Saturday, August 27, 2011
From http://msa-x.msa-x.org/?p=1064 —
"Exit Art New York, The Labyrinth Wall:
From Mythology to Reality" —

From tonight's online New York Times obituaries —

Ms. Ingberman died Wednesday. Related material—
Symmetry (Wednesday), Design (Thursday), Solomon's Labyrinth (Friday).
See also an essay by John Haber —
"Exit Art may yet offer an alternative: shut them up in the labyrinth, with the Minotaur and, as in Iraq, no Ariadne's thread to guide them out. Jeannette Ingberman and Papo Colo line the space with 'The Labyrinth Wall: From Mythology to Reality,' inviting fifty-one artists to cover its sixty-two panels."
— "Marlene Dumas, The Labyrinth Wall, and Emily Jacir"
Haber (ibid .) also describes artist Marlene Dumas, a recent winner of a Royal Swedish Academy Schock Prize. For a fellow Schock winner— mathematician Michael Aschbacher— see Thursday's Design.)
* For another version of the title, see this morning's front page.
Comments Off on This Way to the Egress*
Thursday, January 2, 2020
See Nada + Hemingway in this journal.
The above upload date suggests a look at
other posts now tagged Red to Green.
Comments Off on Nada for Hemingway
Sunday, July 14, 2019
The Quantum Tesseract Theorem Revisited
From page 274 —
"The secret is that the super-mathematician expresses by the anticommutation
of his operators the property which the geometer conceives as perpendicularity
of displacements. That is why on p. 269 we singled out a pentad of anticommuting
operators, foreseeing that they would have an immediate application in describing
the property of perpendicular directions without using the traditional picture of space.
They express the property of perpendicularity without the picture of perpendicularity.
Thus far we have touched only the fringe of the structure of our set of sixteen E-operators.
Only by entering deeply into the theory of electrons could I show the whole structure
coming into evidence."
A related illustration, from posts tagged Dirac and Geometry —
Compare and contrast Eddington's use of the word "perpendicular"
with a later use of the word by Saniga and Planat.
Comments Off on Old Pathways in Science:
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
The New York Times at 8:22 PM ET —
"Knight Landesman, a longtime publisher of Artforum magazine
and a power broker in the art world, resigned on Wednesday
afternoon, hours after a lawsuit was filed in New York accusing
him of sexually harassing at least nine women in episodes that
stretched back almost a decade."
See as well, in this journal, Way to the Egress.
Comments Off on To the Egress
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Comments Off on For Two Artists of Norway
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Three links with a Borges flavor—
Related material
The 236 in yesterday evening's NY lottery may be
viewed as the 236 in March 18's Defining Configurations.
For some background, see Configurations and Squares.
A new illustration for that topic—

This shows a reconcilation of the triples described by Sloane
in Defining Configurations with the square geometric
arrangement described by Coxeter in the Aleph link above.
Note that the 56 from yesterday's midday NY lottery
describes the triples that appear both in the Eightfold Way
link above and also in a possible source for
the eight triples of Sloane's 83 configuration—

The geometric square arrangement discussed in the Aleph link
above appears in a different, but still rather Borgesian, context
in yesterday morning's Minimalist Icon.
Comments Off on The Aleph, the Lottery, and the Eightfold Way
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
The Finkelstein Talisman —
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime in "Transformers" (Paramount, 2007)
Wikipedia on Hasbro —
Three American Jewish brothers,[6] Herman, Hillel, and Henry Hassenfeld[7]
founded Hassenfeld Brothers in Providence, Rhode Island in 1923 . . . .
The Hassenfeld Auction —
Also on September 16, 2015 —

The Hindman Image —
The Hood Warenkorb —
Under the Hood —
Megan Fox in "Transformers" (2007) —

This Way to the Egress —

Comments Off on The Hassenfeld Legacy
Saturday, March 4, 2017
New York Times headline about a death
on Friday, March 3, 2017 —
René Préval, President of Haiti
in 2010 Quake, Dies at 74
See also …
This way to the egress.
Comments Off on At 74
Monday, July 29, 2013
Comments Off on Papiere, Bitte!
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Last night's 9:29 PM (ET) post featured the phrase
"This way to the egress."
Last night's 10 PM post featured two deaths:
The author of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
reportedly died at 85 on Tuesday, July 9.
A former director of the Museum of Modern Art
who was famously shown the exit door there
in his younger years reportedly died at 80 on
Saturday, July 6.
For a sort of pageant combining Christmas,
the Museum of Modern Art, and an egress,
see St. Stephen's Day, 2008.
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Sunday, August 15, 2010
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Saturday, April 14, 2007
Curtain Up,
Light the Lights!
Cafe Society Part I –
Jack Torrance at
the Overlook Hotel:

Cafe Society Part II –
Don Imus at The FanHouse,
Friday the 13th:

Cafe Society Part III –
The Bank Dick at
the Black Pussy Cafe:

“Which way to the egress?”
Comments Off on Saturday April 14, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Comments Off on Thursday April 12, 2007
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Headline in today’s New York Times:
‘Year of Magical Thinking’
Headed for Broadway
which suggests…
Heaven, Hell,
and Hollywood
(continued)
“This could be Heaven
or this could be Hell.”
— The Eagles, Hotel California
“There are no facts,
there is no truth–
just data to be manipulated.”
— Don Henley, The Garden of Allah
Data:
The New York Lottery numbers
on Joan Didion’s birthday,
Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, were
Mid-day 729,
Evening 439.
Since that day’s Log24 entry,
Magical Thinking, interpreted
the previous day’s (Sunday’s)
NY lottery numbers as a date
and a page number, it seems
appropriate to do a follow-up.
Date 7/29:
See Log24, 7/29/05,
Anatomy of a Death:
Page 439:
See Bartlett’s Familiar
Quotations, 1919, p. 439:
A man’s ingress into the world
is naked and bare,
His progress through the world
is trouble and care;
And lastly,
his egress out of the world,
is nobody knows where.
— John Edwin (1749-1790)
Related material:
The Log24 version of
“This Way to the Egress,”
Directions Out,
linked to in yesterday’s
Magical Thinking.
Comments Off on Tuesday December 6, 2005
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Popcorn Theology,
Part II:
Justice at
the Supremes’ Court
From today’s New York Times:
LeRoy Myers, tap dancer and
road manager for the original Supremes,
died April 26, 2004.
From a log24 entry of April 26, 2004:
“This Way to the Egress”
— Sign supposedly written by P. T. Barnum
A Google search on this phrase leads to the excellent website
The Summoning of Everyman.
|
Comments Off on Saturday May 15, 2004
Monday, April 26, 2004
Directions Out
Part I: Indirections
“By indirections, find directions out.”
— Polonius in Hamlet: II, i
“Foremost among the structural similarities between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein… is the use of indirect communication: as paradoxical as it may sound, both authors deliberately obfuscate their philosophy for the purposes of clarifying it…. let us examine more closely particular instances of indirect communication from both of the philosophers with the intention of finding similarity. ‘By indirections, find directions out.’ – Polonius in Hamlet: II, i“
— WowEssays.com
On religious numerology (indirections)…
For the page number “373” as indicating “eternity,” see
Zen and Language Games (5/2/03), which features Wittgenstein,
Language Game (1/14/04), also featuring Wittgenstein, and
Note 31, page 373, in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (1964 Harper Torchbook paperback, tr. by Howard and Edna Hong),
Publisher: Perennial (Nov. 7, 1964)
ISBN: 0061301221
which says “Compare I John 4:17.”
Okay….
4:17 Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world.
The reference to Judgment Day leads us back to Linda Hamilton, who appears (some say, as noted in Zen and Language Games, as the Mother of God) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and to Part II of our meditation….
Part II: Directions Out
“This Way to the Egress”
— Sign supposedly written by P. T. Barnum
A Google search on this phrase leads to the excellent website
The Summoning of Everyman.
Related thoughts….
A link from Part I of a log24 entry for Thursday, April 22:
ART WARS:
Judgment Day
(2003, 10/07)
to the following —

Frame not included in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Dr. Silberman: You broke my arm!
Sarah Connor: There are
two-hundred-fifteen bones
in the human body,
[expletive deleted].
That’s one.
This suggests, in light of the above-mentioned religious interpretation of Terminator 2, in light of the 2003 10/07 entry, and in light of the April 22 10:07 PM log24 invocation, the following words from the day after the death of Sgt. Pat Tillman:
Doonesbury April 23, 2004

A more traditional farewell, written by a soldier, for a soldier, may be found at The Summoning of Everyman site mentioned above:
A Few Noteworthy Words
From an American Soldier.
Comments Off on Monday April 26, 2004
Sunday, January 17, 2021
The title is from Nabokov.
Related: A sign or symbol known to
techies as “the hamburger.”
See also “White Palace” earlier tonight.

The above image appeared earlier in posts
now tagged “Darkinbad the Brightdayler.”
Thursday, December 3, 2020
Comments Off on Unframed Prime
A search in this journal for “Jean Brodie” suggests a review —
“A professor is all-powerful, Gareth liked to tell his daughter, he puts
‘a veritable frame around life,’ and ‘organizes the unorganizable.
Nimbly partitions it . . . .'”
— Review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics , Aug. 13, 2006
Comments Off on A Veritable Frame
The “bricks” in posts tagged Octad Group suggest some remarks
from last year’s HBO “Watchmen” series —

Related material — The two bricks constituting a 4×4 array, and . . .

“(this is the famous Kummer abstract configuration )”
— Igor Dolgachev, ArXiv, 16 October 2019.
As is this —
.
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.
A related Broomsday event for the Church of Synchronology —

Comments Off on Brick Joke
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Comments Off on Annals of Subliminal Typography
The tinfoil link in the previous post suggests a review.

The Wikipedia article on the Harvard Psilocybin Project links to . . .

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Windows lockscreen, morning of December 1, 2020.
Related security tips. . . See tinfoil. “We all know the song.”
Image related to last night’s post “Time Class” —

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(Tom Ford directed “Nocturnal Animals.”)
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Monday, November 30, 2020
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Sunday, November 29, 2020
Comments Off on Osterman Meets Brosterman
” . . . one person’s favorite comedy might be a wrenching drama to someone else.”
— The Atlantic promotional email by film critic David Sims on Saturday,
November 28, 2020, 11:37 AM ET.
See as well “Star Quality: Mirror Guy” (this journal, 12:30 PM ET on Saturday,
November 28, 2020, the reported date of death for Darth Vader actor
David Prowse).
Comments Off on De Gustibus
For the Dr. Seuss School of Neuropsychopharmacology —

From the school itself —

Related material — Pilgrim’s Progress in this journal and . . .
an image from Log24 on December 8, 2012 —

See as well “To Think That It Happened on Prescott Street“
and related posts.
Comments Off on Sunday Morning in a Cartoon Graveyard
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Comments Off on Star Quality: “Mirror Guy”

A nostalgia pill for Watchmen fans.
For Harvard Watchmen fans, a link to 2346:
http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=2346
—


Comments Off on A Poster for Doctor Manhattan
From a post of June 12, 2018 —
Like Decorations in a Cartoon Graveyard —

More-recent neuronal art —

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Friday, November 27, 2020
Comments Off on Unreality in Oz

See also, in memory of a Northfield, Minnesota, professor
of mathematics who reportedly died on October 28 —
Posts tagged Olaf Gate.
Comments Off on Reality at Northfield
Comments Off on The Sun-Ra Code

Perhaps Affleck’s rendition of “Aquellos Ojos Verdes ” will help.
See Hollywood Moment (January 22, 2018).
Comments Off on Latinx Critique
Thursday, November 26, 2020
For the title, see the previous post as well as Prescott Street
and Psychedelic Club in this journal.
Some related art —



Comments Off on Harvard Psychedelic Club vs. Harvard Alcoholic Club
Comments Off on Critic’s Pick
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
In his weblog today, Peter Woit quotes “a remarkable article
entitled Contemplating the End of Physics posted today at
Quanta magazine [by] Robbert Dijkgraaf (the director of the IAS)”
An excerpt from the quoted remarks by the Institute for
Advanced Study director —
“All of this is part of a much larger shift in
the very scope of science, from studying what is
to what could be. In the 20th century, scientists
sought out the building blocks of reality:
the molecules, atoms and elementary particles
out of which all matter is made;
the cells, proteins and genes
that make life possible;
the bits, algorithms and networks
that form the foundation of information and intelligence,
both human and artificial. This century, instead,
we will begin to explore all there is to be made with
these building blocks.”
Then there are, of course, the building blocks of mathematical reality:
unit cubes. See building-block.space.
Comments Off on Scientism vs. Pure Mathematics
Monday, November 16, 2020


See as well . . .
Lost in Building-Block.Space .
Comments Off on Physics Jeopardy: “What Is a Particle?”
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Comments Off on The Lost Girls of 1983
Thursday, October 29, 2020
The service hosting my Log24 images is down. I do not know
when it will be up again.*
Meanwhile, a WordPress Media workaround image —

Related narrative for a Code Girl —
“Tickle: Change, Shift, Reveal.”
* Update at 5 AM Oct. 30: Images are back.
To celebrate their return . . . .
“Dance Practice Video,” still and detail.
Comments Off on Images in posts are down.
Sunday, October 25, 2020
A search in this journal for Harvard Alcoholic Club
leads to a dead link, then to . . .



Comments Off on A Tune for Bojangles
Saturday, October 24, 2020
“C24 is the list of codewords of the extended
binary Golay code C24. Each codeword is expressed
by a subset of the set M of the positions [1, . . . , 24]
of MOG.”
— From Shimada’s notes on computational data at
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shimada/
preprints/Edge/PaperEdge/compdataEdge.pdf .
* Related material — A new Ariana Grande video and . . .
a recent digital artwork, “Code Girl,” with accompanying story —

Comments Off on Switchin’ the Positions*
Friday, October 23, 2020

“Quadrangle” is also a mathematical term.
Example: The Doily.

See also The Crosswicks Curse .
Comments Off on Language Game: The Doily Curse
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 118-119 —
118. |
Where does our investigation get its importance from,
since it seems only to destroy everything interesting,
that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all
the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and
rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but
houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground
of language on which they stand. |
119. |
The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one
or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps
that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us
see the value of the discovery. |


Comments Off on The Limits of Language
See “Unfolded.jpg” in this journal. From that search —

Compare and contrast these figures with images by Wittgenstein in . . .

Related material from last night’s post Modernist Cuts —

Schlick also appears in recent posts tagged Moriarty Variations.
Comments Off on Unfolded
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Comments Off on “I Could a Tale …”
Comments Off on The Doily Man
Monday, October 12, 2020
Comments Off on New Fields
Comments Off on Old Fields
Tuesday, October 6, 2020

The above Vanity Fair article was republished on the Web by VF
on September 3, 2013. See also this journal on that date.
Related religious remarks —


* “Bulk apperception” is a phrase from Westworld. See Log24 notes.
Comments Off on Only Connect : Bulk Apperception* Continues.
Friday, September 11, 2020
From the Vanderbilt University obituary of Vaughan F. R. Jones —
“During the mid-1980s, while Jones was working on a problem in von Neumann algebra theory, which is related to the foundations of quantum mechanics, he discovered an unexpected link between that theory and knot theory, a mathematical field dating back to the 19th century.
Specifically, he found a new mathematical expression—now known as the Jones polynomial—for distinguishing between different types of knots as well as links in three-dimensional space. Jones’ discovery had been missed by topologists during the previous 60 years, and his finding contributed to his selection as a Fields Medalist.
‘Now there is an area of mathematics called
quantum topology, which basically followed
from his original work,’
said Dietmar Bisch, professor of mathematics.” [Link added.] |
Related to Jones’s work —
“Topological Quantum Information Theory” at
the website of Louis H. Kauffman —
http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Quanta.pdf.
Kauffman —

Comments Off on In Memoriam

Elsewhere on that same date —

Comments Off on Welcome to AMS-LaTeX
Friday, September 4, 2020
(Continued from September 22, 2002.)
“As you read, watch for patterns. Pay special attention to
imagery that is geometric….” — “Pattern in The Defense “


See as well Wednesday’s Smile, and “Expanding the Spielraum“ .
Comments Off on Force Field of Dreams
Thursday, September 3, 2020
Recreation of a 1960s LA marquee in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” —

But seriously . . .

See also a “Once-Upon-a-Time”-related death.
Comments Off on LA Stories
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Saturday, August 22, 2020

Posts tagged Plato’s Video continue.

Related literary remarks from this journal on Oct. 1, 2016 —


— A Heart for the Gods of Mexico , Conrad Aiken, 1939
Related imagery this morning from the Gulf of Mexico —

Meanwhile, also on Oct. 1, 2016, related imagery from Star Wars Rebels —

Click here to enlarge the holocrons.
Comments Off on An Object Lesson
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Comments Off on Dry Humor
Comments Off on Hidden Figure: Type Design at the East Village Other
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Comments Off on Consensual Objectification… Continued
New Woke Stance
“The new Playboy claims to have moved away from the male gaze, but no matter how tasteful it may be, it is still relying on nudity.
‘We talk a lot about when something is objectification versus when it is consensual objectification versus when it is art,’ Singh said. ‘I think objectification removes the agency of the subject.
‘Consensual objectification is the idea of someone feeling good about themselves and wanting someone to look at them. Art means, O.K., we can hang this on a wall. And if it’s both, for us, that’s the major win.’ ”
— Erica Tempesta for DailyMail.com, 2 Aug. 2019 |

Comments Off on Here’s to Consensual Objectification
Thursday, July 30, 2020
An article yesterday at Quanta Magazine suggests a review . . .
From Diamond Theorem images at Pinterest —

Some background —

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Wednesday, July 22, 2020
“The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.
I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot
I happen to choose. These bits I write on
index cards until the novel is done.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, interview,
Paris Review No. 41 (Summer-Fall 1967).

Another story —


Related material: Mathematics as a Black Art.
Comments Off on Card
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
In memory of . . .
“Helene Lovie Aldwinckle,
codebreaker, broadcaster and gallerist,
born 26 October 1920; died 24 April 2020″ —
Other posts now also tagged The Cologne Sextet.
Comments Off on The Sextet Enigma






Click on the tag “The Log” for other parts of the tale.
Comments Off on The Log: A Tale for Joe Hill
Monday, July 13, 2020
The lexicographic Golay code
contains, embedded within it,
the Miracle Octad Generator.
By Steven H. Cullinane, July 13, 2020
Background —

The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
of R. T. Curtis (Conway-Sloane version) —

A basis for the Golay code, excerpted from a version of
the code generated in lexicographic order, in
“Constructing the Extended Binary Golay Code“
Ben Adlam
Harvard University
August 9, 2011:
000000000000000011111111
000000000000111100001111
000000000011001100110011
000000000101010101010101
000000001001011001101001
000000110000001101010110
000001010000010101100011
000010010000011000111010
000100010001000101111000
001000010001001000011101
010000010001010001001110
100000010001011100100100
Below, each vector above has been reordered within
a 4×6 array, by Steven H. Cullinane, to form twelve
independent Miracle Octad Generator vectors
(as in the Conway-Sloane SPLAG version above, in
which Curtis’s earlier heavy bricks are reflected in
their vertical axes) —
01 02 03 04 05 . . . 20 21 22 23 24 -->
01 05 09 13 17 21
02 06 10 14 18 22
03 07 11 15 19 23
04 08 12 16 20 24
0000 0000 0000 0000 1111 1111 -->
0000 11
0000 11
0000 11
0000 11 as in the MOG.
0000 0000 0000 1111 0000 1111 -->
0001 01
0001 01
0001 01
0001 01 as in the MOG.
0000 0000 0011 0011 0011 0011 -->
0000 00
0000 00
0011 11
0011 11 as in the MOG.
0000 0000 0101 0101 0101 0101 -->
0000 00
0011 11
0000 00
0011 11 as in the MOG.
0000 0000 1001 0110 0110 1001 -->
0010 01
0001 10
0001 10
0010 01 as in the MOG.
0000 0011 0000 0011 0101 0110 -->
0000 00
0000 11
0101 01
0101 10 as in the MOG.
0000 0101 0000 0101 0110 0011 -->
0000 00
0101 10
0000 11
0101 01 as in the MOG.
0000 1001 0000 0110 0011 1010 -->
0100 01
0001 00
0001 11
0100 10 as in the MOG.
0001 0001 0001 0001 0111 1000 -->
0000 01
0000 10
0000 10
1111 10 as in the MOG.
0010 0001 0001 0010 0001 1101 -->
0000 01
0000 01
1001 00
0110 11 as in the MOG.
0100 0001 0001 0100 0100 1110 -->
0000 01
1001 11
0000 01
0110 00 as in the MOG.
1000 0001 0001 0111 0010 0100 -->
10 00 00
00 01 01
00 01 10
01 11 00 as in the MOG (heavy brick at center).
Update at 7:41 PM ET the same day —
A check of SPLAG shows that the above result is not new:

And at 7:59 PM ET the same day —
Conway seems to be saying that at some unspecified point in the past,
M.J.T. Guy, examining the lexicographic Golay code, found (as I just did)
that weight-8 lexicographic Golay codewords, when arranged naturally
in 4×6 arrays, yield certain intriguing visual patterns. If the MOG existed
at the time of his discovery, he would have identified these patterns as
those of the MOG. (Lexicographic codes have apparently been
known since 1960, the MOG since the mid-1970s.)
* Addendum at 4 AM ET the next day —
See also Logline (Walpurgisnacht 2013).
Comments Off on The Lexicographic Octad Generator (LOG)*

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 —

A quote from a 1962 novel —
“There’s something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz.”
Addendum for the Church of Synchronology —
The Joe Hill novel above was published (in hardcover)
on Walpurgisnacht —April 30, 2013. See also this journal
on that date.
Comments Off on Unpoetic License
Sunday, July 12, 2020
The phrase “the ability to jump in and out of spaces” was quoted
in an update this morning to a July 2 post, “The Maxwell Enticement.”
This suggests other Log24 posts now tagged “Jack in the Box.”
A related image, from Know Your Meme —

Comments Off on Jack in the Box
Saturday, July 4, 2020
Image from a film review of “Eureka” (a 1983 film by Nicolas Roeg).
Note the date of the review — January 09, 2015.

Also on January 09, 2015 —

Related cinematic philosophy —

Note the number, 701, on the colonel’s collar.
Comments Off on Plan 9 from Oz
Friday, July 3, 2020

See also a different interpretation, by David Lynch,
of the “twin peaks” concept —

Midrash for Mayakofsky —


Comments Off on The Hot Rock
Thursday, July 2, 2020

From the above search result — “0.69 seconds.”
See as well Theresa Russell and Rutger Hauer in Eureka . . .

See also a different interpretation, by David Lynch,
of the “twin peaks” concept —

Comments Off on The Speed of Thought
[Update of Sunday morning, July 12, 2020 —
This July 2 post was suggested in part by the July 1 post Magic Child
and in part by the Sept. 15, 1984, date in the image below. For more
details about that date, possibly the death date of author Richard
Brautigan, see “The Life and Death of Richard Brautigan,” by
Lawrence Wright, in Rolling Stone on April 11, 1985.
From that article:
Marcia called him the next night [Sept. 15, 1984]
in Bolinas. He asked if she liked his mind. “I said,
‘Yes, Richard, I like your mind. You have the ability
to jump in and out of spaces. It’s not linear thinking;
it’s exciting, catalytic, random thinking.’ “
Such thinking, though interesting, is not recommended for the
general public. Sept. 15, 1984, was perhaps Brautigan’s last day alive.]

* See Maxwell in posts tagged Gods and Giants.
Comments Off on The Maxwell* Enticement
Wednesday, July 1, 2020


“The road is long
With many a winding turn”
— Neil Diamond
Comments Off on The Long Strange Road
Comments Off on Magic Child
The above title was suggested by a scene in Body Double (1984) . . .

Variations, starring Theresa Russell, on related themes —
The De Palma Balcony in Body Double , and “ready for my closeup” —


“Bing bang, I heard the whole gang!”
Summary —

Comments Off on Actress Descending a Staircase
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Writer Robert Avrech on director Brian De Palma —
“Both Brian and I greatly admire Alfred Hitchcock so we were
pretty much on the same page aesthetically. That’s how I came
to write Body Double , a superb thriller that immediately thrust
me into the Hollywood limelight.”
— https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?
f=Behind-the-Scenes-with-Hol-by-Joan-Brunwasser-
American-Jews_Hollywood_Interviews_Judaism-Jewish-
131219-897.html

Comments Off on The Social Network
Monday, June 29, 2020

Writer Robert Avrech on director Brian De Palma —
“Both Brian and I greatly admire Alfred Hitchcock so we were
pretty much on the same page aesthetically. That’s how I came
to write Body Double , a superb thriller that immediately thrust
me into the Hollywood limelight.”
— https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?
f=Behind-the-Scenes-with-Hol-by-Joan-Brunwasser-
American-Jews_Hollywood_Interviews_Judaism-Jewish-
131219-897.html
See also Avrech in this journal —

Comments Off on The Same Page

“The Demolished Man was a novel that had fascinated De Palma
since the late 1950s and appealed to his background in mathematics
and avant-garde storytelling. Its unconventional unfolding of plot
(exemplified in its mathematical layout of dialogue) and its stress on
perception have analogs in De Palma’s filmmaking.” — Wikipedia
This, together with the Cuernavaca balcony in Deschooling MIT, is
perhaps enough of a clue for mystified theologians on St. Peter’s Day.
Comments Off on The De Palma Balcony
Friday, June 26, 2020
Comments Off on Nihilist Tune for Dixie
Saturday, June 20, 2020
Comments Off on Password: Snowball
Wednesday, June 3, 2020

See also Litsky’s obituary from All Saints’ Day, 2018.
Litsky reportedly died on October 30, 2018 — Devil’s Night.
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Monday, June 1, 2020
“The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference
creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself
is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real.
There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because
you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears:
the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.”
— Amanda Gefter in 2014, quoted here on Mayday 2020.

See as well the previous post.
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See also Vril Chick.
Comments Off on A Graveyard Smash: Galois Geometry Meets Nordic Aliens
Thursday, May 28, 2020
“Old men ought to be explorers.” — T. S. Eliot
“Everybody’s lost but me!” — Young Indiana Jones, quoted
in a book review (“Knox Peden on Martin Hägglund”) in
Sydney Review of Books on May 26 . . .
” Here I am reminded of the words of
the young Indiana Jones alone in the desert,
decades before the Last Crusade:
‘Everybody’s lost but me.’ “


Related remarks — Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
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My website on finite geometry is now available
on GitHub at http://m759.github.io/ . The part
of greatest interest to coders is also at
https://repl.it/@m759/View-4x4x4#index.html .
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Wednesday, May 20, 2020
In memory of a music editor.


Blangsted reportedly died on May 1.
See also that date in this journal, among
other posts tagged The Next Level.
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Comments Off on Raiders of the Lost Unity
Comments Off on Mathematics as a Black Art
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Source citation for an article quoted here last night —
“Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action” —

A check of that source yields the seal of the University of Torino —

Related material —

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Saturday, May 16, 2020
Comments Off on Bullshit Studies
Thursday, May 7, 2020
“Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain
how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.”
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016

Illustrations, from the American Mathematical Society Spring
2020 book sale, of a book scheduled to be published May 28.
Comments Off on Now You See It, Now You Don’t
“He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it.
That master diamond cutter.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Part III.
Kant’s “category theory” —
“In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant deduces the table of twelve categories, or pure concepts of the understanding….
The categories must be ‘schematized’ because their non-empirical origin in pure understanding prevents their having the sort of sensible content that would connect them immediately to the objects of experience; transcendental schemata are mediating representations that are meant to establish the connection between pure concepts and appearances in a rule-governed way. Mathematical concepts are discussed in this context since they are unique in being pure but also sensible concepts: they are pure because they are strictly a priori in origin, and yet they are sensible since they are constructed in concreto . ”
— Shabel, Lisa, “Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/kant-mathematics/>. |
See also The Diamond Theorem and Octad.us.
Comments Off on Kant as Diamond Cutter
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
is a philosophical conundrum discussed this morning in the weblog of
David Justice.

A related statement of this “problem of identity,” from posts
in this weblog tagged “For Banff 2009” yesterday afternoon—

Remarks related to the ship of Theseus —


Comments Off on “The Ship of Theseus”…
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Comments Off on In Memoriam: Jan Saxl, Mathematician
Comments Off on Notes for a Wake

This is perhaps the same Robert Mezey, poet at Pomona College,
who reportedly died on April 25.
See a Pomona link, the Fano Hallows, from this journal on that date.
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Monday, May 4, 2020
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The title is a phrase from the Suzanne Vega song in the previous post.
“Always busy counting . . . .” — Tagline at Peter J. Cameron’s weblog.
“This morning brought the news that Jan Saxl died on Saturday.”
— Peter J. Cameron today
A search for Saxl in this weblog yields a post related to a topic in
Wolfram Neutsch’s book Coordinates. See Saturday’s post
“Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level.”
Related narrative from the Saturday post —

Related narrative from Sunday’s Westworld finale —

Comments Off on The Man Behind the Counter
Continues.

Update at 4 PM —

“It is always
Nice to see you”
Says the man
Behind the counter
— Suzanne Vega. “Tom’s Diner”

Tom Stall’s diner in “A History of Violence” (30 September 2005).
This journal on 30 September 2005 —
“This place ain’t doing me any good.
I’m in the wrong town,
I should be in Hollywood.”
— Dylan, “Things Have Changed“
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Sunday, May 3, 2020
Comments Off on Crichton Time

He beomes aware of something else… some other presence.
“Anybody here?” he says.
I am here.
He almost jumps, it is so loud. Or it seems loud. Then he wonders if
he has heard anything at all.
“Did you speak?”
No.
How are we communicating? he wonders.
The way everything communicates with everything else.
Which way is that?
Why do you ask if you already know the answer?
— Sphere by Michael Crichton, Harvard ’64
Comments Off on Into the Westworld
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Comments Off on Beat the Clock
From the obituary of a game inventor who reportedly died
on Monday, February 25, 2013 —
” ‘He was hired because of the game,’ Richard Turyn,
a mathematician who worked at Sylvania, told
the Washington Post in a 2004 feature on Diplomacy.”

* For the theorem, see Wolfram Neutsch, Coordinates .
(Published by de Gruyter, 1996. See pp. 761-766.)
Having defined (pp. 751-752) the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
as a 4×6 array to be used with Conway’s “hexacode,” Neutsch says . . .
“Apart from the three constructions of the Golay codes
discussed at length in this book (lexicographic and via
the MOG or the projective line), there are literally
dozens of alternatives. For lack of space, we have to
restrict our attention to a single example. It has been
discovered by Turyn and can be connected in a very
beautiful way with the Miracle Octad Generator….
To this end, we consider the natural splitting of the MOG into
three disjoint octads L, M, R (‘left’, ‘middle’, and ‘right’ octad)….”
— From page 761
“The theorem of Turyn” is on page 764 —

Comments Off on Turyn’s Octad Theorem: The Next Level*
Friday, May 1, 2020

Related pure mathematics —
The Escape from Plato’s Cave to . . .

See also Numberland and Walpurgisnacht Geometry.
Comments Off on The H-State
The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn (Bantam Books, 2014).
“You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”
I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.”
I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.
“If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.”
That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing. |
My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (Cornell, 1970) —
“There is a point at which
‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’ “
The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”
Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:

See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.
Comments Off on Bullshit Studies
Sunday, April 26, 2020
This post was suggested by yesterday morning’s link to The Fano Hallows.
“Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain
how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.”
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016
A symbol related to The Fano Hallows —

Comments Off on The Triangle of Art
Saturday, April 25, 2020
“Brahms maintained a classical sense of
form and order in his works….” — Wikipedia
For example —

The above Cologne sextet upload date suggests a review.
See posts now tagged The Fano Hallows.
Comments Off on Form and Order
Friday, April 24, 2020

This post was suggested by a New York Review of Books article
on Cologne artist Gerhard Richter in the May 14, 2020, issue —
“The Master of Unknowing,” by Susan Tallman.

Some less random art —

Comments Off on Art at Cologne
Sunday, April 19, 2020
A language game on Orthodox Easter —

See also Geometric Theology and Trinity Staircase.
Comments Off on Easter Egg for Wittgenstein
Friday, April 17, 2020
Comments Off on Under the April Snow…
Thursday, April 16, 2020

See as well Pi Day 2020.
Comments Off on Snow White’s Time in Space
Sunday, April 5, 2020
Comments Off on Plan 9 from The New York Times
Comments Off on The Ghost in the Shell
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
“Before time began…” — Optimus Prime

See also posts tagged Aitchison.
Comments Off on Geometric Theology
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Comments Off on Letter to the World
Today's 4:02 AM ET post, "Steinfeld as Rose the Hat,"
suggests a review —
A more impressive woman in white —
Update of 8 PM ET —
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.
Comments Off on Play Date
Sunday, March 8, 2020
Detail:
Click on the above date for further details.
Comments Off on A Tool
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Freeman Dyson on his staircase at Trinity College
(University of Cambridge) and on Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“I held him in the highest respect and was delighted
to find him living in a room above mine on the same
staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down
the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation.”
Frank Close on Ron Shaw:
“Shaw arrived there in 1949 and moved into room K9,
overlooking Jesus Lane. There is nothing particularly
special about this room other than the coincidence that
its previous occupant was Freeman Dyson.”
— Close, Frank. The Infinity Puzzle (p. 78).
Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
See also other posts now tagged Trinity Staircase.
Illuminati enthusiasts may enjoy the following image:

Comments Off on Same Staircase, Different Day
Sunday, February 23, 2020
"Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same,
nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed
to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. ….
The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively."
— Mondrian, 1936 [Links added.]
An image search today (click to enlarge) —

Comments Off on The Representation of Reality
Friday, February 14, 2020
“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will
bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest
possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward
logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary
for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.”
— Albert Einstein, May 1, 1935, obituary for Emmy Noether
(Quoted in part, without source, in Quanta Magazine yesterday.)
Comments Off on Math Woo
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