In related news …

"All we want are the facts." — Jack Webb

"Eliyahu Rips, Who Claimed to Find
Secret Codes in the Torah, Dies at 75"

See also Gromov in this  journal.

"Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis
that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard."

— A. O. Scott in The New York Times  today

See Dimensions and Multidimensional in this  journal.

Related material
from Log24 on July 20 —

Remarks by Kai Bird, co-author
of the biography behind the July 21
film "Oppenheimer" . . .
 

Wormhole Science:  The Kaku’s Nest

Filed under: General — Tags: Bullshit Studies — m759 @ 9:29 AM 

See also Peter Woit on Wormholes and Kaku.

See also Peter Woit on Wormholes and Kaku.

The first Romantics

"How a close group of brilliant friends,
in a tiny German university town, laid
the foundations of modern consciousness"

— Headline for the article whose URL is . . .

https://aeon.co/essays/
english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania

The article was published by Aeon  on December 20, 2022,
and is featured in today's Arts & Letters Daily . On the author:

"Andrea Wulf is a historian and the award-winning author
of several books, including the bestselling 
The Invention of Nature  (2015) and, most recently, 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and
the Invention of the Self  (2022). She is a Miller Scholar

at the Santa Fe Institute

and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature."

Related material — "The Eight" According to Coleridge.

In memoriam —

Friedman co-edited the ISAMA journal  Hyperseeing .  See also . . .

See too the other articles in Volume 40 of  Kybernetes .

Related material —

Compare and contrast the discussion of the geometry
of the 4×4 square in the diamond theorem (1976) with
Nat Friedman’s treatment of the same topic in 2001 —

Art:

From an October 3 post —

Bullshit:

From an academic's website —

A Midnight Special for Charles Wallace

Peter Block —

Old Kid on Peter Block —

See the remarks today of Harvard philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly
in The New York Times :

Alexander's "15 properties that create the wholeness and aliveness" —

This is the sort of bullshit that seems to go over well at Harvard.
See Christopher Alexander in this journal.

A page from a book suggested by the previous post —

Another approach to "the midrash  of space" —

Or:  Nine, Eight, Seven . . .

See as well
Rainbow Countdown.

The previous post dealt with a symbol of an apparently
admirable "social development environment."

For a less admirable development environment, see a film
described in a July 2014 story from Film New Europe —

"Shooting started in Bucharest on 9 June 2014. . . ."

This  journal on 8-9 June 2014 —

Yin Yang Yung

* See also earlier posts on Bullshit Studies.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education  on March 2, 2017 —

The above paragraphs are clearly propaganda, not physics.

For "It has been estimated," see …

The "without Einstein 's theory" statement may or may not be correct.
See the lengthy discussion at …

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1061/
why-does-gps-depend-on-relativity .

See also Princeton's March of Mediocrity Continues.

(Continued)

Click image to enlarge.

From A. Trehub's remarks on the "space-like retinoid system"
mentioned by Bernd Schmeikal in his masterpiece of bullshit,
"Four Forms Make a Universe" —

The Self Locus 

For a different grounding of the self, see the previous post.

Explorations in Media Ecology
Volume 12 Numbers 3 & 4
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article.

For some background, see Bullshit Studies.

Or:  Bullshit for Brit …  continues.

From the new film "I Origins," starring Brit Marling —

Plan 9:

The protagonist of "I Origins" is led to the above billboard
by apparently chance encounters with 11 's — such as the
1111 on the following page —

Update of Dec. 10, 2014: The "bullshit" in the subtitle above refers
to the remarks of Joan Stambaugh, not those of Nicholas of Cusa.
The passage from Nicholas was added because it indicates a more
reliable source than Stambaugh, because it is relevant to lines
about the metaphorical significance of light in "I Origins," and 
because it contains the number 1111. 

(Continued from Midsummer Eve)

"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."

— Norman Mailer, March 3, 1992, PBS transcript

"Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 1962, as quoted in The Enneagram of Paradigm Shifting

"In the spiritual traditions from which Jung borrowed the term, it is not the SYMMETRY of mandalas that is all-important, as Jung later led us to believe. It is their capacity to reveal the asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry." 

— The Enneagram as Mandala

I have little respect for Enneagram enthusiasts, but they do at times illustrate Mailer's maxim.

My own interests are in the purely mathematical properties of the number nine, as well as those of the next square, sixteen.

Those who prefer bullshit may investigate non-mathematical properties of sixteen by doing a Google image search on MBTI.

For bullshit involving nine, see (for instance) Einsatz  in this journal.

For non-bullshit involving nine, sixteen, and "asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry," see Monday's Mapping Problem continued. (The nine occurs there as the symmetric  figures in the lower right nine-sixteenths of the triangular analogs  diagram.)

For non-bullshit involving psychological and philosophical terminology, see James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology .

In particular, see Hillman's "An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit."

This post is for the Stonehenge solstice crowd, who might,
like the London artist Steve Richards, confuse bullshit
with scholarship and inspire the same confusion
in others.

The image, apparently an epigraph put there
by the author, is from the Forgotten Books edition
of Cassirer's Substance and Function:
And Einstein's Theory of Relativity .

This is a scanned copy of the 1923 original.
The egg-figure above, however, is from the publisher's
prefatory notes and not  from the original.

A check of other Forgotten Books publications
shows that the motto and the Bacon
attribution are those of Forgotten Books and
not  of the authors they reprint — in particular,
not  of Ernst Cassirer, who would probably
be dismayed to have this nonsense associated
with his work.

Why nonsense? The attribution to Francis Bacon is
false. The lines are from "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
by William Shakespeare.

The Herschel Chronicle, by Constance A. Lubbock, Cambridge University Press, 1933, page 139:

“Sir John Herschel has recorded that his father [astronomer William Herschel, 1738-1822], when observing at Datchet, ‘when the waters were out round his garden, used to rub himself all over, face and hands &c., with a raw onion, to keep off the infection of the ague, which was then prevalent; however he caught it at last.'”

Herschel and his onion appear in a large illustration on the cover of next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.  A review, titled “Science and the Sublime,” states that Herschel and his sister

“spent endless hours at the enormous telescopes that Herschel constructed, rubbing raw onions to warm their hands….'”

Clearly the anti-ague motive makes more sense.

A quotation from the book under review, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (published today, Bastille Day, 2009):

“The emphasis of on [sic] secular, humanist (even atheist) body of knowledge… was particularly strong in revolutionary France.”

This, apparently, is the terror part.

A related quotation from Publishers Weekly:

“It’s an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society. Illus. (July 14)”

On its front page next Sunday, The New York Times Book Review boldly lays claim to intellectual leadership with the following opening sentence:

“In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page.”

The sentence begins with an insult to Hemingway and ends with a cascade of vulgarized-science bullshit. Its author, Christopher Benfey, has done better, and should be ashamed.

Yesterday’s entry Deep Structures discussed the “semiotic square,” a device that exemplifies the saying “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, then baffle ’em with bullshit.”

A search today for what the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson might have meant by saying that the square “is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition” leads to two documents of interest.

1. “Theory Pictures as Trails: Diagrams and the Navigation of Theoretical Narratives” (pdf), by J.R. Osborn, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego (Cognitive Science Online, Vol.3.2, pp.15-44, 2005)

2. “The Semiotic Square” (html), by Louis Hébert (2006), professor, Université du Québec à Rimouski, in Signo (http://www.signosemio.com).

Shown below is Osborn’s picture of the semiotic square:

Osborn’s discussion of the square, though more clear than, say, that of Rosalind Krauss (who reverses the bottom two parts of the square– see Deep Structures), fails. His Appendix A is miserably obscure.

On the brighter side, we have, as a sign that Gallic clarity still exists, the work of Hébert.

Here is how he approaches Jameson’s oft-quoted, but seemingly confused, remark about “ten conceivable positions”–

“The Semiotic Square,”   by Louis Hébert 1. ABSTRACT The semiotic square, developed by Greimas and Rastier, is a means of refining oppositional analyses by increasing the number of analytical classes stemming from a given opposition from two (life/death, for instance) to four (for example, life, death, life and death (the living dead), and neither life nor death (angels)) to eight or even ten. 2. THEORY The actantial model, isotopy and the semiotic square are undoubtedly the best-known theoretical propositions that have emerged from the Paris School of semiotics, with Greimas as its central figure. Like the actantial model and the veridictory square, the semiotic square is designed to be both a conceptual network and a visual representation of this network, usually depicted in the form of a “square” (which actually looks like a rectangle!). Courtés defines it as the visual representation of the logical structure of an opposition (cf. Courtés, 1991, 152). The semiotic square is a means of refining oppositional analyses by increasing the number of analytical classes stemming from a given opposition from two (for instance, life/death) to four (for example, life, death, life and death (the living dead), and neither life nor death (angels)) to eight or even ten. Here is an empty semiotic square. Structure of the semiotic square     5. (=1+2) COMPLEX TERM       1. TERM A   2. TERM B   9. (=1+4) 10. (=2+3)   3. TERM NOT-B   4. TERM NOT-A   7. (=1+3) POSITIVE DEIXIS 8. (=2+4) NEGATIVE DEIXIS         6. (=3+4) NEUTRAL TERM     LEGEND: The + sign links the terms that are combined to make up a metaterm (a compound term); for example, 5 is the result of combining 1 and 2. 2.1 CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS The semiotic square entails primarily the following elements (we are steering clear of the constituent relationships of the square: contrariety, contradiction, and complementarity or implication): 1. terms 2. metaterms (compound terms) 3. object(s) (classified on the square) 4. observing subject(s) (who do the classifying) 5. time (of the observation) 2.1.1 TERMS The semiotic square is composed of four terms: Position 1 (term A) Position 2 (term B) Position 3 (term not-B) Position 4 (term not-A) The first two terms form the opposition (the contrary relationship) that is the basis of the square, and the other two are obtained by negating each term of the opposition. 2.1.2 METATERMS The semiotic square includes six metaterms. The metaterms are terms created from the four simple terms. Some of the metaterms have been named. (The complex term and the neutral term, despite their names, are indeed metaterms). Position 5 (term 1 + term 2): complex term Position 6 (term 3 + term 4): neutral term Position 7 (term 1 + term 3): positive deixis Position 8 (term 2 + term 4): negative deixis Position 9 = term 1 + term 4: unnamed Position 10 = term 2 + term 3: unnamed

These ten “positions” are apparently meant to explain Jameson’s remark.

Hébert’s treatment has considerably greater entertainment value than Osborn’s. Besides “the living dead” and angels, Hébert’s examples and exercises include vampires, transvestites, the Passion of Christ, and the following very relevant quotation:

“Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” (Matthew 5:37)

Death of a Nominalist

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.” –Ernest Hemingway

(The Hemingway quotation is from the AP’s “Today in History” on July 21, 2007; for the context, see Death in the Afternoon.)

Today seems as good a day as any for noting the death of an author previously discussed in Log24 on January 29, 2007, and January 31, 2007.

Joseph Goguen died on July 3, 2006. (I learned of his death only after the entries of January 2007 were written. They still hold.)

Goguen’s death may be viewed in the context of the ongoing war between the realism of Plato and the nominalism of the sophists. (See, for instance, Log24 on August 10-15, 2004, and on July 3-5, 2007.)

Joseph A. Goguen, “Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology” (pdf):

“Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve. For example, Euclid wrote, ‘The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.’ Similarly, the ‘situations’ in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated– perhaps too sophisticated), are considered to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally considered judgements.⁵ The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as scientific study or engineering design, for the heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view, all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course, this does not mean that they are not useful.”

⁵ The “types” of situation theory are even further removed from concrete reality.

[23] Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT (Bradford), 1983.
[24] Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Harvard, 1965. In 6 volumes; see especially Volume 2: Elements of Logic.

From Log24 on the date of Goguen’s death:

Requiem for a clown:

“At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit.”

— Norman Mailer

This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer’s birth.  Also quoted on that date:

Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also thoughts of God.

Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those of God….

Whether the above excerpt– from Hans Christian Oersted‘s The Soul in Nature (1852)– is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide.

“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” — Nabokov

A Harvard Education
in a Sentence

Harvard alumnus Norman Mailer:

“At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit.“

For Harvard bullshit, see
The Crimson Passion.

For superior bullshit, see
Shrine of the Holy Whapping.

The Zen of Abraham

Today’s Zen Chautauqua, prompted by the fact that this is Abrahamic week at the real Chautauqua, consists of links to

The Matrix of Abraham,

Matrix of the Death God, and

Happy Birthday, Kate and Kevin.

The real Chautauqua’s program this week is, of course, Christian rather than Zen.  Its theme is “Building a Global Neighborhood: The Abrahamic Vision 2004.”  One of the featured performers is Loretta Lynn; in her honor (and, of course, that of Sissy Spacek), I will try to overcome the fear and loathing that the Semitic (i. e., “Abrahamic”) religions usually inspire in me.

To a mathematician, the phrase “global neighborhood” sounds like meaningless politico-religious bullshit —  a phrase I am sure accurately characterizes most of the discourse at Chautauqua this week.  But a Google search reveals an area of research — “particle swarm optimization” in which the phrase “global neighborhood” actually means something.  See

A Hybrid Particle Swarm
and Neural Network Approach
for Reactive Power Control,
by Paulo F. Ribeiro and
W. Kyle Schlansker (pdf).

This article includes the following:

Given the sophistication of his writing, I am surprised at Schlansker’s Christian background:

A good omen for the future is the fact that Schlansker balances the looney Semitic (or “Abrahamic”) teachings of Christianity with good sound Aryan religion, in the form of the goddess Themis.

 Themis, often depicted as “Justice”

For those who must have an Abraham, Schlansker’s paper includes the following:

A Themis figure I prefer to the above:

For more on religious justice
at midnight in the garden of
good and evil, see the Log24
entries of Oct. 1-15, 2002.

For material on Aryan religion that is far superior to the damned nonsense at Chautauqua, New York, this week, see

Jane Ellen Harrison’s Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, with an excursus on the ritual forms preserved in Greek tragedy by Gilbert Murray and a chapter on the origin of the Olympic games by F. M. Cornford.  Rev. 2nd ed., Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1927.

Those who prefer the modern religion of Scientism will of course believe that Themis is purely imaginary, and that truth is to be found in modern myths like that of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, illustrated below.

Jodie Foster (an admirer of
Leni Riefenstahl) and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics

“Heraclitus…. says: ‘The ruler whose prophecy occurs at Delphi oute legei oute kryptei, neither gathers nor hides, alla semainei, but gives hints.'”
— An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press paperback, 1959, p. 170

“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God, Doubleday, 1998, p. 50

Scholarship vs. Bullshit

“Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov

An example of scholarship:

Paul Friedlander.

An example of bullshit:

Leo Strauss.

Further background:

Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq.

ART WARS:

A Terrible Beauty

On this date in 1905, Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate of the United States, was born.  

This is also the date of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Monday rebellion, of which Yeats wrote that “a terrible beauty is born,”  and the date of Vatican I’s 1870 attack on reason, Dei Filius.

My comment on Yeats’s remarks:

“No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first.”

— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, published 1914-15 in serial form

My comment on the Vatican’s remarks:

“[Robert Penn] Warren taught for years at Yale and became toward the end of his life one of the most vocal critics of deconstruction, which had Yale as its headquarters. He is said to have exclaimed, ‘They got a whole new line of bullshit up here.’ ”

— Dr. Gerald McDaniel 

Warren wrote that

“…only, only,
In the name of Death do we learn
    the true name of Love.”

For some clues as to whether this, too, is bullshit, see my note of Easter Monday 2003,

Time, Song, and Tragedy.

The Fourth Man:
In Lieu of Rosebud, Part III

Posted on Fri, Oct. 11, 2002

Carlos Castañeda, who led
El Nuevo Herald, dies at 70

BY TERE FIGUERAS

Carlos Castañeda, the publisher emeritus of El Nuevo Herald whose passionate belief in a free press helped guide several newspapers across Latin America, died Thursday morning in Lisbon, Portugal. He was 70.

Perhaps a little too active.

Arthur Koestler’s somewhat more respectable mystical thoughts about infinity may be found here.  Related material: my September 5 entry, Arrow in the Blue.

Added ca. 10 to 11:40 p.m. October 11, 2002:

A review of Castaneda seems in order… the bad Carlos, not the good Carlos.  (The bad Carlos being, of course, the bullshit artist who apparently died in 1998, and the good Carlos the publisher who died yesterday.)

From the LiveJournal site of fermina —

Today’s Public Service Message:

My comment:

From a review of Carlos Castaneda’s last book, The Active Side of Infinity:

“We wind up learning something more of Castaneda but not much at all about the active side of infinity, which is mystically translated as ‘intent.’ It appears that we ought to live with intent, never forgetting that we will die, regardless. Death (and the knowledge of it) should thus inform all of our actions and relationships, providing a perspective and enforcing our humility. This is hardly an original idea, and it can’t justify wading through Castaneda’s welter of self-indulgence, which might translate better to a bumper-sticker adage.”

Hmm… What adage might that be?

As for the good Carlos, see “In Lieu of Rosebud, Part II,” below… As was said of Saint Francis Borgia, whose feast is celebrated on the day good Carlos died, he

rendered glorious a name which, but for him, would have remained a source of humiliation.