Continued from Feb. 18, 2017 —
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Verbum
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Friday, June 24, 2022
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Verbum Sat
Vinnie Mancuso, in an article now dated December 25, 2018 —
Related art —
Click image for further details.
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Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Verbum
The Log24 version (Nov. 9, 2005, and later posts) —
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VERBUM
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See also related material in the previous post, Transformers.
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Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Verbum*
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Thursday, October 24, 2024
Space Vesper: “Shaken, Not Stirred”
A Tuesday dies natalis —
From the Log24 post "Verbum" (Saturday, February 18, 2017).
A different Tuesday —
Tuesday Weld in the 1972 film of Didion's Play It As It Lays :
Note the making of a matching pattern.
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Sunday, November 19, 2023
Six Dimensions
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four,
then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math
that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands.
Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three–
you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done.
Maybe Escher could have done it."
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Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Saving the Appearances
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Related images —
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Thursday, April 20, 2023
Alphabet Meets Gestalt . . .
Continued from April 18 .
"Working with words to create art
and working with your hands to create art
seem like two separate activities to me."
— Cover artist, The New Yorker , on April 17
See also Alphabet Blocks in this journal
as well as Escher's Verbum.
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Sunday, August 21, 2022
Monday, June 27, 2022
Dealing With Cubism
Continued from April 12, 2022.
"It’s important, as art historian Reinhard Spieler has noted,
that after a brief, unproductive stay in Paris, circa 1907,
Kandinsky chose to paint in Munich. That’s where he formed
the Expressionist art group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) —
and where he avoided having to deal with cubism."
— David Carrier,
Remarks by Louis Menand in The New Yorker today —
"The art world isn’t a fixed entity.
It’s continually being reconstituted
as new artistic styles emerge."
(Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition (1911), Crystallography .)
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime
See as well Verbum (February 18, 2017).
Related dramatic music —
"Westworld Season 4 begins at Hoover Dam,
with William looking to buy the famous landmark.
What does he consider to be 'stolen' data that is inside?"
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Saturday, June 25, 2022
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Alternate Past: LA/91506
(Title suggested by the beanie label "Alternate Future: NYC/10001")
A version of the Salinger story title "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" —
"… her mouth is red and large, with Disney overtones. But it is her eyes,
a pale green of surprising intensity, that hold me."
— Violet Henderson in Vogue , 30 August 2017
See also that date in this journal.
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Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Monday, March 4, 2019
Davos Logos
A less sophisticated approach to logos —
See also Logos in this journal.
For those who prefer Latin, there is Verbum.
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Wednesday, February 13, 2019
April 18, 2003 (Good Friday), Continued
"The purpose of mathematics cannot be derived from an activity
inferior to it but from a higher sphere of human activity, namely,
religion."
— Igor Shafarevitch, 1973 remark published as above in 1982.
"Perhaps."
— Steven H. Cullinane, February 13, 2019
|
From Log24 on Good Friday, April 18, 2003 — . . . What, indeed, is truth? I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown. For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma. See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum , which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.” Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day. See
“Examples are the stained glass windows Motto of Plato’s Academy † The Exorcist, 1973 |
Detail from an image linked to in the above footnote —
"And the darkness comprehended it not."
Id est :
A Good Friday, 2003, article by
a student of Shafarevitch —
"… there are 25 planes in W . . . . Of course,
replacing {a,b,c} by the complementary set
does not change the plane. . . ."
Of course.
See. however, Six-Set Geometry in this journal.
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Saturday, December 15, 2018
Casting
"When you cast a spell . . . ."
See Lily Collins in The Telegraph today. A related tale —
"On August 30, 2017, Lily Collins was cast … as Edith Tolkien,
love and later wife of Tolkien, who was also the inspiration of
the princess characters in The Lord of the Rings ."
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_(film)
The Log24 posts of August 30, 2017, are now tagged Verbum 2017.
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Saturday, September 22, 2018
Symmetric Generation, by Netflix
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Friday, September 21, 2018
Symmetric Generation, by Nao
"The creation of a new world
starts now.
Once again I am tied
to the logic of this
Hyper-symmetrical-dimension."
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Saturday, July 12, 2014
Sequel
A sequel to the 1974 film
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot :
Contingent and Fluky
Some variations on a thunderbolt theme:
These variations also exemplify the larger
Verbum theme:
A search today for Verbum in this journal yielded
a Georgetown University Chomskyite, Professor
David W. Lightfoot.
"Dr. Lightfoot writes mainly on syntactic theory,
language acquisition and historical change, which
he views as intimately related. He argues that
internal language change is contingent and fluky,
takes place in a sequence of bursts, and is best
viewed as the cumulative effect of changes in
individual grammars, where a grammar is a
'language organ' represented in a person's
mind/brain and embodying his/her language
faculty."
Some syntactic work by another contingent and fluky author
is related to the visual patterns illustrated above.
See Tecumseh Fitch in this journal.
For other material related to the large Verbum cube,
see posts for the 18th birthday of Harry Potter.
That birthday was also the upload date for the following:
See esp. the comments section.
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Saturday, March 10, 2012
Boo Boo Boo*
Academics today—
-
- What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the S.A.T.
- VERBUM SAT in this journal
- In the Beginning Was the Void†—
Home Page of Steven Z. Levine
(A.B., A.M., Ph.D., all at Harvard University, 1968-1974)—
Note that Levine states forthrightly that he won Third Prize for Bad Writing
from the international journal Philosophy and Literature in 1998.
* Stanley H. Kaplan, mnemonic for “square root of two.”
† On the void — See this morning’s post and “Is Nothing Sacred?“
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Brightness at Noon, continued
"One wild rhapsody a fake for another."
– Wallace Stevens, "Arrival at the Waldorf," in Parts of a World (1942)
"Camelot is an illusion.
That doesn't matter, according to Catherine.
Camelot is an artificial construction, a public perception.
The things that matter are closer, deeper, self-generated, unkillable.
You've got to grow up to discover what those things are."
— Dan Zak, Washington Post movie review on Feb. 27, 2009. See also this journal on that date.
See as well a note on symmetry from Christmas Eve, 1981, and Verbum in this journal.
Some philosophical background— Derrida in the Garden.
Some historical background— A Very Private Woman and Noland.
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Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Brightness at Noon
David Levine's portrait of Arthur Koestler (see Dec. 30, 2009) —
See also this morning's post as well as
Monday's post quoting George David Birkhoff —
"If I were a Leibnizian mystic… I would say that…
God thinks multi-dimensionally — that is,
uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp."
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Sunday, April 18, 2010
A Generation Lost in Space
or, Deja Vu All Over Again
Top two obituaries in this morning's NY Times list–
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David Simons, Who Flew High Dr. Simons, a physician turned Air Force officer, had sent animals aloft for several years before his record-breaking flight. James Aubrey, who Portrayed the Hero Mr. Aubrey portrayed Ralph in the film version of the William Golding novel and had a busy career on stage and television in England. |
Simons reportedly died on April 5,
Aubrey on April 6.
This journal on those dates–
April 5 —
Monday, April 5, 2010Space Cowboys
Google News, 11:32 AM ET today–
Related material: Yesterday's Easter message, |
April 6 —
Tuesday, April 6, 2010Clue
See also Leary on Cuernavaca, Team Daedalus"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162 "Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys" "Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction\ |
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"At the moment which is not of action or inaction |
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Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Team Daedalus
"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162
"Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys"
"Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Epiphany Revisited
|
January 06, 2007 Picture of Nothing
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself….” Related material: The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.” — Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word “Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son’s procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12″ — Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J., Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162
“So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil’s Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: ‘In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, from Slate‘s “High Concept” department  “Bang.” “…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….” For properties of the “nothing” represented by the 3×3 grid, see The Field of Reason. For religious material related to the above and to Epiphany, a holy day observed by some, see Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star and Shining Forth.
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Some Context:
See also Nativity.
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Saturday, September 5, 2009
Saturday September 5, 2009
For the
Burning Man
Burning Man
(Cover slightly changed.)
Background —
SAT
Part I:
Part II:
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|
Part III:
From August 25th —
"Boo, boo, boo,
square root of two."
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Sunday, August 17, 2008
Sunday August 17, 2008
“Maybe Escher
could have done it.“
could have done it.“
Detail from
Escher’s Verbum
(“In Touch with God“)
The title link of this entry
leads, via a Log24 entry, to
a story by Robert A. Heinlein.
For those who, like Rick Warren
(shown below in a current news page),
prefer Jewish narratives,
I recommend
1. Kesher Talk’s “Dick Morris:
Flaming Sword of Vengeance“
3. Triangulation.
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Friday, April 18, 2008
Friday April 18, 2008
In memory of
Gian-Carlo Rota,
mathematician, who died
at 66 on this date in 1999
Gian-Carlo Rota,
mathematician, who died
at 66 on this date in 1999
"Numbers go to heaven
who know no more
of God on earth than,
as it were,
of sun in forest gloom."
— Meister Eckhart,
In Principio Erat Verbum
Related material:
yesterday's entry, and
Comments Off on Friday April 18, 2008
Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday July 23, 2007
Daniel Radcliffe
is 18 today.
is 18 today.
Greetings.
“The greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably)
would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of
taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions.
Would not this be true of us?”
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”
“El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis)
sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de
tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas.
¿No sería este nuestro caso?”
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Los Avatares de la Tortuga“
Autonomous Apparition
At Midsummer Noon:
|
|
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And if we ate the incipient colorings – Wallace Stevens, “The Rock” |
See also
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Hofstadter’s cover.
Here are three patterns,
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
Click on image for details.
Comments Off on Monday July 23, 2007
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Saturday January 6, 2007
Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
“Pictures of Nothing“–
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately
about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction,
and abstraction as a kind of
anti-religious faith in itself….”
Related material:
The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato’s cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″
— Index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162
“So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil’s Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
‘In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department
“Bang.”
“…Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite or
any other form of matter.
They are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal….”
For properties of the
“nothing” represented
by the 3×3 grid, see
The Field of Reason.
For religious material related
to the above and to Epiphany,
a holy day observed by some,
see Plato, Pegasus, and the
Evening Star and Shining Forth.
Comments Off on Saturday January 6, 2007
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Thursday October 5, 2006
In Touch with God
(Title of an interview with
the late Paul Halmos, mathematician)
Since Halmos died on Yom Kippur, his thoughts on God may be of interest to some.
And, more simply,
April 28, 2004:
From a 1990 interview:
“What’s the best part of being a mathematician? I’m not a religious man, but it’s almost like being in touch with God when you’re thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it’s fun to try to learn some of the secrets.”
I personally prefer Annie Dillard on God:
“… if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken. And it is…. Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone.”
Some other versions of
the philosopher’s stone:
April 28, 2004:
This last has the virtue of
being connected with Halmos
via his remarks during the
“In Touch with God” interview:
“…at the root of all deep mathematics there is a combinatorial insight… the really original, really deep insights are always combinatorial….”
“Combinatorics, the finite case, is where the genuine, deep insight is.”
“Combinatorics, the finite case, is where the genuine, deep insight is.”
See also the remark of Halmos that serves as an epigraph to Theme and Variations.
Finally, it should be noted that
the 4×9 black rectangle
the 4×9 black rectangle
has also served
at least one interpreter
as a philosopher’s stone,
and is also the original
“Halmos tombstone.”
Comments Off on Thursday October 5, 2006
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Wednesday January 4, 2006
Dragon School
In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended The Dragon School. Carpenter died a year ago today.
From Log24 on Nov. 16, 2005:
Images
Adam Gopnik on C. S. Lewis in the New Yorker:
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."
"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."
"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."
From Paul Preuss,
Broken Symmetries
(see previous entry):
"Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods…."
From
Verbum Sat Sapienti?
Comments Off on Wednesday January 4, 2006
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Saturday December 24, 2005
High Concept
“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″
— index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon,
Society of Jesus,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162
Then there is
the Daughter’s procession:
For the String Theory
Appreciation Club, see
Raoul Bott, 1923-2005.
For another
imaginary club, see
The Club Dumas (below).
For a non-imaginary club,
see the organization
that included Noon (above).
Comments Off on Saturday December 24, 2005
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Wednesday November 16, 2005
Images
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."
"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."
"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."
"We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery…."
"The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images– the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse– are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew."
Related material:
Click on pictures for details.
See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well as
at Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
"the way of images."
Comments Off on Wednesday November 16, 2005
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Wednesday August 24, 2005
High Concept, continued:
“In the beginning there was nothing.
And God said, ‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.“
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department
Related material:
- On the phrase “verbum mentis”
- From Satan’s Rhetoric, by Armando Maggi
(University of Chicago Press, 2001):
| Page 110:
“In chapter I I explained that devils first and foremost exist as semioticians of the world’s signs. Devils solely live in their interpretations, in their destructive syllogisms. As Visconti puts it, devils speak the idiom of the mind.37 …. The exorcist’s healing voice states that Satan has always been absent from the world, that his disturbing and unclear manifestations in the possessed person’s physicality are really nonexistent occurrences, nothing but disturbances of the mind, since evil itself is a lack of being.” Footnote 37, page 110: “It is necessary to distinguish the devils’ ‘language of the mind’ and Augustine’s verbum mentis (word of the mind), as he theorizes it first of all in On the Trinity (book 15). The devils’ language of the mind disturbs the subject’s internal and preverbal discourse.” |
Comments Off on Wednesday August 24, 2005
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Tuesday August 23, 2005
High Concept*
"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son's procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12"
— index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162
"So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: 'In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'"
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, Slate's "High Concept" department
Related material:
Nothing Ventured,
The God-Shaped Hole, and
Is Nothing Sacred?
* See also John O'Callaghan, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Joshua P. Hochschild, "Does Mental Language Imply Mental Representationalism? The Case of Aquinas’s Verbum Mentis," Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Volume 4, 2004 (pdf), pp. 12-17.
Comments Off on Tuesday August 23, 2005
Friday, April 18, 2003
Friday April 18, 2003
To the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits):
Have a Good Friday, Traitors
†
Prompted by Pilate’s question “What is truth?” and by my March 24 attack on Noam Chomsky, I decided this afternoon to further investigate what various people have written about Chomsky’s posing of what he calls “Plato’s problem” and “Orwell’s problem.” The former concerns linguistics, the latter, politics. As my March 24 entry indicates, I have nothing but contempt for both Chomsky’s linguistics and Chomsky’s politics. What I discovered this afternoon is that Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, in 2001 appointed a Chomskyite, David W. Lightfoot, as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
“Why do we know so much more than we have evidence for in certain areas, and so much less in others? In tackling these questions — Plato’s and Orwell’s problem — Chomsky again demonstrates his unequalled capacity to integrate vast amounts of material.” — David W. Lightfoot, review of Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language
What, indeed, is truth? I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown. For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.
See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum, which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”
Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day. See
“Examples are the stained glass windows of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Motto of Plato’s Academy
† The Exorcist, 1973
Comments Off on Friday April 18, 2003