Log24

Update of 4:36 PM ET from The Wall Street Journal —

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"You, Misirlou, are a dream of delight in the night.

To an oasis, sprinkled by stars above,
Heaven will guide us, Allah will bless our love."

The rest of the post "Sermon" referred to in yesterday's
St. Patrick's Day post "Just Another Block in the Wall" —

For Tom Stoppard, author of "Jumpers" —

"Seven is Heaven" 

          From a webpage of Bill Cherowitzo

" … the Fano plane ,
a set of seven points
grouped into seven lines
that has been called
'the combinatorialist’s coat of arms.' "

— Blake Stacey in a March 14 post 

"Though realism is excellent rhetoric, maybe the best,
in a purely technical or instrumental sense,
that cannot be an adequate reason to accept it
as a serious intellectual position. In its tropes of
Death and Furniture we see a rhetoric  that refuses
to acknowledge its own existence; a politics  that
can claim a critical-radical credibility only by
the selective use of its opponents' analytic tools;
and a theology  which is deeply conservative and
seeks nothing less than the death of disruptive,
disturbing inquiry. While tedium, good taste, political
and moral sensibility will properly determine what
sorts of given realities are thought worthy of inquiry,
those considerations are no grounds for promoting
a realist ontology for social science, nor any other
science, nor for rejecting relativism. On the contrary,
relativism is social science par excellence . . . ."

Loughborough University

— Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., and Potter, J. (1995),
"Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology
of bottom line arguments against relativism," 
History of the Human Sciences , 8, 25-49.

Related material:

Platonic  realism in this journal, yesterday's post Ripples, and …

Gravity's Shadow , 2004 —

Gravity's Ghost , 2010 —

See also an "Inception"-related object —

Suggested by a poem in the current  New Yorker.

Today's text —

"We have no more beginnings. 
Incipit : that proud Latin word
which signals the start
survives in our dusty 'inception'."

— George Steiner, beginning of
      Grammars of Creation

Reply in the Latin tradition—

.

Cast

(From the Log24 posts
​of August 23-24, 2013)

Note that the visible faces of the die, in counter -clockwise
order, are 3 6 5. See also this journal 365 days ago and,
since 2012 is a leap year, also today's date last year.