Log24

Monday, November 13, 2017

Plan 9 at Yale

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer

"So, after summer, in the autumn air, 
Comes the cold volume*  of forgotten ghosts,

But soothingly, with pleasant instruments, 
So that this cold, a children's tale of ice, 
Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized."

— Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

* Update of 10:20 the same evening:

An alternative to The Snow Queen  
as "the cold volume" of Wallace Stevens

On The King in the Window , by Adam Gopnik —

"The book is dedicated to Adam Gopnik's son,
Luke Auden, and his late, great godfathers,
Kirk Varnedoe and Richard Avedon.

'A fantasy that is as ambitious in theme,
sophisticated in setting, and cosmic in scope
as the works of Madeline L'Engle.

The unlikely eponymous hero is Oliver Parker,
an 11-year-old American boy living in Paris
with his mother and journalist father.
After he finds a prize in his slice of cake on
The Night of Epiphany and dons the customary
gilt-paper crown, the boy is plunged into
a battle over nothing less than control of the universe.

His enemy is the dreaded Master of Mirrors,
who rose to power during the reign of Louis XIV,
when Parisians developed technology for making
sheet glass. This faceless, evil being,
capable of capturing souls
through mirrors and enslaving them
in an alternate world that lies beyond all mirrors,
now seeks to dominate the entire universe by
mounting a quantum computer on the Eiffel Tower.

Oliver's mission is to defeat the Master of Mirrors
and save his father's stolen soul.' "

— Description at https://biblio.co.nz/. . . .

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Polarities and Correlation

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

"Read something that means something."
                — New Yorker  ad

'Knight' octad labeling by the 8 points of the projective line over GF(7) .

Sunday, January 8, 2017

A Theory of Everything

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:11 pm

The title refers to the Chinese book the I Ching ,
the Classic of Changes .

The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching  may be arranged
naturally in a 4x4x4 cube. The natural form of transformations
("changes") of this cube is given by the diamond theorem.

A related post —

The Eightfold Cube, core structure of the I Ching

Saturday, January 7, 2017

Conceptualist Minimalism

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"Clearly, there is a spirit of openhandedness in post-conceptual art
uses of the term 'Conceptualism.' We can now endow it with a
capital letter because it has grown in scale from its initial designation
of an avant-garde grouping, or various groups in various places, and
has evolved in two further phases. It became something like a movement,
on par with and evolving at the same time as Minimalism. Thus the sense
it has in a book such as Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art. … Beyond that,
it has in recent years spread to become a tendency, a resonance within
art practice that is nearly ubiquitous." — Terry Smith, 2011

See also the eightfold cube —

The Eightfold Cube

 

The Lotus Lunch

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 am

Friday, January 6, 2017

Eightfold Cube at Cornell

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:35 pm

The assignments page for a graduate algebra course at Cornell
last fall had a link to the eightfold cube:

Terms Not Dissimilar

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:14 am

The title is a phrase by New York Times  obituary writer
William Grimes in yesterday's post on an Oxford philosopher.

Related material —

Thursday, January 5, 2017

All Souls’ Confusion

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:12 pm

Recent reports of the death of a writer on philosophy associated
with All Souls College, Oxford, reflect some confusion.

The New York Times  says the death was on Monday, January 2, 2017.
Other sources, including the college itself, say it was the day before —
Sunday, January 1 (New Year's Day), 2017.

At any rate, perhaps the following post from 9 PM ET Sunday night is relevant:

Sunday, January 1, 2017

9 PM New Year’s Day

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 PM

See "Four Gods" in this journal.

Phaedrus  265b:  "And we made four divisions
of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods . . . ."

See as well a search for All Souls in this journal.

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Exit

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:48 pm

A post from the end of last year —

Also on New Year's Eve —

A Drama of Many Forms

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:24 pm

According to art historian Rosalind Krauss in 1979,
the grid's earliest employers

"can be seen to be participating in a drama
that extended well beyond the domain of art.
That drama, which took many forms, was staged
in many places. One of them was a courtroom,
where early in this century, science did battle with God,
and, reversing all earlier precedents, won."

The previous post discussed the 3×3 grid in the context of
Krauss's drama. In memory of T. S. Eliot, who died on this date
in 1965, an image of the next-largest square grid, the 4×4 array:

 

See instances of the above image.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Cultist Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 6:29 pm

The image of art historian Rosalind Krauss in the previous post
suggests a review of a page from her 1979 essay "Grids" —

The previous post illustrated a 3×3 grid. That  cultist space does
provide a place for a few "vestiges of the nineteenth century" —
namely, the elements of the Galois field GF(9) — to hide.
See Coxeter's Aleph in this journal.

Ein Eck…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:19 am

Continued

By a disciple of the late John Berger —

For further ideological remarks from this source, see the now-defunct
web journal Everyday Analysis: An International Collective.

For further remarks from the date of the above post, October 9, 2013,
see this  journal on that date.

Monday, January 2, 2017

John Berger Has Died

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:11 pm

Screenshot of 11:07 PM ET tonight —

A sample of his work —

An antidote to Berger's remarks —

Constructivist Theology

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:21 pm

This journal on December 24, 2016 (Christmas Eve)
quoted some remarks on "constructivism" in art and 
added a link to the same word as applied in mathematics:

"The word 'constructivism' also refers to
a philosophy of mathematics. See a Log24 post,
'Constructivist Witness' . . . ."

From that post —

From a post later the same day, Dec. 22— "The Laugh-Hospital"—

Constructivism in mathematics and the laughing academy

This  (Jan. 2, 2017) post was suggested by the reported Christmas Eve death
of a Jesuit priest, Joseph Fitzmyer.

Those entertained by the thought of constructivist laugh-hospitals may
contemplate the New Year's  Eve death of a sitcom actor who played 
a priest. See today's previous post, Sitcom Theology.

Related material — "Laugh Track" in this journal.

Sitcom Theology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:20 pm

The Hollywood Reporter —

"William Christopher, best known for playing Father Mulcahy
on the hit sitcom M*A*S*H , died Saturday [Dec. 31, 2016] of
lung cancer, his agent confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.
He was 84.

Christopher died at his home in Pasadena, with his wife by
his bedside, at 5:10 a.m. on New Year's Eve, according to a
statement from his agent."

— 5:59 PM PST 12/31/2016 by Meena Jang

Image reshown in this journal on the midnight (Eastern time)
preceding Christopher's death —

IMAGE- Triangular models of the 4-point affine plane A and 7-point projective plane PA

Related material —

From a Log24 search for "Deathly Hallows" —

Mathematics

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-WikipediaFanoPlane.jpg

The Fano plane block design

Magic

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-DeathlyHallows.jpg

The Deathly Hallows symbol—
Two blocks short of  a design.

Those who prefer Latin with their theology
may search this journal for "In Nomine Patris."

Sunday, January 1, 2017

9 PM New Year’s Day

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

See "Four Gods" in this journal.

Phaedrus  265b:  "And we made four divisions
of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods . . . ."

The Unhurried Curve

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:33 pm

From today's previous post —

"The unhurried curve got me. 
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."

— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015

Related figures —

Art critic Robert Hughes in "The Space of Horizons,"
a Log24 post of August 7, 2012:

Religion writer Huston Smith, who reportedly died
on December 30, 2016:

Like the Horizon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

(Continued from a remark by art critic Peter Schjeldahl quoted here
last  year on New Year's Day in the post "Art as Religion.")

"The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."

— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015

This suggests some further material from the paper
that was quoted here yesterday on New Year's Eve —

"In teaching a course on combinatorics I have found
students doubting the existence of a finite projective
plane geometry with thirteen points on the grounds
that they could not draw it (with 'straight' lines)
on paper although they had tried to do so. Such a
lack of appreciation of the spirit of the subject is but
a consequence of the elements of formal geometry
no longer being taught in undergraduate courses.
Yet these students were demanding the best proof of
existence, namely, production of the object described."

— Derrick Breach (See his obituary from 1996.)

A related illustration of the 13-point projective plane
from the University of Western Australia:

Projective plane of order 3

(The four points on the curve
at the right of the image are
the points on the line at infinity .)

The above image is from a post of August 7, 2012,
"The Space of Horizons."  A related image —

Click on the above image for further remarks.

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