Log24

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Agents of a Great Despair

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Or:  Concepts of Space

1976 according to Cullinane:

1976 according to Plotnick:

“Irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and . . .
at the same time they are the agents of a great despair
and stasis in U.S. culture.”  — David Foster Wallace,
as quoted by Adam Kirsch today at Salon

Electric Dreams

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:31 pm

Continued from Black Friday 

"Tell me no secrets, tell me some lies."

Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

View from the Bottom

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

Reality's Mirror: Exploring the Mathematics of Symmetry —

"Here is a book that explains in laymen language
what symmetry is all about, from the lowliest snowflake
and flounder to the lofty group structures whose
astonishing applications to the Old One are winning
Nobel prizes. Bunch's book is a marvel of clear, witty
science writing, as delightful to read as it is informative
and up-to-date. The author is to be congratulated on
a job well done." — Martin Gardner

"But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye!"

— Rimbaud,  A Season in Hell

"… the lowliest snowflake and flounder…." 
      — Martin Gardner

Thomas Mann on the deathly precision of snowflakes

Britannica article, 'Flounder'

Back to the Real

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 am

Continued from June 17, 2009 —

"I sit now in a little room off the bar
at four-thirty in the morning drinking
ochas and then mescal and writing this
on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched
the other night…."

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano 

See too a search for Snowflake in this journal.
This word may serve as Mark Strand's "Rosebud."

Investments

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 am

From "A Piece of the Storm," by the late poet Mark Strand —

A snowflake, a blizzard of one….

From notes to Malcolm Lowry's "La Mordida" —

he had invested, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death….

See also Weyl's Symmetry  in this journal.

Two Physical Models of the Fano Plane

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:23 am

The Regular Tetrahedron

The seven symmetry axes of the regular tetrahedron
are of two types: vertex-to-face and edge-to-edge.
Take these axes as the "points" of a Fano plane.
Each of the tetrahedron's six reflection planes contains 
two vertex-to-face axes and one edge-to-edge axis.
Take these six planes as six of the "lines" of a Fano
plane. Then the seventh line is the set of three 
edge-to-edge axes.

(The Fano tetrahedron is not original with me.
See Polster's 1998 A Geometrical Picture Book pp. 16-17.)

The Cube

There are three reflection planes parallel to faces
of the cube. Take the seven nonempty subsets of
the set of these three planes as the "points" of a
Fano plane. Define the Fano "lines" as those triples
of these seven subsets in which each member of
the triple is the symmetric-difference sum of the 
other two members.

(This is the eightfold cube  discussed at finitegeometry.org.)

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