Unfortunately, the volume of the dodecahedron formed by
unfolding a cube as in the University of Ghent animation above
is not double that of the cube, since refolding the cube leaves
an empty space inside … not shown in the Ghent animation.
But taking six congruent square pyramids that form a cube and using
them to cover the faces of a second, congruent, cube yields a rhombic dodecahedron. This does offer a sort of solution to the
Delian problem… provided the new rhombic-dodecahedral altar is
found to be fit for ceremonial use. See . . .
Comments Off on To the Church of Synchronology, Greetings: Geometry for Columbus (and Dali)
A synchronology check of the date June 7, 2023, in this journal yields
an account of a sin allegedly committed by author Susan Sontag . . .
A biographer accuses her of falsifying, by two years, the date of a
meeting with Thomas Mann in his Pacific Palisades home. There may,
of course, have been more than one such meeting — once in 1947,
as described much later in detail by Sontag in a New Yorker piece, and
again in 1949, as noted privately at the time by Sontag in her journal
and by Mann himself in his diary. But the thoroughness of the biographer's
research makes this seem unlikely.
Comments Off on Synchronology Meets Sin Chronology
The date — January 9, 2010 — of the Guardian book review
in the previous post was noted here by a top 40 music list
from that same date in an earlier year.
Update of 4:07 AM ET the same morning:
Fans of Cormac McCarthy's recent adventures in unreality
might enjoy interpreting the time — 3:25 AM ET — of this post
as the date 3/25, and comparing the logos, both revisited
and new, in a Log24 post from 3/25. . .
"There are many places one can read about twistors
and the mathematics that underlies them. One that
I can especially recommend is the book Twistor Geometry
and Field Theory, by Ward and Wells."
"On 31 October 2013 (Halloween), David J and Jill Tracy released
'Bela Lugosi's Dead (Undead Is Forever),' a cinematic piano-led
rework of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead.'"
"Eric "Dr. Rock" Isralow, one of the world's first rock historians
and a longtime Bay Area radio personality, died June 2 at
St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. He was 67."
A contemporary minimalist composer whose work resembles that of
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus reportedly died at 85 Tuesday
in Paris on New Year's Eve (December 31, 2024). The phrase
"mathematical clarity" in his obituary in today's New York Times
suggests a synchronology check —
"It was — and is — very difficult to focus, to navigate
between each sentence and its real-time double,
to find the fuzzy edges where these reflections meet."
" William Beecher, who as a reporter for The New York Times
revealed President Richard M. Nixon’s secret bombing campaign
over Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and who later won a
Pulitzer Prize at The Boston Globe, died on Feb. 9 at his home
in Wilmington, N.C. He was 90." — Clay Risen, 2:28 PM
In memory of a Broadway star who reportedly died on Jan. 30 . . .
A Jan. 29 New Yorker story, "Life with Spider," suggests
a look at the author's earlier novel The Variations and,
after a synchronology check, a Log24 flashback —
The previous post displayed a use of the phrase "quantum kernel"
by Prof. Dr. Koen Thas of Ghent University. Here is an example of
a rather different, and more widely known, meaning of the phrase —
Synchronology check (approximate) — Also from May 2023 —
Lewis Carroll's chess Red Queen, from Through the Looking Glass,
is "often confused with" the playing cards Queen of Hearts,
from Alice in Wonderland —
" The King turned pale, and shut his notebook hastily.
'Consider your verdict,' he said to the jury in a low, trembling voice….
. . . . 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first—verdict afterward.' "
"In Alice in Wonderland , the Red Queen
does everything backwards—
she demands the punishment first, and then
the trial, and then the crime comes last of all.
Today, the Red Queen is everywhere."
A check of today's New Yorker penbots yields an entertaining piece on pop culture by Sarah Larson:
Perhaps, in death's dream kingdom, there is some guidance from
the illustrator who reportedly did the book cover in the previous post —
one Hector Garrido.
The phrase "octad group" does not, as one might reasonably
suppose, refer to symmetries of an octad (a "brick"), but
instead to symmetries of the above 4×4 array.
"After years in hiding, latex fashion re-emerged in the late 1950s,
thanks to the British designer John Sutcliffe, who created the world’s
first catsuit – the prototype rubber-fetish garment. …
The 1960s British spy series The Avengers was monumental
in bringing rubberwear to the masses. The show’s feminist heroine,
Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg), was styled in a latex, Sutcliffe-
inspired catsuit. With Peel as a media archetype, latex’s second-skin
look wasn’t just sexy, it was superhuman.
Sutcliffe capitalised on the obsession with his products, and founded
AtomAge Magazine in 1972. The periodical, filled with artful and erotic
bondage imagery, gained a huge following among fetishists, and made
quite the splash on London’s progressive fashion scene. "
The above novel uses extensively the term “inscape.”
The term’s originator, a 19th-century Jesuit poet,
is credited . . . sort of. For other uses of the term,
search for Inscape in this journal. From that search —
Beckinsale gives Oct. 5, 2001, as the date of the New York
premiere of the film "Serendipity." Synchronology check:
Beckinsale's premiere date — Oct. 5, 2001 — is incorrect.
The film was released on that date, but its New York premiere
was actually on Oct. 3, 2001. See Getty Images.
That Ereignis post is dated July 3, 2007.
Related material for the Church of Synchronology —
"The deepest strain in a religion is the particular
and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart,
in the company of such pronouncements as ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’
Take the deepest strain of religion away…
and what remains are the surface pieties —
abstractions without substantive bite —
to which everyone will assent
because they are empty, insipid, and safe."
The production-company logos for Carpenter B and Bad Robot
in end credits for a 2016 TV mini-series based on the Stephen King
novel 11/22/63 suggest a look at . . .
For the Church of Synchronology — This weblog on Aug. 11, 2017:
The title was suggested by the previous post, by Zorro Ranch,
by the classic 1967 film The Producers , and by . . .
Related material —
Vanity Fair on Sept. 8, 2017, celebrated the young actress
who played Beverly Marsh in the 2017 film version of
Stephen King's IT . See a post from her 12th birthday —
"Winter's Game" — that touches upon Maori themes.
Misreading the words of di Bonaventura
yields a phrase that might be applied to
the Church of Rome . . .
"A franchise based on release dates."
See dies natalis in this journal.
"Elmore Rual 'Rip' Torn Jr. (February 6, 1931 – July 9, 2019)
was an American actor, voice artist … Torn was born in Temple, Texas,
on February 6, 1931, the son of Elmore Rual "Tiger" Torn Sr. and
Thelma Mary Torn (née Spacek)."
(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).
Wolff himself, in a weblog post of Oct. 16, 2017,*
had some trenchant comments on religion . . .
See "How Odd of God." (See as well today's midnight
post in this journal, "Ghost in the Shell.")
"One model for what I’m trying to accomplish is the writings of
Martin Gardner. Some other models are … well, actually, I’m not
going [to] tell you; I’d much rather imitate these writers in hope that
you’ll notice the resemblance and figure it out. That’s a game
I’ll be playing with you over the next few years."
"Eric Salzman, a composer and music critic who
championed a new art form, music theater,
that was neither opera nor stage musical, died
on Nov. 12 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 84."
Among that first festival’s featured works was
'Strike Up the Band!,' Mr. Salzman’s 'reconstructed
and adapted' version of a satirical musical
with a score by George and Ira Gershwin
that had not been staged in 50 years. The director
of that production, Frank Corsaro, died
the day before Mr. Salzman did."
" In 1965, Mr. Simmons, an incisive, erudite reviewer and essayist,
won a William Faulkner Foundation Award for Powdered Eggs [ 1964 ],
recognized as a notable first novel. (He wryly called it his
'64th first novel.') The Boston Globe said it was 'certainly among
the outstanding fictions of the ′60s.' [ Later, in 1971,* ] The novelist
Harry Crews heralded him as 'one of the finest comic voices to appear
anywhere in years.' "
"I guess I found my future through Billy Name’s eye.
I saw his pictures of the Warhol Factory when I was
in college and thought, 'Oh that’s the place to get to.
Everyone is so beautiful and it looks brilliant and
complicated – art, music, film, but most of all a kind
of wild life.' It looked like the future as I imagined it."
"… through Billy Name's eye …."
Then there is Kurt Seligmann's eye …
The above-mentioned Billy Name appeared in this journal
in July 2016 in the post "Coterie (for Philip Rieff)." Also
featured in that post was artist Kurt Seligmann.
A Google Search sidebar on Seligmann today:
Synchronology check of this journal on the above Guardian date:
I do not recommend any of the above entertainments,
but they do supply some background for the article
"Fantasy and the Buffered Self" (which is recommended.)
.
