Friday, February 20, 2026
Annals of Friday the 13th:
An Ordinary Evening in Plan 9
Friday, November 13, 2020
|
Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001:
“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into
a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully
said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city
should be sacred. Scully said the colony’s founders thought of
their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth,
heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”
|
“Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven
— Wallace Stevens, |
♫ “To illustrate my last remark” . . .
Clint Eastwood Sings Johnny Mercer Lyrics in
the Garden of Good and Evil
|
The mediative, ordering capacity of myths, their ability to “encode”—another Lévi-Strauss word—to give coherent expression to reality, points to a profound harmonic accord between the inner logic of the brain and the structure of the external world. “When the mind processes the empirical data which it receives previously processed by the sense organs, it goes on working out structurally that which at the outset was already structural. And it can only do so inasmuch as the mind, the body to which the mind belongs, and the things which body and mind perceive, are part and parcel of one and the same reality.” The codes through which these perceptions are transmitted and understood are, suggests Lévi-Strauss, binary. That’s again a technical word, but not difficult for us to understand. He says that everything that matters comes in sets of two. Thus we have the relations and interactions of what he calls “the great pairings”. For example, affirmation and negation, which really means in simple language, yes and no; organic and inorganic; left and right; before and after. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the symmetries of the nervous system and the hemispheric architecture of the human cortex—the two halves of our brain—seem to be an active reflection of this binary structure of reality.
— Steiner, George. Nostalgia for the Absolute |
For some uses of real binary codes,
see NotebookLM's Diamond Theory.
Reindeer Games: In Search of the Lost Harmonica Chord
Epigraph by George Steiner —
"There is an Hassidic parable which tells us that God created man
so that man might tell stories. This telling of stories is, according
to Lévi-Strauss, the very condition of our being. The alternative
would be total inertia or the eclipse of reason. The mediative,
ordering capacity of myths, their ability to 'encode' — another
Lévi-Strauss word — to give coherent expression to reality, points
to a profound harmonic accord between the inner logic of the brain
and the structure of the external world."
— "Nostalgia for the Absolute," CBC Massey Lectures, Toronto, 1974
♫ "Rudolf with your nose so bright …."
Search for a meditative "harmonic accord" —
More seriously . . .
From T. S. Eliot's "timeless" zone . . .
Cadence Count:
FDR Reads You Your Rights
"Your left … your left … your left right left"
Related reading . . .
Photo Cropping for Orwell
Alternative meditations . . .
Toronto Mythspace
"It is through myths that man makes sense of the world,
that he experiences it in some coherent fashion,
that he confronts its irremediably contradictory,
divided, alien presence." — George Steiner
in "Nostalgia for the Absolute," the Massey lectures
on CBC radio in 1974
Some will prefer the thoughts quoted here on the above YouTube date —
Thoughts of the young Carl Reiner as rendered above in 1967 —
“Somewhere, someplace… there must be a lost horizon…
A Shangri-La where a man can find peace, happiness,
and lots of naked ladies.”
Voilà.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
“Another Day, Another Sunrise” —
News from Fishman and Brook
From yesterday's post Lockscreen and Unlockscreen —
Later yesterday, a report of a Mardi Gras death —
A Midrash for Hays —
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Definitions
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
From “The Crimson Passion: A Drama at Mardi Gras”
From "The Practice of Mathematics, Part 1" by Robert P. Langlands —
|
My feeling for the Greeks as mathematicians is every bit as inadequate as that for the youthful Gauss. I do not know whence came their curiosity and depth. Perhaps no-one does. We live in a highly structured environment dedicated to research. We earn our living by it and we pin our hopes of recognition on it, but the questions we ask and the problems we solve are determined more by tradition, more by our colleagues than by our own natural and spontaneous curiosity. We are seldom playful; our efforts are never simply for our own amusement. A brief romp with Greek mathematics in which we examine the construction of the pentagon at length may be an occasion to capture briefly the ludible spirit of the Greeks An hour is also not enough for an adequate understanding of analytic geometric and complex numbers nor for a presentation of the algebra required for Gauss’s construction [of the 17-sided regular polygon]. The complex numbers are an enormously effective tool that swallows the geometry, but it will be good to ask ourselves how. Moreover the four-fold or sixteen-fold algebraic symmetry is far more subtle than the five-fold or seventeen-fold geometric symmetry. Since it will reappear again and in spades when, and if, we discuss Galois and Kummer, it is best to get used to it now. |
Monday, February 16, 2026
Evidence
Related literature . . . The Dreaming Jewels, a fictional tale
by the real author Theodore Sturgeon, and Timequake,
a fictional tale by the real author Kurt Vonnegut that features
the semi-fictional Sturgeon-like character Kilgore Trout.
Being semi-fictional is not a comfortable metaphysical state.
Sunday, February 15, 2026
Accuracy
"Pray for the grace of accuracy." — Robert Lowell
From Snaith's pages 76 and 77 —
Compare and contrast . . .
Wikipedia on the numbers of cubies and facelets —
"The puzzle consists of 26 unique miniature cubes,
also known as 'cubies' or 'cubelets'."
"A 3 × 3 × 3 Rubik's Cube consists of 6 faces, each with
9 colored squares called facelets, for a total of 54 facelets."
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Friday, February 13, 2026
Geometry for Friday the 13th
The previous post — "Cube Space" — and today's date
suggest a review of the 13 symmetry axes of the cube.
Related geometry —
|
By NotebookLM today — Symmetry in Finite Geometry and Combinatorial Design The provided sources explore the mathematical and artistic intersections of finite geometry, specifically focusing on the Cullinane diamond theorem and its square-based representations of PG(3,2). By utilizing 4×4 and 4×6 arrays, these works illustrate how combinatorial designs, such as Latin squares and Miracle Octad Generators, relate to highly symmetric structures like the Mathieu group M24 and the binary Golay code. The texts demonstrate that properties of symmetry, such as the affine group AGL(4,2), govern both abstract group theory and visual patterns found in puzzles, quilt designs, and sphere packings. This framework extends into coding theory and quantum mechanics, where geometric "bricks" and "lines" help simplify the analysis of complex lattices and error-correcting systems. Ultimately, the collection bridges rigorous algebraic abstraction with interactive visualization, showing that the logic of finite space underpins both mathematical truth and aesthetic form. |
Cube Space
Theorem:
Some large natural symmetry groups of the sets of 8, 16, 32, or 64 points
in Euclidean space that are located at the vertices of a cube in 3, 4, 5. or 6
dimensions are generated by, respectively, arbitrary permutations of
parallel edges or parallel faces or parallel cubes or parallel hypercubes .
(For an example, see Diamond Theory in 1937.)
Illustration of related group actions:
Thursday, February 12, 2026
DJ School Today: The Erection
"Suggest an improvement to earn IQ" . . .
Update at 9:06 AM EST —
Logos and Branding* . . . Continues.
A search this morning for "SourceForge logo" led to a podcast featuring
a website-creation company that offers the following "agency" template —
A fictional "forward-thinking" brand . . .
* Vide other posts so tagged.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
“Artistic Style”
From the target of the "Artistic Style" link above . . .
For another meditation on a "marriage of math and physics," see other
posts tagged Cartier Wedding.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Things of August
A January 22 death and
Shadowcraft Backstory suggest a
May Tricks review . . .
DJ School 2026 —
From a South Florida Cinderella Yesterday . . .
Blue-Black Lyrics
Speak, Memory
A 1956 passage by Robert Silverberg—
"There was something in the heart of the diamond—
not the familiar brown flaw of the others, but something
of a different color, something moving and flickering.
Before my eyes, it changed and grew.
And I saw what it was. It was the form of a girl—
a woman, rather, a voluptuous, writhing nude form
in the center of the gem. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black,
her eyes a piercing ebony. She was gesturing to me,
holding out her hands, incredibly beckoning from within
the heart of the diamond."
The Day I Turned 14:
The Chicago Hangover
Monday, February 9, 2026
The Tesseract Theorem
The natural symmetry group of the 16 vertices of a tesseract
is generated by arbitrary permutations of parallel faces and
is of order 322,560.
(This is an abstract version of the Cullinane diamond theorem.)
For the corresponding cube theorem, see Cube Space.
Some backstory . . .
Preprogrammed “Tiny, Pitiful Words”
from a Human Language Model
"Shawn’s characters ponder the preprogrammed compulsions
to fall in and out of love, to be overwhelmed by and then lose
all desire,
'to use the tiny, pitiful words that the creature uses
to point to invisible parts of itself, invisible parts
that grow so vast that they turn us inside out and
then swallow us up and eat us.' "
— www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/t-magazine/wallace-shawn.html
A less "tiny, pitiful" word . . . "inscape" in this journal.
Sunday, February 8, 2026
Laurel Canyon 47
“There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies.
But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies.
And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication,
there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Winter Fire Golden Key
"Now he believed that where there was a key,
there must also be a lock…."
|
From The Golden Key by George MacDonald "We must find the country from which the shadows come," said Mossy. "We must, dear Mossy," responded Tangle. "What if your golden key should be the key to it?" "Ah! that would be grand," returned Mossy. |
Deep Wade
(The title was suggested by this morning's previous post.)
See as well "Lives of the Painters: Dutch Boy."
The K-Pop Conspiracy: Cube Codes
"Before time began . . . ." — Optimus Prime
For the above K-Pop date [ Sept. 19, 2022 ] in this journal
see the Cube Codes posts.
A less Pop approach to cube codes —
Cupid at the Daily Beast
From The Daily Beast . . .
"The Story Behind the Plot Twists on Netflix’s Best Drama:
The creator and showrunner of 'The Diplomat' talks to Obsessed
about the biggest twists in the new season."
By Sophie Brookover
Published Oct. 27 2025 11:12 AM EDT
Lower-case “e” . . .
Honoring Euler and Einheit
In this journal, "e" often signifies "Einheit,"
German for "identity" in algebra.
And then there is the identity of one
Michael Harris . . .
From yesterday's post "Lowell Space" —
A Song for Harris to Sing
I prefer Kerouac.
Saturday, February 7, 2026
Metaphor
"… enclosed in a bubble wrap of darkness and hatred and resentment"
— Rahm Emanuel, according to Maureen Dowd today .
I prefer Nathalie Emmanuel.
DJ School . . . Related Reading
Related reading from http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Hot+Wife —
|
From Tom McCarthy's review of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
"A Hanging Detail" — 1531*
* This "Wolf Hall" year was suggested by the 15:31 time-remaining data above.
Friday, February 6, 2026
Stupid Cupid Space
From a post of February 9, 2007 —
From Facebook yesterday…
Doubledoublebb lipsyncs "Stupid Cupid" —
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Before Entertainment was God . . .
Biloxi Blues — The Backstory
Detail —
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Biloxi Blues — The Backstory
Biloxi Blues — The Backstory
Annals of Redacted Art . . . Continue.
Comments Off on Annals of Redacted Art . . . Continue.
The Squared Circle
Related reading — http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=minority-report.
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Severance
From other posts now tagged Severance —
“… There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover.
I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down
and moved a knight…. I looked down at the chessboard.
The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where
I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game.
It wasn’t a game for knights.”
I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down
and moved a knight…. I looked down at the chessboard.
The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where
I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game.
It wasn’t a game for knights.”
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
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“A Rock and a Hard Place” . . . Plymouth!
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The Shakespeare Files . . .
“Another Opening, Another Show” —
The Straight Man
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“Another Opening, Another Show” —
The Straight Man
“Another Opening, Another Show” —
The Straight Man
Lander in Artspace
Evolution of an image . . .
( Not to be confused with The Tin Man’s Hat. ) |
From the monograph preprint Diamond Theory (1976) —
(See pages 2 and 3 of the monograph.)
The above theorem underlies a revised anatomy of the Fano plane . . .
The fundamental theorem, expounded further in a 2001 web page, also
underlies the "seventh seal" derived from Peter J. Cameron's 1976 book
Parallelisms of Complete Designs — a representation of the 105 lines of the
Klein Quadric in PG(5,2) as the 105 partitions of an 8-set into four 2-sets.
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Innie-Outie . . . Continues.
For the title, see http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Inner+Outer .
Earlier . . .
Tonight . . .
"Between aliens and music . . . ."
or "Between a rock and a hard place."
From Appalachian Theology (March 20, 2025) —
"A key concept in Augustine's great
The City of God is that the Christian church
is superior and essentially alien
to its earthly surroundings."
— David Van Biema in Time Magazine
(May 2, 2005, p. 43)
Comments Off on Innie-Outie . . . Continues.
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
Uncornering Baby
Undirty Dancing . . .
Baby in a Corner
Less Undirty . . .
Attitude of Gratitude
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Floor Show
Related reading from http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Hot+Wife —
|
From Tom McCarthy's review of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
Comments Off on Floor Show
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Words About Music . . .
for The Day the Music Died
Related reading — http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Static+Dynamic.
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for The Day the Music Died
for The Day the Music Died
Monday, February 2, 2026
Happy Birthday, James Joyce —
Córdoba in Dublin
"Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice,
in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of
squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner:
so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world,
Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and
movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure
soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which
brightness could not comprehend." — James Joyce
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Córdoba in Dublin
Córdoba in Dublin
Crimson Date
The date November 30, 2014, in a Harvard Crimson story yesterday
suggests some posts from that date now tagged Strand Flake.
Also so tagged . . .
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Sunday, February 1, 2026
Analogy for the Scottish Café
"Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?"
Vide the geometry in
a post from last summer.
Illustration of a title by George Mackey
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A Question for Tom Paine . . .
“What About Women’s Souls?”
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“What About Women’s Souls?”
“What About Women’s Souls?”
The Times That Try Men’s Souls:
The Akeley Midrash
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The Akeley Midrash
The Akeley Midrash
The Times That Try Men’s Souls:
Defense or Prosecution?
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Defense or Prosecution?
Defense or Prosecution?
Saturday, January 31, 2026
Times That Try Men’s Souls:
Another Opening, Another Show
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Another Opening, Another Show
Another Opening, Another Show
Alignment Problem
See as well this journal on the above Tsinghua date, 2025-11-17 . . .
♫ "When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards…."
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For Word Collectors
(And “Simple, Earnest” James Joyce)
*
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(And “Simple, Earnest” James Joyce)
(And “Simple, Earnest” James Joyce)
Friday, January 30, 2026
Windows
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=825068717111731 —
From "All Creatures Great and Small" S6 E3 —
A seminar room window at Harvard in today's online Crimson —
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Where Entertainment Is God:
Definition
Deadline yesterday reporting a January 28 death —
". . . 'remembered as a legend of Hollywood publicity,
one who helped define the role . . . .'"
This journal on January 28 —
Earlier in this journal . . .
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Definition
Definition
Waymark* for January 30
* See the term "Waymark" in this journal.
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Thursday, January 29, 2026
Jung Diamonds
From a Jan. 27 post —
The Hustvedt title "Dance Around the Self" suggests
a review of other posts now tagged Jung Diamonds.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2026
For Your Consideration: California Navel-Gaze . . .
Art by Marcela Nowak, Performance by Kiernan Shipka
From the star of Swimming with Sharks today . . .
260128-Branding-agency-featuring-Kiernan_Shipka-navel-pic.jpg
260126-Innie-Outie-Kiernan-Shipka-LA-Times-detail.jpg
Earlier . . .
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Art by Marcela Nowak, Performance by Kiernan Shipka
Art by Marcela Nowak, Performance by Kiernan Shipka
Surreal Art vs. Photo Realism
260128-Crary_Art-Philadelphia_Dawn-photo-date-
synchronology-check-Maltese_Parrot.jpg —
Also on May 23, 2024 . . .
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Annals of Popular Culture:
PopCult for Quine*
* From a post of June 25, 2008 —
Trevanian (and Kurt Weill) fans may
enjoy a variation on this theme.
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PopCult for Quine*
PopCult for Quine*
“Nexus of pop culture”
"A 2012 story in the East Bay Express of Oakland, Calif.,
described Mr. Legend as 'a living nexus of pop culture.'"
— New York Times report tonight of a Jan. 2 death.
See also this journal on Jan. 2.
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Tuesday, January 27, 2026
YouTube Reverie
260127-Mozart's_Birthday-Eagles-lyric.jpg
— "This could be heaven or this could be . . . ."
— "Sunset Boulevard?"
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Annals of Cultural Appropriation:
Waymark for Erewhon
260127-Elliott_Smith-memorial-mural-in-LA.jpg
In 2004 —
See as well this journal on the above upload date, 7 August 2010 —
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Waymark for Erewhon
Waymark for Erewhon
Cultural Waymarks: In the Fold
"the reflection in the water showed an iron man"
is the line of verse by Elliott Smith that lay hidden
in a fold of cloth on the breast of Soundwavesoffwax
in an Instagram post yesterday.
Related meditation —
Tony Stark in The Avengers , May the Fourth, 2012
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260126-Innie-Outie-Kiernan-Shipka-thanks-LA-Times.jpg
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Monday, January 26, 2026
For Your Consideration:
Multispeech Illustrated*
* Related material — The black shirt above, and Elliott Smith.
From https://genius.com/artists/Elliott-smith —
" Smith is best-known for 'Miss Misery', his Oscar-nominated
contribution to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, and XO’s
addictive and gorgeous family tension meditation, 'Waltz #2'."
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Multispeech Illustrated*
Multispeech Illustrated*
Sunday Evening*
|
We are born with the dead: With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
Not known, because not looked for |
* A post from Dec. 3, 2023, that was saved as a draft and
apparently future-dated to today —whether by mistake or not,
I do not know — and appeared to me this (Monday) evening.
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Woman in Blue
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Twin Pillars
The "Gray Lotus" octad within the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) framework of Robert T. Curtis might be called, for
fans of Freemasonry, The Twin Pillars.
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Incidental Cultural Waymarks*
collider.com/kate-mara-sci-fi-movie-the-astronaut-
streaming-hulu-february-2026
* See as well Waymark in this journal.
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Sunday, January 25, 2026
Palette Portrait
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