Thursday, June 6, 2019
Strange Dots
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Sunday Shul: Connecting the Dots
"It's very easy to say, 'Well, Jeff couldn't quite connect these dots,'"
director Jeff Nichols told BuzzFeed News. "Well, I wasn't actually
looking at the dots you were looking at."
— Posted on March 21, 2016, at 1:11 p.m,
Adam B. Vary, BuzzFeed News Reporter
"Magical arrays of numbers have been the talismans of mathematicians and mystics since the time of Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. And in the 16th century, Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria devised a cosmological world view that seems to have prefigured superstring theory, at least superficially. Rabbi Luria was a sage of the Jewish cabalist movement — a school of mystics that drew inspiration from the arcane oral tradition of the Torah.
According to Rabbi Luria's cosmology, the soul and inner life of the hidden God were expressed by 10 primordial numbers
— "Things Are Stranger Than We Can Imagine," |
Saturday, May 25, 2019
Brand On Breyer
Or: One Quark for Muster Mark
"In this way the eight trigrams came into being." — Richard Wilhelm
Detail:
Midrash:
Friday, May 24, 2019
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Brightness at Noon*
A recent not-too-bright book from Princeton —
Some older, brighter books from Tony Zee —
Fearful Symmetry (1986) and
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (2003).
* Continued.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Saturday May 22, 2004
A Form
John Leonard in the June 10, 2004, New York Review of Books, on E. L. Doctorow:
"… he's got urgent things to say and seeks some form to say them in, or a form that will tease and torture secret meanings out of what he thinks he already knows, or a form, like a wishing well, down which to dream, scream, or drown."
48. The Well
The Judgment
The Well. The town may be changed,
But the well cannot be changed.
It neither decreases nor increases.
They come and go and draw from the well.
If one gets down almost to the water
And the rope does not go all the way,
Or the jug breaks, it brings misfortune.From the Book of Ecclesiastes 12:6—
or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern
From Chuck Polisher's I Ching Lexicon:
See also the following form, discussed in
Balanchine's Birthday
(1/9/03) and in
Art Theory
for Yom Kippur
(10/5/03)