A completely unrelated book from Colorado Springs —
Monday, May 10, 2021
Sunday, May 9, 2021
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Sides
The FBI holding cube in "The Blacklist" —
" 'The Front' is not the whole story . . . ."
— Vincent Canby, New York Times film review, 1976,
as quoted in Wikipedia.
See also Solomon's Cube in this journal.
Some may view the above web page as illustrating the
Glasperlenspiel passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica —
“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”
A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —
"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."
See also a related remark by Lévi-Strauss in 1955:
"…three different readings become possible:
left to right, top to bottom, front to back."
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Friday, April 6, 2018
Watching the Zero
From "The Blacklist" Season 5, Episode 11 —
– Remind me again what it is that we think we're doing here.
– The phone acts as a passive packet sniffer.
It's a trick Tom taught me.
– Packet sniffer? Ugh.
– The FBI uses them.
I'm sure your tech people know all about them.
It can intercept and log traffic that passes over a digital network.
– It is an absolute mystery to me how these gadgets work —
the Dick Tracy phones, these blueteeth connections.
Quite frankly, I miss the rotary phone.
Except for that zero.
Watching that zero crawl back.
Oh, my God.
It was painful.
– We have the code.
– Great.
And more:
Philip J. Davis reportedly turned 86 on January 2, 2009.
An image from this journal on that date —
“You have the incorrect number.
I will tell you what you are doing:
you are turning the letter O
instead of the zero.”
— "Symbols and Signs,"
Vladimir Nabokov, 1948
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The Thread Phantom: A Death on Pi Day*
The American Mathematical Society on April 4 posted a story
about a death that they said occurred on March 14 (Pi Day):
* Notes on the Title —
The Thread Part
The Phantom Part
"What a yarn!" — Raymond Reddington in "The Blacklist"
Fact check on the death date reported by the AMS —
But Davis's funeral-home obituary agrees with the Pi Day date.
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Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Date
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Gold Bug Variations (Continued)
See as well a search for "Gold Bug" in this journal.
From that search —
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations , first published in 1991—
Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old
as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age,
Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math
into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy
potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid
does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding
any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes
him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign.
He has the sub, Lovering the congealed mac and cheese.
Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins
sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an
algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness
Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code
can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick
in the head?"
Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy.
But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar
ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the
mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us.
Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too
complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox
is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to
demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes
up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded
in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more.
He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking
Lovering politely for the insight.
"The key is to find some formal symmetry…."
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Friday, April 29, 2016
Blackboard Jungle…
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Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Black List
A search for "Max Black" in this journal yields some images
from a post of August 30, 2006 . . .
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"Jackson has identified the seventh symbol." |
The "Jackson" above is played by the young James Spader,
who in an older version currently stars in "The Blacklist."
|
"… the memorable models of science are 'speculative instruments,' — Max Black in Models and Metaphors , Cornell U. Press, 1962 |
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Thursday, September 3, 2015
Rings of August
For the title, see posts from August 2007 tagged Gyges.
Related theological remarks:
Boolean spaces (old) vs. Galois spaces (new) in
“The Quality Without a Name”
(a post from August 26, 2015) and the…
Related literature: A search for Borogoves in this journal will yield
remarks on the 1943 tale underlying the above film.
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Friday, April 24, 2015
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Word and Object
From actor James Spader, whose birthday is today —
"… my father taught English. My mother taught art…."
— Spader in a 2014 interview
See as well the 2013 film "Words and Pictures"
and Log24 posts on a 2007 film, "The Last Mimzy."
Above: A scene from Spader's TV series "The Blacklist"
that was aired on Thursday, February 5, 2015.
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Saturday, May 12, 2007
Saturday May 12, 2007
Artistic Vision
Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers– mid-day 384, evening 952.
In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers.
First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters– "You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary." An example was given illustrating this saying. Here is another example:
Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary–
Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960–
Page 384: "Defender of the Faith"
Related Log24 entries:
"To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006,
and earlier Log24 entries from
that year's Halloween season
Page 952: "monolith"
Related Log24 entries:
"Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line"
(with the four entries that preceded it).
It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry– "Lonesome No More!"– was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis."
See also April 7, 2003:
April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."
"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim
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Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Wednesday March 9, 2005
Women's History Month,
continued:
continued:
American Activities
Col. Mary A. Hallaren,
a much-decorated WW II veteran and
head of the Women's Army Corps,
died on Feb. 13, 2005.
U.S. Army Photo
Col. Mary A. Hallaren in 1950.
Happy Year of the Rooster.
"The entertaining script was adapted from the novel by Charles Portis, by well-known, long time writer, Marguerite Roberts who liked to write scripts for tough men. She wrote scripts for MGM in the '30's, '40's, until she was blacklisted in 1952, for not revealing names to The Committee on Un-American Activities."
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Thursday, March 13, 2003
Thursday March 13, 2003
Death Knell
In memory of Howard Fast, novelist and Jewish former Communist,
who died yesterday, a quotation:
|
"For many of us, the geometry course sounded the death knell — "Shape and Space in Geometry"
© 1997-2003 Annenberg/CPB. All rights reserved. |
See also
Geometry for Jews.
|
Added March 16, 2003: See, too, the life of |