The title was suggested by Ellmann's roulette-wheel analogy
in the previous post, "The Perception of Coincidence."
Monday, August 20, 2018
A Wheel for Ellmann
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The Perception of Coincidence
Ellmann on Joyce and 'the perception of coincidence' —
"Samuel Beckett has remarked that to Joyce reality was a paradigm,
an illustration of a possibly unstatable rule. Yet perhaps the rule
can be surmised. It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble
than either of these, it is the perception of coincidence. According to
this rule, reality, no matter how much we try to manipulate it, can only
assume certain forms; the roulette wheel brings up the same numbers
again and again; everyone and everything shift about in continual
movement, yet movement limited in its possibilities."
— Richard Ellmann, James Joyce , rev. ed.. Oxford, 1982, p. 551
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Sunday, August 19, 2018
Possible Permutations
John Calder, an independent British publisher who built a prestigious list
of authors like Samuel Beckett and Heinrich Böll and spiritedly defended
writers like Henry Miller against censorship, died on Aug. 13 in Edinburgh.
He was 91.
— Richard Sandomir in the online New York Times this evening
On Beckett —
Also on August 13th —
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Thursday, October 12, 2017
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Strange Awards
From a review of a play by the late Anne Meara* —
"Meara, known primarily as an actress/comedian
(half of the team of Stiller & Meara, and mother of
Ben Stiller), is also an accomplished writer for the
stage; her After Play was much acclaimed….
This new, more ambitious piece starts off with a sly
send-up of awards dinners as the late benefactor of
a wealthy foundation–the comically pixilated scientist
Herschel Strange (Jerry Stiller)–is seen on videotape.
This tape sets a light tone that is hilariously
heightened when John Shea, as Arthur Garden,
accepts the award given in Strange's name."
Compare and contrast —
- A figure from yesterday's 1 PM post Black List:
-
The circular device of Doctor Strange on the cover of
Entertainment Weekly , Jan. 8/15 2016:
I of course prefer the Galois I Ching .
* See the May 25, 2015, post The Secret Life of the Public Mind.
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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 . . .
|
"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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Friday, February 11, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
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Monday, July 27, 2009
Monday July 27, 2009
Field Dance
The New York Times
on June 17, 2007:
Design Meets Dance,
and Rules Are Broken
Yesterday's evening entry was
on the fictional sins of a fictional
mathematician and also (via a link
to St. Augustine's Day, 2006), on
the geometry of the I Ching* —
The eternal
combined with
the temporal:
The fictional mathematician's
name, noted here (with the Augustine-
I Ching link as a gloss) in yesterday's
evening entry, was Summerfield.
From the above Times article–
"Summerspace," a work by
choreographer Merce Cunningham
and artist Robert Rauschenberg
that offers a competing
vision of summer:
From left, composer John Cage,
choreographer Merce Cunningham,
and artist Robert Rauschenberg
in the 1960's
"When shall we three meet again?"
* Update of ca. 5:30 PM 7/27– today's online New York Times (with added links)– "The I Ching is the 'Book of Changes,' and Mr. Cunningham's choreography became an expression of the nature of change itself. He presented successive images without narrative sequence or psychological causation, and the audience was allowed to watch dance as one might watch successive events in a landscape or on a street corner."
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Thursday, December 18, 2008
Thursday December 18, 2008
Polar Opposites
Susan Sontag in
this week's New Yorker:
"The mind is a whore."
Embedded in the Sontag
article is the following:
Act One
South Pole:
Shi Ho
Act Two
North Pole:
Kun
"If baby I'm the bottom,
you're the top."
— Cole Porter
Happy birthday,
Steven Spielberg.
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Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Tuesday December 16, 2008
The Square Wheel
(continued)
(continued)
From The n-Category Cafe today:
David Corfield at 2:33 PM UTC quoting a chapter from a projected second volume of a biography:
"Grothendieck’s spontaneous reaction to whatever appeared to be causing a difficulty… was to adopt and embrace the very phenomenon that was problematic, weaving it in as an integral feature of the structure he was studying, and thus transforming it from a difficulty into a clarifying feature of the situation."
John Baez at 7:14 PM UTC on research:
"I just don’t want to reinvent a wheel, or waste my time inventing a square one."
For the adoption and embracing of such a problematic phenomenon, see The Square Wheel (this journal, Sept. 14, 2004).
For a connection of the square wheel with yesterday's entry for Julie Taymor's birthday, see a note from 2002:
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Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
"Caught up
in circles…"
in circles…"
— Song lyric,
Cyndi Lauper
Alethiometer from
"The Golden Compass"
Update:
See also this morning's
later entry, illustrating
the next line of Cyndi
Lauper's classic lyric
"Time After Time" —
"… Confusion is
nothing new."
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Saturday, February 23, 2008
Saturday February 23, 2008
Jumpers
"An acute study of the links
between word and fact"
— Nina daVinci Nichols
Thanks to a Virginia reader for a reminder:
| Virginia | /391062427/item.html? | 2/22/2008 7:37 PM |
The link is to a Log24 entry
that begins as follows…
that begins as follows…
Johnny Cash:
"And behold,
a white horse."
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
This, along with the "jumper" theme in the previous two entries, suggests a search on springer jumper.That search yields a German sports phrase, "Springer kommt!" A search on that phrase yields the following:
"Liebe Frau vBayern,
mich würde interessieren wie man
mit diesem Hintergrund
(vonbayern.de/german/anna.html)
zu Springer kommt?"
Background of "Frau vBayern" from thePeerage.com:
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg
F, #64640, b. 15 March 1978Last Edited=20 Oct 2005
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg was born on 15 March 1978. She is the daughter of Ludwig Ferdinand Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg and Countess Yvonne Wachtmeister af Johannishus. She married Manuel Maria Alexander Leopold Jerg Prinz von Bayern, son of Leopold Prinz von Bayern and Ursula Mohlenkamp, on 6 August 2005 at Nykøping, Södermanland, Sweden.
The date of the above "Liebe Frau vBayern" inquiry, Feb. 1, 2007, suggests the following:
From Log24 on
St. Bridget's Day, 2007:
The quotation
"Science is a Faustian bargain"
and the following figure–
Change
From a short story by
the above Princess:
"'I don't even think she would have wanted to change you. But she for sure did not want to change herself. And her values were simply a part of her.' It was true, too. I would even go so far as to say that they were her basis, if you think about her as a geometrical body. That's what they couldn't understand, because in this age of the full understanding for stretches of values in favor of self-realization of any kind, it was a completely foreign concept."
To make this excellent metaphor mathematically correct,
change "geometrical body" to "space"… as in
"For Princeton's Class of 2007"—
Review of a 2004 production of a 1972 Tom Stoppard play, "Jumpers"–
Related material:
Knight Moves (Log24, Jan. 16),
Kindergarten Theology (St. Bridget's Day, 2008),
and
(Click on image for details.)
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Thursday, February 1, 2007
Thursday February 1, 2007
Change
The above is from
Feb. 15, 2006.
Commencement Address (doc)
to Computer Science Division,
College of Letters and Science,
University of California, Berkeley,
by Jim Gray,
May 25, 2003:
"I was part of Berkeley's class of 1965. Things have changed a lot since then….
So, what's that got to do with you? Well, there is going to be MORE change…. Indeed, change is accelerating– Vernor Vinge suggests we are approaching singularities when social, scientific and economic change are so rapid that we cannot imagine what will happen next. These futurists predict humanity will become post-human. Now, THAT! is change– a lot more than I have seen.
If it happens, the singularity will happen in your lifetime– and indeed, you are likely to make it happen."
For other singular
sci-fi tales, click on
the above hexagram.
sci-fi tales, click on
the above hexagram.
More from Gray's speech:
"I am an optimist. Science is a Faustian bargain– and I am betting on mankind muddling through. I grew up under the threat of atomic war; we've avoided that so far. Information Technology is a Faustian bargain. I am optimistic that we can have the good parts and protect ourselves from the worst part– but I am counting on your help in that."
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Wednesday August 30, 2006
The Seventh Symbol:
A Multicultural Farewell
to a winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature,
the Egyptian author of
The Seventh Heaven:
Supernatural Stories —
"Jackson has identified
the seventh symbol."
— Stargate
Other versions of
the seventh symbol —
"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra' …."
— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
Monday, August 28, 2006
Monday August 28, 2006
Today's Sinner:
Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.
"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine
Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:
|
The Eternal
Symbol of necessity,
For details, see |
The Temporal
Symbol of the
For details, see |
|
The eternal
combined with the temporal:
|
|
Related material:
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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Tuesday July 18, 2006
Sacred Order
In memory of Philip Rieff, who died on July 1, 2006:
- An essay from July 16 on Rieff's concept of "the sacred order"
-
An example of order— sacred, since purely mathematical (as was Einstein's "holy geometry book")– linked to on the date of Rieff's death:
Related material:
and
For details, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on the morning of
Midsummer Day, 2006.
Thanks to University Diaries for pointing out the essay on Rieff.
That essay says Rieff had "a dense, knotty, ironic style designed to warn off impatient readers. You had to unpack his aphorisms carefully. And this took a while. As a result, his thinking had a time-release effect." Good for him. For a related essay (time-release effect unknown), see Hitler's Still Point: A Hate Speech for Harvard.
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Friday, June 23, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Wednesday February 15, 2006
Anthony Hopkins
Writes Screenplay
About God, Life & Death
Writes Screenplay
About God, Life & Death
These topics may be illuminated
by a study of the Chinese classics.
If we replace the Chinese word "I"
(change, transformation) with the
word "permutation," the relevance
of Western mathematics (which
some might call "the Logos") to
the I Ching ("Changes Classic")
beomes apparent.
Related material:
Hitler's Still Point,
Jung's Imago,
Solomon's Cube,
Geometry of the I Ching,
and Globe Award.
Yesterday's Valentine
may also have some relevance.
Comments Off on Wednesday February 15, 2006
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Tuesday September 14, 2004
The Square Wheel
Harmonic analysis may be based either on the circular (i.e., trigonometric) functions or on the square (i. e., Walsh) functions. George Mackey's masterly historical survey showed that the discovery of Fourier analysis, based on the circle, was of comparable importance (within mathematics) to the discovery (within general human history) of the wheel. Harmonic analysis based on square
For some observations of Stephen Wolfram on square-wheel analysis, see pp. 573 ff. in Wolfram's magnum opus, A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media, May 14, 2002). Wolfram's illustration of this topic is closely related, as it happens, to a note on the symmetry of finite-geometry hyperplanes that I wrote in 1986. A web page pointing out this same symmetry in Walsh functions was archived on Oct. 30, 2001.
That web page is significant (as later versions point out) partly because it shows that just as the phrase "the circular functions" is applied to the trigonometric functions, the phrase "the square functions" might well be applied to Walsh
"While the reader may draw many a moral from our tale, I hope that the story is of interest for its own sake. Moreover, I hope that it may inspire others, participants or observers, to preserve the true and complete record of our mathematical times."
— From Error-Correcting Codes
Through Sphere Packings
To Simple Groups,
by Thomas M. Thompson,
Mathematical Association of America, 1983
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