Log24

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Science Marches On

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

Connoisseurs of bullshit who enjoyed the previous post
might also enjoy the following:

The previous two posts introduced Mazzola's noxious combination of 
category theory and Hegel. The current version (Rev. 254) of the above 
nLab "Science of Logic" article, though not by Mazzola, displays this
combination in its full hideous splendor.

Some posts in this  journal that might be viewed as leading up to 
the original Sept. 2, 2012, "Science of Logic" article are now tagged
Death Warmed Over.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Word in the Desert

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 am

(Continued)

For Trotsky's Birthday (Old Style), 2009—

IMAGE- Two Log24 posts, on Rosalind Krauss and on the occult, from Oct. 25, 2009

Related material:

IMAGE- Video- On the road to the U2 Rose Bowl concert of Oct. 25, 2009- 'Quest for the U2 Joshua Tree + Zabriskie'

IMAGE- NY Times Sept. 1, 2012, online obituary for Alexander Saxton, who died by his own hand on Aug. 20, 2012

(Click for further details.)

See also St. Stephen's Day, 2011.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

College of the Desert

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:08 am

(Continued from 6:08 AM EDT yesterday and the day before)

"Richard Elster was seventy-three, I was less than half his age. He’d invited me to join him here, old house, under-furnished, somewhere south of nowhere in the Sonoran Desert or maybe it was the Mojave Desert or another desert altogether.* Not a long visit, he’d said."

— Don DeLillo, Point Omega

IMAGE- Detail of John Ritter's NY Times illustration for Geoff Dyer's review of 'Point Omega,' plus link to Twitter beneath illustration

Maybe it was the desert near Twentynine Palms.

IMAGE- Twentynine Palms in Geoff Dyer's review of 'Point Omega'

"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."

— Ending of Point Omega

* Update of Sept. 2, 2012— A different passage yields a more precise location.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Translation

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:08 am

"Translation in the direction
conceptual -> concrete and symbolic
is much easier than
translation in the reverse direction…."

The late William P. Thurston

(See also "Atlas to the Text," Harvard Crimson , March 8, 2011).

Related cinematic imagery

Conceptual  (thanks to Don DeLillo and The New York Times )—

IMAGE- NY Times headline 'A Wrinkle in Time' with 24 Hour Psycho and Point Omega scene

Concrete and symbolic (thanks to Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, as well as
Frederick Seidel in the September 3, 2012, New Yorker )

"Biddies still cleaned the student rooms."

IMAGE- Shower wall in 'Sunshine Cleaning'

Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Cruelest Month

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:08 am

Last night's 10 PM post linked to an April 7, 2012,
post that through a series of further links leads
to Columbia Film Theory .

For other film-related remarks, by a
Columbia alumnus,* see last night's post.

See also the 1.3 MB image from Aug. 16, the night 
of Elvis's Wrap Party. An excerpt from that image
stars Amy Adams—

Images, including the late Richard Zanuck

For Amy, from the current New Yorker

The Master

* N.O.C.D.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

It’s 10 PM…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Do you know where your children are?

Continued from Plan 9 , a Log24 post of  9 PM Monday

See another weblog's April 7, 2012, post on
God and Horror Movies.

See also this  weblog's post on that date.

Hexagram 18

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:14 am

(Continued from June 14, 2007)

The late William P. Thurston on how mathematical knowledge may decay:

"There are several obvious mechanisms of decay. The experts in a subject retire and die, or simply move on to other subjects and forget. Mathematics is commonly explained and recorded in symbolic and concrete forms that are easy to communicate, rather than in conceptual forms that are easy to understand once communicated. Translation in the direction conceptual -> concrete and symbolic is much easier than translation in the reverse direction, and symbolic forms often replaces [sic ] the conceptual forms of understanding. And mathematical conventions and taken-for-granted knowledge change, so older texts may become hard to understand.

In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths [sic ] life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification. The question of who is the first person to ever set foot on some square meter of land is really secondary. Revolutionary change does matter, but revolutions are few, and they are not self-sustaining — they depend very heavily on the community of mathematicians."

At mathoverflow.net, October 30, 2010.
     The discussion has been "closed as no longer relevant."
     For another Thurston quote of interest, see a more recent
     mathoverflow discussion "closed as not a real question."

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Dark and Stormy

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 pm

It  was a  dark and stormy night.

A Wrinkle in Time  (brought  up to date)

Up to Date

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:29 pm

"Plato's cave was brought up to date in 1978…."

— Keith Devlin in Mathematics: The Science of Patterns

Related material from yesterday: Touchy-Feely and Plan 9.

"Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead.

IMAGE- Bill Murray explains Ed Wood's 'Plan 9 from Outer Space'

For a rather different approach to Plato, see three posts of August 16, 2012—

Hope and Pope

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:59 am

IMAGE- 'Hope of Heaven,' by John O'Hara, 1947 Avon paperback

Hope of Heaven , by John O'Hara
Avon paperback edition, 1947

   Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle, marked by Heaven:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
   Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

— Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man

Monday, August 27, 2012

Plan 9

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

(Continued)

IMAGE- 'The Ninth Configuration,' based on a novel by William Peter Blatty

See also "Or Only Die" and Corpus Hypercubus .

Touchy-Feely

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:24 am

A remark by the late William P. Thurston

Please note: I'm not advocating that
we turn mathematics into a touchy-feely subject.

Noted. But see this passage—

The Mathematical Experience , by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh (1981), updated study edition, Springer, 2011—

From the section titled "Four-Dimensional Intuition," pages 445-446:

"At Brown University Thomas Banchoff, a mathematician, and Charles Strauss, a computer scientist, have made computer-generated motion pictures of a hypercube….

… at the Brown University Computing Center, Strauss gave me a demonstration of the interactive graphic system which made it possible to produce such a film….

… Strauss showed me how all these controls could be used to get various views of three-dimensional projections of a hypercube. I watched, and tried my best to grasp what I was looking at. Then he stood up, and offered me the chair at the control.

I tried turning the hypercube around, moving it away, bringing it up close, turning it around another way. Suddenly I could feel  it!. The hypercube had leaped into palpable reality, as I learned how to manipulate it, feeling in my fingertips the power to change what I saw and change it back again. The active control at the computer console created a union of kinesthetics and visual thinking which brought the hypercube up to the level of intuitive understanding."

Thanks to the Web, a version of this experience created by Harry J. Smith
has been available to non-academics for some time.

IMAGE- The Harry J. Smith Memorial Tesseract

IMAGE- From 'Touchy-Feely: The Musical!'

Saturday, August 25, 2012

One Small Step

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:19 pm

Click image for some related material.

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