisfy the rules of the game, there, formal rules of inference hold according to which new formulae can be gained, or ‘deduced,’ from formulae.  By a game-conforming [spielgerecht] configuration in chess I understand a configuration that is the result of a match played from the initial position according to the rules of the game.  The analogue in mathematics is the provable (or, better, the proven) formula, which follows from the axioms on grounds of the inference rules.  Certain formulae of intuitively specified character are branded as contradictions; in chess we understand by contradictions, say, every configuration which there are 10 queens of the same color.  Formulae of a different structure tempt players of mathematics, in the way checkmate configurations tempt chess players, to try to obtain them through clever combination of moves as the end formula of a correctly played proof game.  Up to this point everything is a game; nothing is knowledge; yet, to use Hilbert’s terminology, in ‘metamathematics,’ this game now becomes the object of knowledge.  What is meant to be recognized is that a contradiction can never occur as an end formula of a proof.  Analogously it is no longer a game, but knowledge, if one shows that in chess, 10 queens of one color cannot occur in a game-conforming configuration.  One can see this in the following way: The rules are teaching us that a move can never increase the sum of the number of queens and pawns of one color.  In the beginning this sum = 9, and thus– here we carry out an intuitively finite [anschaulich-finit] inference through complete induction– it cannot be more than this value in any configuration of a game.  It is only to gain this one piece of knowledge that Hilbert requires contentual and meaningful thought; his proof of consistency proceeds quite analogously to the one just carried out for chess, although it is, obviously, much more complicated.
It follows from our account that mathematics and logic must be formalized together.  Mathematical logic, much scorned by philosophers, plays an indispensable role in this context.”

Constance Reid says it was not Hilbert himself, but his critics, who described Hilbert’s formalism as reducing mathematics to “a meaningless game,” and quotes the Platonist Hardy as saying that Hilbert was ultimately concerned not with meaningless marks on paper, but with ideas:

“Hilbert’s program… received its share of criticism.  Some mathematicians objected that in his formalism he had reduced their science to ‘a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper.’  But to those familiar with Hilbert’s work this criticism did not seem valid.
‘… is it really credible that this is a fair account of Hilbert’s view,’ Hardy demanded, ‘the view of the man who has probably added to the structure of significant mathematics a richer and more beautiful aggregate of theorems than any other mathematician of his time?  I can believe that Hilbert’s philosophy is as inadequate as you please, but not that an ambitious mathematical theory which he has elaborated is trivial or ridiculous.  It is impossible to suppose that Hilbert denies the significance and reality of mathematical concepts, and we have the best of reasons for refusing to believe it: “The axioms and demonstrable theorems,” he says himself, “which arise in our formalistic game, are the images of the ideas which form the subject-matter of ordinary mathematics.”‘”

— Constance Reid in Hilbert-Courant, Springer-Verlag, 1986 (The Hardy passage is from “Mathematical Proof,” Mind 38, 1-25, 1929, reprinted in Ewald, From Kant to Hilbert.)

Harris concludes his essay with a footnote giving an unsourced Weyl quotation he found on a web page of David Corfield:

“.. we find ourselves in [mathematics] at exactly that crossing point of constraint and freedom which is the very essence of man’s nature.”

One source for the Weyl quotation is the above-cited book edited by Mancosu, page 136.  The quotation in the English translation given there:

“Mathematics is not the rigid and petrifying schema, as the layman so much likes to view it; with it, we rather stand precisely at the point of intersection of restraint and freedom that makes up the essence of man itself.”

Corfield says of this quotation that he’d love to be told the original German.  He should consult the above references cited by Richard Zach.

For more on the intersection of restraint and freedom and the essence of man’s nature, see the Kierkegaard chapter cited in the previous entry.

Sunday, October 9, 2005

Sunday October 9, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am
Today’s Sermon:
Magical Thinking

On this date– “In 1936,
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.”
— Today in History, Associated Press

“Brightness doubled
   generates radiance.”
— Hexagram 30

“I know what nothing means.”
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays

“Nothing is random.”
— Mark Helprin in Winter’s Tale

Maria Wyeth in Las Vegas:

“… She thought about nothing.  Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.  When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day’s tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer’s rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table.  A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip.  A sign on Fremont Street.  A light blinking.  In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.

By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.  She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get.  As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity.  She could feel smoke against her skin.  She could feel voice waves.  She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which.  ‘Maria,’ she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water.  When the pressure got great enough she drove out there.  All that day she felt the power  surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam’s face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.  With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched, clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam.  The platform quivered.  Her ears roared.  She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.

‘Just how long have you been here now,’ Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar’s.  ‘You planning on making a year of it?  Or what?'”

Related material

The front page of today’s
New York Times Book Review

and Log24, July 15, 2004:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040715-Pit2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A quotation that somehow
seems relevant:

O the mind, mind has mountains,
   cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
   Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Thursday June 16, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm
Final Arrangements, continued:

"Joe Strauss to
Joe Six-Pack"

(Editor's sneering headline
for a David Brooks essay
in today's New York Times)
and Back Again

"I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14, 1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine today….

The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era….

The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel* or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one….

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said."

— David Brooks,
   The New York Times,
   June 16, 2005

The Time essay begins by quoting Hemingway himself:

"All stories,
 if continued far enough,
 end in death,
 and he is no true storyteller
 who would keep that from you."

Here is the top section of today's
New York Times obituaries.
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050616-NYTobits.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Here is the
middlebrow part —

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050616-NYTbrow.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Esteemed Conductor
Dies at 91

— and here is a link that returns,
as promised in this entry's headline,
to "Joe Strauss"
complete with polkas.

*  "Judaism is a religion of time, not space."
    — Wikipedia on Heschel.
    See the recent Log24 entries
    Star Wars continued,
    Dark City, and
    Cross-Referenced, and last year's
    Bloomsday at 100.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Wednesday June 15, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 am

Cross-Referenced

From today’s New York Times,
a review of a Werner Herzog film,
“Wheel of Time,” that opens
today in Manhattan:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050615-Mandala.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From the June 13-14
midnight Log24 entry:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050614-DarkCity.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“With a little effort, anything can be
shown to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

These images suggest
a Google search on the phrase
crucified on the wheel of time,”

which yields the following.

Click to go to DARK CITYDARK CITY (1998)
Crucified on the Wheel Of Time.
A visual feast.

From Dark City: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review

“There is something mesmerizing about this important film. It flows in the same vein as The Truman Show, The Game, and Pleasantville.  Something isn’t real with the world around John Murdoch. Some group is trying to control things and it isn’t God.”

Amen.

Related material:
Skewed Mirrors and
The Graces of Paranoia

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Tuesday May 31, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Subject and Predicates

“A Chu space is a set X of subjects and a set A of predicates on those subjects. These stand in a symbiotic relationship in which the nature of each is determined by the other. Each subject is characterized by the values the predicates take on it, while each predicate is characterized by its values on subjects.”

— Vaughan Pratt, Chu Spaces

Sambin's Basic Picture

Click here for Sambin’s paper (ps).

It would seem that Pratt and Sambin need to reconcile their similar predicates for the same subject.

For some background on Sambin’s approach to the subject, see

Mathematical Modal Logic:
A View of its Evolution (pdf),
by Robert Goldblatt at
Victoria University of Wellington’s
Centre for Logic, Language,
and Computation

For some background on Pratt’s approach to the subject, see

Information Transfer
Across Chu Spaces
(pdf),
by Johan van Benthem
at the University of Amsterdam’s
Institute for Logic, Language,
and Computation

For a gloss on Sambin’s words
The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/SambinBP1-Diamondx.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
see the Log24 entry of Epiphany, 2005.

Sunday, May 8, 2005

Sunday May 8, 2005

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

Geometry and Theology

See

the science fiction writer mentioned in a Friday entry.

Mark Olson’s article is at the website of the New England Science Fiction Association, publisher of Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson.  This book, by one of my favorite science-fiction authors, was apparently edited by the same Mark Olson.

The following remarks seem relevant to the recurring telepathy theme in Henderson:

From the first article cited above,
David L. Neuhouser,
Higher Dimensions in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (pdf):

“If we are three-dimensional cross-sections of four-dimensional reality, perhaps we are parts of the same body. In fact, we know we are parts of the same body in some way, this four-dimensional idea just may help us to see it more clearly. Remember the preceding comments are mine, not Lewis’s. He puts it this way, ‘That we can die “in” Adam and live “in” Christ seems to me to imply that man as he really is differs a good deal from man as our categories of thought and our three-dimensional imaginations represent him; that the separateness… which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute reality, by some kind of inter-inanimation of which we have no conception at all. It may be that the acts and sufferings of great archetypal individuals such as Adam and Christ are ours, not by legal fiction, metaphor, or causality, but in some much deeper fashion. There is no question, of course, of individuals melting down into a kind of spiritual continuum such as Pantheistic systems believe in; that is excluded by the whole tenor of our faith.'”

From Webster’s Unabridged, 1913 edition:

inanimate
, v. t.

[Pref. in- in (or intensively) + animate.]
 To animate. [Obs.] — Donne.

inanimation, n.

Infusion of life or vigor;
animation; inspiration.
[Obs.]
The inanimation of Christ
living and breathing within us.
Bp. Hall.

Related words…

Also from the 1913 Webster’s:

circumincession, n.

[Pref. circum- + L. incedere, incessum, to walk.]
(Theol.) The reciprocal existence in each other
of the three persons of the Trinity.

From an online essay:

perichoresis
, n.

“The term means mutual indwelling or, better, mutual interpenetration and refers to the understanding of both the Trinity and Christology. In the divine perichoresis, each person has ‘being in each other without coalescence’ (John of Damascus ca. 650). The roots of this doctrine are long and deep.”

—  Bert Waggoner

coinherence, n.

“In our human experience of personhood, at any rate in a fallen world, there is in each person an inevitable element of exclusiveness, of opaqueness and impenetrability.  But with the three divine persons it is not so.  Each is entirely ‘open’ to the others, totally transparent and receptive.  This transparency and receptivity is summed up in the Greek notion of perichoresis, which Gibbon once called ‘the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.’  Rendered in Latin as circumincessio and in English usually as ‘coinherence,’ the Greek term means literally, cyclical movement, and so reciprocity, interchange, mutual indwelling.  The prefix peri bears the sense ‘around,’ while choresis is linked with chora, ‘room,’ space,’ ‘place’ or ‘container,’ and with chorein, to ‘go,’ ‘advance,’ ‘make room for’ or ‘contain.’  Some also see a connection with choros, ‘dance,’ and so they take perichoresis to mean ’round dance.’  Applied to Christ, the term signifies that his two natures, the divine and the human, interpenetrate one another without separation and without confusion.  Applied to the Trinity, it signifies that each person ‘contains’ the other two and ‘moves’ within them.  In the words of St Gregory of Nyssa, ‘All that is the Father’s is seen in the Son, and all that is the Son’s belongs also the Father. For the whole Son abides in the Father, and he has in his turn the whole Father abiding in himself.’ 

By virtue of this perichoresis, Father, Son and Holy Spirit ‘coinhere‘ in one another, each dwelling in the other two through an unceasing movement of mutual love – the ’round dance’ of the Trinity.”

— Timothy Ware, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia,
    The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity

Sunday, September 5, 2004

Sunday September 5, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime

Notes from the Journal
of Steven H. Cullinane

Summary:

Aug 31 2004 
07:31:01 PM
Early Evening,
Shining Star 
Sep 01 2004
09:00:35 AM
Words
and Images
Sep 01 2004
12:07:28 PM
Whale Rider
Sep 02 2004
11:11:42 AM
Heaven
and Earth

Sep 02 2004
07:00:23 PM
Whale Road

Sep 03 2004
12:00:54 AM

Cinderella’s
Slipper
 
Sep 03 2004
10:01:56 AM
Another
September Morn

 

Sep 03 2004
12:00:25 PM

Noon

Sep 03 2004
01:13:49 PM

De Nada

Sep 03 2004
03:17:13 
PM

Ite, Missa Est 


Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 1…

Early Evening,
Shining Star

7:31:01 PM ET

Hexagram 01
The Creative:

 

The Image

Heaven

Heaven

The movement of heaven
is full of power.

Click on picture
for details.

The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…

Under the Volcano,
Chapter VI:

“What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men… The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening…. smiles when I say I don’t know. And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world’s notions of time and space, once leaned down… to ask me… ragged freshman… at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed.”

For the thoughts on time
of another famous man,
from Mexico, see the
Nobel Prize acceptance speech
of Octavio Paz,
In Search of the Present.”


Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 2…

Words and Images

9:00:35 AM ET

Hexagram 35
Progress:

The Image

Fire

Earth

The sun rises over the earth.

From Aug. 18, 2004:

“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words
to play with!” (Nabokov, Lolita)

“This is the best toy train set
a boy ever had!”
(Orson Welles, after first touring
RKO Studios, quoted in Halliwell)

“As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.”

Donald F. Larsson

For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —

Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:

Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.

September morn…
We danced until the night
      became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes
      from some romantic play.
September morning still can
      make me feel this way.

Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…

— Neil Diamond

Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:

The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges

In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”

Related material:

Bill’s Diamond Theory

and

Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004
.

Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.

I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s book — ‘It’s called The Little Engine That Could Because It Could.'”

“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!” 

 


 

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 3…

Whale Rider

12:07:28 PM

Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:

The Image

Lake

Wind

The lake rises
above
the trees.

 

Cullinane College News:

“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”

For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and

Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004) 


Thursday, September 2, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 4…

Heaven and Earth

11:11:42 AM ET

Hexagram 42
Increase:

The Image

Wind

Thunder

Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.

“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”


Kylie


Finney

Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
Lonnie Donegan (d. Nov. 3)
and others
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois

“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”

The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson

“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing

For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.

It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:

(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)

For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star


Thursday, September 2, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 5…

Whale Road

7:00:23 PM

Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:

The Image

Mountain

Earth

The mountain rests
on the earth
.

“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”

— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf 

Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:

Water Wings.

This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:


Friday, September 3, 2004

 Symmetry and Change, Part 6…

Cinderella’s Slipper

12:00:54 AM ET

Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:

 

The Image

Thunder


Lake
See
The hundredletter
thunderwords of
Finnegans Wake


“… a Thoreau-like retreat
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”

Friday, September 3, 2004  

Symmetry and Change, Part 7…

Another September Morn

10:01:56 AM ET

Hexagram 56:
The Wanderer

 

The Image

Fire


Mountain

Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run…
Devil’s in the House of
The Rising Sun!
 


Friday, September 3, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 8…

Noon

12:00:25 PM ET

Hexagram 25
Innocence:

The Image

Heaven


Thunder

Under heaven
thunder rolls.
 


Friday, September 3, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 9…

De Nada

Helen Lane

1:13:49 PM ET

Hexagram 49
Revolution:

The Image

Lake


Fire
 Fire in the lake:
the image of Revolution
.

“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano 


Friday, September 3, 2004

Symmetry and Change, conclusion…

Ite, Missa Est

3:17:13 PM ET

Hexagram 13
Fellowship With Men:

The Image

Heaven


Fire

Heaven together with fire.

“A pretty girl —
is like a melody —- !”

 For details, see
A Mass for Lucero


Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Wednesday August 18, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:25 pm

A Cross Between

  

Grace

“The only way to describe her voice is a cross between Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays & Alanis Morissette.”

Review of Jen Slocumb of Martha’s Trouble by Diane Matay

“Apostrophe Theory is a cross between.”

— Ian Lee, The Third Word War

Monday, July 26, 2004

Monday July 26, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:07 pm

Happy Birthday

to Kate Beckinsale
(star of Cold Comfort Farm)

and Kevin Spacey
(star of The Usual Suspects).

From a novel,
The Footprints of God,
published August 12, 2003

A tour guide describes
stations of the cross in Jerusalem:

"Ibrahim pointed down the cobbled street to a half circle of bricks set in the street.  'There is where Jesus began to carry the cross.  Down the street is the Chapel of Flagellation, where the Roman soldiers whipped Jesus, set on him a crown of thorns, and said, "Hail, King of the Jews!" Then Pilate led him to the crowd and cried, "Ecce homo!  Behold the man!" '

Ibrahim delivered this information with the excitement of a man reading bingo numbers in a nursing home."

In keeping with this spirit of religious fervor and with the spirit of Carl Jung, expositor of the religious significance of the mandala,

Behold —

The Mandala of Abraham

For the religious significance of this mandala,
see an entry of May 25, 2003:

Matrix of the Death God.

Sunday, June 6, 2004

Sunday June 6, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:30 pm
The X Factor

On OSS veteran Charles Hostler,
an unsung D-Day hero, now sung:

“He was trained by the British MI6
intelligence agency for an operation
known as X2 – or ‘double cross.’ “

Beth Gardiner, AP, June 6, 2004

 From Fritz Leiber’s
“Damnation Morning,” 1959:

Bordered version
of the sigil

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a plus sign.  It looked permanent….

… “Here is how it stacks up:  You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….”

“It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me.  “Call it an empire or a power if you like.  So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist.  It has agents everywhere, literally.  Space and time are no barriers to it.  Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past.  It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.”

“I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor.

She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“The Spiders,” she said.

That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly.  I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me — something like that.

She watched me.  “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.”

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Saturday May 22, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:14 am

Star Wars

In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:

“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”

— Obituary in the Telegraph 

Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004.  From a journal entry of my own on that date:

This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.

Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star.  Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:

Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”
….

Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a plus sign.  It looked permanent.
….

… “Here is how it stacks up:  You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….”
….

“It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me.  “Call it an empire or a power if you like.  So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist.  It has agents everywhere, literally.  Space and time are no barriers to it.  Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past.  It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.”

“I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor.

She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“The Spiders,” she said.

That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly.  I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that.

She watched me.  “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.”

— Fritz Leiber,
   “Damnation Morning,” 1959

From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:

From Borges’s “The Aleph“:

“The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court…. The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions…. Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone?”

(“Los fieles que concurren a la mezquita de Amr, en el Cairo, saben muy bien que el universo está en el interior de una de las columnas de piedra que rodean el patio central…. la mezquita data del siglo VII; las columnas proceden de otros templos de religiones anteislámicas…. ¿Existe ese Aleph en lo íntimo de una piedra?”)

From The Hunchback of Notre Dame:

Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.

A coffer of great richness
In a pillar’s heart they found,
Within it lay new banners,
With figures to astound.

See also the figures obtained by coloring and permuting parts of the above religious symbol.

Lena Olin and Harrison Ford
in “Hollywood Homicide

Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

— “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage” (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality

Friday, April 30, 2004

Friday April 30, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:24 pm

Notes

  

On “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” by Wallace Stevens:

“This third section continues its play of opposing forces, introducing in the second canto a ‘blue woman,’ arguably a goddess- or muse-figure, who stands apart from images of fecundity and sexuality….”

Michael Bryson 

From a Beethoven’s Birthday entry:

Moulin Bleu

  

Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat   

See, too, Blue Matrices, and
a link for Beethoven’s birthday:

Song for the
Unification of Europe
(Blue 1)

From today’s news:

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) – Ushering in a bold new era, hundreds of thousands of people packed streets and city squares across Europe on Friday for festivals and fireworks marking the European Union’s historic enlargement to 25 countries from 15.

The expanded EU, which takes in a broad swath of the former Soviet bloc – a region separated for decades from the West by barbed wire and Cold War ideology – was widening to 450 million citizens at midnight (6 p.m.EDT) to create a collective superpower rivalling the United States.

“All these worlds are yours
except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.”

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Saturday April 10, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:23 am

Harrowing

“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it.  The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.  Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down.  It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage!  Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)

Comment by Stephen Spender:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to Under the Volcano


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


William Golding:

 “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.  His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. 

‘What are you doing out here all alone?  Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.  Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’

Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.

‘Pig’s head on a stick.’

‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head.  For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.  ‘You knew, didn’t you?  I’m part of you?  Close, close, close!’ “


“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”

Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004

Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano

From the official
     Anne Francis Web Site:   

   Come into my parlor….

For some background,
see the use of the word
“spider” in Under the Volcano:

WRIDER/ESPIDER:
THE CONSUL AS ARTIST IN
UNDER THE VOLCANO,

by Patrick A. McCarthy.

See, too, Why Me?

Thursday, February 5, 2004

Thursday February 5, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Affirmation of Place and Time:
East Coker and Grand Rapids

This morning’s meditation:

“Let us talk together with the courage, humor, and ardor of Socrates.

In that long conversation, we may find ourselves considering something Plato’s follower Plotinus said long ago about ‘a principle which transcends being,’ in whose domain one can ‘assert identity without the affirmation of being.’  There, ‘everything has taken its stand forever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is…. Its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be.’  Individuality and existence in space and time may be masks that our sensibilities impose on the far different face of quantum reality.”

— Peter Pesic, Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature, MIT Press paperback, 2003, p. 145

A search for more on Plotinus led to sites on the Trinity, which in turn led to the excellent archives at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.

A search for the theological underpinnings of Calvin College led to the Christian Reformed church:

“Our emblem is
the cross in a triangle.”

The triangle, as a symbol of “the delta factor,” also plays an important role in the semiotic theory of Walker Percy.  A search for current material on Percy led back to one of my favorite websites, that of Percy expert Karey Perkins, and thus to the following paper:

The “East Coker” Dance
in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
An Affirmation of Place and Time

by Karey Perkins

For a rather different, but excellent, literary affirmation of place and time — in Grand Rapids, rather than East Coker — see, for instance, Michigan Roll, a novel by Tom Kakonis.

We may, for the purposes of this trinitarian meditation, regard Percy and Kakonis as speaking for the Son and Karey Perkins as a spokesperson for the Holy Spirit.  As often in my meditations, I choose to regard the poet Wallace Stevens as speaking perceptively about (if not for, or as) the Father.  A search for related material leads to a 1948 comment by Thomas McGreevy, who

“… wrote of Stevens’ ‘Credences of Summer’ (Collected Poems 376),

On every page I find things that content me, as ‘The trumpet of the morning blows in the clouds and through / The sky.’

A devout Roman Catholic, he added, ‘And I think my delight in it is of the Holy Spirit.’ (26 May 1948).”

An ensuing search for material on “Credences of Summer” led back, surprisingly, to an essay — not very scholarly, but interesting — on Stevens, Plotinus, and neoplatonism.

Thus the circle closed.

As previous entries have indicated, I have little respect for Christianity as a religion, since Christians are, in my experience, for the most part, damned liars.  The Trinity as philosophical poetry, is, however, another matter.  I respect Pesic’s speculations on identity, but wish he had a firmer grasp of his subject’s roots in trinitarian thought.  For Stevens, Percy, and Perkins, I have more than respect.

Monday, December 8, 2003

Monday December 8, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

Happy Rohatsu

“The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus.”

— Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk

A poem for Rohatsu:

On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.

~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)

Commentary on poetry of Buson:

Poetry as an open space
 for lightening of Being

“… a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where ‘nothing’ crosses with ‘being’ or the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s term, the only light place in the dark forest.”

Hiroo Saga

In other words,
From Here to Eternity.

For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.

For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.

For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.

For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 2002.

Saturday, July 5, 2003

Saturday July 5, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:21 pm

Elementary,
My Dear Gropius

“What is space, how can it be understood and given a form?”
— Walter Gropius

Stoicheia:

Stoicheia,” Elements, is the title of
Euclid’s treatise on geometry.

Stoicheia is apparently also related to a Greek verb meaning “march” or “walk.”

According to a website on St. Paul’s phrase ta stoicheia tou kosmou,” which might be translated

The Elements of the Cosmos,

“… the verbal form of the root stoicheo was used to mean, ‘to be in a line,’ ‘to march in rank and file.’ … The general meaning of the noun form (stoicheion) was ‘what belongs to a series.’ “

As noted in my previous entry, St. Paul used a form of stoicheo to say “let us also walk (stoichomen) by the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:25) The lunatic ravings* of Saul of Tarsus aside, the concepts of walking, of a spirit, and of elements may be combined if we imagine the ghost of Gropius strolling with the ghosts of Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid, and posing his question about space.  Their reply might be along the following lines:

Combining stoicheia with a peripatetic peripateia (i.e., Aristotelian plot twist), we have the following diagram of Aristotle’s four stoicheia (elements),

which in turn is related, by the “Plato’s diamond” figure in the monograph Diamond Theory, to the Stoicheia, or Elements, of Euclid.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

* A phrase in memory of the Paulist Norman J. O’Connor, the “jazz priest” who died on St. Peter’s day, Sunday, June 29, 2003.  Paulists are not, of course, entirely mad; the classic The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation, by the Episcopal priest Morton Kelsey, was published by the Paulist Press.

Its cover (above), a different version of the four-elements theme, emphasizes the important Jungian concept of quaternity.  Jung is perhaps the best guide to the bizarre world of Christian symbolism.  It is perhaps ironic, although just, that the Paulist Fathers should distribute a picture of “ta stoicheia tou kosmou,” the concept that St. Paul himself railed against.

The above book by Kelsey should not be confused with another The Other Side of Silence, a work on gay history, although confusion would be understandable in light of recent ecclesiastical revelations.

Let us pray that if there is a heaven, Father O’Connor encounters there his fellow music enthusiast Cole Porter rather than the obnoxious Saul of Tarsus.

Thursday, April 24, 2003

Thursday April 24, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 am

Cross-Referenced

Shortly after midnight on the night of April 22-23, I updated my entry for Shakespeare's birthday with the following quotation: 

"With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced."

Opening sentence of Martha Cooley's The Archivist

About 24 hours later, I came across the following obituary in The New York Times: 

"Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday…. He was 79."

The Times does not mention that the Friday it refers to is Good  Friday.  God will  have his little jokes.

From Computerworld.com:

1969: Edgar F. "Ted" Codd invents the relational database.
1969: Edgar F. "Ted" Codd invents the relational database.

1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database.

1973: Cullinane, led by John J. Cullinane, ships IDMS, a network-model database for IBM mainframes.

1976: Honeywell ships Multics Relational Data Store, the first commercial relational database.

For a better (and earlier) obituary than the Times's, see The San Jose Mercury News of Easter Sunday.  For some thoughts on death and the afterlife appropriate to last weekend, see The Matthias Defense.

The Exorcist, 1973
 

Monday, January 20, 2003

Monday January 20, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:00 pm

Shine On, Robinson Jeffers

"…be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, 
      a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits,
     that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth."
Shine, Perishing Republic, by Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers died at Big Sur, California, on January 20, 1962 — a year to the day after Robert Frost spoke at the Kennedy inauguration.

"The poetry of Robinson Jeffers shines with a diamond's brilliance when he depicts Nature's beauty and magnificence.   His verse also flashes with a diamond's hardness when he portrays human pain and folly."
Gary Suttle  

"Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number…."
— Howard Nemerov, 
   Grace To Be Said at the Supermarket 

"Across my foundering deck shone 
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash 
Fáll to the resíduary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash: 
In a flash, at a trumpet crash, 
I am all at once what Christ is |, since he was what I am, and 
Thís Jack, jóke, poor pótsherd, | patch, matchwood,
    immortal diamond, 
Is immortal diamond."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
    That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

"In the last two weeks, I've been returning to Hopkins.  Even in the 'world's wildfire,' he asserts that 'this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.' A comfort."
— Michael Gerson, head White House speechwriter,
    in Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162

"There's none but truth can stead you.  Christ is truth."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The rock cannot be broken.  It is the truth."
— Wallace Stevens 

"My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite…."
— Robinson Jeffers, Tor House

On this date in 1993, the inauguration day of William Jefferson Clinton, Audrey Hepburn died.

"…today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully…."
Maya Angelou, January 20, 1993

"So, purposing each moment to retire,
She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire"
— John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (January 20), IX

Top view of
ordinary
diamond

Top view of
Hearts On Fire
diamond

Advertising Copy:

What you see with a Hearts On Fire diamond is an unequalled marriage of math and physics, resulting in the world's most perfectly cut diamond.

 

"Eightpointed symmetrical signs are ancient symbols for the Venus goddess or the planet Venus as either the Morning star or the Evening star."
Symbols.com

"Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame."
Song of Solomon

"The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were 'I love you.'  Over and over again, the message was the same, 'I love you.' …. Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock:  we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death."
The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs

"Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again."
The Who 

See also my note, "Bright Star," of October 23, 2002.

 

Saturday, January 4, 2003

Saturday January 4, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 am

A Darker Side of C. S. Lewis

Known for his fairy-story series “The Chronicles of Narnia,” C. S. Lewis had a more serious — some might say darker — side.

His portrayals of science and scientists in That Hideous Strength  give an accurate picture of moral degeneracy in that subculture.  The hero of Lewis’s “space trilogy,” of which That Hideous Strength is the conclusion, is a philologist  — a student of language.  In keeping with Lewis’s interest in philology and in fairy stories, and with the fact that today is Jacob Grimm‘s birthday, here are some philological observations related to the word “middle” — as in the “middle earth” of Lewis’s friend Tolkien, or in “middle kingdom,” the Chinese name for China.

From a bulletin board site, sciforums.com, that bills itself as an “intelligent science community”:

Forum: Art & Culture

Thread: Red Dragon

User: aseedrain

I’ve just watched “Red Dragon”. Not bad actually but there was a triviality in the film that somewhat spoilt my appreciation of it. In the film, the serial killer (played by Ralph Fiennes) leaves a mark behind – a Chinese character. The character is explained as a character that appear [sic] on mahjung pieces that carries the meaning ‘red dragon’.

Now I know for a fact that the Chinese character that appears in the film means ‘centre’ or ‘middle’. It is one of the two characters that make up the name “China” or its literal translation “Middle Kingdom”. I’m no expert on the mahjung game but I do know that even in the game, the piece that carry [sic] this character is also referred as “chung” meaning ‘middle’. I have never come across any instances where this particular character referred to dragons.

Therefore, in the absence of any other explanation, I assume the film made a mistake with this little detail….

From the Four Winds Mah Jong site:

The developers of the classical Mah Jong were educated and knew well the classical Chinese philosophical and mythological tradition, particularly the Book of Changes and the Book of Surprises. The elements of the game symbolize interaction of the three extremes of the universe: Heaven, Earth and Man, expressed in many ways, not only by images graved in the tiles, but also in a way the tiles form numerically significant groups and combinations.

Thus 144 is said to be the number of the plan of Earth, and the square formed by the tiles can be seen as a symbolic representation of the universe. Heaven is manifested in the Four Seasons, Earth in the Four regions (East, South, West and North), and Man in the Four Flowers (symbolizing motion or life). The Dragons (‘San Yuan’ or ‘San Chi’ in Chinese, meaning “Extremes”) symbolize Heaven (White Dragon, ‘Po’, meaning “white” or” blank”), Earth (Green Dragon, ‘Fa’, meaning “prosperous”) and Man (Red Dragon, ‘Chung’, meaning “center”, i.e. “between Heaven and Earth”). 

From another mah jong site:

Red Dragon
Chinese Character: “Chung”

The true name of this tile is represented by the Chinese character “Chung” which means centre or middle. The “Chung” character represents interpretation an arrow striking the centre of a target. The meaning of this tile is therefore – success or achievement.

This tile is the counterpart of the “The Green Dragon” tile which shows the arrow about to leave the bow. It is commonly called “The Red Dragon” in western Mah Jong sets because the “Chung” character is generally drawn in red ink.

From a page on a pilot of the USAF China National Aviation Corp. (CNAC) Air Transport Command Group:

The significance of the chung on the plane is explained here.  Suggested as an insignia by General Claire Chennault in 1942, it may be imagined to have signified — as on the mah jong tile — success or achievement in this area as well.

Let us hope that philologists and fairy-tale students like Grimm and Lewis — rather than followers of the religion of scientism — continue to inspire and guide those who must fight for our values.

Sunday, December 8, 2002

Sunday December 8, 2002

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:48 pm

Lucero

From a Spanish-English dictionary:

lucero m. morning or evening star:
any bright star….
2. hole in a window panel for the
admission of light….

Sal a tu ventana,
que mi canto es para ti….
Lucero, lucero, lucero, lucero

— "Ya la ronda llega aquí"

Cross Window — Ex Cathedra

See In Mexico City, a Quiet Revelation,
in the New York Times of December 5.
The photo, from a different website, is
   of a room by the architect Luis Barragán.
 

From the Nobel Prize lecture of Octavio Paz
on December 8, 1990 — twelve years ago today:

"Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sindbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present."

Today's site music is courtesy of the Sinatra MIDI Files

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Sunday September 29, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:18 pm

New from Miracle Pictures
– IF IT’S A HIT, IT’S A MIRACLE! –

Pi in the Sky
for Michaelmas 2002

“Fear not, maiden, your prayer is heard.
Michael am I, guardian of the highest Word.”

A Michaelmas Play

Contact, by Carl Sagan:

Chapter 1 – Transcendental Numbers

  In the seventh grade they were studying “pi.” It was a Greek letter that looked like the architecture at Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at the top. If you measured the circumference of a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the top of a mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured the circle’s circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by the other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.

  The next day the teacher, Mr. Weisbrod, said that pi was about 22/7, about 3.1416. But actually, if you wanted to be exact, it was a decimal that went on and on forever without repeating the pattern of numbers. Forever, Ellie thought. She raised her hand. It was the beginning of the school year and she had not asked any questions in this class.
  “How could anybody know that the decimals go on and on forever?”
  “That’s just the way it is,” said the teacher with some asperity.
  “But why? How do you know? How can you count decimals forever?”
  “Miss Arroway” – he was consulting his class list – “this is a stupid question. You’re wasting the class’s time.”

  No one had ever called Ellie stupid before and she found herself bursting into tears….

  After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three. The Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in pi went on forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How was she expected to know if she couldn’t ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first few digits. Pi wasn’t 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or maybe she’d been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she’d been much more careful, though, they couldn’t expect her to measure an infinite number of decimals.

  There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted. If you knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for pi that would let you calculate it to as many decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she couldn’t understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: pi/4, the book said, was the same as 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …, with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and subtracting the fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than pi/4 to being smaller than pi/4, but after a while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could never get there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her

a miracle


 Cartoon by S.Harris

that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could circles know about fractions? She was determined to learn

calculus.

  The book said something else: pi was called a “transcendental” number. There was no equation with ordinary numbers in it that could give you pi unless it was infinitely long. She had already taught herself a little algebra and understood what this meant. And pi wasn’t the only transcendental number. In fact there was an infinity of transcendental numbers. More than that, there were infinitely more transcendental numbers that ordinary numbers, even though pi was the only one of them she had ever heard of. In more ways than one, pi was tied to infinity.

  She had caught a glimpse of something majestic.

Chapter 24 – The Artist’s Signature

  The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 2 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Her program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

  The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover

a miracle

— another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons… there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

Song lyric not in Sagan’s book:

Will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by?
Is a better home a-waitin’
in the sky, Lord, in the sky?

“Contact,” the film: 

Recording:

Columbia 37669

Date Issued:

Unknown

Side:

A

Title:

Can The Circle Be Unbroken

Artist:

Carter Family

Recording Date:

May 6, 1935

Listen:

Realaudio

Music courtesy of honkingduck.com.
 
For bluegrass midi version, click here.
 

The above conclusion to Sagan’s book is perhaps the stupidest thing by an alleged scientist that I have ever read.  As a partial antidote, I offer the following.

Today’s birthday: Stanley Kramer, director of “On the Beach.”

From an introduction to a recording of the famous Joe Hill song about Pie in the Sky:

“They used a shill to build a crowd… You know, a carny shill.”


Carny

Friday, September 27, 2002

Friday September 27, 2002

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:59 pm

ART WARS for the clueless

Someone's weblog entry for 9/27/02:

[27 Sep 2002|08:33pm]

"After a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth."
-Hunter S. Thompson

My comment:

How to Handle a Thompson
by m759 2002-09-27 09:05 pm

"What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn't march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn't even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be."

The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson
(born on September 27th, 1906)

"The Old Man's still an artist
 with a Thompson."

— Terry in "Miller's Crossing "

Saturday, September 7, 2002

Saturday September 7, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:44 pm

The Boys from Uruguay

If one were to write a “secret history” of the twentieth century, one possible organizing theme might be the religious struggle between worshippers of the Semitic deity (variously known as Yahweh, God, and Allah) and worshippers of the Aryan deities… notably, the Aryan god of music, light, and reason, Apollo.

(See my jounal notes of Monday, Sept. 2, 2002, below.)

In perhaps the best academic website I have ever seen, Karey L. Perkins quotes Walker Percy:

“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…”

The greatest symbol-monger of the twentieth century was, of course, Adolf Hitler. His use of the Aryan sun-wheel symbol rose to the level of genius. Of course, it ultimately failed to win the approval of the sun god himself, Apollo, who is also the god of reason.

Since symbol-mongering cannot be avoided, let us hope that it can be done in a somewhat more reasonable way than that of the National Socialist movement. Two examples suggest themselves.

  1. From Peggy Noonan’s column of Friday, Sept. 6:

    The cross, the heart, and the flag.

  2. From Karey Perkins’s website:

    A brain, a heart, and courage

On this Rosh Hashanah, the cross as a symbol of intelligence may be offensive to some worshippers of Yahweh. Let them read The Archivist, a novel by Martha Cooley, and then my journal note The Matthias Defense.

They might also contemplate the biblical quotation in the musical “Contact” broadcast from Lincoln Center on September 1, 2002: “Let there be light!”

Three Jews named Paul have been associated with light…

  1. Saul of Tarsus, who later assumed an alias.

  2. Paul Newman, whose performance in “The Verdict” continues, indirectly, to trouble Cardinal Law of Boston.

  3. Paul R. Halmos, a personal hero of mine ever since I saw his Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces and Measure Theory as an ignorant young undergraduate browsing the bookstores of Harvard Square.

In accordance with the “secret history” theme mentioned above, the struggle between Aryan and Semitic religions may also be viewed in the light of the struggle between Christianity and Communism. Hitler exploited this viewpoint very successfully, pretending to be the champion of the Christians against the godless Reds. Peggy Noonan also successfully uses this strategy. Both Hitler and Noonan manage to ignore the fact that Christianity is itself one of the Semitic religions, and that at least two of its three deities are Jewish.

As for me, I rather identify with the young Hitler clone at the end of the film “The Boys from Brazil.” Forced to decide between Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, he sides with Olivier. His reason? Peck lied.

In a similar situation, forced to decide between Peggy Noonan and the Jew Halmos, I would probably side with Halmos. Halmos, who should, if not a saint, be at least dubbed a knight, does not, unlike the great majority of the damned human race, lie.

See Halmos’s memoir, I Want to Be a Mathematician. In particular, see the single index entry “communist by allegation” and the 29 entries under “Uruguay.”

Happy birthday to Elia Kazan and Peggy Noonan, and a happy and prosperous New Year to should-be-Sir Paul R. Halmos. 

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Bach’s Minuet in G

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:29 pm
toys.jpg (17640 bytes)

The Toys

Left to right: June Montiero, Barbara Parritt, and Barbara Harris

From the website http://www.history-of-rock.com/toys.htm

In 1964 they were signed by the Publishing firm Genius, Inc., which teamed them with the songwriting duo Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell…. The writers took a classical finger exercise from Bach and put a Motown bassline to it and “A Lover’s Concerto” was born.

September 1965: “A Lover’s Concerto” on the Dynavoice label went #4 R&B, crossed over to pop charts #2, and also became a #5 hit in England. In 1965 the song sold over a million copies. The Toys began appearing on television shows such as “Shindig!,” “Hullabullo,” and “American Bandstand,”  toured with Gene Pitney, and appeared in the film It’s a Bikini World.

Other sites giving further details on Bach’s Minuet in G:

Search for the sheet music and a rendition of the work at codamusic.com’s Finale Showcase Search Page.

Seeing and hearing the music on this site requires that you download  Coda’s SmartMusic Viewer, and possibly requires that you adjust your browser settings, depending on the operating system you use.

For another look at Bach’s music, along with a midi rendition, you can download Music MasterWorks composing software from the Aspire Software site…

http://www.musicmasterworks.com/.

Then download the midi file of the Minuet in G itself,  “Minuet in G,  BWV841” (M.Lombardi), from the website

http://www.classicalarchives.com/bach.html.

(To do this, right-click on the minuet link and use the “Save Target As” option, if you, like me, are using Internet Explorer with Windows.)

After you have downloaded the midi file of the minuet, use the “File” and “Open” options in Music MasterWorks to display and play the music.

A comparison of these two versions of Bach is instructive for anyone planning to purchase music composition software.   The MasterWorks creates sheet music from its midi file that is quite sophisticated and rather hard to follow, but this music accurately reflects the superior musical performance in the downloaded midi file versus the rendition in the online Finale Showcase file.   The Showcase file is much simpler and easier to read, as the rendition it describes is also quite simple.

The Gentle Rain

For an even simpler version, those of us who were in our salad days in 1965 can consult our memories of The Toys:

How gentle is the rain
That falls softly on the meadow.
Birds high up in the trees
Serenade the clouds with their melodies.

Oh, see there beyond the hill,
The bright colors of the rainbow.
Some magic from above
Made this day for us just to fall in love.

Those of the younger generation with neither the patience nor the taste to seek out the original by Bach may be content with the following site —

A Lover’s Concerto in Venice

To a more mature audience, the picture of a Venetian sunset at the above site (similar to the photo below, from Shunya’s Italy)

will, together with the lyrics of The Toys, suggest that

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven….

This line, addressed to Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” contradicts, to some extent, the statement by Igor Stravinsky in The Poetics of Music (1942, English version 1947) that music does not express anything at all. Stravinsky is buried in Venice.

From  Famous Graves:


Igor Stravinsky,

Venice

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