Sunday, May 3, 2020
Into the Westworld
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
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Wednesday, October 5, 2016
The Crichton Prize …
Goes to Feynman, Epstein, and Kaplan
“A self-replicating swarm of predatory molecules
is rapidly evolving outside the plant.”
— Amazon.com synopsis of Michael Crichton’s
2002 novel Prey
Washington Post online today —
Nobel Prize in chemistry is awarded
for molecular machines
” The physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman
gave a seminal lecture on the subject in 1959,
envisioning a ‘great future’ in which ‘we can arrange
the atoms the way we want; the very atoms,
all the way down.’ ” — Sarah Kaplan
“How do we write small?”
Related material quoted here on Sunday morning, Oct. 2, 2016 —
” Westworld is especially impressive because it builds two worlds
at once: the Western theme park and the futuristic workplace.
The Western half of Westworld might be the more purely
entertaining of the two, with its shootouts and heists and chases
through sublime desert vistas. Behind the scenes, the theme park’s
workers show how the robot sausage is made. And as a dystopian
office drama, the show does something truly original.”
— Adam Epstein at QUARTZ, October 1, 2016
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Friday, October 23, 2015
Retro or Not?
Happy birthday to the late Michael Crichton (Harvard ’64).
See also Diamond Theory Roulette —
Part of the ReCode Project (http://recodeproject.com). Based on "Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane, originally published in "Computer Graphics and Art" Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977. Copyright (c) 2013 Radames Ajna — OSI/MIT license (http://recodeproject/license).
Related remarks on Plato for Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design —
See also posts from the above publication date, March 31,
2006, among posts now tagged “The Church in Philadelphia.”
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Thursday, November 6, 2008
Thursday November 6, 2008
Death of a Classmate
Michael Crichton,
Harvard College, 1964
Authors Michael Crichton and
David Foster Wallace in today’s
New York Times obituaries
The Times’s remarks above
on the prose styles of
Crichton and Wallace–
“compelling formula” vs.
“intricate complexity”–
suggest the following works
of visual art in memory
of Crichton.
“Crystal”—
“Dragon”
(from Crichton’s
Jurassic Park)–
For the mathematics
(dyadic harmonic analysis)
relating these two figures,
see Crystal and Dragon.
Some philosophical
remarks related to
the Harvard background
that Crichton and I share–
Hitler’s Still Point
and
The Crimson Passion.
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Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Wednesday July 5, 2006
And now, from
the author of Sphere…
CUBE
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
"… when I went to Princeton things were completely different. This chapel, for instance– I remember when it was just a clearing, cordoned off with sharp sticks. Prayer was compulsory back then, and you couldn't just fake it by moving your lips; you had to know the words, and really mean them. I'm dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ."
— Baccalaureate address at Princeton, Pentecost 2006, reprinted in The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick, Princeton '81
Related figures:
For further details,
see Solomon's Cube
and myspace.com/affine.
For further details,
see Jews on Buddhism
and
Adventures in Group Theory.
"In this way we are offered
a formidable lesson
for every Christian community."
Pope Benedict XVI
on Pentecost,
June 4, 2006,
St. Peter's Square.
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Thursday, November 21, 2002
Thursday November 21, 2002
Pray
This brief heading echoes the title of the latest novel by Michael Crichton, perhaps the best-known member of the Harvard College class of 1964. In honor of that class and of Q (see the preceding entry), here is a condensed excerpt from a passage of Plato quoted by Q:
Socrates. ‘Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?’
‘By all means,’ Phaedrus agrees.
Socrates (praying): ‘Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one!….
That prayer, I think, is enough for me.’
Phaedrus. ‘Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.’
Socrates. ‘So be it…. Let us go.’
In accordance with this prayer, and with the coming of summer to Australia, that land beloved of Pan, this site’s music now returns to the theme introduced in my note of September 10, 2002, “The Sound of Hanging Rock.”
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