Log24

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Synchronicity Check

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

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

For the Church of Synchronology

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

Monday, January 25, 2016

Synchronicity

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

For Mel Gibson

The Police, 'Synchronicity' album, detail of cover

The book in the previous post, "A Hateful Eight," was
reportedly published on February 25, 2004. See also
this journal on that date


  Click image for post.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Khora as Synchronicity

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:01 am

A search for khora  + tao  yields a paper on Derrida—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120117-IanEdwards-OnKhora.gif

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120117-IanEdwards.jpg

A check of the above date— Nov. 18, 2010— yields…

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Frontiers of Speculation

 m759 @ 8:02 AM

Peter Woit has a post on Scientific American 's new Garrett Lisi article, "A Geometric Theory of Everything."

The Scientific American  subtitle is "Deep down, the particles and forces of the universe are a manifestation of exquisite geometry."

See also Rhetoric (Nov. 4, 2010) and Exquisite Geometries (May 19, 2009).

Related material on the temptation of physics
for a pure mathematician—

This morning's post on khora  and Cardinal Manning, and,
from Hawking's birthday this year, Big Apple.

Within this  post, by leading us to the apple,
Derrida as usual plays the role of Serpent.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Synchronicity

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

This journal on October 12 (the traditional Columbus day)—

"The text is a two-way mirror
that allows me to look into
the life and times of the reader."
The French Mathematician
   (Galois), by Tom Petsinis

It is not clear how this is supposed to work.

However, there is synchronicity and the New York Lottery—

October 12, 2010—

Midday 765, Evening 365 —

Life  and Times.

Life

APRIL 25, 2008

From Log24 on April 21, the date of Mark Twain’s death–

Psychoshop,  by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny:

His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….

He purred a chuckle. “My place. If you want to come, I’ll show you.”

“Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?”

“That’s what the locals call it. It’s really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole.”

“Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?”

“No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor.”

The Pennsylvania Lottery
yesterday, April 24, 2008:

Mid-day 923, Evening 765….

and hence Log24, 9/23 (2007), and page 765 of From Here to Eternity  (Delta paperback, 1998):

He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette’s expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say “Yes” or “No,” mostly “No,” when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person.

Times

See "Seasons of Love" from the musical "Rent."

See also Mark 15:38— "And the veil of the temple…"

Friday, March 31, 2023

For Sixteen Vestal Virgins — Data and Metadata

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:03 pm

Data:

"The rockers said via their record label:

'It is with the deepest sadness that we must
announce the passing of the lyricist Keith Reid,
who died suddenly on 23 March 2023,
in hospital in London. He had been receiving
cancer treatment for the past couple of years.

Keith was the co-founder and lyricist for the band
Procol Harum, notably penning their biggest hit
A Whiter Shade of Pale, which contains some of
the most enigmatic lyrics of all time.' " 

— https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/
breaking-procol-harums-keith-reid-29586101

Metadata:

A note from Log24 on the above March 23 date

The above Del Shannon upload date
was November 1, 2021 — All Saints' Day.

Synchronicity check —

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

“Buy on Proof”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:25 am

The above title is a commercial slogan from Westinghouse Studio One —

in particular, from its "June Moon" broadcast on June 22, 1949.

The Police, 'Synchronicity' album, detail of cover

The date August 4, 2011, from the previous post suggests a review . . .

Saturday, January 7, 2023

Saturday Reviews

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:26 am

"Might be a nice 20 page essay, but a bomb of a book"
— Herbert Gintis on Taleb's Black Swan , review dated April 10, 2012.

This remark might also be applied to Crumey's Mobius Dick :

A physicist and Doktor Faustus

Related material for Jungians who enjoy synchronicity —

The Log24 posts from the date of the Gintis review — April 10, 2012.

Friday, February 26, 2021

“Only Connect”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:33 pm

Twelves   (in memory of Robert de Marrais)

Receipt date for the above article —

Synchronicity check —

Related reading —

http://www.universityreaders.com/pdf/
Incarnations-of-the-Blaring-Bluesblinger_sneak_preview.pdf

Monday, March 25, 2019

Espacement

(Continued from the previous post.)

In-Between "Spacing" and the "Chôra "
in Derrida: A Pre-Originary Medium?

By Louise Burchill

(Ch. 2 in Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Eds.),  Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics , Lexington Books, October 14, 2010)

"The term 'spacing' ('espacement ') is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those of différance  (characterized, in the text from 1968 bearing this name, as '[at once] spacing [and] temporizing' 1), writing  (of which 'spacing' is said to be 'the fundamental property' 2) and deconstruction (with one of Derrida's last major texts, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy , specifying 'spacing ' to be 'the first word of any deconstruction' 3)."

1  Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie  (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 14. Henceforth cited as  D  .

2  Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. A. Bass, in Writing and  Difference  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 217. Henceforth cited as FSW .

3  Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy  (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 207.

. . . .

"… a particularly interesting point is made in this respect by the French philosopher, Michel Haar. After remarking that the force Derrida attributes to différance  consists simply of the series of its effects, and is, for this reason, 'an indefinite process of substitutions or permutations,' Haar specifies that, for this process to be something other than a simple 'actualisation' lacking any real power of effectivity, it would need “a soubassement porteur ' – let’s say a 'conducting underlay' or 'conducting medium' which would not, however, be an absolute base, nor an 'origin' or 'cause.' If then, as Haar concludes, différance  and spacing show themselves to belong to 'a pure Apollonism' 'haunted by the groundless ground,' which they lack and deprive themselves of,16 we can better understand both the threat posed by the 'figures' of space and the mother in the Timaeus  and, as a result, Derrida’s insistent attempts to disqualify them. So great, it would seem, is the menace to différance  that Derrida must, in a 'properly' apotropaic  gesture, ward off these 'figures' of an archaic, chthonic, spatial matrix in any and all ways possible…."

16  Michel Haar, “Le jeu de Nietzsche dans Derrida,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger  2 (1990): 207-227.

. . . .

… "The conclusion to be drawn from Democritus' conception of rhuthmos , as well as from Plato's conception of the chôra , is not, therefore, as Derrida would have it, that a differential field understood as an originary site of inscription would 'produce' the spatiality of space but, on the contrary, that 'differentiation in general' depends upon a certain 'spatial milieu' – what Haar would name a 'groundless ground' – revealed as such to be an 'in-between' more 'originary' than the play of differences it in-forms. As such, this conclusion obviously extends beyond Derrida's conception of 'spacing,' encompassing contemporary philosophy's continual privileging of temporization in its elaboration of a pre-ontological 'opening' – or, shall we say, 'in-between.'

For permutations and a possible "groundless ground," see
the eightfold cube and group actions both on a set of eight
building blocks arranged in a cube (a "conducting base") and
on the set of seven natural interstices (espacements )  between
the blocks. Such group actions provide an elementary picture of
the isomorphism between the groups PSL(2,7) (acting on the
eight blocks) and GL(3,2) (acting on the seven interstices).

Espacements
 

For the Church of Synchronology

See also, from the reported publication date of the above book
Intermedialities , the Log24 post Synchronicity.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Pieces of April

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:25 am

This journal on April 16, 2018 —

Happy birthday to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

Related material from another weblog in a post also dated April 16, 2018 —

"As I write this, it’s April 5, midway through the eight-day
festival of Passover. During this holiday, we Jews air our
grievances against the ancient Pharaoh who enslaved
and oppressed us, and celebrate the feats of strength
with which the Almighty delivered us from bondage —
wait a minute, I think I’m mixing up Passover with Festivus."
. . . .

"Next month: Time and Tesseracts."

From that next post, dated May 16, 2018 —

"The tesseract entered popular culture through
Madeleine L’Engle’s 'A Wrinkle in Time' . . . ."

The post's author, James Propp, notes that

" L’Engle caused some of her readers confusion
when one of the characters … the prodigy
Charles Wallace Murray [sic ] , declared 'Well, the fifth
dimension’s a tesseract.' "

Propp is not unfamiliar with prodigies:

"When I was a kid living in the Long Island suburbs,
I sometimes got called a math genius. I didn’t think
the label was apt, but I didn’t mind it; being put in
the genius box came with some pretty good perks."

— "The Genius Box," a post dated March 16, 2018

To me, Propp seems less like Charles Wallace
and more like the Prime Coordinator —

For further details, see the following synchronicity checks:

Propp March 16     Log24 March 16

Propp April 16        Log24 April 16

Propp May 16        Log24 May 16 .

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Do Do for Dodos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:40 pm

"Do do that voodoo . . . ." — Cole Porter

This post's title was suggested by a new novel,
"The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O." . . . .

. . .  and by the concepts of

synchronicity  and  diachronicity  

in music.

Related reading for Harvard Summer School (click to enlarge) —

Monday, April 11, 2016

Combinatorial Spider

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:16 pm

“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”

— The novel The Double , by José Saramago,
on which the film "Enemy" was based

Some background for the 2012 Douglas Glover
"Attack of the Copula Spiders" book
mentioned in Sunday's Synchronicity Check

  • "A vision of Toronto as Hell" — Douglas Glover in the
    March 25, 2011, post Combinatorial Delight
  • For Louise Bourgeois — a post from the date of Galois's death—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110715-GaloisMemorial-Lg.jpg

  • For Toronto — Scene from a film that premiered there
    on Sept. 8, 2013:

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Bodies for Crosses

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

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

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

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

Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —

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

Space crosses, simple and not-so-simple

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Geometry for Jews

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:45 am

(Continued from previous episodes)

'Games Played by Boole and Galois'

Boole and Galois also figure in the mathematics of space
i.e. , geometry.  See Boole + Galois in this journal.

Related material, according to Jung’s notion of synchronicity —

Monday, January 11, 2016

Lechner’s End

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

A check on the author of the title illustrated at
the end of today's post Space Oddity yields the fact that
Robert J. Lechner reportedly died on Sept. 16, 2014.

For a synchronicity check, see posts now tagged Lechner's End.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Supplement to Logic

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

For the Janus-Faced Human Race

Related material —

Strange Myths and The Starflight Problem.

Synchronicity check —

"On the afternoon of October 10, 2013,
an unusually cold day, the streets of downtown
Dublin were filled …." — "How Stories Deceive"

See also this  journal on October 10, 2013.

Monday, December 14, 2015

The Forking

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

From the previous post:

"Neat, Dr. Walker, thought Peter Slater—
neat, and totally without content."

— Paul Preuss's 1983 novel Broken Symmetries

A background check yields

"Dr. Evan Harris Walker died on the evening of
August 17, 2006…."

A synchronicity check of that date in this journal yields a diagram
that, taken by itself, is "neat, and totally without content." —

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060817-Tree.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The diagram may be viewed as a tribute
to the late Yogi Berra, to the literary
"Garden of Forking Paths," or, more
seriously, to the modular group Γ.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Take This, Waltz

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

An excerpt from http://yarchive.net/med/middle_ages.html

From: ((Steven B. Harris))
Subject: Re: Problems with sci.med.aids FAQ (section 7) Part II
Date: 09 Jun 1995

In <173AD1188AS85.AVIRAMA@UNIVSCVM.CSD.SCAROLINA.EDU>
AVIRAMA@UNIVSCVM.CSD.SCAROLINA.EDU (Amittai F. Aviram) writes to
David Mertz:

>Ahem....  With all due respect, it seems to me to make no sense
>to criticize a scientist or medical doctor for "a childish
>little schoolboy positivism."

    Well, I think he was referring to the Vienna School, where
the schoolboys shout childish things like "Your mother still
believes in Compte!" and "Well, at least my mother has values and
isn't a logical empiricist like YOUR old man!"  Woody Allen went
there, but says he was expelled during a philosophy test for
looking into the soul of the kid next to him.

Midrash —

"There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews"

— Leonard Cohen lyric, "Take This Waltz"

Here's looking at you, kid.

Synchronicity check:

Friday, October 23, 2015

Flashback

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:15 am

Synchronicity check —

Friday, October 2, 2015

Letters

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:28 pm

"The close of trading today will spell a new era for Google
as the search giant becomes a part of new holding company 
Alphabet Inc." — ABC News, 1:53 PM ET today

From an Aug. 10, 2015, letter by Larry Page announcing the change:

Other business philosophy:

Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from
Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano

On Sale: 04/14/2015

A not-so-timeless lesson: a synchronicity check
(of this journal, not of the oeuvre  of Joseph Jaworski) —

04/14/2015 — Sacramental Geometry.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Sparks News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:45 pm

On an incident in Sparks, Nevada, on
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015:

"Reno and Sparks police then approached the apartment
just before 11 a.m. and knocked on the door in an effort
to check on Debra Constantino’s welfare, Sparks police
said. That’s when officers heard gunshots."

— Marcella Corona, Reno Gazette-Journal

(Tuesday 11 a.m. PDT in Sparks was Tuesday 2 p.m. EDT.)

"A file photo of Mark and Debby Constantino taken on
Oct. 24, 2011 near their home in northwest Reno.
The couple worked as paranormal investigators
specializing in EVP voice recordings and were often
featured in the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures ."
(Photo: Reno Gazette-Journal  file)

Synchronicity check: Log24 on the date of the above photo.

"… a bee for the remembering of happiness" — Wallace Stevens

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

A Mirror Darkly

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:45 pm

This post was suggested by the publication date — July 7, 2015 —
of a novel reviewed in The New York Times  online last Monday.

A synchronicity check of the publication date yields

Friday, May 22, 2015

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am

Continued .

A tale for pentagram enthusiasts

Synchronicity check on the date of the above Salon  story:

Two posts from Log24 on Jan. 5, 2014 —
 

Hits

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:59 AM 

Wikipedia on a Springsteen album released on
this date in 1973—

"… when Columbia Records president Clive Davis 
heard the album, he felt that it lacked a hit single.
As such, Springsteen wrote and recorded
'Blinded by the Light' and 'Spirit in the Night.' "

The upload dates from the above links are also dates
of some posts in this journal— Thursday, June 26, 2008,
and Sunday, July 6, 2008.

Little Mornings…

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 6:29 AM 

 que cantaba el rey David.

Update of 7 AM Jan. 5— See also Endor's Game.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Real Life

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

From Amazon.com —

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  Tuesday afternoon —

A 46-year-old Jesuit priest who was a Marquette University
assistant professor of theology collapsed on campus
Tuesday morning and died, President Michael Lovell
announced to the campus community in an email.

"Rev. Lúcás (Yiu Sing Luke) Chan, S.J., died after
collapsing this morning in Marquette Hall. Just last Sunday,
Father Chan offered the invocation at the Klingler College
of Arts and Sciences graduation ceremony."

Synchronicity check

From this journal on the above publication date of
Chan's book — Sept. 20, 2012 —

IMAGE- Immersion in a fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

From a Log24 post on the preceding day, Sept. 19, 2012 —

The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job,
a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary,
it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game,
we call the Game Dhum Welur , the Mind of God."

 — The Gameplayers of Zan

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Fire and Ice

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:45 am

Or: Debriefing Josefine

From the CV of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche:

Selected Collections/ Public Commissions:
2016 Jarfjord Grensevaktstasjon,
Jarfjord/Kirkenes, NO (upcoming)
 

From an Amazon.com customer review of a book on
northern Norway in World War II, Fire and Ice 

"… Hunt doesn't take sides. He approaches
the story as a journalist and documentary maker,
rather than as an academic."

The book, as the author notes, was published in Britain
on October 6, 2014.

A synchronicity check of the publication date yields 
a variation on the "Fire and Ice" theme —


____________________________

"Jeg prøver å innføre et narrativ, noe magisk og forførende,
samt erstatte den iboende materialistiske logikken med
esoterisk kosmologi og symbolikk." — Josefine Lyche

Monday, February 9, 2015

Overarching Symmetry

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

Continued from earlier posts.

The Washington Post  online yesterday:

"Val Logsdon Fitch, the Nebraska rancher’s son who shared the Nobel Prize for detecting a breakdown in the overarching symmetry of physical laws, thus helping explain how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, died Feb. 5 in Princeton, N.J. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by Princeton University, where he had been a longtime faculty member and led the physics department for several years.

Dr. Fitch and his Princeton colleague James Cronin received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1980 for high-energy experiments conducted in 1964 that overturned fundamental assumptions about symmetries and invariances that are characteristic of the laws of physics."

— By Martin Weil

Fans of synchronicity may prefer some rather
ig -Nobel remarks quoted here  on the date
of Fitch's death:

"The Harvard College Events Board presents
Harvard Thinks Big VI, a night of big ideas
and thinking beyond traditional boundaries.
On Thursday February 5th at 8 pm in
Sanders Theatre …."

— Log24 post The Big Spielraum

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

V is for Verity

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Or: Spectral Theory 
(continued from Oct. 2, 2013, and earlier)

A memorable phrase by Verity Stob
at theregister.co.uk on Jan. 26:

"… remember you're not just an emotionless Dalek.
You are in the lavender  band of the autistic spectrum."

See also lavender  in this journal

("Dalek, Spacek.  Spacek, Dalek.")

Verity herself —

Verity's column, illustrated above, on Nov. 12, 2013,
was titled "Three Men in a Tardis."

Connoisseurs of synchronicity may consult my own
remarks on that date.  Three men discussed there
are the two X-Men patriarchs Patrick Stewart and 
Ian McKellen, as well as a more interesting character,
composer Sir John Tavener.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Marlowe Deception*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am

From The New York Times  this morning:

"David Henry Marlowe was born in Brooklyn
on June 6, 1931, the youngest of three children
of Karl and Lena Marlowe, Jewish immigrants
from Russia and Ukraine. His father sold
insurance, among other things, and his mother
ran the household.

For a time, the couple had a 'mind reading' act
on the Coney Island boardwalk, and their son
never forgot it. 'I can’t read minds, like my
parents,' he liked to say to friends. 'What I can
read is behavior.'"

For the rest of the story, see Marlowe's obituary.
For synchronicity, see this journal on the reported
date of his death.

*  "I wrote another book." — Harlan Kane

Monday, December 29, 2014

The Source

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 pm

Bogus religion from a bogus "research lab" —

Journal of Scientific Exploration,
Vol. 18, No. 4 (2004), pp. 547-570
"Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality"
Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
Princeton University 
D-334 Engineering Quadrangle
School of Engineering/Applied Science

"… Consequently, the inferred models of reality are limited to those substances, processes, and sources of information that constitute conventional contemporary science.

In this paper we ally ourselves with the sharply contrary position that there exists a much deeper and more extensive source of reality, which is largely insulated from direct human experience, representation, or even comprehension. It is a domain that has long been posited and contemplated by metaphysicians and theologians, Jungian and Jamesian psychologists, philosophers of science, and a few contemporary progressive theoretical physicists, all struggling to grasp and to represent its essence and its function. A variety of provincial labels have been applied, such as 'Tao,' 'Qi,' 'prana,' 'void,' 'Akashic record,' 'Unus Mundi,' 'unknowable substratum,' 'terra incognita,' 'archetypal field,' 'hidden order,' 'aboriginal sensible muchness,' 'implicate order,' 'zero-point vacuum,' 'ontic (or ontological) level,' 'undivided timeless primordial reality,' among many others, none of which fully captures the sublimely elusive nature of this domain. In earlier papers we called it the 'subliminal seed regime,' (2,3) but for our present purposes we shall henceforth refer to it simply as the 'Source.' "*

References:

2. Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (2001). A modular model of mind/matter manifestations (M5). Journal of Scientific Exploration , 15(3), 299–329.
3. Jahn, R. G. (2002). M*: Vector representation of the subliminal seed regime of M5. Journal of Scientific Exploration , 16(3), 341–357.

Note:

* This assortment of contexts, labels, or models should not be regarded as mutually exclusive or hierarchical; nor are they isomorphic to one another. Rather, they represent different perspectives on the same basic search, and hence should be respected as collectively complementary. Where they reinforce one another, or display common features, this may indicate some degree of basic insight. Where they disagree on details, testable hypotheses may present themselves.

This was quoted approvingly in a recent book by
Joseph JaworskiSource  (Berrett-Koehler Publishers
1st ed. Jan. 11, 2012, pp. 2-3).

A book unrelated, despite its title, to Michener's novel 'The Source'

Jaworski, a lawyer-turned-guru,
in 1980 founded a cult for executives
called the American Leadership Forum.

A synchronicity cult I prefer —
the Roman Catholic Church:

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Like a Bee

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:22 am

From a Log24 search for “Boxing Day“—

(Click image for some commentary.)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051227-Diebold.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From The New York Times —

Correction: Jan. 16, 2006

“An obituary on Dec. 27 about John Diebold,
a businessman and engineer who helped shape
modern industrial development in America,
misstated a business venture of John Diebold Inc.,
an investment firm he founded in 1967. It did
not finance Diebold Election Systems, a maker of
polling machines that, despite its name, has no
connection to John Diebold.”

Related material:

Synchronicity and this  journal on the date of the correction.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Say It With Flowers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:30 pm

The title is a reference to the Jan. 4 post "Learning Guide."

Update of 7:59 PM ET Feb. 2 —

"… they entered the apartment together around 11:30 a.m."

— NY Times  today on the discovery of Hoffman's body.

Synchronicity:  Today's 11 AM (ET) Log24 post, as well as
a 2007 Hoffman film involving drugs, jewels, and a planned
​escape to Brazil —

"May you be in heaven a full half-hour
 before the devil knows you're dead ."

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Not Subversive, Not Fantasy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:01 pm

The title refers to that of today's previous post, which linked to
a song from the June 1, 1983, album Synchronicity .
(Cf.  that term in this journal.)

For some work of my own from the following year, 1984, see

IMAGE- Internet Archive, 'Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986'

as well as the Orwellian dictum Triangles Are Square.

(The cubical figure at left above is from the same month,
if not the same day, as Synchronicity —  June 21, 1983.)

Subversive Fantasy

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Maureen Dowd on "Downton Abbey"
(yesterday's online NY Times) —

"Watching the saga from the beginning this week,
I saw the extent of the subversive fantasy:
The servants rule the masters."

"I have only come here seeking knowledge."

Sting, "Wrapped Around Your Finger"

Saturday, January 4, 2014

For Phil Everly

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

A Souther song at YouTube.

See also the lyrics and, in this journal,
synchronicity on the uploading date.

Related art —

End of the Line Blues

IMAGE- YouTube statistics: 384 views, 3 thumbs up, 0 down.

and The Crosswicks Curse

IMAGE- The full group of hypercube symmetries, including both rotations and reflections, is of order 384.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

An End in Itself

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:24 pm

Continued from August 29th

"The general mood was summed up by fan
Debra Kay, who tweeted simply: 'R.I.P. Frederik Pohl.
Thanks for the stories.'" — The Guardian  today

Pohl reportedly died Monday
A synchronicity check:  Quoted here Monday

IMAGE- Barry Mazur: 'A good story is an end in itself.'

See also this journal on August 5th, 2008

Cover of 'The Last Theorem,' a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Heaven’s Gate

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:01 pm

Yesterday's post Devil's Gate provided a dark view of life and culture.

A more cheerful view is provided by the late Gail Levin,
a maker of PBS "American Masters" documentaries
that included, notably, Jeff Bridges and Marilyn Monroe.

Levin reportedly died at 67 on July 31, 2013.*

An image from an interview with Levin —

The date in the image, July 19th, 2006, is the broadcast
date of the PBS "American Masters" program on Monroe.
A check for synchronicity shows there was no Log24 post
on that date.

See, however, posts for the day before— "Sacred Order"—
and the day after— "Bead Game."

A related quote from an article linked to in the latter—

"First world culture, which is 'pagan and in the majority
everywhere,' has as its defining characteristic
a 'primacy of possibility,' or pop— a broadly inclusive
concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal
dreamtime to Plato’s Forms."

Review by Jess Castle of Philip Rieff’s 
Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the
Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority
,
University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.

This quote may serve as the missing July 19, 2006, post.

Related material:  Dreamtime,  Possibility,  and Plato's Forms.

* See that date in this journal for two less famous American
  masters, artist Edward Valigursky and writer Robert Silverberg.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

In the Details

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am

By chance, the latest* remarks in philosopher Colin McGinn's
weblog were posted (yesterday) at 10:04 AM.

Checking, in my usual mad way, for synchronicity, I find
the following from this  weblog on the date  10/04 (2012)—

Note too the time of this morning's previous post here
(on McGinn)— 9:09 AM.  Another synchronistic check
yields Log24 posts from 9/09 (2012):

Related to this last post:

Detail from a stock image suggested by the web page of
a sociologist (Harvard '64) at the University of Washington in Seattle—

Note, on the map of  Wyoming, Devil's Gate.

There are, of course, many such gates.

* Correction (of about 11:20 AM Aug. 3):
  Later  remarks by McGinn were  posted at 10:06 AM today.  
  They included the phrase "The devil is in the details."
  Yet another check for synchronicity leads to
  10/06 (2012) in this  journal with its post related to McGinn's
  weblog remarks yesterday on philosophy and art.
  That 10/06 Log24  post is somewhat in the spirit of other
  remarks by McGinn discussed in a 2009 Harvard Crimson  review.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Dark Humor

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:09 am

Arts and Letters Daily  today links to a July 17
Washington Post  review of two books on the
occult and the enlightenment. The review, by
Michael Dirda, ends on a cheerful note:

"Happy synchronicity."

In related news, a Walpurgisnacht obituary also
ends cheerfully:

"He was still trying to get out a joke
with his final breath."

That obituary describes a life that reportedly ended
on April 21, 2013. Synchronicity involving that date—

The posts of April 21, 2013 (and related material in
this morning's previous post).

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Speaking of Dates…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

See also 11 February 2012 in this journal, as well as the link in
last evening's post to 2 March 2012, in the context of synchronicity.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Window

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:48 am

From Jim Holt’s Aug. 29, 2008, review of
The Same Man:
George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War

by David Lebedoff

“Orwell thought ‘good prose is like a window pane,’
forceful and direct. Waugh was an elaborate stylist
whose prose ranged from the dryly ironical to the
richly ornamented and rhetorical. Orwell was solitary
and fiercely earnest. Waugh was convivial and
brutally funny. And, perhaps most important, Orwell
was a secularist whose greatest fear was the
emergence of Big Brother in this world. Waugh was
a Roman Catholic convert whose greatest hope lay
with God in the next.”

The Orwell quote is from “Why I Write.”
A search for the original yields

IMAGE- Heading data for Orwell's 'Why I Write' in Chinese weblog 'Acquisition of Sunshine'

Detail:

IMAGE- Date of a Chinese weblog post: 2009-06-04

Synchronicity:

Log24 posts of 2009-06-04.

See, too, in this journal the
Chinese character for “field”

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Logline

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

Found this morning in a search:

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:

IMAGE- Anne Taormina on 'Mathieu Moonshine' and the 'super overarching symmetry group'

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.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Say When

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

IMAGE- The author of a book on 'Solomon's Seal' in mathematics once introduced Mark Twain to George Bernard Shaw.

Beneath the word "When" above, there appears
the date of a journal post— "July 27, 2012."

A check of synchronicity for this  journal on that date
yields two posts related to this morning's remarks.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Discourse

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:04 pm

(Continued)

"No puzzle has exercised more fascination
upon writers interested in the history of mathematics."

— Sir Thomas Little Heath, quoted by Mark Dominus in
his journal "The Universe of Discourse" on January 22, 2009.

If synchronicity is admitted to the universe of discourse,
a post in this  journal on that same date may be of interest.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Who Shot J. R.?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:24 am

For the answer, click here.

Connoisseurs of synchronicity may note two posts
from the date the above photo was taken:

First Draft of History and The Swedish Solution.

(The late Larry Hagman was, according to NBC News, "a longtime member 
of the Peace and Freedom Party, a minor leftist organization in California.")

Friday, August 24, 2012

Formal Pattern

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:28 pm

(Continued from In Memoriam (Aug. 22), Chapman's Homer (Aug. 23),
and this morning's Colorful Tale)

An informative, but undated, critique of the late Marvin W. Meyer
by April D. DeConick at the website of the Society of Biblical Literature
appeared in more popular form in an earlier New York Times
op-ed piece, "Gospel Truth," dated Dec. 1, 2007.

A check, in accord with Jungian synchronicity, of this  journal
on that date yields a quotation from Plato's Phaedrus  —

"The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate."

Related verses from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

"The detail of the pattern is movement."

"So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern."

Some background from pure mathematics (what the late
William P. Thurston called "the theory of formal patterns")—

The Animated Diamond Theorem.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Étude

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

 IMAGE- Google Books ad for 'Geometric Etudes in Combinatorial Mathematics,' by Alexander Soifer

IMAGE- Triangle cut into four congruent subtriangles

For remarks related by logic, see the square-triangle theorem.

For remarks related by synchronicity, see Log24 on
the above publication date,  June 15, 2010.

According to Google (and Soifer's page xix), Soifer wants to captivate
young readers.

Whether young readers should  be captivated is open to question.

"There is  such a thing as a 4-set."

Update of 9:48 the same morning—

Amazon.com says Soifer's book was published not on June 15, but on
 June 29 , 2010
(St. Peter's Day).

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

O for October

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:29 pm

(Not Olympus )

(Continued from Mythopoetic, a post of April 12)

This post was suggested by a 2010 film about fictional Olympians,
by today's New York Times obituaries, and by a bar brawl at the Olympian
New York Athletic Club in "the wee hours of April 13."

Rick Riordan in the image below advertises another large
"Demigod Gathering" on October 12, 2010.

The Riordan image is from a post at ComposersCave.com
made on October 3, 2010.

Applying Jung's principle of synchronicity to this demigod material,
we find the October 3, 2010, Log24 post Search for the Basic Picture
and the October 12, 2010, Log24 post King Solomon's Mind.

Note that the latter October date is that of the traditional
Columbus Day, and that the 2010 film of The Lightning Thief   
was directed by Chris Columbus of 1492 Pictures.

The film's release was earlier in 2010, on February 12.

Monday, October 10, 2011

10/10

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

See last year's Day of the Tetraktys.

Those who prefer Hebrew to Greek may consult Coxeter and the Aleph.

See also last midnight's The Aleph as well as Saturday morning's
An Ordinary Evening in Hartford and Saturday evening's
For Whom the Bell (with material from March 20, 2011).

For connoisseurs of synchronicity, there is …

THE LAST CONCERT

Cached from http://mrpianotoday.com/tourdates.htm —
The last concert of Roger Williams — March 20, 2011 —

   March 20

"Roger Williams" In Concert,
The Legendary Piano Man!!
Roger Williams & his Band
(Sierra Ballroom)
7:30-9:00pm

Palm Desert, CA    

Background music… Theme from "Somewhere in Time"

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Magical Realism Revisited

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

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110728-RogerCohen-MagicalRealism.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110727-ProtoZone-Quilters500w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110727-LICM-QuiltMaker500w.jpg

The magical part— Synchronicity—

See Roger Cohen in this journal on January 15, 2009 and, on the
same date, Jesse Jarnow on Bob Dylan in  The Jewish Daily Forward .

The realism part— Cohen's "smart power" and IQ tests involving pattern blocks.

The above quilt pattern software (both versions) is by Jarnow's father Al.
For a realistic approach to such patterns, see Blockheads in this journal.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

24-Part Invention

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 am

IMAGE- The 24-drawer filing cabinet of Lucia St. Clair Robson

“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.

She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”

— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun  by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*

From this  journal later that same day

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

Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .

A corpse will be transported by express!

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different  dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different  24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

An Abstract Power

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:45 am

Two characters named “Black” and “White” debate religion and the afterlife in the Cormac McCarthy play “The Sunset Limited.”

The play opened in Chicago in a Steppenwolf Theatre production on May 18, 2006.

A New York Times  theater review from All Hallows’ Eve, 2006—

“…there is an abstract power in the mysteriousness of Mr. McCarthy’s
vision’s allowing for a multitude of interpretations.” –Jason Zinoman

The current New Yorker  (Feb.14) has a note
by Lillian Ross on the same play— “Two-Man Show: O Death

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110209-TwoManShow.gif

Some purely visual black-and-white variations that are less dramatic, but have their own “abstract power”—

A book cover pictured here last November to contrast with
“the sound and fury of the rarified Manhattan art world”—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101027-LangerSymbolicLogic.jpg

and a web page with multiple interpretations of the book cover’s pattern—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110209-SymFrameBWPage.gif

A synchronicity— The first version of “Symmetry Framed” was done
on May 18, 2006— the day “The Sunset Limited” opened.

Another synchronicity relates the mathematics underlying
such patterns to the Halloween date of the above review.
See “To Announce a Faith,” from October 31, 2006.

Monday, October 25, 2010

The Embedding*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:04 pm

A New York Times  "The Stone" post from yesterday (5:15 PM, by John Allen Paulos) was titled—

Stories vs. Statistics

Related Google searches—

"How to lie with statistics"— about 148,000 results

"How to lie with stories"— 2 results

What does this tell us?

Consider also Paulos's phrase "imbedding the God character."  A less controversial topic might be (with the spelling I prefer) "embedding the miraculous." For an example, see this journal's "Mathematics and Narrative" entry on 5/15 (a date suggested, coincidentally, by the time of Paulos's post)—

Image-- 'Then a miracle occurs' cartoon
Cartoon by S.Harris

Image-- Google search on 'miracle octad'-- top 3 results

 

* Not directly  related to the novel The Embedding  discussed at Tenser, said the Tensor  on April 23, 2006 ("Quasimodo Sunday"). An academic discussion of that novel furnishes an example of narrative as more than mere entertainment. See Timothy J. Reiss, "How can 'New' Meaning Be Thought? Fictions of Science, Science Fictions," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature , Vol. 12, No. 1, March 1985, pp. 88-126. Consider also on this, Picasso's birthday, his saying that "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…."

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Sixteen

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 am

— A sequel of sorts to yesterday's post on the number fifteen —

Today's date and the title of the recent Pythagorean novel "The Thousand" suggest a search for the title "The Sixteen." This yields a British music ensemble.

Listen, for instance, to the ensemble performing works by Purcell in honor (partly) of Scottish composer James MacMillan's fiftieth birthday on July 16, 2009.

A check on synchronicity yields the following Log24 posts —

Happy birthday, Professor Gates.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A Problem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:35 pm

From Telegraph.co.uk (published: 5:56 PM BST 10 Aug 2010), a note on British-born Canadian journalist Bruce Garvey, who died at 70 on August 1—

In 1970, while reporting on the Apollo 13 mission at Nasa Mission Control for the Toronto Star, he was one of only two journalists— alongside Richard Killian of the Daily Express— to hear the famous message: "Houston we've had a problem."

See also Log24 posts of 10 AM and noon today.

The latter post poses the problem "You're dead. Now what?"

Again, as in this morning's post, applying Jungian synchronicity—

A check of this journal on the date of Garvey's death yields a link to 4/28's "Eightfold Geometry."

That post deals with a piece of rather esoteric mathematical folklore. Those who prefer easier problems may follow the ongoing struggles of Julie Taymor with "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."

The problems of death, geometry, and Taymor meet in "Spider Woman" (April 29) and "Memorial for Galois" (May 31).

Architecture Continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:00 am

Yesterday's architectural entertainment coincided, more or less, with the New York Times  article "The Hand of a Master Architect" (Online Sunday, Aug. 8, and in the print edition Monday, Aug. 9).

A search for some background on that architect (Philip Johnson, not Howard Roark) showed that the Art Libraries Society of North America published a notable graphic logo in 2005—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100810-ARLISlogoSm.jpg

See this journal on April 7, 2005, for a related graphic design.

The ARLIS/NA 2005 page cited above says about Houston, Texas, that 

"Just beyond the museum district lies Rice University, the city's most prestigious and oldest college….

Other campuses that contain significant architecture include St. Thomas University where Philip Johnson has made his mark for a period that extends more than forty years."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100810-Chapel.jpg

University of St. Thomas, Chapel of St. Basil

Applying Jungian synchronicity, we note that Johnson designed the Chapel of St. Basil at the University of St. Thomas, that the traditional date of the Feast of St. Basil is June 14, and that this journal on that date contained the following, from the aforementioned Rice University—                          

… a properly formulated Principle of Sufficient Reason plays
a fundamental role in scientific thought and, furthermore, is
to be regarded as of the greatest suggestiveness from the
philosophic point of view.2

… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of
Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle
is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated
mathematical “Theory of Groups.”

If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished
harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire
in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups
arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally3
whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the
Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to
remedy our deficiency in this respect.

The founder of the Theory of Groups was the mathematician
Evariste Galois….

2 As far as I am aware, only Scholastic Philosophy has fully recognized
  and exploited this principle as one of basic importance for philosophic thought.

3 That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp.

George David Birkhoff, 1940

For more about Scholastic Philosophy, see the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

For more about the graphic symbol shown (as above) by ARLIS and by Log24 in April 2005, see in this journal "rature sous rature ."

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Academy Award

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

The history of mathematics continues…

Image-- Academy of Athens announces a Jan. 26, 2010, speech by Professor Nicolaos Artemiadis

PRESS RELEASE

The Academician Professor Nicolaos Artemiadis will give a speech entitled "The Exploration of the Universe through the Mathematical Science" during a public session of the Academy of Athens (the speech will be in Greek).

The public session will be held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010, at 19:00 at the Academy of Athens.

For some background on Professor Artemiadis, see two notes of July 2005 (the month an international conference on "Mathematics and Narrative" was held in Greece).

A post related by synchronicity to Artemiadis's Jan. 26 speech— Symbology.

Other philosophical remarks— "The Pediment of Appearance."

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Annals of Religious Thought

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Sting as Hamlet

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100124-SynchronicityDetai.jpgl.JPG

Detail, cover of Synchronicity album, 1983

Further details of the text on the album cover–

Synchronicity:
An Acausal Connecting Principle

Publisher's description

"Jung's only extended work in the field of parapsychology aims, on the one hand, to incorporate the findings of 'extrasensory perception' (ESP) research into a general scientific point of view and, on the other, to ascertain the nature of the psychic factor in such phenomena.

   While he had advanced the 'synchronicity' hypothesis as early as the 1920's, Jung gave a full statement only in 1951, in an Eranos lecture; the following year (he was seventy-seven) he published the present monograph in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel winner) Wolfgang Pauli. Together with a wealth of historical and contemporary material on 'synchronicity,' Jung describes an astrological experiment conducted to test his theory."

Monday, August 3, 2009

Monday August 3, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am
For Your Consideration

The Police, 'Synchronicity' album, detail of cover

LA Times yesterday:

Steven Miessner, keeper
of the Academy’s Oscars,
died of a heart attack at 48
on Wednesday, July 29, 2009:

LA Times obit for Steven Miessner, 'Keeper of the Oscars,' who died July 29, 2009

Click the above to enlarge.

Steve Miessner, keeper of the Oscars, on Feb. 21, 2009

Steve Miessner, the keeper of the Oscars,
packages the statues for transport

to Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles
in preparation for the 81st
 Academy Awards ceremony held
on Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009
(Chris Carlson/AP).

From the date of
Miessner’s death
:

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

From the following day:

Log24 on Thursday, July 30, 2009

Annals of Aesthetics, continued:

Academy Awards
for Cambridge

“First of all, I’d like
 to thank the Academy.”
Remark attributed to Plato

Arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Cambridge, Mass.

“A poem cannot exhaust reality,
  but it can arrest it.

At War with the Word:
   Literary Theory and
   Liberal Education
,
   by R. V. Young,
   Chapter One

“Who knows where madness lies?”

— Quoted here July 29, 2009
(the day the keeper of
the Oscars died)

Possible clues:

From Google News at about
7 AM ET Mon., Aug. 3, 2009:

Henry Louis Gates Jr. mulls moving over death threats

Boston Herald – Susan MiltonJessica Van Sack – ‎6 hours ago‎
CHILMARK – Black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has received numerous death threats since he accused a white officer of

Death threats may make Gates move

The Daily Inquirer – ‎4 hours ago‎
Henry Louis Gates Jr. said yesterday that Harvard University suggested he move after receiving numerous death threats since he accused a white officer of

Gates: I’ve received death threats

NECN – ‎9 hours ago‎
Gates spoke at a book signing on Martha’s Vineyard. He also said that he has received death and bomb threats after the incident at his Cambridge home.

Black scholar says he’s able to joke about arrest

The Associated Press – Denise Lavoie – ‎17 hours ago‎
Gates said he received numerous threats after the incident, including an e-mail that read, “You should die, you’re a racist.” Gates has changed his e-mail

Gates grateful for island haven

Cape Cod Times – Susan Milton – ‎4 hours ago‎
As a result of death threats and bomb threats, he hasn’t returned to his Cambridge home, leased from Harvard University. The university has encouraged him

Gates makes public appearance after race debate

Worcester Telegram – Denise Lavoie – ‎20 hours ago‎
Gates, who spoke at a book signing on Martha’s Vineyard Sunday, says there also have been some serious moments. He says he received death and bomb threats

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Tuesday January 6, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am
Archetypes, Synchronicity,
and Dyson on Jung

The current (Feb. 2009) Notices of the American Mathematical Society has a written version of Freeman Dyson’s 2008 Einstein Lecture, which was to have been given in October but had to be canceled. Dyson paraphrases a mathematician on Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes:

“… we do not need to accept Jung’s theory as true in order to find it illuminating.”

The same is true of Jung’s remarks on synchronicity.

For example —

Yesterday’s entry, “A Wealth of Algebraic Structure,” lists two articles– each, as it happens, related to Jung’s four-diamond figure from Aion as well as to my own Notes on Finite Geometry. The articles were placed online recently by Cambridge University Press on the following dates:

R. T. Curtis’s 1974 article defining his Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.

Curtis’s 1987 article on geometry and algebraic structure in the MOG was published online on Dec. 19, 2008.

On these dates, the entries in this journal discussed…

Oct. 24:
Cube Space, 1984-2003

Material related to that entry:

Dec. 19:
Art and Religion: Inside the White Cube

That entry discusses a book by Mark C. Taylor:

The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).

In Chapter 3, “Sutures of Structures,” Taylor asks —

“What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work?”

One possible answer —

Hermann Weyl on the relativity problem in the context of the 4×4 “frame of reference” found in the above Cambridge University Press articles.

“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.”
— Vladimir Nabokov 

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Saturday August 2, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:23 am
Prattle

There is an article in today’s Telegraph on mathematician Simon Phillips Norton– co-author, with John Horton Conway, of the rather famous paper “Monstrous Moonshine” (Bull. London Math. Soc. 11, 308–339, 1979).
“Simon studies one of the most complicated groups of all: the Monster. He is, still, the world expert on it ….

Simon tells me he has a quasi-religious faith in the Monster. One day, he says, … the Monster will expose the structure of the universe.

… although Simon says he is keen for me to write a book about him and his work on the Monster and his obsession with buses, he doesn’t like talking, has no sense of anecdotes or extended conversation, and can’t remember (or never paid any attention to) 90 per cent of the things I want him to tell me about in his past. It is not modesty. Simon is not modest or immodest: he just has no self-curiosity. To Simon, Simon is a collection of disparate facts and no interpretative glue. He is a man without adjectives. His speech is made up almost entirely of short bursts of grunts and nouns.

This is the main reason why we spent three weeks together …. I needed to find a way to make him prattle.”

Those in search of prattle and interpretive glue should consult Anthony Judge’s essay “Potential Psychosocial Significance of Monstrous Moonshine: An Exceptional Form of Symmetry as a Rosetta Stone for Cognitive Frameworks.”  This was cited here in Thursday’s entry “Symmetry in Review.”  (That entry is just a list of items related in part by synchronicity, in part by mathematical content. The list, while meaningful to me and perhaps a few others, is also lacking in prattle and interpretive glue.)

Those in search of knowledge, rather than glue and prattle, should consult Symmetry and the Monster, by Mark Ronan.  If they have a good undergraduate education in mathematics, Terry Gannon‘s survey paper “Monstrous Moonshine: The First Twenty-Five Years” (pdf) and book– Moonshine Beyond the Monster— may also be of interest.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Thursday June 12, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 am
Feel lucky?

Dirty Harry asks the classic question

“The scientific mind does not so much
provide the right answers as
ask the right questions.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss

(The Raw and the Cooked,
1964, English translation 1969 —
paperback, U. of Chicago Press,
1983, “Overture,” p. 7
)

The Police, Synchronicity album

Context of the question:

A Venn diagram —
shown here last Sunday —
Jessica Hagy, card 675: The Holy Trinity

 by the illustrator of last Sunday’s
New York Times review of

The Drunkard’s Walk:

How Randomness
Rules Our Lives

Well, do you?

NY Lottery June 11, 2008: mid-day 610, evening 928

Related material:

6/10

(San Francisco’s new
Contemporary Jewish Museum
as a vision of Hell)
 
9/28

(A less theological,
more personal, discussion
of Venn diagrams)

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Thursday May 8, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:48 pm
Synchronicity,
Part Deux

Footprints at Log24 on the afternoon of May 8, 2008, including two from France

From
“On the Holy Trinity,”
the entry in the 3:20 PM
French footprint:

“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”

Vladimir Nabokov

From
“Angel in the Details,”
 the entry in the 3:59 PM
French footprint:

“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”

Emily Dickinson

These, along with this afternoon’s
earlier entry, suggest a review
of a third Log24 item, Windmills,
with an actress from France as…

Changing Woman:

“Kaleidoscope turning…

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

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

“When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?”

— For the source, see 
Joyce’s Nightmare Continues.

Thursday May 8, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Synchronicity

Today is the feast of
Saint Robert A. Heinlein.

Time of the above: 1:00 PM.
Update of 2:07 PM —

On the local Charlie Rose broadcast today at about 1:48 PM, Paola Antonelli, the organizer of an exhibit at MoMA, "Design and the Elastic Mind," talked about science fiction's influence (or non-influence) on the exhibit. She used the metaphor "the day after tomorrow." As I had just written a link relating design, science fiction, and May 10 (the date of the literal day after tomorrow– click on "feast" above), I found her remarks of interest. Here is a related passage from a web page.
 

Paola Antonelli, curator of 'Design and the Elastic Mind' at MoMA
Paola Antonelli

Photo Credit: Andrea Ciotti

Antonelli on scientists as designers who do not call themselves designers:

"So they all try to reach out. They have that in common. Then what they have in common is this attempt to… propose something for the real future. I don't really like science fiction, but I like to think of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow."

Amen.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Sunday April 6, 2008

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

Synchronicity

"Something isn't real until it's on TV."
— Folk saying quoted, for instance,
   in Postmodern Times

Time of this entry: 11:07:48 PM.

Overheard yesterday, on the night
of Charlton Heston's death:

"He's a good gun, and we aren't
  heading for a church social."

— Yul Brynner to Steve McQueen
    in The Magnificent Seven
    (AMC, 8 PM ET Saturday, April 5, 2008)

"Lord, I remember!"
— Bob Seger

Related material:
this date last year
(Good Friday)

Friday, June 15, 2007

Friday June 15, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Geometry and Death

(continued from Dec. 11, 2006):

J. G. Ballard on "the architecture of death":

"… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death."

The Guardian, March 20, 2006

From the previous entry, which provided a lesson in geometry related, if only by synchronicity, to the death of Jewish art theorist Rudolf Arnheim:

"We are going to keep doing this until we get it right."

Here is a lesson related, again by synchronicity, to the death of a Christian art scholar of "uncommon erudition, wit, and grace"– Robert R. Wark of the Huntington Library.  Wark died on June 8, a date I think of as the feast day of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest-poet of the nineteenth century.

From a Log24 entry on the date of Wark's death–

Samuel Pepys on a musical performance (Diary, Feb. 27, 1668):

"When the Angel comes down"

"When the Angel Comes Down, and the Soul Departs," a webpage on dance in Bali:

"Dance is also a devotion to the Supreme Being."

Julie Taymor, interview:

"I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain…."

The above three quotations were intended to supply some background for a link to an entry on Taymor, on what Taymor has called "skewed mirrors," and on a related mathematical concept named, using a term Hopkins coined, "inscapes."

They might form part of an introductory class in mathematics and art given, like the class of the previous entry, in Purgatory.

Wark, who is now, one imagines, in Paradise, needs no such class.  He nevertheless might enjoy listening in.

A guest teacher in
the purgatorial class
on mathematics
and art:

Olivier as Dr. Christian Szell

The icosahedron (a source of duads and synthemes)

"Is it safe?"

Friday, April 20, 2007

Friday April 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am
Icons

Part I

The Library of Congress
Today in History, April 20:

“American sculptor Daniel Chester French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire on April 20, 1850. His colossal seated figure of Abraham Lincoln presides over the Lincoln Memorial.

Reared in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts, he was embraced by members of the Transcendentalist community including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Author and fellow Concord resident Louisa May Alcott encouraged young French to pursue a career as an artist. Louisa’s sister, artist May Alcott, was his early teacher.

French studied in Boston and New York prior to receiving his first commission for the 1875 statue The Minute Man. Standing near the North Bridge in Concord, in the Minute Man National Historical Park, this work commemorates events at the North Bridge, the site of ‘the shot heard ’round the world.’ An American icon, images derivative of The Minute Man statue appeared on defense bonds, stamps, and posters during World War II.”

Part II:

Entertainment Weekly,

November 7, 2003

Keanu Reeves, Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 7, 2003

Part III:

Log24 on the anniversary of
Lincoln’s assassination —

Saturday, April 14, 2007  4:30 AM

The Sun Also Sets, or…

This Way to
the Egress

Continued from April 12:

“I have only come here 
seeking knowledge,
 Things they would not   
       teach me of in college….”
 
— Synchronicity
lyrics

Quoted in Log24,
Time’s Labyrinth continued:

“The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before?”

— Katherine Neville,
The Eight,

Ballantine reprint, 1990,


“Know the one about
the Demiurge and the
Abridgment of Hope?”

— Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise,
Knopf, 1981,
the final page

Part IV:

Log24 entry of

November 7, 2003

Nixon's the One button

— and a
student play from
Virginia Tech:

Play by Virginia Tech student

Part V:


Symmetry
for Beavis and Butt-Head

and
The Rhetoric of Scientism:

It’s a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you’ll be taught.

— Oscar Hammerstein,
“Getting to Know You”

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Saturday April 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 am
This Way to
the Egress

Continued from April 12:

“I have only come here 
seeking knowledge,
 Things they would not   
       teach me of in college….”
 
— Synchronicity
lyrics

Quoted in Log24,
Time’s Labyrinth continued:

“The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before?”

— Katherine Neville,
The Eight,

Ballantine reprint, 1990,


“Know the one about
the Demiurge and the
Abridgment of Hope?”

— Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise,
Knopf, 1981,
the final page:

page 439

Sunset Boulevard

Related material:

John Bartlett  (1820–1905),
Familiar Quotations,
10th edition, 1919,

page 439

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Wednesday August 11, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:35 am

Battle of Gods and Giants,
Part II:

Wonders of the Invisible World

Yesterday at about 5 PM I added a section titled "Invariants" to the 3:01 PM entry Battle of Gods and Giants.  Within this added section was the sentence

"This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible 'form' or 'idea' behind the visible two-color pattern."

Now, at about 5 AM, I see in today's New York Times a review of a book titled The Invisible Century, by Richard Panek.  The reviewer, David Gelernter, says the "invisible" of the title refers to

"science that is done not by studying what you can see…. but by repairing instead to the privacy of your own mind, with the shades drawn and the lights off: the inner sanctum of intellectual history."

The book concerns the research of Einstein and Freud.  Gelernter says

"As Mr. Panek usefully notes, Einstein himself first called his work an 'invariant theory,' not a 'relativity theory.' Einstein does not say 'everything is relative,' or anything remotely like it."

The reader who clicks on the word "invariants" in Battle of Gods and Giants will receive the same information.

Gelernter's conclusion:

"The Invisible Century is a complex book about a complex topic. Mr. Panek's own topic is not so much invisibility, it seems to me, as a different kind of visibility, centering on mind-pictures revealed by introspection, which are just as sharp and clear as (for example) the mind-music Beethoven heard when he was deaf.

Inner visibility is a fascinating topic…."

As is synchronicity, a topic in the work of a greater man than Freud– Carl Jung.  The above remarks may be viewed as "synchronicity made visible."

All of this was, of course, foreshadowed in my web page "A Mathematician's Aesthetics" of August 2000:

C. G. Jung on Archetypes
and Visible Reality:

"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us."

— Carl Gustav Jung, "The Structure of the Psyche" (1927), in Collected Works Vol. 8, Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, P. 342

Paul Klee on Visible Reality:

"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible…. My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting– to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence."

— Paul Klee, "Creative Credo" from The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. Abrams, not dated; published c. 1958.

Wallace Stevens on
the Visibility of Archetypes:

"These forms are visible
     to the eye that needs,
Needs out of the whole
     necessity of sight."

— Wallace Stevens, "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," (first publ. 1950) in
Collected Poetry and Prose, Library of America, 1997

Friday, March 5, 2004

Friday March 5, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:20 am

Songs for Shakespeare

from Willie and Waylon

From today's New York Times

by Ben Brantley

…."Dost thou know me, fellow?" thunders Christopher Plummer, who is giving the performance of a lifetime in the title role of "King Lear"….

Throughout Jonathan Miller's engrossing production of Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy, which opened last night, Mr. Plummer bestrides the boundary between being and nothingness….

The Line,
by S.H. Cullinane

LEAR:

Now you better do some thinkin'
then you'll find
You got the only daddy
that'll walk the line
.

FOOL:

I've always been different
with one foot over the line….
I've always been crazy
    but it's kept me from going insane.

FOOL:

 

 

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

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

The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

Follow-up of Friday, March 5

From Arts & Letters Daily,
Weekend Edition, March 6-7, 2004 —

Some readers crave awe more than understanding, and lurid pop science is always there to feed their addiction to junk ideas… more»

Does Shakespeare’s Lear have a spiritual dimension? “No,” insists Jonathan Miller. “That’s modern, New Age drivel…." more»

The "more" link of the item at left above leads to an American Scientist article titled

The Importance of
Being Nothingness
.

The appearance of these two items side-by-side at Arts & Letters Daily, together with Brantley's remark above, is an example of Jungian synchronicity — a concept that the American Scientist author and Jonathan Miller probably both sneer at.  Sneer away.

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Tuesday January 6, 2004

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

720 in the Book

Searching for an epiphany on this January 6 (the Feast of the Epiphany), I started with Harvard Magazine, the current issue of January-February 2004.

An article titled On Mathematical Imagination concludes by looking forward to

“a New Instauration that will bring mathematics, at last, into its rightful place in our lives: a source of elation….”

Seeking the source of the phrase “new instauration,” I found it was due to Francis Bacon, who “conceived his New Instauration as the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy and a rediscovery of ‘the seal of God on things,’ ” according to a web page by Nieves Mathews.

Hmm.

The Mathews essay leads to Peter Pesic, who, it turns out, has written a book that brings us back to the subject of mathematics:

Abel’s Proof:  An Essay
on the Sources and Meaning
of Mathematical Unsolvability

by Peter Pesic,
MIT Press, 2003

From a review:

“… the book is about the idea that polynomial equations in general cannot be solved exactly in radicals….

Pesic concludes his account after Abel and Galois… and notes briefly (p. 146) that following Abel, Jacobi, Hermite, Kronecker, and Brioschi, in 1870 Jordan proved that elliptic modular functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.  The reader is left with little clarity on this sequel to the story….”

— Roger B. Eggleton, corrected version of a review in Gazette Aust. Math. Soc., Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 242-244

Here, it seems, is my epiphany:

“Elliptic modular functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.”


Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part I

Those who seek a star
on this Feast of the Epiphany
may click here.


Most mathematicians are (or should be) familiar with the work of Abel and Galois on the insolvability by radicals of quintic and higher-degree equations.

Just how such equations can be solved is a less familiar story.  I knew that elliptic functions were involved in the general solution of a quintic (fifth degree) equation, but I was not aware that similar functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.

The topic is of interest to me because, as my recent web page The Proof and the Lie indicates, I was deeply irritated by the way recent attempts to popularize mathematics have sown confusion about modular functions, and I therefore became interested in learning more about such functions.  Modular functions are also distantly related, via the topic of “moonshine” and via the  “Happy Family” of the Monster group and the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, to my own work on symmetries of 4×4 matrices.


Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part II

There is no Log24 entry for
December 30, 2003,
the day John Gregory Dunne died,
but see this web page for that date.


Here is what I was able to find on the Web about Pesic’s claim:

From Wolfram Research:

From Solving the Quintic —

“Some of the ideas described here can be generalized to equations of higher degree. The basic ideas for solving the sextic using Klein’s approach to the quintic were worked out around 1900. For algebraic equations beyond the sextic, the roots can be expressed in terms of hypergeometric functions in several variables or in terms of Siegel modular functions.”

From Siegel Theta Function —

“Umemura has expressed the roots of an arbitrary polynomial in terms of Siegel theta functions. (Mumford, D. Part C in Tata Lectures on Theta. II. Jacobian Theta Functions and Differential Equations. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1984.)”

From Polynomial

“… the general quintic equation may be given in terms of the Jacobi theta functions, or hypergeometric functions in one variable.  Hermite and Kronecker proved that higher order polynomials are not soluble in the same manner. Klein showed that the work of Hermite was implicit in the group properties of the icosahedron.  Klein’s method of solving the quintic in terms of hypergeometric functions in one variable can be extended to the sextic, but for higher order polynomials, either hypergeometric functions in several variables or ‘Siegel functions’ must be used (Belardinelli 1960, King 1996, Chow 1999). In the 1880s, Poincaré created functions which give the solution to the nth order polynomial equation in finite form. These functions turned out to be ‘natural’ generalizations of the elliptic functions.”

Belardinelli, G. “Fonctions hypergéométriques de plusieurs variables er résolution analytique des équations algébrique générales.” Mémoral des Sci. Math. 145, 1960.

King, R. B. Beyond the Quartic Equation. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1996.

Chow, T. Y. “What is a Closed-Form Number.” Amer. Math. Monthly 106, 440-448, 1999. 

From Angel Zhivkov,

Preprint series,
Institut für Mathematik,
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:

“… discoveries of Abel and Galois had been followed by the also remarkable theorems of Hermite and Kronecker:  in 1858 they independently proved that we can solve the algebraic equations of degree five by using an elliptic modular function….  Kronecker thought that the resolution of the equation of degree five would be a special case of a more general theorem which might exist.  This hypothesis was realized in [a] few cases by F. Klein… Jordan… showed that any algebraic equation is solvable by modular functions.  In 1984 Umemura realized the Kronecker idea in his appendix to Mumford’s book… deducing from a formula of Thomae… a root of [an] arbitrary algebraic equation by Siegel modular forms.”  

— “Resolution of Degree Less-than-or-equal-to Six Algebraic Equations by Genus Two Theta Constants


Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part III

From Music for Dunne’s Wake:

Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe,
a lid that kept everything underneath it
where it belonged.”

— Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge

     

720 in  
the Book”

and
Paradise

“The group Sp4(F2) has order 720,”
as does S6. — Angel Zhivkov, op. cit.

Those seeking
“a rediscovery of
‘the seal of God on things,’ “
as quoted by Mathews above,
should see
The Unity of Mathematics
and the related note
Sacerdotal Jargon.

For more remarks on synchronicity
that may or may not be relevant
to Harvard Magazine and to
the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings
that start tomorrow in Phoenix, see

Log24, June 2003.

For the relevance of the time
of this entry, 10:10, see

  1. the reference to Paradise
    on the “postcard” above, and
  2. Storyline (10/10, 2003).

Related recreational reading:

Labyrinth



The Shining

Shining Forth

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Saturday August 16, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:16 am

My Personal Thorny Crown

Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.

From his New York Times obituary:

" 'He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,' said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe's first big show at the Modern, 'High & Low.' 'Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.' "

For some background on the phrase "thorny crown of ideas," see the web page

Understanding.   

The phrase "thorny crown of ideas" is also of interest in the light of recent controversy over Mel Gibson's new film, "The Passion."

For details of the controversy, see Christopher Orlet's Aug. 14 essay at Salon.com,

Mel Gibson vs. "The Jews"

For a real "thorny crown of ideas," consider the following remarks by another art historian:

"Whether or not we can follow the theorist in his demonstrations, there is one misunderstanding we must avoid at all cost.  We must not confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation….

The earliest (and perhaps the rarest) treatise on the theory of design drives home this insight with marvellous precision."

— E. H. Gombrich, 1979, in
   The Sense of Order

This is perhaps the most stupid remark I have ever read.  The "treatise on the theory of design" that Gombrich refers to is

  • Dominique Douat, Methode pour faire une infinité de desseins differents avec des carreaux mipartis de deux couleurs par une ligne diagonale : ou observations du Pere Dominique Douat Religieux Carmes de la Province de Toulouse sur un memoire inséré dans l'Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris l'année 1704, présenté par le Reverend Sebastien Truchet religieux du même ordre, Academicien honoraire, imprimé chez Jacques Quillau, Imprimeur Juré de l'Université, Paris 1722.

This is the title given at the web page

Truchet & Types:
Tiling Systems and Ornaments
,

which gives some background. 

Certain of the Truchet/Douat patterns have rather intriguing mathematical properties, sketched in my website Diamond Theory.  These properties become clear if and only we we do what Gombrich moronically declares that we must not do:  "confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation."  (The verb "confuse" should, of course, be replaced by the verb "combine.") 

What does all this have to do with

Mel Gibson vs. "The Jews" ?

As jesting Pilate seems to have realized, whenever Jews (or, for that matter, Christians) tell stories, issues of truth may arise.  Such issues, as shown by current events in that damned Semitic Hell-on-Earth that used to be referred to as "the Holy Land," can be of life-and-death importance.


Scene from
The Passion

The Roman soldiers may have fashioned a physical crown of thorns, but the Jews are quite capable of fashioning a very uncomfortable crown of, as Gopnik says, "ideas."

Here is an example.

"Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, who as an author went by the name E. H. Gombrich, was born in Vienna in 1909….

The Gombrich family was Jewish, but his parents felt this had no particular relevance. In later years Mr. Gombrich said that whether someone was Jewish or not was a preoccupation for the Gestapo."

— Michael Kimmelman's obituary for Gombrich in the New York Times. Kimmelman is chief art critic for the New York Times and author of the Times's Aug. 15 Varnedoe obituary.

The web page Understanding cited above contains a link to

Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth,

a page combining some religious remarks with a quotation of an extremely patronizing and superficial reference to my own work (and, in passing, to Truchet/Douat patterns).

This reference, and the above-quoted remark by Gombrich, constitute my own modest claim to what the Jew Gopnik jokingly calls a "thorny crown of ideas."

To me it is no joke.

This partly accounts for the rather strained quality of the attempt at humor in a web page I put together yesterday in response to Varnedoe's obituary:

Fahne Hoch, Macbeth!

Another reason for the strained quality is my being struck by the synchronicity of reading Varnedoe's obituary shortly after I had done a journal entry related to the death in July of an earlier Museum of Modern Art curator.  Like Robert A. Heinlein, I think the God of the Jews is a lousy deity and an even worse father figure.  I do, however, believe in synchronicity.
 

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Tuesday March 11, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:09 pm

ART WARS:

The Producers


Broadway City Arcade


"Aryan Christ"
Carl G. Jung


Bloomberg & Bernstein,
Mayor & Producers' Head

Simon and Garfunkel's Tribute to Synchronicity:

Fools, said I,
   you do not know
Silence like
   a cancer grows.
Hear my words
   that I might teach you.
Take my arms
   that I might reach you….

Dummköpfe, sagte ich,
   ihr wißt nicht,
daß die Stille wie
   ein Krebs wächst.
Hört meine Worte,
   die ich euch sage.
Nehmt meine Hände,
   die ich euch reiche….

And the people
   bowed and prayed
To the neon god
   they made.

Und die Menschen
   verbeugten sich vor dem
Neon-Gott, den sie schufen,
   und beteten zu ihm.

                   — Paul Simon

For more on Jung, see

See also the Synchronicity album of The Police,
inducted last night into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Saturday, January 11, 2003

Saturday January 11, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:24 pm

METROPOLITAN ART WARS:

The First Days of Disco

Some cultural milestones, in the order I encountered them today:

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar:

  • “On this day in 1963, Whiskey-A-Go-Go—believed to be the first discotheque in the world—opened on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles with extraordinary hype and fanfare.”

From websites on Whit Stillman’s film, “The Last Days of Disco”:

Scene: Manhattan in the very early 1980’s.

Alice and her friend Charlotte are regulars at a fashionable disco.

Roger Ebert:

“Charlotte is forever giving poor Alice advice about what to say and how to behave; she says guys like it when a girl uses the word ‘sexy,’ and a few nights later, when a guy tells Alice he collects first editions of Scrooge McDuck comic books, she…”

Bjorn Thomson:

“… looks deep into his eyes and purrs ‘I think Scrooge McDuck is sexy!’ It is a laugh-out-loud funny line and a shrewd parody, but is also an honest statement.”

(Actually, to be honest, I encountered Thomson first and Ebert later, but the narrative sequence demands that they be rearranged.)

The combination of these cultural landmarks suggested that I find out what Scrooge McDuck was doing during the first days of disco, in January 1963.  Some research revealed that in issue #40 of “Uncle Scrooge,” with a publication date of January 1963, was a tale titled “Oddball Odyssey.”  Plot summary: “A whisper of treasure draws Scrooge to Circe.”

Further research produced an illustration:

 

Desiring more literary depth, I sought more information on the story of Scrooge and Circe. It turns out that this was only one of a series of encounters between Scrooge and a character called Magica de Spell.  The following is from a website titled

Duckburg Religion:

“Magica’s first appearance is in ‘The Midas Touch’ (US 36-01). She enters the Money Bin to buy a dime from Scrooge. Donald tells Scrooge that she is a sorceress, but Scrooge sells her a dime anyway. He sells her his first dime by accident, but gets it back. The fun starts when Scrooge tells her that it is the first dime he earned. She is going to make an amulet….”

with it.  Her pursuit of the dime apparently lasts through a number of Scrooge episodes.

“…in Oddball Odyssey (US 40-02). Magica discovers Circe’s secret cave. Inside the cave is a magic wand that she uses to transform Huey, Dewey and Louie to pigs, Donald to a goat (later to a tortoise), and Scrooge to a donkey. This reminds us of the treatment Circe gave Ulysses and his men. Magica does not succeed in transforming Scrooge after stealing the Dime, and Scrooge manages to break the spell (de Spell) by smashing the magic wand.”

At this point I was reminded of the legendary (but true) appearance of Wallace Stevens’s wife on another historic dime.  This was discussed by Charles Schulz in a cartoon of Sunday, May 27, 1990:


  

Here Sally is saying…

Who, me?… Yes, Ma’am, right here.

This is my report on dimes and pennies…

“Wallace Stevens was a famous poet…
His wife was named Elsie…”

“Most people do not know that Elsie was the model for the 1916 ‘Liberty Head’ dime.”

“Most people also don’t know that if I had a dime for every one of these stupid reports I’ve written, I’d be a rich person.”

Finally, sitting outside the principal’s office:

I never got to the part about who posed for the Lincoln penny.


I conclude this report on a note of synchronicity:

The above research was suggested in part by a New York Times article on Ovid’s Metamorphoses I read last night.  After locating the Scrooge and Stevens items above, I went to the Times site this afternoon to remind myself of this article.  At that point synchronicity kicked in; I encountered the following obituary of a Scrooge figure from 1963… the first days of disco:

The New York Times, January 12, 2003

(So dated at the website on Jan. 11)

C. Douglas Dillon Dies at 93;
Was in Kennedy Cabinet

By ERIC PACE

C. Douglas Dillon, a versatile Wall Street financier who was named secretary of the Treasury by President Kennedy and ambassador to France under President Eisenhower, and was a longtime executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died Friday [Jan. 10, 2003] at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Mr. Dillon, who lived with his wife on Jupiter Island in Hobe Sound, Fla., was 93.

Mr. Dillon was born to wealth and influence as the son of the founder of Dillon, Read & Company, an international banking house. Mr. Dillon was widely respected for his attention to detail — he had a reputation for ferreting out inconspicuous errors in reports — and his intellect, which his parents began shaping at an early age by enrolling Mr. Dillon in elite private schools.

Mr. Dillon is said to have been able to read quickly and to fully comprehend what he read by the time he was 4 years old. At the Pine Lodge School in Lakehurst, N.J., Mr. Dillon’s schoolmates included Nelson, Laurance and John Rockefeller III. Mr. Dillon later graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and sharpened his analytical powers on Wall Street.

Strapping and strong-jawed, Mr. Dillon sometimes seemed self-effacing or even shy in public, despite his long prominence in public affairs and in business. He served over the years as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, president of Harvard University’s board of overseers…”

Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

(See yesterday’s two entries, “Something Wonderful,” and “Story.”)

Two reflections suggest themselves:

“I need a photo opportunity.
I want a shot at
redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard.”
— Paul Simon

Ending up in a cartoon graveyard is indeed an unhappy fate; on the other hand…

It is nice to be called “sexy.”

Added at 1:50 AM Jan. 12, 2003:

Tonight’s site music, in honor of Mr. Dillon
and of Hepburn, Holden, and Bogart in “Sabrina” —
 “Isn’t It Romantic?”

 

Friday, January 10, 2003

Friday January 10, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:15 pm

Story

"How much story do you want?" 
— George Balanchine

While researching yesterday's entry on Balanchine, Apollo, and the nine Muses, I came across this architect's remarks, partially quoted yesterday and continued here:

"The icon that I use for this element is the nine-fold square…. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason….  This is the Temple of Solomon, as inscribed, for example, by a nine-fold compartmentation to provide the ground plan of Yale, as described to me by Professor Hersey."

Duncanology Part 3

Checking this out yesterday, I came across the following at a Yale University Art Gallery site:

"This exhibition of nine boldly colored, asymmetrically designed quilts selected from a private collection will be displayed in the Matrix Gallery….

With the guidance of Professor Maude Southwell Wahlman, author of 'Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts,' the collector has explored and gathered examples…."

Exploring and gathering examples myself today, I received a book in the mail — W. M. Spackman's On the Decay of Humanism (Rutgers University Press, 1967) — and picked up a second-hand book at a sale — Barbara Michaels's Stitches in Time (Harper Collins Publishers, 1995).

The Spackman book includes the following poem at the end:

In sandarac etui for sepulchre
  lies the cered body of a poisoned queen;
     and in her mouth and hair, and at her feet,
     and in the grey folds of her winding-sheet,
  there sifts a dreamy powder, smooth and green,
the magic of an idle sorcerer,
  an ancient spell, cast when the shroud was spun.
     In death her hands clasp amourously a bowl
     that still contains the fragments of her soul,
  a tale of Beauty sought, and Beauty won,
his false lips kissed, and Beauty dead for her.

— Alexander B. Griswold, Princeton '28, in the
    Nassau Literary Magazine of December 1925

From a synopsis of Michaels's Stitches in Time:

"Michaels follows Rachel, a graduate student studying women's crafts–weaving, spinning, quilting, embroidery–and the superstitions connected with them. Linking all important rites of passage to the garments created as markers of these occasions leads Rachel to her theory: in societies in which magic was practiced, the garment was meant to protect its wearer. She gains evidence that her theory is valid when an evil antique bridal quilt enters her life."

Although Stitches in Time is about a quilt — stitched, not spun — Griswold's line

"an ancient spell, cast when the shroud was spun" 

is very closely related to the evil spell in Michaels's book. 

The above events display a certain synchronicity that Wallace Stevens might appreciate, especially in light of the following remark in a review of Stitches in Time:

"…the premise is too outlandish for even the suspension of disbelief…." (Publishers Weekly, 4/24/95)

Stevens might reply,

The very man despising honest quilts
Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.

— "The Comedian as the Letter C," Part V

Finally, those who prefer stories to the more formal qualities of pure dance (ballet) pure mathematics (see previous entry), pure (instrumental) music, and pure (abstract, as in quilt designs) art, can consult the oeuvre of Jodie Foster — as in my 

Pearl Harbor Day entry on Buddhism.

An art historian named Griswold — perhaps that very same Griswold quoted above — might have a thing or two to say to Jodie on her recent film "Anna and the King."  In the April, 1957, issue of The Journal of the Siam Society, Alexander B. Griswold takes issue with Broadway's and Hollywood's "grotesque caricature" of Siamese society, and ultimately with Anna herself:

"The real fault lies in the two books they ultimately spring from — The English Governess at the Court of Siam and The Romance of the Harem — both written by Mrs. Anna Leonowens.''

Is a puzzlement.

See also The Diamond 16 Puzzle for some quilt designs.

Friday, January 3, 2003

Friday January 3, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm

The Shanghai Gesture:
An Exercise in Synchronicity

“A corpse will be transported by express!”

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)


Dietrich


Minogue

For Dietrich, see the reference below;
For Minogue, see my entry
“That Old Devil Moon”
of January 1st, 2003.

From the Turner Classic Movies website:

PLAYING ON TCM:
Jan 03, 2003, 08:00 PM

Shanghai Express  (1932)
CAST: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong. DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg.

A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey. [Set in 1931] BW-82m

From The New Yorker magazine,
received in the mail this afternoon:

Shanghai Moon

“…a new play… set in Shanghai in 1931…. Previews begin Jan. 3.”

Given the above, a believer in synchronicity
under the volcano 
will naturally search for a suitable corpse…
and voilà:

The Toronto Star

Friday, Jan. 3, 2003. 05:50 PM

Syndicated astrologist
Sydney Omarr, 76, dies

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sydney Omarr, the astrologer to the stars who came to write horoscopes that appear in more than 200 North American newspapers, has died. He was 76.

Omarr, who was blinded and paralysed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis, died Thursday [Jan. 2, 2003] in hospital in Santa Monica of complications from a heart attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. His ex-wife, assistants and several close friends were by his side.

Born Sidney Kimmelman in Philadelphia, Omarr decided to change his name at age 15 after watching a movie called The Shanghai Gesture, starring Victor Mature as a character named Omar. He changed the spelling of his first name and adopted Omar as his last name, but added a second “r,” in accordance with certain numerological formulas.

“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.”
 — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in
The Shanghai Gesture.”

“It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe.”
 — Peggy (Vanessa Redgrave) in
Prick Up Your Ears

 

Monday, September 2, 2002

Monday September 2, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:25 am

Elevation of the Host

Some religious fanatics may be offended by my account, in the note below, of a theatrical bartender-priest at Lincoln Center who last night held a CD aloft in what may seem a parody or satire of the elevation of the host in the Mass. They should consider the following account of how a medieval nun viewed the host:

…she saw a great brightness between the priest’s hands, so vivid and so bright and of such wonderful beauty that in her opinion it could not be compared to anything the human spirit could imagine. And it seemed to her that this brightness had a circular shape….

For another appearance of a priest associated, if only by synchronicity, with Lincoln Center, see the photographs below, both from the New York Times obituaries section of Friday, August 30, 2002.

Richard Lippold, a sculptor known for radiant, expansive abstractions in metal, died on Aug. 22….

Richard Lippold’s ‘‘Orpheus and Apollo’’ at Avery Fisher Hall in 1996.

Jack Manning/The New York Times

Bill Wassmuth, a former Roman Catholic priest who opposed the Aryan Nations group in northern Idaho, died on Tuesday, Aug. 27. 

In this little drama of August 30, played out in the obituary section of the New York Times, it is not clear from the Lippold sculpture who is to play the role of Orpheus and who the role of Apollo. One might interpret the note below, written two days later, as implying that Orpheus is to be played by Lionel Hampton and Apollo by Christ himself.  Such a drama is neither parody nor satire.  It is, on the contrary, deadly serious. 

“A great brightness,” as seen by the medieval nun described above, is traditionally associated with the Aryan sun god Apollo.  For more on this theme in Roman Catholic art, see

Sun-Worship and Catholicism,

The Monstrance and the Wafer God, and

A Catholic rebuttal.

For a less dogmatic approach to these matters, see my journal note of June 13, 2002,

 A Mass for Lucero.

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