The above title phrase is from the Windows lockscreen
I encountered at 7:59 AM ET today:
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
“Modern Meets Historic”
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Art Issue*
"… the beautiful object
that stood in
for something else.”
— Holland Cotter quoting an art historian
in The New York Times on May 13
From a post of April 27, 2020 —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside….”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
The beautiful object —
Something else —
* The title is a reference to other posts now also tagged Art Issue.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
The Art Issue
“A sort of pointillist mosaic”
— Author David Mitchell on the film adaptation of
his novel Cloud Atlas .
See also the previous post, Cloud Atlas of Unknowing.
“Art isn’t easy.” — Sondheim.
Monday, April 27, 2020
The Cracked Nut
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable
conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being –
the reward he seeks –the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life,
the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the
essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Friday, April 24, 2020
Art at Cologne
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 —
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Octads and Geometry
See the web pages octad.group and octad.us.
Related geometry (not the 759 octads, but closely related to them) —
The 4×6 rectangle of R. T. Curtis
illustrates the geometry of octads —
Curtis splits the 4×6 rectangle into three 4×2 "bricks" —
.
"In fact the construction enables us to describe the octads
in a very revealing manner. It shows that each octad,
other than Λ1, Λ2, Λ3, intersects at least one of these ' bricks' —
the 'heavy brick' – in just four points." . . . .
— R. T. Curtis (1976). "A new combinatorial approach to M24,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
79, pp 25-42.
Dead Poet Joke
From the subtitles of the recent Kristen Stewart film “Underwater” —
427
00:30:26,144 –> 00:30:27,476
He’d always say
he had a new joke,
428
00:30:27,478 –> 00:30:29,445
and then he’d tell
the same stupid joke.
429
00:30:29,447 –> 00:30:32,785
I was… laughing at that joke.
430
00:30:34,053 –> 00:30:35,685
Yeah, what was it?
431
00:30:35,687 –> 00:30:38,654
What did the fish say when
it bumped into the brick wall?
April 11 was the dies natalis , in the Catholic sense, of John Horton Conway.
Related material: Other posts containing the phrase “brick wall.”