Stealth (the movie) and Stealth (the Super Bowl ad)
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Monday, February 1, 2016
The Hiroshima Preprint
This morning at 11:44 I happened upon …
This was published as …
Toshiyuki Katsura, Shigeyuki Kondo, Ichiro Shimada,
"On the supersingular K3 surface in characteristic 5 with Artin invariant 1,"
Michigan Mathematical Journal , vol. 63, issue 4 (Dec. 2014), 803–844.
Related material from later today —
See also earlier Log24 remarks on the Hoffman-Singleton graph
and a remark on geometry for Princeton.
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Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Symmetry Framed
The cover of the K. O. Friedrichs book From Pythagoras to Einstein
shown in the previous post suggests a review (click the Log24
images for webpages where they can be manipulated) ….
The "more sophisticated" link in the first image above
leads to a webpage by Alexander Bogomolny,
"Pythagoras' Theorem by Tessellation," that says
"This is a subtle and beautiful proof."
Bogomolny refers us to the Friedrichs book, from which one of
the illustrations of the proof by tessellation is as follows —
For a quite different use of superposition, see
The Lindbergh Manifesto (May 19, 2015).
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Monday, September 14, 2015
Happy Birthday to…
The actor who portrayed the angel Uriel in the TV series
"Supernatural," Robert Wisdom.
See also the angel Uriel in the novel Weaveworld .
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Sunday, August 30, 2015
Lines
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
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Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Design Thinking
This post was suggested in part by last night's post
of 11:14 PM ET, Southern Charm, and by a post
of 11/14 last year, Another Opening, Another Show.
See also Design Thinking at Wikipedia and the following
two quotations —
CHARLESTON COUNTY, SC (WCSC) (today) –
Dr. Gerrita Postlewait's contract for Superintendent
of Charleston County Schools was approved and
signed in a meeting with school board members
Wednesday morning, a school system official says….
From 2006 to 2013, she was the chief K-12 officer for
the Stupski Foundation, a San Francisco-based
education reform nonprofit. [See related page.]
PHILANTHROPY.COM (Aug. 2, 2012) –
Chris Tebben, executive director of Grantmakers for
Education, says the [Stupski] foundation was among
the first to consider how the problem-solving approach
known as “design thinking” could play a role in improving
education.
Related cinematic remarks: Robot Overlords (now on-demand).
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Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Literary Notes
From an interview by Glen Duncan with author
Susanna Moore published on January 29, 2013 —
|
When did you first realize that you wanted to write fiction? Was there an epiphanic moment? I was a voracious reader as a child, clearing out the local library (my mother had given me a letter for the librarian, attesting that the books that I borrowed were for her reading alone), and I began to write plays, usually starring myself, when I was 9 or 10. There were years of bad poetry. I was features editor of the Punahou school newspaper. But at no moment did I clearly decide that I was going to be a writer, nor did it feel as if I had always been one. I left home for the mainland (I grew up in Hawaii) when I was 17 with no money or education beyond Punahou and the books that I’d read, and knew that I had to earn my living. I had a fantasy that I’d be a reporter and was sent by an equally naïve friend to Walter Annenberg, the owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer , who promptly sent me to the classified ad room, where I became an ad-taker. I’ve always thought that it was very good training: A man would call to place an ad in the hope of selling his used bed, and I would have to write a convincing few sentences on his behalf. I later read scripts for Jack Nicholson and oddly enough had to do the same thing – condense a complicated proposal into a statement of a dozen words. We’ve talked before about how feeling different from the people around us – “mutant” was the word you used – informs or underpins the burgeoning writer’s mentality. Could you expand on that? By mutant, I mean that state in childhood and adolescence of isolation, sometimes blissful, often bewildering, when you realize that you have little in common with the people closest to you – not because you are superior in intelligence or sensitivity, but because you perceive the world in an utterly different way, which you assume to be a failing on your part. It was only through reading and discovering characters who shared that feeling that I realized when I was about 14 that I wasn’t insane. And yes, I think that the sensation, the awareness and then the conviction that your perception of the world is not what might be called conventional, is essential to the making of an artist. It is a little like speaking a different language from the people around you – it affords you solitude, but it also means that you are sometimes misunderstood. |
Related material:
Midnight Politics, X-Woman, "Welcome to Me," and
the following meditation on the word "binder"—
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Monday, February 23, 2015
For Katy Perry
See also this journal on the date of Mr. Howard's death:
"Mark my words
This love will make you levitate
Like a bird"
— Katy Perry, "Dark Horse"
“It’s the Super Bowl, I guess,”
Michael Keaton said in the first minutes
of ABC’s official Oscar red-carpet special."
— Hallie Cantor in the online New Yorker today
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Saturday, February 14, 2015
Valentine Dance
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Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Dead Reckoning
Continued from yesterday evening
Today's mathematical birthday —
Claude Chevalley, 11 Feb. 1909 – 28 June 1984.
|
Chevalley's daughter, Catherine Chevalley, wrote about For him it was important to see questions as a whole, to see the necessity of a proof, its global implications. As to rigour, all the members of Bourbaki cared about it: the Bourbaki movement was started essentially because rigour was lacking among French mathematicians, by comparison with the Germans, that is the Hilbertians. Rigour consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigour gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure. When that structure had been constructed, he would say it was an object which interested him, something to look at, to admire, perhaps to turn around, but certainly not to transform. For him, rigour in mathematics consisted in making a new object which could thereafter remain unchanged. The way my father worked, it seems that this was what counted most, this production of an object which then became inert— dead, really. It was no longer to be altered or transformed. Not that there was any negative connotation to this. But I must add that my father was probably the only member of Bourbaki who thought of mathematics as a way to put objects to death for aesthetic reasons. |
Recent scholarly news suggests a search for Chapel Hill
in this journal. That search leads to Transformative Hermeneutics.
Those who, like Professor Eucalyptus of Wallace Stevens's
New Haven, seek God "in the object itself" may contemplate
yesterday's afternoon post on Eightfold Design in light of the
Transformative post and of yesterday's New Haven remarks and
Chapel Hill events.
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Sunday, February 1, 2015
Spielraum III
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Drama Club
Julianne Moore at the Screen Actors Guild awards
on Sunday evening:
"When I was 17, I decided I wanted to be
an actor. It didn't seem possible because
I'd never met a real actor," Moore said.
"So I want to say to all the kids in the
drama club, you guys are the real actors."
On the main character of the new film "Birdman"—
"Thomson is clearly talented, yet unable to get out of
the shadow of his superhero role. He is filled with
a simmering rage as Robert Downey Jr. appears
on the TV, arguably the highest profile actor alive
courtesy of a role in the Marvel films."
— Grant Pearsall at The Snapper
A midrash for Robert:
See The Stars My Destination and Cube of Ultron.
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Sunday, December 28, 2014
Cube of Ultron
The Blacklist “Pilot” Review
"There is an element of camp to this series though. Spader is
quite gleefully channeling Anthony Hopkins, complete with being
a well educated, elegant man locked away in a super-cell.
Speaking of that super-cell, it’s kind of ridiculous. They’ve got him
locked up in an abandoned post office warehouse on a little
platform with a chair inside a giant metal cube that looks like
it could have been built by Tony Stark. And as Liz approaches
to talk to him, the entire front of the cube opens and the whole
thing slides back to leave just the platform and chair. Really?
FUCKING REALLY ? "
— Kate Reilly at Geekenstein.com (Sept. 27, 2013)
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Thursday, September 11, 2014
A Class by Itself
The American Mathematical Society yesterday:
Harvey Cohn (1923-2014)
Wednesday September 10th 2014
Cohn, an AMS Fellow and a Putnam Fellow (1942), died May 16 at the age of 90. He served in the Navy in World War II and following the war received his PhD from Harvard University in 1948 under the direction of Lars Ahlfors. He was a member of the faculty at Wayne State University, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Arizona, and at City College of New York, where he was a distinguished professor. After retiring from teaching, he also worked for the NSA. Cohn was an AMS member since 1942.
Paid death notice from The New York Times , July 27, 2014:
COHN–Harvey. Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and member of the Society since 1942, died on May 16 at the age of 90. He was a brilliant Mathematician, an adoring husband, father and grandfather, and faithful friend and mentor to his colleagues and students. Born in New York City in 1923, Cohn received his B.S. degree (Mathematics and Physics) from CCNY in 1942. He received his M.S. degree from NYU (1943), and his Ph.D. from Harvard (1948) after service in the Navy (Electronic Technicians Mate, 1944-46). He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa (Sigma Chi), won the William Lowell Putnam Prize in 1942, and was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal in 1972. A pioneer in the intensive use of computers in an innovative way in a large number of classical mathematical problems, Harvey Cohn held faculty positions at Wayne State University, Stanford, Washington University Saint Louis (first Director of the Computing Center 1956-58), University of Arizona (Chairman 1958-1967), University of Copenhagen, and CCNY (Distinguished Professor of Mathematics). After his retirement from teaching, he worked in a variety of capacities for the National Security Agency and its research arm, IDA Center for Computing Sciences. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Bernice, of Laguna Woods, California and Ft. Lauderdale, FL, his son Anthony, daughter Susan Cohn Boros, three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
— Published in The New York Times on July 27, 2014
See also an autobiographical essay found on the web.
None of the above sources mention the following book, which is apparently by this same Harvey Cohn. (It is dedicated to "Tony and Susan.")
Advanced Number Theory, by Harvey Cohn
Courier Dover Publications, 1980 – 276 pages
(First published by Wiley in 1962 as A Second Course in Number Theory )
Publisher's description:
" 'A very stimulating book … in a class by itself.'— American Mathematical Monthly
Advanced students, mathematicians and number theorists will welcome this stimulating treatment of advanced number theory, which approaches the complex topic of algebraic number theory from a historical standpoint, taking pains to show the reader how concepts, definitions and theories have evolved during the last two centuries. Moreover, the book abounds with numerical examples and more concrete, specific theorems than are found in most contemporary treatments of the subject.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I is concerned with background material — a synopsis of elementary number theory (including quadratic congruences and the Jacobi symbol), characters of residue class groups via the structure theorem for finite abelian groups, first notions of integral domains, modules and lattices, and such basis theorems as Kronecker's Basis Theorem for Abelian Groups.
Part II discusses ideal theory in quadratic fields, with chapters on unique factorization and units, unique factorization into ideals, norms and ideal classes (in particular, Minkowski's theorem), and class structure in quadratic fields. Applications of this material are made in Part III to class number formulas and primes in arithmetic progression, quadratic reciprocity in the rational domain and the relationship between quadratic forms and ideals, including the theory of composition, orders and genera. In a final concluding survey of more recent developments, Dr. Cohn takes up Cyclotomic Fields and Gaussian Sums, Class Fields and Global and Local Viewpoints.
In addition to numerous helpful diagrams and tables throughout the text, appendices, and an annotated bibliography, Advanced Number Theory also includes over 200 problems specially designed to stimulate the spirit of experimentation which has traditionally ruled number theory."
User Review –
"In a nutshell, the book serves as an introduction to Gauss' theory of quadratic forms and their composition laws (the cornerstone of his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae) from the modern point of view (ideals in quadratic number fields). I strongly recommend it as a gentle introduction to algebraic number theory (with exclusive emphasis on quadratic number fields and binary quadratic forms). As a bonus, the book includes material on Dirichlet L-functions as well as proofs of Dirichlet's class number formula and Dirichlet's theorem in primes in arithmetic progressions (of course this material requires the reader to have the background of a one-semester course in real analysis; on the other hand, this material is largely independent of the subsequent algebraic developments).
Better titles for this book would be 'A Second Course in Number Theory' or 'Introduction to quadratic forms and quadratic fields'. It is not a very advanced book in the sense that required background is only a one-semester course in number theory. It does not assume prior familiarity with abstract algebra. While exercises are included, they are not particularly interesting or challenging (if probably adequate to keep the reader engaged).
While the exposition is *slightly* dated, it feels fresh enough and is particularly suitable for self-study (I'd be less likely to recommend the book as a formal textbook). Students with a background in abstract algebra might find the pace a bit slow, with a bit too much time spent on algebraic preliminaries (the entire Part I—about 90 pages); however, these preliminaries are essential to paving the road towards Parts II (ideal theory in quadratic fields) and III (applications of ideal theory).
It is almost inevitable to compare this book to Borevich-Shafarevich 'Number Theory'. The latter is a fantastic book which covers a large superset of the material in Cohn's book. Borevich-Shafarevich is, however, a much more demanding read and it is out of print. For gentle self-study (and perhaps as a preparation to later read Borevich-Shafarevich), Cohn's book is a fine read."
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Saturday, July 26, 2014
OOPs
Or: Two Rivets Short of a Paradigm
Detail from an author photo:
|
From rivet-rivet.net:
The philosopher Graham Harman is invested in re-thinking the autonomy of objects and is part of a movement called Object-Oriented-Philosophy (OOP). Harman wants to question the authority of the human being at the center of philosophy to allow the insertion of the inanimate into the equation. With the aim of proposing a philosophy of objects themselves, Harman puts the philosophies of Bruno Latour and Martin Heidegger in dialogue. Along these lines, Harman proposes an unconventional reading of the tool-being analysis made by Heidegger. For Harman, the term tool does not refer only to human-invented tools such as hammers or screwdrivers, but to any kind of being or thing such as a stone, dog or even a human. Further, he uses the terms objects, beings, tools and things, interchangeably, placing all on the same ontological footing. In short, there is no “outside world.” Harman distinguishes two characteristics of the tool-being: invisibility and totality. Invisibility means that an object is not simply used but is: “[an object] form(s) a cosmic infrastructure of artificial and natural and perhaps supernatural forces, power by which our last action is besieged.” For instance, nails, wooden boards and plumbing tubes do their work to keep a house “running” silently (invisibly) without being viewed or noticed. Totality means that objects do not operate alone but always in relation to other objects–the smallest nail can, for example, not be disconnected from wooden boards, the plumbing tubes or from the cement. Depending on the point of view of each entity (nail, tube, etc.) a different reality will emerge within the house. For Harman, “to refer to an object as a tool-being is not to say that it is brutally exploited as a means to an end, but only that it is torn apart by the universal duel between the silent execution of an object’s reality and the glistening aura of its tangible surface.” — From "The Action of Things," an M.A. thesis at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, by Manuela Moscoso, May 2011, edited by Sarah Demeuse |
From Wikipedia, a programming paradigm:
See also posts tagged Turing's Cathedral, and Alley Oop (Feb. 11, 2003).
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Friday, July 4, 2014
The Hallowed Crucible
“A physicist who played a central role in developing
the theory of supersymmetry – often known as SUSY –
has died.”
— Times Higher Education , July 3, 2014
In honor of the above physicist, Bruno Zumino,
here are two sets of Log24 posts:
Structure, May 2-4, 2013 (the dates of a physicists’ celebration
for Zumino’s 90th birthday)
Hallmark, June 21, 2014 (the date of Zumino’s death)
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Friday, May 23, 2014
Free-Floating Signs
“You’ve got to pick up every stitch…”
— Donovan, song on closing credits of To Die For
“…’Supersymmetry’ was originally written
specifically for Her ….” — Pitchfork
“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Her screenplay by Spike Jonze
This journal on January 24, 2006:
Context: See Free-Floating Signs.
Backstory: Digital Member and Uneven Break.
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Sunday, May 18, 2014
Eyes on the Prize
From 1972:
From 2014:
“Since when did you start writing Chinese?” — Lucy trailer
See also the Saturday night 11:30 post.
Wolven’s Lucy midrash is from April 3. See also this journal on that date.
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Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Two -Year College
See last night’s pentagram photo and a post from May 13, 2012.
That post links to a little-known video of a 1972 film.
A speech from the film was used by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche as a
voice-over in her 2011 golden-ratio video (with pentagrams) that she
exhibited along with a large, wall-filling copy of some of my own work.
The speech (see video below) is clearly nonsense.
The patterns* Lyche copied are not.
“Who are you, anyway?”
— Question at 00:41 of 15:00, Rainbow Bridge (Part 5 of 9)
at YouTube, addressed to Baron Bingen as “Mr. Rabbit”
* Patterns exhibited again later, apparently without the Lyche pentagram video.
It turns out, by the way, that Lyche created that video by superimposing
audio from the above “Rainbow Bridge” film onto a section of Disney’s 1959
“Donald in Mathmagic Land” (see 7:17 to 8:57 of the 27:33 Disney video).
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Saturday, May 10, 2014
Test Patterns
Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test—
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test—
Related art — (Click images for further details.)
Patterns suggesting those of the Raven test:
Patterns suggesting those of the Wechsler test:
The latter patterns were derived from the former.
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Sunday, December 29, 2013
Good Question
Amy Adams in the new film “Her” —
“You’re dating an OS? What is that like?”
— Question quoted in a Hollywood Reporter
story on the film’s second trailer
From the same story, by Philiana Ng —
” The trailer is set to Arcade Fire’s
mid-tempo ballad ‘Supersymmetry.’ “
Parts of an answer for Amy —
Nov. 26, 2012, as well as
Dec. 24, 2013, and
The Hollywood Reporter story is from Dec. 3, 2013.
See also that date in this journal.
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Sunday, December 22, 2013
The Bronfman Catechism
Meanwhile…
|
Log24 on Sunday, October 5, 2008— “In a game of chess, the knight’s move is unique because it alone goes around corners. In this way, it combines the continuity of a set sequence with the discontinuity of an unpredictable turn in the middle. This meaningful combination of continuity and discontinuity in an otherwise linear set of possibilities has led some to refer to the creative act of discovery in any field of research as a ‘knight’s move’ in intelligence.” Related material: Terence McKenna: “Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey ‘haunts time like a ghost.’” Anonymous author: “‘Knight’s move thinking’ is a psychiatric term describing a thought disorder where in speech the usual logical sequence of ideas is lost, the sufferer jumping from one idea to another with no apparent connection. It is most commonly found in schizophrenia.” |
Related journalism—
"What's the 'S' stand for?" — Amy Adams
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Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Bullshit Studies
The essay excerpted in last night's post on structuralism
is of value as part of a sustained attack by the late
Robert de Marrais on the damned nonsense of the late
French literary theorist Jacques Derrida—
Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets:
Deploying the Glass Bead Game
Part I: Ministrations Concerning Silliness, or:
Is “Interdisciplinary Thought” an Oxymoron?
Part II: Canonical Collage-oscopes, or:
Claude in Jacques’ Trap? Not What It Sounds Like!
Part III: Grooving on the Sly with Klein Groups
Part IV: Claude’s Kaleidoscope . . . and Carl’s
Part V: Spelling the Tree, from Aleph to Tav
(While Not Forgetting to Shin)
The response of de Marrais to Derrida's oeuvre nicely
exemplifies the maxim of Norman Mailer that
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
Friday, October 25, 2013
Abstraction
Rhetorical questions by art critic Michael Glover—
"Has this kind of abstraction to do with ideas
of the spiritual? Are we supposed to see behind
what we have here some kind of evidence of
superhuman energies at work in the universe?
Is this some kind of manifestation of the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower—
to quote a line from Dylan Thomas?"
Rhetorical answer —
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Steam
For Jack and Jill.
The above motivational video is from the web page of a middle school
math teacher who was shot to death yesterday morning.
Related journalism —
See also "S in a Diamond" (here, October 2013)
and "Superman Comes to the Supermarket,"
by Norman Mailer (Esquire , November 1960).
In a recent film, Amy Adams asked Superman,
"What's the S stand for?"
One possible answer, in light of Stephen King's
recent sequel to The Shining and of
the motivational video above—
Steam.
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Tuesday, October 8, 2013
S in a Diamond
For Amy Adams, who in a recent
Superman film posed the question…
"What's the S stand for?"
This logo appears on the new game
Beyond: Two Souls . (See this evening's
earlier post on the game.)
In a more appealing sort of computer
entertainment, the S might stand for Scarlett.
"Please wait as your operating system is initiated."
(From the October 5th post Dream Girls.)
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Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Bright Star
(Continued. For the title, see Lucero in this journal.)
See Newton in several works of literary art:
- Dürrenmatt's The Physicists (spoiler alert)
- Newton at a Royal Wedding in Westminster Abbey
- Sicilian Reflections
The date, Nov. 23, 2010, of the Westminster Abbey remarks
in the second Newton link above suggests a quite different church
from that date.
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Tuesday, August 27, 2013
What Seems Insanity
On a way of seeing— superimposition—
that "seems insanity" (cf. C. S. Lewis's remarks below)
Combining last night's post Spectrum with
the August 14 post Valhalla Is Down…
From An Experiment in Criticism
by C.S. Lewis, 1961–
"If we go steadily through all the myths of any people
we shall be appalled by much of what we read.
Most of them, whatever they may have meant to
ancient or savage man, are to us meaningless and
shocking; shocking not only by their cruelty and
obscenity but by their apparent silliness— almost
what seems insanity. Out of this rank and squalid
undergrowth the great myths— Orpheus, Demeter
and Persephone, the Hesperides, Balder, Ragnarok,
or Ilmarinen's forging of the Sampo– rise like elms."
Voilà —
The Aug. 14 post Valhalla Is Down referred to a New York Times blackout.
(Jill Abramson, on earlier being named executive editor at the Times, had
said it was like "ascending into Valhalla.")
Another Times blackout occurred today.
Lewis's term Ragnarok refers to the twilight of the gods of Valhalla.
A more conventional illustration from the gamer website Ragnarok/Valhalla Wiki —
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Monday, August 26, 2013
Spectrum
From the weblog of Dr. David Justice today :
C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover
the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes
that that of Orpheus retains its power to spellbind, even in a
bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels,
become as dust upon such summary.
We venture now upon that territory where words fail ….
Related material :
C. S. Lewis on Orpheus (click to enlarge) —
Lewis, according to Justice, "surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines."
A related image (see, too, today's previous post) —
C. S. Lewis on myth —
"The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—
a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip."
Conceptual Art
For concepts of prism, spectrum, and tulip combined, see Sicilian Reflections.
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Taormina Dualism
"At some point in Greek history, it was noticed that the capital upsilon—Y—
looked like a path branching left and right. The comparison, like so much
traditional material, was ascribed to the Pythagoreans, in accordance with
the dualism just mentioned; our earliest source for it, however, is as late as
the Roman poet Persius (Satires, 3.56)."
— "The Garden of Forking Paths" in the weblog
Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Nov. 21, 2006
Amy Adams at the Lancia Café in Taormina, Sicily, on June 15, 2013.
Adams was in Taormina for the Italian premiere of her Superman film.
See also this journal on that date— June 15, 2013.
Posts related to the Garden of Forking Paths: Witch Ball (Jan. 24, 2013),
Sermon for Harvard (Sept. 19, 2010), and Amy Adams + Craft.
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Thursday, June 20, 2013
ART WARS: Chesterton Thursday
The New York Times philosophy column "The Stone"
last evening had an essay on art by a sarcastic anarchist,
one Crispin Sartwell—
"… whole generations of art lovers have been
trained in modernist dogma, and arts institutions’
access to various forms of state or foundation
support depend on it completely. One goes to
the museum to gasp at stunning works of
incomparable, super-human genius by beings
who are infinitely more exalted and important
than the mere humans staring at their paintings.
That’s why ordinary people staring at a Picasso
(allegedly) experience a kind of transcendence
or re-articulation of their lives and world."
Cubism Re-Articulated:
Click image for some backstory.
(IMAGE: Walter Gropius and Froebel's Third Gift,
from a Google image search today)
Background: Cubism in this journal and
Pilate Goes to Kindergarten.
Related material: Chesterton + Thursday in this journal.
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Monday, June 17, 2013
Savior for Atheists
"Man of Steel is subversive mythology for atheists
that exalts a Superman who behaves the way they
think God should but doesn’t."
— Jeff Jensen, "Why the Superman of 'Man of Steel'
is the Jesus we wish Jesus would be,"
Entertainment Weekly this afternoon
"He's a bird, he's a plane… He's our savior?"
— Nicole Sperling, "'Man of Steel's' Christian link,"
Los Angeles Times this afternoon
Elsewhere on the Web today:
See also Baez in this journal.
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Friday, June 14, 2013
Amy’s Shadow
Why knows what evil lurks…? — The Shadow
Backstory: "Amy Adams" + Shadow in this journal.
Related material —
Amy Adams as Lois Lane:
In the new Amy Adams version, Superman's Smallville mom
is played by Diane Lane.
Lane also played George Reeves's sugar mommy
in the 2006 film Hollywoodland .
Ben Affleck and Diane Lane at the 2006 Venice Film Festival
premiere of Hollywoodland :
See, too, today's previous post, and Amy Adams as Lacey Yeager
in the yet-to-be-made film version of An Object of Beauty .
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Monday, June 10, 2013
Galois Coordinates
Today's previous post on coordinate systems
suggests a look at the phrase "Galois coordinates."
A search shows that the phrase, though natural,
has apparently not been used before 2011* for solutions
to what Hermann Weyl called "the relativity problem."
A thorough historical essay on Galois coordinatization
in this sense would require more academic resources
than I have available. It would likely describe a number
of applications of Galois-field coordinates to square
(and perhaps to cubical) arrays that were studied before
1976, the date of my Diamond Theory monograph.
But such a survey might not find any such pre-1976
coordinatization of a 4×4 array by the 16 elements
of the vector 4-space over the Galois field with two
elements, GF(2).
Such coordinatizations are important because of their
close relationship to the Mathieu group M 24 .
See a preprint by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of Kummer
surfaces in the Mathieu group M 24 ," with its remark
denying knowledge of any such coordinatization
prior to a 1989 paper by R. T. Curtis.
Related material:
Some images related to Galois coordinates, excerpted
from a Google search today (click to enlarge)—
* A rather abstract 2011 paper that uses the phrase
"Galois coordinates" may have some implications
for the naive form of the relativity problem
related to square and cubical arrays.
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Sunday, June 9, 2013
Sicilian Reflections
(Continued from Sept. 22, 2011)
See Taormina in this journal, and the following photo of "Anne Newton"—
Click photo for context.
Related material:
"Super Overarching" in this journal,
a group of order 322,560, and…
See also the MAA Spectrum program —
— and an excerpt from the above book:
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Wednesday, May 1, 2013
The Crosswicks Curse
"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.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Logline
Found this morning in a search:
A logline is a one-sentence summary of your script.
www.scriptologist.com/Magazine/Tips/Logline/logline.html
It's the short blurb in TV guides that tells you what a movie
is about and helps you decide if you're interested …
The search was suggested by a screenwriting weblog post,
"Loglines: WHAT are you doing?".
What is your story about?
No, seriously, WHAT are you writing about?
Who are the characters? What happens to them?
Where does it take place? What’s the theme?
What’s the style? There are nearly a million
little questions to answer when you set out
to tell a story. But it all starts with one
super, overarching question.
What are you writing about? This is the first
big idea that we pull out of the ether, sometimes
before we even have any characters.
What is your story about?
The screenwriting post was found in an earlier search for
the highlighted phrase.
The screenwriting post was dated December 15, 2009.
What I am doing now is checking for synchronicity.
This weblog on December 15, 2009, had a post
titled A Christmas Carol. That post referred to my 1976
monograph titled Diamond Theory .
I guess the script I'm summarizing right now is about
the heart of that theory, a group of 322,560 permutations
that preserve the symmetry of a family of graphic designs.
For that group in action, see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.
The "super overarching" phrase was used to describe
this same group in a different context:
This is from "Mathieu Moonshine," a webpage by Anne Taormina.
A logline summarizing my approach to that group:
Finite projective geometry explains
the surprising symmetry properties
of some simple graphic designs—
found, for instance, in quilts.
The story thus summarized is perhaps not destined for movie greatness.
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Saturday, April 27, 2013
Mark and Remark
“Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels like a shell game.” —R.B. Kitaj
Not just novels.
Fact:
The mark preceding A8 in the above denotes the semidirect product.
 |
Symbol from the box-style I Ching (Cullinane, 1/6/89). This is Hexagram 55, “Abundance [Fullness].” |
The mathematical quote, from last evening’s Symmetry, is from Anne Taormina.
The I Ching remark is not.
Another version of Abbondanza —
Fiction:
Found in Translation and the giorno June 22, 2009, here.
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Friday, April 26, 2013
Symmetry
Anne Taormina on Mathieu Moonshine —
This is, of course, the same group (of order 322,560) underlying the Diamond 16 Puzzle.
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Saturday, April 6, 2013
Seize the Dia
On this journal:
"he seems to repeat stuff compulsively punctuated with citing others and berating them for note taken nor credit given of his precedence .. but like i said, he more than makes up for that, dredging up and dusting off his all time faves like a super expensive store keeper who moves a piece only once a decade"
— "poetpiet" on Feb. 23, 2013
This suggests moving a piece linked to here
(in an update; scroll down) a decade ago.
Photo source: http://evanfazio.com/public-relations-lessons-from-the-chess-board/
The New York Times Magazine cover story
a decade ago, on Sunday, April 6, 2003:
"The artists demanded space
in tune with their aesthetic."
— "The Dia Generation,"
by Michael Kimmelman
Related material: Occupy Space in this journal.
Monday, February 4, 2013
The Universe of Discourse
A Raven's Remark—
Related material:
Fish Story, Object Lesson, The Universe of Discourse,
Archimedes's Approximation of Pi, and…
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Saturday, February 2, 2013
Outside the Box
In memory of the late Ed Koch,
a poem and a link:
Poem — "The Shoebox," by Sheila Gogol
Link — Sheila in this journal
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Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Clash of the Caped Crusaders
The New Yorker , quoted here yesterday, on a meeting in 1638 of Galileo and Milton—
"… it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman…."
Related news yesterday from The Hollywood Reporter—
Phillips's upcoming Superman film stars Amy Adams.
Other entertainment:
Log24 posts from the day of Phillips's death—
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Monday, January 28, 2013
Encounter
"Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, 'Paradise Lost,' all lay before him….
Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter— it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman— there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
— Jonathan Rosen, The New Yorker , June 2, 2008, "Return to Paradise"
More in the spirit of Superman and Batman:
"Huh. You know what? Galileo didn't even write this."
"What!"
"The poem is signed John Milton."
"John Milton ?" The influential English poet who wrote
Paradise Lost was a contemporary of Galileo's and a
savant who conspiracy buffs put at the top of their list
of Illuminati suspects. Milton's alleged affiliation with
Galileo's Illuminati was one legend Langdon
suspected was true. Not only had Milton made a
well documented 1638 pilgrimage to Rome to
"commune with enlightened men," but he had held
meetings with Galileo during the scientist's house
arrest, meetings portrayed in many Renaissance
paintings….
"Milton knew Galileo, didn't he?" Vittoria said, finally
pushing the folio over to Langdon. "Maybe he wrote
the poem as a favor?"
— Angels & Demons , by Dan Brown
(first published in 2000)
See also this journal on August 16, 2009.
Addendum for Aaron Swartz (see today's previous post)—
"The Vatican, it seemed, took their archives
a bit more seriously than most." — Dan Brown
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Monday, December 10, 2012
Review of Leonardo Article
Review of an often-cited Leonardo article that is
now available for purchase online…
|
The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet Authors: Cyril Stanley Smith and Pauline Boucher
Source: Leonardo , Vol. 20, No. 4, Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578535 . |
Smith and Boucher give a well-illustrated account of
the early history of Truchet tiles, but their further remarks
on the mathematics underlying patterns made with
these tiles (see the diamond theorem* of 1976) are
worthless.
For instance…
Excerpt from pages 383-384—
"A detailed analysis of Truchet's
patterns touches upon the most fundamental
questions of the relation between
mathematical formalism and the structure
of the material world. Separations
between regions differing in density
require that nothing be as important as
something and that large and small cells of
both must coexist. The aggregation of
unitary choice of directional distinction
at interfaces lies at the root of all being
and becoming."
* This result is about Truchet-tile patterns, but the
underlying mathematics was first discovered by
investigating superimposed patterns of half-circles .
See Half-Circle Patterns at finitegeometry.org.
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Saturday, September 22, 2012
Occupy Space
"The word 'space' has, as you suggest, a large number of different meanings."
— Nanavira Thera in [Early Letters. 136] 10.xii.1958
From that same letter (links added to relevant Wikipedia articles)—
|
Space (ākāsa) is undoubtedly used in the Suttas
Your second letter seems to suggest that the space |
A simpler metaphysical system along the same lines—
|
The theory, he had explained, was that the persona
— The Gameplayers of Zan , |
"I am glad you have discovered that the situation is comical:
ever since studying Kummer I have been, with some difficulty,
refraining from making that remark."
— Nanavira Thera, [Early Letters, 131] 17.vii.1958
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Incommensurables
(Continued from Midsummer Eve)
"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer, March 3, 1992, PBS transcript
"Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 1962, as quoted in The Enneagram of Paradigm Shifting
"In the spiritual traditions from which Jung borrowed the term, it is not the SYMMETRY of mandalas that is all-important, as Jung later led us to believe. It is their capacity to reveal the asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry."
I have little respect for Enneagram enthusiasts, but they do at times illustrate Mailer's maxim.
My own interests are in the purely mathematical properties of the number nine, as well as those of the next square, sixteen.
Those who prefer bullshit may investigate non-mathematical properties of sixteen by doing a Google image search on MBTI.
For bullshit involving nine, see (for instance) Einsatz in this journal.
For non-bullshit involving nine, sixteen, and "asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry," see Monday's Mapping Problem continued. (The nine occurs there as the symmetric figures in the lower right nine-sixteenths of the triangular analogs diagram.)
For non-bullshit involving psychological and philosophical terminology, see James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology .
In particular, see Hillman's "An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit."
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Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Bright Black
“‘In the dictionary next to [the] word “bright,” you should see Paula’s picture,’ he said. ‘She was super smart, with a sparkling wit. … She had a beautiful sense of style and color.'”
— Elinor J. Brecher in The Miami Herald on June 8, quoting Palm Beach Post writer John Lantigua on the late art historian Paula Hays Harper
This journal on the date of her death—
For some simpleminded commentary, see László Lovász on the cube space.
Some less simpleminded commentary—
“Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
erfassen und gestalten?”
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Thursday, May 24, 2012
Dark, Dark, Dark
|
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of a silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious. 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.
 Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded corners ornamented them. Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic. |
|
You’re not afraid to show yourself at your lowest ebb. In Lit, you stop breast-feeding because you’ve started drinking again. You describe yourself hiding in a closet with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of Listerine, and a spit bowl. It’s not a proud moment. The temptation in Lit was to either make myself seedy or show some glamour. But there wasn’t any. It was just dark, dark, dark for days. Ugly. Were you surprised by how deeply people related to this dark stuff? If I’m doing my job then I’m able to make the strange seem familiar. Bad memoirs try to make the strange stranger, to provide something for people to gawk at. I try to create an experience where no matter how bizarre something is, it seems normal. I don’t want readers to balk, I want them to be in the experience. My goal isn’t for people to go, “Oh, poor little Mary Karr,” but rather to have the reader go, “I can be an asshole too,” or just to have enthusiasm for the possibility for change. |
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Thursday, April 26, 2012
Rainbow People
(Mythopoetic continued)
Voice of America today—
Thousands of Norwegians Defy Confessed Killer Breivik in Song
"The demonstrators waved roses and flags
Thursday as they and Norwegian folk singer
Lillebjoern Nilsen sang an adaptation
of the children's song, 'My Rainbow Race,'
which Breivik in court last week called
an example of Marxist brainwashing."
[See also PETE SEEGER AND LILLEBJØRN NILSEN.
Click on the image below for Seeger's original version.]
Liberia Reacts to Taylor Conviction With Mixed Emotions
"As the verdict was read out, a rainbow was seen
in the sky, encircling the sun. For many Liberians,
superstition is a part of life. The rainbow heralded
a new era, they said, beginning with the verdict of Taylor."
["You're not the only one… with mixed emotions."]
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Sunday, April 1, 2012
The Palpatine Dimension
A physics quote relayed at Peter Woit's weblog today—
"The relation between 4D N=4 SYM and the 6D (2, 0) theory
is just like that between Darth Vader and the Emperor.
You see Darth Vader and you think 'Isn’t he just great?
How can anyone be greater than that? No way.'
Then you meet the Emperor."
Some related material from this weblog—
(See Big Apple and Columbia Film Theory)
The Meno Embedding:
Some related material from the Web—
See also uses of the word triality in mathematics. For instance…
A discussion of triality by Edward Witten—
Triality is in some sense the last of the exceptional isomorphisms,
and the role of triality for n = 6 thus makes it plausible that n = 6
is the maximum dimension for superconformal symmetry,
though I will not give a proof here.
— "Conformal Field Theory in Four and Six Dimensions"
and a discussion by Peter J. Cameron—
There are exactly two non-isomorphic ways
to partition the 4-subsets of a 9-set
into nine copies of AG( 3,2).
Both admit 2-transitive groups.
— "The Klein Quadric and Triality"
Exercise: Is Witten's triality related to Cameron's?
(For some historical background, see the triality link from above
and Cameron's Klein Correspondence and Triality.)
Cameron applies his triality to the pure geometry of a 9-set.
For a 9-set viewed in the context of physics, see A Beginning—
|
From MIT Commencement Day, 2011— A symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"— A minimalist favicon—
This miniature 3×3 square— |
Happy April 1.
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Friday, March 23, 2012
Embedding the Stone
"Imbedding the God character in a holy book's very detailed narrative
and building an entire culture around this narrative
seems by itself to confer a kind of existence on Him."
— John Allen Paulos in the philosophy column "The Stone,"
New York Times online, Oct. 24, 2010
A related post from Log24 later that year—
Sunday, November 28, 2010
|
"Next come the crown of thorns and Jesus' agonized crawl across the stage,
bearing the weight of his own crucifix. And at last, after making
yet another entrance, Mr. Nolan strikes the pose immortalized
in centuries of art, clad in a demure loincloth, arms held out to his sides,
one leg artfully bent in front of the other, head hanging down
in tortured exhaustion. Gently spotlighted, he rises from the stage
as if by magic, while a giant cross, pulsing with hot gold lights,
descends from above to meet him. Mr. Lloyd Webber's churning guitar rock
hits a climactic note, and the audience erupts in excited applause."
— Charles Isherwood, review of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in today's New York Times
Other remarks on embedding —
Part I
Review of a new book on linguistics, embedding, and a South American tribe—
"Imagine a linguist from Mars lands on Earth to survey the planet's languages…."
— Chronicle of Higher Education , March 20, 2012
Part II
The Embedding , by Ian Watson (Review of a 1973 novel from Shakespeare's birthday, 2006)
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Tuesday, March 6, 2012
A Strange Thing
In memory of songwriter Robert Sherman—
See also The Uploading.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Collegiality in Action
"The transcripts of the 2006 meetings, released after a standard five-year delay,
clearly show some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand
the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with supervising."
— Binyamin Appelbaum in the Jan. 12 online New York Times
Academics may recall other examples of comfortably ignorant collegiality.
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Thursday, December 15, 2011
Logic for Jews
New York Daily News , 2:55 PM EST today—
Joe Simon, who dreamed up the star-spangled super hero Captain America while riding on a Manhattan bus during the early days of World War II, died Thursday [Dec. 15] after an undisclosed illness. He was 98.
New York Times , about 10 PM EST today—
Joe Simon, a writer, editor and illustrator of comic books who was a co-creator of the superhero Captain America, conceived out of a patriotic impulse as war was roiling Europe, died on Wednesday [Dec. 14] at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
The discrepancy is perhaps due to initial reports that quoted Simon's family as saying he died "Wednesday night."
Simon was a co-creator of Captain America. For some background on Simon and a photo with his fellow comic artist Jerry Robinson, co-creator of The Joker, see a Washington Post article from this afternoon. Robinson died on either Wednesday, Dec. 7, or Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011.
Jerry Robinson, a pioneer in the early days of Batman comics and a key force in the creation of Robin the Boy Wonder; the Joker; Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred; and Two-Face, died Wednesday afternoon [Dec. 7] in New York City. He was 89.
CNN—
Cartoonist Jerry Robinson, who worked on the earliest Batman comics and claimed credit for creating the super-villain The Joker, died Thursday [Dec. 8] at the age of 89, his family confirmed.
A picture by Robinson—
The Joker in January 1943
with a Nov. 27 calendar page
A non-joke from a more recent November 27—
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Tuesday, November 15, 2011
More Uncertainty*
From this morning's online New York Times—
|
Les Daniels, Historian of Comic Books, Dies at 68 By DENNIS HEVESI Published: November 14, 2011 Les Daniels, one of the earliest historians of comic books— from the launching (off the doomed planet Krypton) of Superman in 1938 through the countercultural comix movement of the ’60s— and an author of horror novels, died on Nov. 5 at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 68. The cause was a heart attack, said Diane Manning, his sister and only immediate survivor. … |
The version at The Comics Reporter may or may not be more accurate—
|
Leslie Noel Daniels III, 1943-2011 Posted 7:00 AM PST Nov. 14, 2011 — (Unsigned, apparently by Tom Spurgeon.) The writer Les Daniels died at an unknown moment before November 4 in his Providence apartment, local media sources have reported. Daniels' body was identified by his friend, the illustrator Steve Gervais, on that day, who told the Providence Journal that it looked like Daniels had been dead a couple of days by the time he saw the body. The police had been called after other acquaintances worried that the they had not been in contact with the writer for an extended period of time. Daniels was a diabetic waiting to receive surgery for a heart-valve replacement. No autopsy was requested. Daniels was 68 years old. … |
* The title refers to yesterday's post Uncertainty.
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Monday, October 24, 2011
The Hunt for Profitable October
Wikipedia today—
Paranormal Activity 3 is a 2011 American supernatural horror film. It is the third film of the Paranormal Activity series and serves as a prequel, set 18 years prior to the events of the first two films. It was released in theaters on October 21, 2011. The film broke financial records upon release, setting a new record for a midnight opening for a horror film ($8M), the best opening day for a horror film in the United States ($26.2M), the highest opening for any film in October, highest opening for a film in the fall (Sep-Oct), and setting a record opening for the franchise ($54M).
So much for Celebration of Mind.
(Background: Last year's Paranormal post of October 23.)
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Thursday, September 8, 2011
Starring the Diamond
"In any geometry satisfying Pappus's Theorem,
the four pairs of opposite points of 83
are joined by four concurrent lines."
— H. S. M. Coxeter (see below)
Continued from Tuesday, Sept. 6—
The Diamond Star
The above is a version of a figure from Configurations and Squares.
Yesterday's post related the the Pappus configuration to this figure.
Coxeter, in "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs," also relates Pappus to the figure.
Some excerpts from Coxeter—
The relabeling uses the 8 superscripts
from the first picture above (plus 0).
The order of the superscripts is from
an 8-cycle in the Galois field GF(9).
The relabeled configuration is used in a discussion of Pappus—
(Update of Sept. 10, 2011—
Coxeter here has a note referring to page 335 of
G. A. Miller, H. F. Blichfeldt, and L. E. Dickson,
Theory and Applications of Finite Groups , New York, 1916.)
Coxeter later uses the the 3×3 array (with center omitted) again to illustrate the Desargues configuration—
The Desargues configuration is discussed by Gian-Carlo Rota on pp. 145-146 of Indiscrete Thoughts—
"The value of Desargues' theorem and the reason why the statement of this theorem has survived through the centuries, while other equally striking geometrical theorems have been forgotten, is in the realization that Desargues' theorem opened a horizon of possibilities that relate geometry and algebra in unexpected ways."
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Sunday, June 19, 2011
Metalibrarianship
This screenshot was suggested by the word "metalibrarianship" in a Bloomsday 2011 post by artist Steve Richards.
Note the words in the search field.
The phrase "Dublin Core metadata" refers to a city in Ohio, not in Ireland.
Related material— The highlighted phrase below is in the epigraph to Borges's "The Library of Babel"—
"I would, for these causes, wish him that is melancholy, to use both humane and divine authors, voluntarily to impose some taske upon himself, to divert his melancholy thoughts; to study the art of memory, Cosmus Rosselius, Pet. Ravennas, Scenkelius Detectus, or practise brachygraphy, &c. that will aske a great deal of attention: or let him demonstrate a proposition in Euclide in his five last books, extract a square root, or studie Algebra: than which, as gClavius holds, in all humane disciplines nothing can be more excellent and pleasant, so abstruse and recondite, so bewitching, so miraculous, so ravishing, so easie withal and full of delight, omnem humanum captum superare videtur . By this means you may define ex ungue leonem , as the diverbe is, by his thumb alone the bigness of Hercules, or the true dimensions of the great hColossus, Solomons temple, and Domitians amphitheater, out of a little part. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…."
g Ad. 2. definit.2. elem. In disciplinis humanis nihil praestantius reperitur: quippe miracula quaedam numerorum eruit tam abstrusa et recondita, tanta nihilo minus facilitate et voluptate, ut, &c.
h Which contained 1080000 weight of brass.
— The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 4
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Saturday, June 4, 2011
Mystery
"… a little mystery to figure out…." — Bonnie Raitt, 1991
Two writers walk into a bar…
(A phrase from Immoveable Feast on May 28, 2005. See also May 28 this year.)
Yesterday's post First Class featured a picture of Mystique.
A related passage* from a book pictured here May 28—
See also Wallace Stevens on the Center.
* on participation mystique — "The primitive mind
does not differentiate the supernatural from reality,
but rather uses 'mystical participation'
to manipulate the world."
— Wikipedia
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Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Anomalies
Perfect Symmetry (Oct. 2008) and Perfect Symmetry single (Dec. 2008)—
Related science…
Heinz Pagels in Perfect Symmetry (paperback, 1985), p. xvii—
The penultimate chapter of this third part of the book—
as far as speculation is concerned— describes some
recent mathematical models for the very origin of the
universe—how the fabric of space, time and matter can
be created out of absolutely nothing. What could have more
perfect symmetry than absolute nothingness? For the first
time in history, scientists have constructed mathematical
models that account for the very creation of the universe
out of nothing.
On Grand Unified Theories (GUT's) of physics (ibid., 284)—
In spite of the fact that GUTs leave deep puzzles unsolved,
they have gone a long way toward unifying the various
quantum particles. For example, many people are disturbed
by the large numbers of gluons, quarks and leptons. Part of
the appeal of the GUT idea is that this proliferation of
quantum particles is really superficial and that all the gluons
as well at the quarks and leptons may be simply viewed as
components of a few fundamental unifying fields. Under the
GUT symmetry operation these field components transform
into one another. The reason quantum particles appear to
have different properties in nature is that the unifying
symmetry is broken. The various gluons, quarks and leptons
are analogous to the facets of a cut diamond, which appear
differently according to the way the diamond is held but in
fact are all manifestations of the same underlying object.
Related art— Puzzle and Particles…
The Diamond 16 Puzzle (compare with Keane art above)—
—and The Standard Model of particle theory—
The fact that both the puzzle and the particles appear
within a 4×4 array is of course completely coincidental.
See also a more literary approach— "The Still Point and the Wheel"—
"Anomalies must be expected along the conceptual frontier between the temporal and the eternal."
— The Death of Adam , by Marilynne Robinson, Houghton Mifflin, 1998, essay on Marguerite de Navarre
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Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Groups Acting
The LA Times on last weekend's film "Thor"—
"… the film… attempts to bridge director Kenneth Branagh's high-minded Shakespearean intentions with Marvel Entertainment's bottom-line-oriented need to crank out entertainment product."
Those averse to Nordic religion may contemplate a different approach to entertainment (such as Taymor's recent approach to Spider-Man).
A high-minded— if not Shakespearean— non-Nordic approach to groups acting—
"What was wrong? I had taken almost four semesters of algebra in college. I had read every page of Herstein, tried every exercise. Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act . The elements of a group do not have to just sit there, abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can 'produce changes.' In particular, groups arise naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure. And if a group is given abstractly, such as the fundamental group of a simplical complex or a presentation in terms of generators and relators, then it might be a good idea to find something for the group to act on, such as the universal covering space or a graph."
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon's Groups and Geometry in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4 (April 1987), pp. 392-394
"Groups act "… For some examples, see
- The 2×2×2 Cube,
- The Diamond 16 Puzzle,
- The Diamond Theorem, and
- Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
Related entertainment—
High-minded— Many Dimensions—
Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube—
One way of blending high and low—
The high-minded Charles Williams tells a story
in his novel Many Dimensions about a cosmically
significant cube inscribed with the Tetragrammaton—
the name, in Hebrew, of God.
The following figure can be interpreted as
the Hebrew letter Aleph inscribed in a 3×3 square—
The above illustration is from undated software by Ed Pegg Jr.
For mathematical background, see a 1985 note, "Visualizing GL(2,p)."
For entertainment purposes, that note can be generalized from square to cube
(as Pegg does with his "GL(3,3)" software button).
For the Nordic-averse, some background on the Hebrew connection—
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Saturday, May 7, 2011
Bridges
|
24 Frames column in the LA Times Critical Mass: 'Thor' swings his hammer and the critics scream May 6, 2011 | 2:55 pm
Bridges are the key theme of this weekend's "Thor," a film that bridges us from the doldrums of spring releases to the flashier, if not better, world of summer blockbusters. It also serves as another step in the bridge from the first "Iron Man" in 2008 to next summer's superhero all-star jam, "The Avengers." And within the film itself, a superhero actioner about the Norse god of thunder and his adventures in his home of Asgard and on Earth, a rainbow bridge connects the well-regarded Asgard sections of the film with the less successful Earth sections, set in Puente Antiguo, N.M. (which means "Old Bridge"). According to Times critic Kenneth Turan, the film also attempts to bridge director Kenneth Branagh's high-minded Shakespearean intentions with Marvel Entertainment's bottom-line-oriented need to crank out entertainment product. — Patrick Kevin Day |
Related material: Kate and Thor in The Turning and A Bridge Too Far.
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Midnight Purple
From an obituary in tonight's online New York Times —
Margalit Fox on Lanny Friedlander, founder of Reason magazine, who died at 63 on March 19*—
"As Mr. Friedlander conceived it, Reason was neither strictly right-wing libertarian nor strictly left— in modern parlance, neither red nor blue but a purple amalgam of the two. It was genuinely purple at first, as it was run off on a ditto machine."
Related material: Tonight's previous post and, from November 5, 2008—
* The date of Knecht Moves and Supermoon.
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Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Peace and War
This post was suggested by—
- A quotation from Under the Volcano :
"A corpse will be transported by express!" - The wish in a novel by Ernesto Sábato, who died Saturday, April 30,
for a tombstone that says "PEACE" - A statement by another author in this morning's post:
"I think of myself as writing about war," said Robson….
"I try to get away from war, but I can't.
War forces ordinary people to behave extraordinarily."
The above Sábato novel was translated as The Angel of Darkness .
Its Spanish title was "Abaddón el Exterminador " (Abaddon the Exterminator ).
From a customer review of the novel at Amazon.com—
"Early in the book a drunken outcast will see the vision of the Great Beast of Revelation. Near the end he will tell others of what he has seen. Meanwhile Sábato, who was originally trained as a scientist, seeks out the supernatural and the mystical in order to find an antidote to Stalinism, simple-minded 'Progress' and a superficial positivism."
For a more sophisticated vision of the Beast, see The Ninth Gate.
For Abaddon in a less sophisticated antidote to positivism, see The Chronicle of Abaddon the Destroyer: The War in Heaven .
I prefer Charles Williams's approach to War in Heaven .
If there is an afterlife, perhaps Sábato's experience there will be more lively than his novel's tombstone would imply.
He may, despite his wish for heavenly peace, turn out to be (in a phrase from this morning's post) a badly needed "ghost warrior."
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Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Unique Figure
In the landscape of minimalism, John McCracken cuts a unique figure. He is often grouped with the “light and space” artists who formed the West Coast branch of the movement. Indeed, he shares interests in vivid color, new materials, and polished surfaces with fellow Californians enamored of the Kustom Kar culture. On the other hand, his signature works, the “planks” that he invented in 1966 and still makes today, have the tough simplicity and aggressive presence of New York minimalism….
“They kind of screw up a space because they lean,” McCracken has said of the planks. Their tilting, reflective surfaces activate the room, leaving the viewer uncertain of traditional boundaries. He notes that the planks bridge sculpture (identified with the floor) and painting (identified with the wall)….
His ultimate goal, as with all mystics, is unity— not just of painting and sculpture, but of substance and illusion, of matter and spirit, of art and life. Such ideas recall the utopian aspirations of early modernists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky.
Related Art —
Unity
—Roman numeral I
as well as capital I
For a related figure, see a film review by A. O. Scott at The New York Times (September 21, 2010)—
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator— , sounding a lot like — paraphrasing . You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious.
If life signifies nothing, perhaps the tall dark figure above signifies something . Discuss.
Related Art Criticism —
For more on light and space, see this journal on the date of McCracken’s death—
Note planks.
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Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Harvard Hicks
Austin Considine on a Tennessee tourist trap—
"It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines."
It probably doesn't, but a certain academic tourist trap does .
A trio of Harvard hicks—
1. The chairman of the Harvard philosophy department, Sean D. Kelly—
"Football can literally bring meaning to life."
(See also Garry Wills on Kelly, Rite of Spring, and Heisman Trophy.)
2. A professor of English at Harvard, Marjorie Garber, in a deconstructive meditation—
Garber notes that the word "literature" has two meanings– the English department's meaning, and that of other departments' references to "the literature."
"Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other."
— The Use and Abuse of Literature , published by Pantheon on March 29, 2011
3. The president of Harvard, Drew Faust—
A comment recently made to Faust—
“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged…."
Her response—
"Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her 'scold in chief.'"
— University Diaries today. See the excellent commentary there.
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Friday, March 25, 2011
Combinatorial Delight
See Margaret Atwood in this journal.
This link was suggested by the phrase "combinatorial* delight" in last night's quote from Nabokov, which also appears in Douglas Glover's review essay, "Her Life Entire," in Books in Canada , Volume 17, Number 7, October 1988—
Cat's Eye is Atwood's seventh novel. It is dense, intricate, and superb, as thematically diverse and complex as anything she has written. It is what you might expect from a writer at mid-career, mid-life: a portrait of the artist, a summation of what she knows about art and people. It is also an Atwoodian Under the Volcano , a vision of Toronto as Hell.
See also Under the Volcano and Toronto in this journal.
"Right through hell there is a path." –Under the Volcano
* Update: Corrected on Dec. 13, 2014, to "combinational delight."
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Heroic Finger
From The New York Times on February 27th, 1949— the day Elizabeth Taylor turned 17—
"Tragedy enlightens-and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom."
— Arthur Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man"
For an illustration, see the link in last Saturday's Night of the Supermoon to July 2005.
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Thursday, February 17, 2011
Figure in the Carpet
"Why don't you come with me, little girl,
On a magic carpet ride?"
– Steppenwolf lyrics
"I like to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose
one part of the pattern upon another."
– Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory
See also Nabokov at Harvard in today's Crimson
and the Russian boxes of Henry James.
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Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Glad Rags
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Another Reappearing Number
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Sunday, November 7, 2010
Chapter and Verse
Sicut aquila provocans ad volandum pullos suos,
et super eos volitans, expandit alas suas,
et assumpsit eum, atque portavit in humeris suis.
— Deuteronomy 32:11 (Clementine Latin Vulgate)
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Monday, October 11, 2010
Venue
… Don't you know that when you play
at this level there's no ordinary venue?
— Lyrics from Chess
Why don't you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride?
— Steppenwolf lyrics in Star Trek: First Contact
I like to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose
one part of the pattern upon another.
— Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory
See also recent Log24 posts.
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Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Happy birthday to Mira Sorvino (Harvard '89).
Related material: June 9 and June 10, 2008.
A more dramatic presentation, also done on June 9-10, 2008—
Alicia Keys, "Superwoman" video.
Happy dies natalis to Miles Davis—
"… nothing ever truly dies. The universe wastes nothing. Everything is simply… transformed."
— Keanu Reeves in the 2008 "Day the Earth Stood Still." (See today's 11:07 AM entry.)
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Friday, September 24, 2010
Cartoon Graveyard continued
The New York Times today—
Stuart E. Hample,
|
Enlarge This Image
Hample died on Sunday.
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Friday, August 13, 2010
For a Bright Star
The Hunt for Blue August
From Wikipedia's timeline for 1991—
- August 6 – Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.
- August 13 – The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or "Super Nintendo") is released in the United States.
- August 19 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is put under house arrest while vacationing in the Crimea during a coup. The attempted coup, led by Vice President Gennady Yanayev and 7 hard-liners, collapses in less than 72 hours.
- August 20 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Estonia declares its independence from the Soviet Union, and more than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union's parliament building protesting the coup that deposed President Mikhail Gorbachev.
- August 21 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Latvia declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
- August 24 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Ukraine declares independence from Soviet Union.
- August 25 – Student Linus Torvalds posts messages to Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix about the new operating system kernel he has been developing.
- August 25 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Belarus declares independence from Soviet Union.
- August 27 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Moldova declares independence from the Soviet Union.
- August 30 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Azerbaijan declares independence from Soviet Union.
- August 31 – Collapse of the Soviet Union: Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan declare independence from the Soviet Union.
September
- September 2 – The United States recognizes the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
- September 3 – In Hamlet, North Carolina, a grease fire breaks out at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant, killing 25 people.
- September 5–7 – At the 35th Annual Tailhook Symposium in Las Vegas, 83 women and seven men are assaulted.
- September 6 – The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states.
- September 6 – The name Saint Petersburg is restored to Russia's second-largest city, which had been renamed Leningrad in 1924.
"CQ, CQ!" — Jodie Foster's character in Contact
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Thursday, July 1, 2010
Omega at Eight
The "compact key to universal wisdom" passage in the previous post seemed
too well written to be the work of an anonymous webforum author.
Here is a slightly expanded version—
Throughout history mystics and philosophers have sought
a compact key to universal wisdom, a finite formula or text
that would provide the answer to every question. The use of
the Bible, the Koran and the I Ching for divination and the
tradition of the secret books of Hermes Trismegistus and the
medieval Jewish Cabala exemplify this belief or hope. Such
sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from
casual use by being difficult to find as well as difficult to un-
derstand and dangerous to use, tending to answer more quest-
ions and deeper ones than the searcher wishes to ask. The
esoteric book is, like God, simple yet undescribable. It is om-
niscient, and it transforms all who know it. The use of clas-
sical texts to foretell mundane events is considered supersti-
tious nowadays, yet in another sense science is in quest of its
own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws that would explain
all phenomena. In mathematics, where no set of axioms can
hope to prove all true statements, the goal might be a concise
axiomatization of all "interesting" true statements.
Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known
of through human reason, but not known. To know it in detail
one must accept its uncomputable sequence of digits on faith,
like words of a sacred text.
This is Martin Gardner's* and Charles H. Bennett's
revised version of a passage from Bennett's paper
"On Random and Hard-to-Describe Numbers," 1979.
The original passage from Bennett's paper—
Throughout history mystics and philosophers have sought a compact key to
universal wisdom, a finite formula or text which, when known and understood,
would provide the answer to every question. The Bible, the Koran, the mythical
secret books of Hermes Trismegistus, and the medieval Jewish Cabala have
been so regarded. Sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from
casual use by being hard to find, hard to understand when found, and dangerous
to use, tending to answer more and deeper questions than the user wishes to
ask. Like God the esoteric book is simple yet undescribable, omniscient, and
transforms all who know It. The use of classical texts to fortell [sic] mundane events
is considered superstitious nowadays, yet, in another sense, science is in quest of
its own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws which would explain all phenomena.
In mathematics, where no set of axioms can hope to prove all true statements,
the goal might be a concise axiomatization of all "interesting" true statements.
Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known of, but not known,
through human reason. To know it in detail, one would have to accept its un-
computable digit sequence on faith, like words of a sacred text.
The Bennett paper deals with Gregory Chaitin's concept of an "Omega Number."
I prefer the Omega of Josefine Lyche—
See also All Hallows' Eve, 2002.
* Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column
"The Random Number Omega Bids Fair to Hold the Mysteries of the Universe,"
Scientific American, November 1979, 241(5), pp. 20–34.
The column is reprinted as "Chaitin's Omega," Ch. 21, pp. 307-319 in the
collection of Gardner's columns titled Fractal Music, Hypercards and More,
W.H. Freeman & Co., 1991
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Monday, April 26, 2010
Types of Ambiguity
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
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Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Theology 101
Part I — If Superior Beings Exist, How Would We Know?
Part II — Professor Corcoran's Boxes
Part III — Corcoran 101
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Sunday, January 10, 2010
Leaving Las Vegas, continued
A sermon for the father of Kal-El.
See also related material in this journal
on Vegas and on Maniacs.
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Monday, November 2, 2009
For All Souls’ Day
The Interpreter’s House
| From Sunday morning’s October Endgame: A Korean Christian site–
See Mizian Translation Service for |
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part, “The Interpreter’s House“–
“When the Interpreter had shown them this, He has them into the very best room in the house; a very brave room it was. So He bid them look round about, and see if they could find anything profitable there. Then they looked round and round; for there was nothing there to be seen but a very great spider on the wall: and that they overlooked.
MERCY. Then said Mercy, Sir, I see nothing; but Christiana held her peace.
INTER. But, said the Interpreter, look again, and she therefore looked again, and said, Here is not anything but an ugly spider, who hangs by her hands upon the wall. Then said He, Is there but one spider in all this spacious room? Then the water stood in Christiana’s eyes, for she was a woman quick of apprehension; and she said, Yea, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea, and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in her. The Interpreter then looked pleasantly upon her, and said, Thou hast said the truth. This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle.74
Then said the Interpreter again, “The spider taketh hold with their hands (as you see), and is in kings’ palaces’ (Prov. 30:28). And wherefore is this recorded, but to show you, that how full of the venom of sin soever you be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the best room that belongs to the King’s house above!75
CHRIST. I thought, said Christiana, of something of this; but I could not imagine it all. I thought that we were like spiders, and that we looked like ugly creatures, in what fine room soever we were; but that by this spider, this venomous and ill-favoured creature, we were to learn how to act faith, that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands, as I see, and dwells in the best room in the house. God has made nothing in vain.”
Related material:
The spider metaphor in
Under the Volcano
(April 10, 2004) and
an AP obituary
from yesterday.
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Saturday, August 29, 2009
Saturday August 29, 2009
Continued from
Father's Day
last year–
Father's Day
last year–
"For further details,
click on the well."
"The kind of movement Olson urges is
an inward deepening of the image,
an in-sighting of the superimposed
levels of significance within it.
This is the very mode that Jung
suggested for grasping dreams–
not as a sequence in time,
but as revolving around
a nodal complex."
And from Feb. 29, 2008:
and the following day:
— Heraclitus
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Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday June 29, 2009
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter’s Day
Diamond life, lover boy;
we move in space
with minimum waste
and maximum joy.
Diamond Life — Related material from Wikipedia:
for St. Peter’s Day
“Have your people
call my people.“
— George Carlin
Diamond life, lover boy;
we move in space
with minimum waste
and maximum joy.
— Sade, quoted here on
Lincoln’s Birthday, 2003
This is perhaps suitable
for the soundtrack of
the film “Blockheads“
(currently in development)–
Diamond Life — Related material from Wikipedia:
“Uta Frith, in her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma,[5] addresses the superior performance of autistic individuals on the block design [link not in Wikipedia] test. This was also addressed in [an] earlier paper.[6] A particularly interesting article demonstrates the differences in construction time in the performance of the block design task by Asperger syndrome individuals and non-Asperger’s individuals. An essential point here is that in an unsegmented version of the task, Asperger’s individuals performed dramatically faster than non-Asperger’s individuals: [7].”
5. Frith, Uta (2003). Autism: explaining the enigma (2nd ed. ). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Pub. ISBN 0-631-22901-9.
6. Shah A, Frith U (Nov 1993). “Why do autistic individuals show superior performance on the block design task?”. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 34 (8): 1351–64. PMID 8294523.
7. Caron MJ, Mottron L, Berthiaume C, Dawson M (Jul 2006). “Cognitive mechanisms, specificity and neural underpinnings of visuospatial peaks in autism”. Brain 129 (Pt 7): 1789–802. doi:. PMID 16597652. “Fig 3”.
Lover Boy —
Related material from a film (see Calvinist Epiphany, June 17):
Related material from a film (see Calvinist Epiphany, June 17):
Related material from another film:
For the relevance of this maxim to autism, see Markoff Process (March 4, 2009).
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Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday April 12, 2009
Where Entertainment
Is God, continued
Is God, continued
Dialogue from the classic film Forbidden Planet—
"… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one of us gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost."
— Taken from a video (5:18-5:24 of 6:09) at David Lavery's weblog in the entry of Tuesday, April 7.
(Cf. this journal on that date.)
Thanks to Professor Lavery for his detailed notes on his viewing experiences.
My own viewing recently included, on the night of Good Friday, April 10, the spiritually significant film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The mystic circle of 13 aliens at the end of that film, together with Leslie Nielsen's Forbidden Planet remark quoted above, suggests the following:
|
"The aim of Conway’s game M13 is to get the hole at the top point and all counters in order 1,2,…,12 when moving clockwise along the circle." —Lieven Le Bruyn
The illustration is from the weblog entry by Lieven Le Bruyn quoted below. The colored circles represent 12 of the 13 projective points described below, the 13 radial strokes represent the 13 projective lines, and the straight lines in the picture, including those that form the circle, describe which projective points are incident with which projective lines. The dot at top represents the "hole."
From "The Mathieu Group M12 and Conway’s M13-Game" (pdf), senior honors thesis in mathematics by Jeremy L. Martin under the supervision of Professor Noam D. Elkies, Harvard University, April 1, 1996–
"Let P3 denote the projective plane of order 3. The standard construction of P3 is to remove the zero point from a three-dimensional vector space over the field F3 and then identify each point x with -x, obtaining a space with
Conway [3] proposed the following game…. Place twelve numbered counters on the points… of P3 and leave the thirteenth point… blank. (The empty point will be referred to throughout as the "hole.") Let the location of the hole be p; then a primitive move of the game consists of selecting one of the lines containing the hole, say There is an obvious characterization of a move as a permutation in S13, operating on the points of P3. By limiting our consideration to only those moves which return the hole to its starting point…. we obtain the Conway game group. This group, which we shall denote by GC, is a subgroup of the symmetric group S12 of permutations of the twelve points…, and the group operation of GC is concatenation of paths. Conway [3] stated, but did not prove explicitly, that GC is isomorphic to the Mathieu group M12. We shall subsequently verify this isomorphism. The set of all moves (including those not fixing the hole) is given the name M13 by Conway. It is important that M13 is not a group…." [3] John H. Conway, "Graphs and Groups and M13," Notes from New York Graph Theory Day XIV (1987), pp. 18–29. Another exposition (adapted to Martin's notation) by Lieven le Bruyn (see illustration above):
"Conway’s puzzle M13 involves the 13 points and 13 lines of P3. On all but one point numbered counters are placed holding the numbers 1,…,12 and a move involves interchanging one counter and the 'hole' (the unique point having no counter) and interchanging the counters on the two other points of the line determined by the first two points. In the picture [above] the lines are represented by dashes around the circle in between two counters and the points lying on this line are those that connect to the dash either via a direct line or directly via the circle. In the first part we saw that the group of all reachable positions in Conway's M13 puzzle having the hole at the top position contains the sporadic simple Mathieu group M12 as a subgroup." |
For the religious significance of the circle of 13 (and the "hole"), consider Arthur and the 12 knights of the round table, et cetera.
But seriously…
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Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Wednesday April 8, 2009
Good’s Singularity
Irving John “I.J.” Good died Sunday, April 5, 2009.
The date of his death was also Palm Sunday and the day of the Academy of Country Music Awards.
Information from Wikipedia:
Good, 92, was a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park during World War II.
“He was born as Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Jewish family in London. In his publications he was called I. J. Good. He studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938. He did research work under G.H. Hardy and Besicovitch before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his doctorate.
At Bletchley Park, he was initially in Hut 8 under the supervision of Alan Turing…”
[Related material: the death of Turing (a major fan of the Evil Queen in Snow White) and yesterday’s entry]
Wikipedia states that “I. J. Good’s vanity car license plate, hinting at his spylike wartime work, was ‘007 IJG’…. He played chess to county standard, and helped to popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist (he had learned the rules from Turing). In 1965, he described a concept similar to today’s meaning of technological singularity, in that it included in it the advent of superhuman intelligence:
- Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make….
- — Good, I. J. (1965). ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine‘, Advances in Computers, Vol. 6.”
| “Some say the symbol of Apple Computers, the apple with a bite out of it, is a nod to Alan Turing.”– from “Alan Turing and the Apple” at Flickr, uploaded on Epiphany 2006 by guano |
Above: Composite by “guano” at Flickr
Will: Do you like apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?
Happy Spy Wednesday.
Comments Off on Wednesday April 8, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday March 29, 2009
Getting All
the Meaning In
Webpage heading for the
2009 meeting of the
American Comparative
Literature Association:
The mysterious symbols on
the above map suggest the
following reflections:
From A Cure of the Mind: The Poetics of Wallace Stevens, by Theodore Sampson, published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 2000–
Page x:
"… if what he calls 'the spirit's alchemicana' (CP [Collected Poems] 471) addresses itself to the irrational element in poetry, to what extent is such an element dominant in his theory and practice of poetry, and therefore in what way is Stevens' intricate verbal music dependent on his irrational use of language– a 'pure rhetoric of a language without words?' (CP 374)?"
Related material:
| From "'When Novelists Become Cubists:' The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport," by Andre Furlani:
Laurence Zachar argues that Davenport's writing is situated "aux frontieres intergeneriques" where manifold modes are brought into concord: "L'etonnant chez Davenport est la facon don't ce materiau qui parait l'incarnation meme du chaos– hermetique, enigmatique, obscur, avec son tropplein de references– se revele en fait etre construit, ordonne, structure. Plus l'on s'y plonge, et plus l'on distingue de cohesion dans le texte." 'What astonishes in Davenport is the way in which material that seems the very incarnation of chaos– hermetic, enigmatic, obscure, with its proliferation of allusions– in fact reveals itself to be constructed, organized, structured. The more one immerses oneself in them the more one discerns the texts' cohesion.' (62). Davenport also works along the intergeneric border between text and graphic, for he illustrates many of his texts. (1) "The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing," he states in an interview (Hoeppfner 123). Visual imagery is not subordinated to writing in Davenport, who draws on the assemblage practice of superimposing image and writing. "I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page," he writes in the essay "Ernst Machs Max Ernst." "A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. […] The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of Pound, a Brakhage film" (Geography 374-75). Note: (1.) Davenport is an illustrator of books (such as Hugh Kenner's The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters) and journals (such as The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and Paideuma). His art is the subject of Erik Anderson Reece's monograph, A Balance of Quinces, which reveals the inseparable relationship between Davenport's literary and pictorial work. References: Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Hoepffner, Bernard. "Pleasant Hill: An Interview with Guy Davenport." Conjunctions 24 (1995): 118-24. Reece, Erik Anderson. A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions, 1996. Zachar, Laurence. "Guy Davenport: Une Mosaique du genres." Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 21 (1994): 51-63. |
"… when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in."
— Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
Comments Off on Sunday March 29, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Saturday February 28, 2009
Mathematics
and Narrative
continued
and Narrative
continued
Narrative:
xxx
Mathematics:
"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."
— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference, (July 2000), Springer, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97
Mathematics:
"Regular graphs are considered, whose automorphism groups are permutation representations P of the orthogonal groups in various dimensions over GF(2). Vertices and adjacencies are defined by quadratic forms, and after graphical displays of the trivial isomorphisms between the symmetric groups S2, S3, S5, S6 and corresponding orthogonal groups, a 28-vertex graph is constructed that displays the isomorphism between S8 and O6 + (2)."
— J. Sutherland Frame in "Orthogonal Groups over GF(2) and Related Graphs," Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics vol. 642, Theory and Applications of Graphs (Proceedings, Michigan, May 11–15, 1976), edited by Y. Alavi and D. R. Lick, pp. 174-185
"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8!…."
— "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint. This paper gives some context in superstring theory for the following work of Frame:
[F1] J.S. Frame, The classes and representations of the group of 27 lines and 28 bitangents, Annali
di Mathematica Pura ed Applicata, 32 (1951) 83–119.
[F2] J.S. Frame, Some characters of orthogonal groups over the field of two elements, In: Proc. of the
Second Inter. Conf. on the Theory of Groups, Lecture Notes in Math., Vol. 372, pp. 298–314,
Springer, 1974.
[F3] J. S. Frame, Degree polynomials for the orthogonal groups over GF(2), C. R. Math. Rep. Acad.
Sci. Canada 2 (1980) 253–258.
Comments Off on Saturday February 28, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday February 24, 2009
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
to hear about our religion
… that we made up."
|
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:
… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer… A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."
As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.
Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."
|
A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:
For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...
The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,
Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
(Collected Poems, 528)
|
Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:
B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'…. Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."
This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.
More positively…
Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space (or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)
over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."
Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.
Cara:
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.
Comments Off on Tuesday February 24, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Saturday February 14, 2009
The Devil
in the Details
in the Details
Here are clearer pictures of
the Einstein-Gutkind letter
discussed here February 7.
the Einstein-Gutkind letter
discussed here February 7.
The pictures are from
the Bloomsbury Auctions site.
The Bloomsbury Auctions caption for these images is as follows:
303. Einstein (Albert, theoretical physicist, 1879-1955) Autograph Letter signed to Eric B. Gutkind, in German, 1½pp. & envelope, 4to, Princeton, 3rd January 1954, thanking him for a copy of his book and expressing his view of God and Judaism, [The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish… . For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people…], folds, slightly browned ; and a photograph of Gutkind, v.s., v.d.
est. £6000 – £8000
Einstein’s view of God and Judaism.
Eric B. Gutkind (1877-1965), philosopher; author of Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, 1952.
Albert Einstein – see also lot 497Sold for £170000
Sale 649, 15th May 2008
Here is a close reading of the part of the letter itself that Bloomsbury gives in English, transcribed from the above images.
Line-by-line transcription of paragraph 2, starting at line 4 of that paragraph:
... Das Wort Gott ist für mich nichts als Ausdruck und Produkt menschlicher Schwächen, die Bibel eine Sammlung ehrwürdiger, aber doch reichlich primitiver Legenden. Keine noch so feinsinnige Auslegung kann (für mich) etwas daran ändern. Diese verfeinerten Auslegungen sind naturgemäß höchst mannigfaltig und haben so gut wie nichts mit dem Urtext zu schaffen. Für mich ist die unverfälschte jüdische Religion, wie alle anderen Religionen, eine Inkarnation des primitiven Aberglaubens. Und das jüdische Volk, zu dem ich gern gehöre und mit dessen Mentalität ich tief verwachsen bin, hat für mich doch keine andersartige Qualität als alle anderen Völker. So weit meine Erfahrung reicht, ist es auch um nichts besser als andere menschliche Gruppierungen, wenn es auch durch Mangel an Macht gegen die schlimmsten Auswüchse gesichert ist. Ansonsten kann ich nichts "Auserwähltes" an ihm wahrnehmen.The Guardian of May 13, 2008 stated that the following was "translated from German by Joan Stambaugh"–
... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish [German: primitiven] superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
Phrases by Stambaugh that do not appear in the German text are highlighted.
Stambaugh, a philosophy professor, is the author of a work on Buddhism, The Formless Self. For some related material on young men who "go crying 'The world is myself, life is myself'" in May, see Wallace Stevens's "The Pediment of Appearance."
Comments Off on Saturday February 14, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Thursday January 15, 2009
Harvard, Magic,
and The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine for next Sunday:
The Edge of the Mystery, by Matt Bai–
“Weeks before the election of 1960, Norman Mailer, already an accomplished novelist, sat down to write his first major work of political journalism, an essay for Esquire in which he argued that only John F. Kennedy could save America… the only kind of leader who could rescue it, who could sweep in an era of what Mailer called ‘existential’ politics, was a ‘hipster’ hero– someone who welcomed risk and adventure, someone who sought out new experience, both for himself and for the country….
… Mailer essentially created a new genre for a generation of would-be literary philosophers covering politics…. By 1963, Mailer and other idealists were crushed to discover that Kennedy was in fact a fairly conventional and pragmatic politician, more Harvard Yard than Fortress of Solitude.”
Magic and Realism, by Roger Cohen–
“… what I want from the Obama administration is something more than Harvard-to-the-Beltway smarts. I want magical realism.”
Mailer and Cohen, taken together, suggest I should review two authors– Picard and Hesse– I encountered as a Harvard freshman in 1960.
“In the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ in Goethe’s Faust a powerful silence is produced by the powerful word after each verse. There is an active, audible silence after every verse. The things that were moved into position by the word stand motionless in the silence, as if they were waiting to be called back into the silence and to disappear therein. The word not only brings the things out of silence; it also produces the silence in which they can disappear again.”
DER HERR:
Kennst du den Faust?
Kennst du den Faust?
MEPHISTOPHELES:
Den Doktor?
DER HERR:
Meinen Knecht!
knight
O.E. cniht “boy, youth, servant,” common W.Gmc. (cf. O.Fris. kniucht, Du. knecht, kneht “boy, youth, lad,” Ger. Knecht “servant, bondsman, vassal”), of unknown origin. Meaning “military follower of a king or other superior” is from c.1100. Began to be used in a specific military sense in Hundred Years War, and gradually rose in importance through M.E. period until it became a rank in the nobility 16c. The verb meaning “to make a knight of (someone)” is from c.1300. Knighthood is O.E. cnihthad M.H.G. “the period between childhood and manhood;” sense of “rank or dignity of a knight” is from c.1300. The chess piece so called from c.1440.
O.E. cniht “boy, youth, servant,” common W.Gmc. (cf. O.Fris. kniucht, Du. knecht, kneht “boy, youth, lad,” Ger. Knecht “servant, bondsman, vassal”), of unknown origin. Meaning “military follower of a king or other superior” is from c.1100. Began to be used in a specific military sense in Hundred Years War, and gradually rose in importance through M.E. period until it became a rank in the nobility 16c. The verb meaning “to make a knight of (someone)” is from c.1300. Knighthood is O.E. cnihthad M.H.G. “the period between childhood and manhood;” sense of “rank or dignity of a knight” is from c.1300. The chess piece so called from c.1440.
Further background on the word “Knecht”–
Epigraph to Magister Ludi
(Joseph Knecht’s translation):
(Joseph Knecht’s translation):
“… For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”
Comments Off on Thursday January 15, 2009
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Tuesday December 16, 2008
The Square Wheel
(continued)
(continued)
From The n-Category Cafe today:
David Corfield at 2:33 PM UTC quoting a chapter from a projected second volume of a biography:
"Grothendieck’s spontaneous reaction to whatever appeared to be causing a difficulty… was to adopt and embrace the very phenomenon that was problematic, weaving it in as an integral feature of the structure he was studying, and thus transforming it from a difficulty into a clarifying feature of the situation."
John Baez at 7:14 PM UTC on research:
"I just don’t want to reinvent a wheel, or waste my time inventing a square one."
For the adoption and embracing of such a problematic phenomenon, see The Square Wheel (this journal, Sept. 14, 2004).
For a connection of the square wheel with yesterday's entry for Julie Taymor's birthday, see a note from 2002:
Comments Off on Tuesday December 16, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Saturday November 8, 2008
Roman Religion
ET SUPER HANC PETRAM
AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM
MEAM ET PORTAE INFERI
NON PRAEVALEBUNT
ADVERSUS EAM
ET SUPER HANC PETRAMAEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM
MEAM ET PORTAE INFERI
NON PRAEVALEBUNT
ADVERSUS EAM
Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:
“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”
“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….
One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….
The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”
Related material:
Log24 on
August 24,
October 5, and
November 8.
Comments Off on Saturday November 8, 2008
Saturday November 8, 2008
From a
Cartoon Graveyard “That corpse you planted
last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?”
Cartoon Graveyard “That corpse you planted
last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?”
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land“
“In the Roman Catholic tradition, the term ‘Body of Christ’ refers not only to the body of Christ in the spiritual realm, but also to two distinct though related things: the Church and the reality of the transubstantiated bread of the Eucharist….
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘the comparison of the Church with the body casts light on the intimate bond between Christ and his Church. Not only is she gathered around him; she is united in him, in his body….’
….To distinguish the Body of Christ in this sense from his physical body, the term ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ is often used. This term was used as the first words, and so as the title, of the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi of Pope Pius XII.”
Pope Pius XII:
“83. The Sacrament of the Eucharist is itself a striking and wonderful figure of the unity of the Church, if we consider how in the bread to be consecrated many grains go to form one whole, and that in it the very Author of supernatural grace is given to us, so that through Him we may receive the spirit of charity in which we are bidden to live now no longer our own life but the life of Christ, and to love the Redeemer Himself in all the members of His social Body.”
Related material:
Log24 on this date in 2002:
Religious Symbolism
at Princeton
as well as
and a
“striking and wonderful figure”
from this morning’s newspaper–
Comments Off on Saturday November 8, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Thursday October 30, 2008
From the Mountaintop
Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:
“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right angles to form a cross.”
Related material
(Oct. 14, 2004):
|
The Eight
Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:
|
The eight-rayed star may be taken
as representing what is known
in philosophy as a “universal.”
See also
Comments Off on Thursday October 30, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Monday October 27, 2008
Halloween
Meditation
for…
Meditation
for…
5:07:33 AM ET
33 Retreat
THE IMAGE
Mountain under heaven:
the image of RETREAT.
Thus the superior man
keeps the inferior man
at a distance,
not angrily
but with reserve.
“The mountain rises up under heaven, but owing to its nature it finally comes to a stop. Heaven on the other hand retreats upward before it into the distance and remains out of reach. This symbolizes the behavior of the superior man toward a climbing inferior; he retreats into his own thoughts as the inferior man comes forward. He does not hate him, for hatred is a form of subjective involvement by which we are bound to the hated object. The superior man shows strength (heaven) in that he brings the inferior man to a standstill (mountain) by his dignified reserve.” —Richard Wilhelm
Comments Off on Monday October 27, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Saturday October 25, 2008
Actual Being
The New York Times Book Review online today has a review by Sam Tanenhaus of a new John Updike book.
The title of the review (not the book) is "Mr. Wizard."
"John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone (60 books, almost 40 of them novels or story collections) has been supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose. He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world– from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual– emerges, as if for the first time, in the completeness of its actual being."
Rolling Stone interview with Sting, February 7, 1991:
"'I was brought up in a very strong Catholic community,' Sting says. 'My parents were Catholic, and in the Fifties and Sixties, Catholicism was very strong. You know, they say, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic." In a way I'm grateful for that background. There's a very rich imagery in Catholicism: blood, guilt, death, all that stuff.' He laughs."
RS 597, Feb. 7, 1991
Last night's 12:00 AM
Log24 entry:
From this date six years ago:
From this morning's newspaper,
a religious meditation I had not
seen last night:
Related material:
Juneteenth through
Midsummer Night, 2007and
Comments Off on Saturday October 25, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Sunday September 7, 2008
Bringing Change
to Washington
to Washington
First in War,
First in Peace…
| Chairman George on February 22, 1999
|
 |
Thus the |
Change for Washington:
For the details, see
yale.edu/lawweb:
“As important to Chinese civilization as the Bible is to Western culture, the I Ching or Book of Changes is one of the oldest treasures of world literature. Yet despite many commentaries written over the years, it is still not well understood in the English-speaking world. In this masterful [sic] new interpretation, Jack Balkin returns the I Ching to its rightful place….
\
Jack M. Balkin
\Jack M. Balkin
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project. His books and articles range over many different fields….”
Comments Off on Sunday September 7, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Sunday August 24, 2008
Cross-Purposes
Yesterday’s entry, Absurdities, quoted Erich Heller:
“All relevant objective truths are born and die as absurdities. They come into being as the monstrous claim of an inspired rebel and pass away with the eccentricity of a superstitious crank.”
The context for this remarkable saying is Heller’s essay “The Hazard of Modern Poetry.” (See p. 270 in the links below.)
Discussing “the century of Pascal and Hobbes,” he says (see the link to p. 269 below) that
“… as for spiritual cunning, it was in the conceits of metaphysical poetry, in the self-conscious ambiguities of poetical language (there are, we are told, as many types of it as deadly sins), and in the paradoxes of Pascal’s religious thought. For ambiguity and paradox are the manner of speaking when reality and symbol, man’s mind and his soul, are at cross-purposes.”
Heller’s description of “relevant objective truths” as “absurdities” seems to be an instance of such ambiguity and paradox. For further details, see
The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (Harvest paperback, 1975)–
“The Hazard of Modern Poetry” (pp. 263-300), Section 1, pages
263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272.
For material related to Pascal, see the five Log24 entries ending on D-Day, 2008.
For material related to Hobbes, see the five Log24 entries ending on St. Patrick’s Day, 2007.
Comments Off on Sunday August 24, 2008
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Saturday August 23, 2008
Absurdities
“All relevant objective truths are born and die as absurdities. They come into being as the monstrous claim of an inspired rebel and pass away with the eccentricity of a superstitious crank.”
— Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind
Comments Off on Saturday August 23, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Tuesday July 8, 2008
Translation
Yesterday's entry discussed T.E. Hulme— a co-founder, with Ezra Pound, of the Imagist school of poetry. Recent entries on randomness, using the New York Lottery as a source of examples, together with Hulme's approach to poetry discussed yesterday, suggest the following meditation– what Charles Cameron might call a "bead game."
Part I:
Ezra Pound on Imagism (from Gaudier-Brzeska,* 1916):
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. [….]
The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: —
"The apparition of these
faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a
wet, black bough."
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant† when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.
Part II:
Eleanor Goodman on translation (in a July 7, 2008, weblog entry, "Pound and Process: An Introduction"):
"… all translations exist on an axis. Indeed, they exist in a manifold of many axes intersecting. One axis is that of foreignness and familiarity. One axis is that of structural mimicry, another of melodic mimicry. And one axis is that of semantic fidelity."
Goodman's use of the word "manifold" here is of course poetic, not mathematical.
Part III:
New York Lottery, mid-day on July 7, 2008: 771.
Part IV:
A Google search on manifold 771 reveals that 771 is, according to Google's scanners, an alternate form (a "translation," via structural mimicry) of a script version of the letter M. (See Part V below.)
Part V:
Long version of a
one-image poem —
"Random apparition:
manifold translated."
This poem summarizes the
relationship (See Part IV above) of
the (apparently) random number 771
to the rather non-random concept of
a linear manifold:
[Such lines and planes have not
been, in mathematical language,
"translated."]
— Paul R. Halmos,
Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces,
Princeton University Press, 1948
Short version of the
above one-image poem —
771:
* Gaudier-Brzeska created the artifact shown on the cover of Solid Objects, a work of literary theory by Douglas Mao. For more on that artifact and on the New York Lottery, see Sermon for St. Peter's Day. "It is not in the premise that reality/ Is a solid…." –Wallace Stevens
† "I was like, Oh My God." —Poet Billy Collins at Chautauqua Institution, morning of July 7, 2008
Comments Off on Tuesday July 8, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday June 24, 2008
Random Walk with
X's and O's
X's and O's
Part I: Random Walk
Part II: X's
3/22:
"Shakespeare, Rilke, Joyce,
Beckett and Levi-Strauss are
instances of authors for whom
chiasmus and chiastic thinking
Beckett and Levi-Strauss are
instances of authors for whom
chiasmus and chiastic thinking
are of central importance,
for whom chiasmus is a
generator of meaning,
tool of discovery and
philosophical template."
for whom chiasmus is a
generator of meaning,
tool of discovery and
philosophical template."
— Chiasmus in the
Drama of Life
Drama of Life
Part III: O's —
A Cartoon Graveyard
in honor of the late
Gene Persson †
Today's Garfield —
See also
Midsummer Eve's Dream:
"The meeting is closed
with the lord's‡ prayer
and refreshments are served."
† Producer of plays and musicals
including Album and
The Ruling Class
‡ Lower case in honor of
Peter O'Toole, star of
the film version of
The Ruling Class.
(This film, together with
O'Toole's My Favorite Year,
may be regarded as epitomizing
Hollywood's Jesus for Jews.)
Those who prefer
less randomness
in their religion
may consult O'Toole's
more famous film work
involving Islam,
as well as
the following structure
discussed here on
the date of Persson's death:
"The Moslems thought of the
central 1 as being symbolic
of the unity of Allah."
Comments Off on Tuesday June 24, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Monday June 16, 2008
Bloomsday for Nash:
The Revelation Game
(American Mathematical Society Feb. 2008
review of Steven Brams’s Superior Beings:
If They Exist, How Would We Know?)
(pdf, 15 megabytes)
"Brams does not attempt to prove or disprove God. He uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios….
In the 'Revelation Game,' for example, the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB's existence
2) P can not believe in SB's existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself
1) P can believe in SB's existence
2) P can not believe in SB's existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself
Each player also has a primary and secondary goal. For the Person, the primary goal is to have his belief (or non-belief) confirmed by evidence (or lack thereof). The secondary goal is to 'prefer to believe in SB’s existence.' For the Supreme Being, the primary goal is to have P believe in His existence, while the secondary goal is to not reveal Himself. These goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best (4) to worst (1). We end up with a matrix as follows (the first number in the parentheses represents the SB's ranking for that box; the second number represents P's ranking):
The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?"
Analogously:
|
Lotteries on Bloomsday, June 16, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
|
Mid-day (No belief) |
418
No belief, |
064
Revelation |
|
Evening (Belief) |
709
Belief without |
198
|
The holy image
denoting belief and revelation
may be interpreted as
a black hole or as a
symbol by James Joyce:
|
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Chapter 17 |
Comments Off on Monday June 16, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
Friday June 6, 2008
The Dance of Chance
"Harvard seniors have
every right to demand a
Harvard-calibre speaker."
— Adam Goldenberg in
The Harvard Crimson
"Look down now, Cotton Mather"
— Wallace Stevens,
Harvard College
Class of 1901
For Thursday, June 5, 2008,
commencement day for Harvard's
Class of 2008, here are the
Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:
Mid-day 025
Evening 761
Thanks to the late
Harvard professor
Willard Van Orman Quine,
the mid-day number 025
suggests the name
"Isaac Newton."
(For the logic of this suggestion,
see On Linguistic Creation
and Raiders of the Lost Matrix.)
Thanks to Google search, the
name of Newton, combined with
Thursday's evening number 761,
suggests the following essay:
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE:
|
What can a non-scientist add?
Perhaps the Log24 entries for
the date of Koshland's death:
The Philosopher's Stone
and The Rock.
Or perhaps the following
observations:
On the figure of 25 parts
discussed in
"On Linguistic Creation"–
"The Moslems thought of the
central 1 as being symbolic
of the unity of Allah. "
— Clifford Pickover
"At the still point,
there the dance is."
— T. S. Eliot,
Harvard College
Class of 1910
Comments Off on Friday June 6, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Hall of Mirrors
Epigraph to
“Deploying the Glass Bead Game, Part II,”
by Robert de Marrais:
“For a complete logical argument,”
Arthur began
with admirable solemnity,
“we need two prim Misses –”
“Of course!” she interrupted.
“I remember that word now.
And they produce — ?”
“A Delusion,” said Arthur.
— Lewis Carroll,
Sylvie and Bruno
Prim Miss 1:
Erin O’Connor’s weblog “Critical Mass” on May 24:
Erin O’Connor’s weblog “Critical Mass” on May 24:
Roger Rosenblatt’s Beet [Ecco hardcover, Jan. 29, 2008] is the latest addition to the noble sub-genre of campus fiction….
Curricular questions and the behavior of committees are at once dry as dust subjects and areas ripe for sarcastic send-up– not least because, as dull as they are, they are really both quite vital to the credibility and viability of higher education.
Here’s an excerpt from the first meeting, in which committee members propose their personal plans for a new, improved curriculum:
“… Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers, they would understand history with hands-on excitement.”
To demonstrate his idea, he’d brought along a shoe box full of toy doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. “We get it,” he said.
“That’s quite interesting, Molton,” said Booth [a chemist]. “But is it rigorous enough?”
At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.
“Rigor is so important,” said Kettlegorf.
“We must have rigor,” said Booth.
“You may be sure,” said the offended Kramer. “I never would propose anything lacking rigor.”
Smythe inhaled and looked at the ceiling. “I think I may have something of interest,” he said, as if he were at a poker game and was about to disclose a royal flush. “My proposal is called ‘Icons of Taste.’ It would consist of a galaxy of courses affixed to several departments consisting of lectures on examples of music, art, architecture, literature, and other cultural areas a student needed to indicate that he or she was sophisticated.”
“Why would a student want to do that?” asked Booth.
“Perhaps sophistication is not a problem for chemists,” said Smythe. Lipman tittered.
“What’s the subject matter?” asked Heilbrun. “Would it have rigor?”
“Of course it would have rigor. Yet it would also attract those additional students Bollovate is talking about.” Smythe inhaled again. “The material would be carefully selected,” he said. “One would need to pick out cultural icons the students were likely to bring up in conversation for the rest of their lives, so that when they spoke, others would recognize their taste as being exquisite yet eclectic and unpredictable.”
“You mean Rembrandt?” said Kramer.
Smythe smiled with weary contempt. “No, I do not mean Rembrandt. I don’t mean Beethoven or Shakespeare, either, unless something iconic has emerged about them to justify their more general appeal.”
“You mean, if they appeared on posters,” said Lipman.
“That’s it, precisely.”
Lipman blushed with pride.
“The subject matter would be fairly easy to amass,” Smythe said. “We could all make up a list off the top of our heads. Einstein–who does have a poster.” He nodded to the ecstatic Lipman. “Auden, for the same reason. Students would need to be able to quote ‘September 1939[ or at least the last lines. And it would be good to teach ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ as well, which is off the beaten path, but not garishly. Mahler certainly. But Cole Porter too. And Sondheim, I think. Goya. Warhol, it goes without saying, Stephen Hawking, Kurosawa, Bergman, Bette Davis. They’d have to come up with some lines from Dark Victory, or better still, Jezebel. La Dolce Vita. Casablanca. King of Hearts. And Orson, naturally. Citizen Kane, I suppose, though personally I prefer F for Fake.”
“Judy!” cried Heilbrun.
“Yes, Judy too. But not ‘Over the Rainbow.’ It would be more impressive for them to do ‘The Trolley Song,’ don’t you think?” Kettlegorf hummed the intro.
“Guernica,” said Kramer. “Robert
Capa.” “Edward R. Murrow,” said Lipman.
“No! Don’t be ridiculous!” said Smythe, ending Lipman’s brief foray into the world of respectable thought.
“Marilyn Monroe!” said Kettlegorf.
“Absolutely!” said Smythe, clapping to indicate his approval.
“And the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Booth, catching on. “And the Chrysler Building.”
“Maybe,” said Smythe. “But I wonder if the Chrysler Building isn’t becoming something of a cliche.”
Peace had had enough. “And you want students to nail this stuff so they’ll do well at cocktail parties?”
Smythe sniffed criticism, always a tetchy moment for him. “You make it sound so superficial,” he said.
Prim Miss 2:
Siri Hustvedt speaks at Adelaide Writers’ Week– a story dated March 24,
“I have come to think of my books as echo chambers or halls of mirrors in which themes, ideas, associations continually reflect and reverberate inside a text. There is always point and counterpoint, to use a musical illustration. There is always repetition with difference.”
A Delusion:
Exercise — Identify in the following article the sentence that one might (by unfairly taking it out of context) argue is a delusion.
(Hint: See Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.)
Why Borovik’s Figure 4
is included above:
Euclid, Peirce, L’Engle:
No Royal Roads.
And now, perhaps, his brother Cornell Capa, who died Friday.
† Related material: Log24 on March 24– Death and the Apple Tree— with an excerpt from George MacDonald, and an essay by David L. Neuhouser mentioning the influence of MacDonald on Lewis Carroll– Lewis Carroll: Author, Mathematician, and Christian (pdf).
No Royal Roads.
For more on Prim Miss 2
and deploying
the Glass Bead Game,
see the previous entry.
And now, perhaps, his brother Cornell Capa, who died Friday.† Related material: Log24 on March 24– Death and the Apple Tree— with an excerpt from George MacDonald, and an essay by David L. Neuhouser mentioning the influence of MacDonald on Lewis Carroll– Lewis Carroll: Author, Mathematician, and Christian (pdf).
Comments Off on Sunday May 25, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Thursday May 22, 2008
The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art
Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT
THE JUDGMENT
Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.
“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:
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.”
See also Epiphany 2008:
“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54
|
…. Now thou art an 0 |
“…. 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.
Comments Off on Thursday May 22, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Tuesday May 20, 2008
The Unembarrassed Peddler
From yesterday’s New York Times, in an obituary of a teacher of reporters:
(For readers of
the previous entry
who would like to
know more about
purchasing the
Brooklyn Bridge)
From yesterday’s New York Times, in an obituary of a teacher of reporters:
“He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: ‘Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady’s ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'”
Spelling Your Way
To Success
To Success
Chapter I:
“gnawing on a
desiccated potato”
“gnawing on a
desiccated potato”
From the website
Blue Star Traders:
Blue Star Traders:
| How the ancient crystal skull Synergy came to the Western World…
This skull first came to light when it was acquired about two and a half decades ago by a European businessman and avid hiker, as he traveled around Central and South America. He acquired the skull from a very old native man, in a tiny village in the Andes, near the borders of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. He was just passing through, and had come upon the small settlement while looking for a place to stay for the night. He wandered into the village and was greeted with smiles and an invitation to share a meal. This gentleman, George, speaks several languages, and he usually has at least a few words in common with most of the people he meets in his travels– enough to get by, anyway. Although he didn’t speak the same language as most of the people in this isolated village, there was an instant connection between them, and they managed with the smattering of Spanish and Portuguese that a few of them knew. In need of shelter for the night, George was offered a spot for his sleeping bag, near the fire, in the dwelling of an elderly man. After a peaceful evening in the old man’s company, George gratefully accepted a simple breakfast and got ready to take his leave. As he thanked the man for his generous hospitality, the elder led George to an old chest. Opening the crumbling wooden lid, he took out the crystal skull, touched it reverently, and handed it to George. Awed by an artifact of such obvious antiquity, beauty and value, yet uncertain what he was expected to do with it, George tried to hand it back. But the old man urged it upon him, making it clear that he was to take it with him. Curious about the history of such a thing, George tried to find out what the villagers knew about it. One young fellow explained in halting Spanish that the skull had come into the possession of a much loved Catholic nun, in Peru. She was quite old when she died in the early 1800’s, and she had given it to the old man’s “Grandfather” when he was just a boy. (Note: It’s hard to say if this was really the man’s grandfather, or just the honorary title that many natives use to designate an ancestor or revered relative.) The nun told the boy and his father that the skull was “an inheritance from a lost civilization” and, like the Christian cross, it was a symbol of the transcendence of Soul over death. She said that it carried the message of immortal life and the illumination that we may discover when we lose our fear of death. She gave it to the boy and his father, asking them to safeguard it until the “right” person came to get it– and share its message with the world. It had been brought to that land from “somewhere else” and needed to wait until the right person could help it to continue its journey. “Your heart will know the person,” she said. “What a strange story,” thought George. |
“… ‘Supercholita’ tiene sobre todo una clara vocación divulgadora de la cultura andina. No en vano Valdez recibió su primer premio por explicar mediante este personaje cómo se cocina el ‘chuño,’ una típica patata deshidratada muy consumida en el altiplano boliviano.”
Chapter II:
“gazing on the symmetry
of a lady’s ankle”
“gazing on the symmetry
of a lady’s ankle”
From “Sinatra: A Man
and His Music, Part II”
(reshown. prior to
“It Happened in Brooklyn,”
by Turner Classic Movies
on Sunday, May 11, 2008):
“Luck, be a lady tonight.”
and His Music, Part II”
(reshown. prior to
“It Happened in Brooklyn,”
by Turner Classic Movies
on Sunday, May 11, 2008):
“Luck, be a lady tonight.”
astragalo-, astragal-
(Greek: anklebone, talus ball of ankle joint; dice, die [the Greeks made these from ankle bones])
astragalomancy, astragyromancy
Divination with dice, knuckle bones, stones, small pieces of wood, or ankle bones which were marked with letters, symbols, or dots. Using dice for divination is a form of astragalomancy.
Chapter III:
“unparalleled ecstasy”
Bright Star —
“unparalleled ecstasy”
Bright Star —
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte
— Rubén Darío
Image adapted from
Blue Star Traders
Related material:
The New York Lottery
mid-day number yesterday–
719– and 7/19.
Comments Off on Tuesday May 20, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Sunday May 11, 2008
In memory of poet May Swenson and sports novelist Rozanne Ruth “Zan” Knudson:
Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times:
“It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in ‘Pat and Mike.’
The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, ‘You are the wrong jockey for this chick.’
‘You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,’ he says, later adding, ‘When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?'”
Summary of M. A. Foster’s
The Gameplayers of Zan:
The Gameplayers of Zan:
“Then she has a vision of herself,
enclosed by an unfolded hypercube,
and then an immense screen
behind it covered by complex,
ever-shifting patterns….”
“Christ! What are
patterns for?”
“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?“
— Robert A. Heinlein
Comments Off on Sunday May 11, 2008
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Saturday March 8, 2008
Tilting at
Whirligigs
Whirligigs
of literary “signature passages” —
An answer:
“The whirligig of time”
— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
and
Hamilton’s Whirligigs
Click image to enlarge.
Related material:
Rotation in the complex plane.
The plane was discovered
in the late 1700’s by Wessel:
|
Caspar Wessel
by J.J. O’Connor “Wessel’s paper [in Danish] was not noticed by the mathematical community until 1895… A French translation… was published in 1897 but an English translation of this most remarkable work was not published until 1999 (exactly 200 years after it was first published)…. We have called Wessel’s work remarkable, and indeed although the credit has gone to Argand, many historians of mathematics feel that Wessel’s contribution was [1]:-
In the [1] article the approaches by Argand and Wessel are compared and contrasted. Of course Wessel was a surveyor and his paper was motivated by his surveying and cartography work:-
However more is claimed for Wessel’s single mathematical paper than the first geometric interpretation of complex numbers. In [3] Crowe credits Wessel with being the first person to add vectors. Again this shows the depth of Wessel’s thinking but again, as the paper was unnoticed it had no influence on mathematical development despite appearing in the Memoirs of the Royal Danish Academy which by any standard was a major source of publications…. 1. … Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990). 3. M.J. Crowe, A History of Vector Analysis (Notre Dame, 1967).” |
Comments Off on Saturday March 8, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Tuesday February 19, 2008
Sumerian
Cuneiform
Cuneiform
An: sky, heaven
also
digir (dingir): god, goddess
“The sigil was an eight-limbed
asterisk made of fine dark lines,,,,
An X superimposed on a plus sign.
It looked permanent.”
— Fritz Leiber,
“Damnation Morning,”
1959 short story
in Changewar
asterisk made of fine dark lines,,,,
An X superimposed on a plus sign.
It looked permanent.”
— Fritz Leiber,
“Damnation Morning,”
1959 short story
in Changewar
Ace edition, May 1, 1983
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday February 17, 2008
Big Time
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
|
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's 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.
Bordered version 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.
Comments Off on Sunday February 17, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Monday February 4, 2008
New York Lottery,
Super Bowl Sunday, 2008:
Super Bowl Sunday, 2008:
Susan Sontag,
“Against Interpretation“
“Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation.”
A Certain Code
Edward Gibbon on the Trinity:
“perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss”
Friedrich Nietzsche on the 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.”
Frank Sinatra on narrative:
“You gotta be true to your code.”
The Lottery Code:
Log24, Feb. 27, 2007
Comments Off on Monday February 4, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Friday January 25, 2008
Requiem for a Curator
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question
'What is truth?'"
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
book introduction quoted
as epigraph to
Art Wars
book introduction quoted
as epigraph to
Art Wars
"I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another."
Figure by Coxeter
reminiscent of the
Ojo de Dios of
Mexico's Sierra Madre
In memory of
National Gallery
of Art curator
Philip Conisbee,
who died on
January 16:
|
"the God's-eye of the author"
— Dorothy Sayers, |
"one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions"
— Vladimir Nabokov, |
Comments Off on Friday January 25, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Thursday January 3, 2008
Context-Sensitive Theology
continued:
continued:
The Revelation Game
New Year’s reading for
the tigers of Princeton
Two reviews from the February 2008 Notices of the American Mathematical Society:
From a review of
A Certain Ambiguity
(A Mathematical Novel)
by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal
Princeton University Press
Hardcover, US$27.95, 281 pages —
“From the Habermas-Lyotard debate (see [1] for an introduction) to the Sokal hoax ([4]), to recent atheist manifestos on the bestseller lists (e.g., [2]) the question of foundations for intellectual thought and especially for intellectual debate has never been more critical or urgent.”
[1] M. Bérubé, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education, W. W. Norton, 2006.
[2] S. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, Knopf, 2006.
[4] A. Sokal and P. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Picador, 1999.
Also in the February Notices– a review of a book, Superior Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know?, in which the author
“.. uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios….
In the ‘Revelation Game,’ for example,
the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB’s existence
2) P can not believe in SB’s existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself….
… [and] goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best… to worst…. The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?”
The answer is what one might expect from the American Mathematical Society:
“… the dominant strategy for both is when SB does not reveal Himself and P does not believe in His existence.”
Other strategies are, of course, possible. See last year’s entries.
See also
the life of John Nash,
for whom the above
equilibrium is named.
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Friday, December 28, 2007
Friday December 28, 2007
The Gospel according to
Harvard Business School:
Harvard Business School:
Last Temptation
The New York Times today:
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Teen Vogue
From The Harbus, the Harvard Business School independent weekly, a 4/28/03 interview with the late Steven Florio: HARBUS: It seems you attribute the ability to ‘invest in quality’ and to say ‘we’re going this direction because it’s going to help us be the best’ directly to being a private company. SF: For the 10 years I’ve been CEO, that has been the marching order I’ve given to my staff, to all the Editors and Publishers, and quite frankly the order that has been given to me by Newhouse. Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t get memos from him saying ‘I noticed that we spent an additional $100,000 last year on Christmas parties, can you please cut this back?’. He’s not a guy who’s just standing on top of the building throwing off $100 bills. He wants the company run efficiently. On the other hand, if I say to him we really ought to take a hard look at this idea called ‘Teen Vogue’, he’ll smile, as he did, and say ‘The rest of the industry is cutting back, and you want to do a $50 million launch?’. And I said ‘It’s time. It is time for this magazine, it is time for line extension, and we should do it’. I have a management meeting once a week, which he [Newhouse] attends more often than not, where I presented the new magazine idea to the whole management team, which is only 6 or 7 people. I looked at him and said ‘We’re doing it’, and he said ‘Go ahead, it’s a great idea’. |
A Great Idea:
 Model: Irina Kulikova |
 Kulikova
elsewhere |
Related material:
Plato’s “Heaven of Ideas”
Welcome to the Cave
April 22, 2007
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Friday, December 21, 2007
Friday December 21, 2007
Soft-Rock Jesus
An entry in memory of…
Reflections of a screenwriter:
“I began to doubt the premises
of all the stories I had ever
told myself, a common condition
but one I found troubling.”
— Joan Didion in
The White Album
On Fogelberg’s “Leader of the Band”
tribute to his father:
“Dan included his father’s arrangement
of ‘The Washington Post March’….
Dan even showed up during the band’s
recording session to play cymbals….”
“Gosh, does this movie
have it all or what?”
— The Washington Post,
Dec. 21, 2007
Such, Denise, is the language of love.
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Wednesday December 19, 2007
Tutelary Figures
An entry in memory of
Dr. Joseph L. Henderson,
Jungian analyst, who died
on Nov. 17 at 104
(An obituary appears in
today’s New York Times.)
Some remarks by Dr. Henderson:
The myth of the hero is the most common and the best known myth in the world… classical mythology… Greece and Rome… Middle Ages… Far East… contemporary primitive tribes. It also appears in dreams… obvious dramatic… profound… importance. P. 101
And Stan Carlisle had
Dr. Lilith Ritter:
See also the noir entry on
“Nightmare Alley” for
Winter Solstice 2002,
as well as a solstice-related
commentary on I Ching
Hexagram 41, Decrease.
“Nightmare Alley” for
Winter Solstice 2002,
as well as a solstice-related
commentary on I Ching
Hexagram 41, Decrease.
Related material:
Dr. Dyane N. Sherwood and
Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, authors
of Transformation of the Psyche
(Routledge, Nov. 7, 2003)
Dr. Henderson is said to
have been, in his youth,
a student of Thornton Wilder
as well as of Dr. Jung.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Sunday December 16, 2007
Mad Phaedrus
Meets Mad Ezra
Meets Mad Ezra
"Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." –Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This apparent conflict between eternity and time, fixity and motion, permanence and change, is resolved by the philosophy of the I Ching and by the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Consider, for example, the image of The Well
as discussed here on All Saints' Day 2003 and in the previous entry.
As background, consider the following remarks of James Hillman in "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique," Part III: Persons as Images—
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"To conceive images as static is to forget that they are numens that move. Charles Olson, a later poet in this tradition, said: 'One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… always, always one perception must must must move instanter, on another.' 80 Remember Lavater and his insistence on instantaneity for reading the facial image. This is a kind of movement that is not narrational, and the Imagists had no place for narrative. 'Indeed the great poems to come after the Imagist period– Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets; Pound’s Cantos; Williams’s Paterson– contain no defining narrative.' 81 The kind of movement Olson urges is an inward deepening of the image, an in-sighting of the superimposed levels of significance within it. 82 This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams– not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex. If dreams, then why not the dreamers. We too are not only a sequence in time, a process of individuation. We are also each an image of individuality."
80 The New American Poetry (D. M. Allen, ed.) N.Y.: Evergreen, Grove, 1960, pp. 387-88. from Jones, p. 42. 81 Jones,* p. 40. 82 H. D. later turned narration itself into image by writing a novel in which the stories were "compounded like faces seen one on top of another," or as she says "superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives" (Jones, p. 42). Cf. Berry,** p. 63: "An image is simultaneous. No part precedes or causes another part, although all parts are involved with each other… We might imagine the dream as a series of superimpositions, each event adding texture and thickening to the rest." * Imagist Poetry (Peter Jones, ed.) London: Penguin, 1972 ** The contrast between image simultaneity and narrative succession, and the different psychological effects of the two modes, is developed by Patricia Berry, "An Approach to the Dream," Spring 1974 (N. Y./Zürich: Spring Publ.), pp. 63, 68-71 |
Hillman also says that
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"Jung’s 'complex' and Pound's definition of Image and Lavater's 'whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once' are all remarkably similar. Pound calls an Image, 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'… 'the Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy'… 'a Vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' 79 Thus the movement, the dynamics, are within the complex and not only between complexes, as tensions of opposites told about in narrational sequences, stories that require arbitrary syntactical connectives which are unnecessary for reading an image where all is given at once."
79 These definitions of Image by Pound come from his various writings and can all be found in Jones, pp. 32-41. Further on complex and image, see J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-17, London: Secker & Warburg, 1975, pp. 164-68. |
These remarks may help the reader to identify with Ada during her well-viewing in Cold Mountain (previous entry):
"She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo…."
If such complexity can be suggested by Hexagram 48, The Well, alone, consider the effect of the "cluster of fused ideas… endowed with energy" that is the entire 64-hexagram I Ching.
Related material: St. Augustine's Day 2006
Comments Off on Sunday December 16, 2007
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Wednesday October 31, 2007
On Time
Anthony Hopkins on time:
"For me time is God, God is time…. I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time. The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time." —Cinema Blend
"For me time is God, God is time. It's an equation, like an Einstein equation." —Washington Square News
A Marxist on time:
"God demands scrutiny beyond his menacingly comic aspects. Primarily, the [Saramago] Gospel 's God is time, and not truth, the other attribute he asserts. Saramago, a Marxist (an eccentric one), and not a Christian, subverts St. Augustine on the theodicy of time. If time is God, then God can be forgiven nothing, and who would desire to forgive him anyway?"
—Harold Bloom on José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
Related material:
Augustine's Theodicy
and Joyce's Aesthetics,
Comments Off on Wednesday October 31, 2007