Friday, June 6, 2025
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
For Harlan Kane: The Eigenspace Handle
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From http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/v/eigen.html — Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by funny looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents … We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see. (Pp. 155-6, Harper Perennial ed.) |
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Monday, October 16, 2023
For Harlan Kane — The Heidegger Conundrum
Where's Y?
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Sunday, October 15, 2023
Efficient Packend
"Stencils" from a 1959 paper by Golomb —
These 15 figures also represent the 15 points of a finite geometry
(Cullinane diamond theorem, February 1979).
This journal on Beltane (May 1), 2016 —
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Monday, May 15, 2023
Death on Beltane
"Stencils" from a 1959 paper by Golomb —
These 15 figures also represent the 15 points of a finite geometry
(Cullinane diamond theorem, February 1979).
This journal on Beltane (May 1), 2016 —
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Thursday, March 24, 2022
Mathematics and Narrative: Solomon vs. the Wicked Queen
"Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences,
published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—
went out of print long ago. But its content lives on. . . ."
For part of that content, see Stencils .
A :Log24 post from the date of Golomb's death —
See as well other posts on Mathematics and Narrative.
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Friday, November 25, 2016
Priority
Before the monograph "Diamond Theory" was distributed in 1976,
two (at least) notable figures were published that illustrate
symmetry properties of the 4×4 square:
Hudson in 1905 —
Golomb in 1967 —
It is also likely that some figures illustrating Walsh functions as
two-color square arrays were published prior to 1976.
Update of Dec. 7, 2016 —
The earlier 1950's diagrams of Veitch and Karnaugh used the
1's and 0's of Boole, not those of Galois.
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Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Hail Affleck
Random thoughts suggested by the reference in the
previous post to Aegean Park Press and to stencils —
"Stencil’s entire existence is focused on the hunt for V.,
a classic novelistic quest-without-resolution (in fact, V.
might be fiction’s greatest example of a MacGuffin). V.
may be a person, or may be a place, though it could
also be neither: Pynchon calls it, at one point,
'a remarkably scattered concept' and, at another,
'the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name.' "
— Alexander Nazaryan in The New Yorker ,
article dated March 29, 2013
How about a date ?
From this journal on Good Friday, March 29, 2013 —
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Golomb and Symmetry
From the webpage Diamond Theory Bibliography —
Golomb, Solomon W.
Shift register sequences (Revised edition)
Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills, CA, 1982
The fifteen "stencils" in Golomb's Fig. VIII-8, page 219,
are the same as the fifteen affine hyperplanes that
account for patterns' symmetry in diamond theory.
This figure occurs in a discussion of Rademacher-
Walsh functions.
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Wednesday December 18, 2002
For the Dark Lady
On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, our new site music is “Nica’s Dream.”
From a website on composer Horace Silver:
“Horace Silver apparently composed Nica’s Dream (1956) for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter-Rothschild, an English aristocrat and a very dear friend of his. She was known to the New York press as the Jazz Baroness and to the black musicians for whom she was something of a patron, simply as Nica. Her apartment in the fashionable Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue became a ‘hospitality suite for some of the greatest jazz players of the day, whom she treated generously.’ (Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1:248)
This music is not unrelated to the work of Thomas Pynchon. From an essay by Charles Hollander:
“There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with ‘…a young crude Mata Hari act.’ (V.; 386)…. Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, ‘The Big One, the century’s master cabal,’ and ‘the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name’ (V.; 226)….”
See also my journal entry for the December 16-17 midnight, “Just Seventeen.”
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