“Multispeech is… like a kind of multidimensional speech…."
— langmaker.com on The Gameplayers of Zan
The Hunt for Blue August concludes…
As quoted today in The New York Times—
“We only have so much time to leave a mark.”
— Carl Paladino
"Now, it’s time to turn the page."
— President Obama
A search in this journal for the President's phrase yields…
For Jenny
Quality
Click on the mark for some context.
A New York Times story from the Feast of St. Augustine
("A version of this article appeared in print on August 28, 2010,
on page A17 of the New York edition.") —
|
22-Story Fall in Manhattan With summer winding down, Eric G. John, the United States ambassador to Thailand, made a trip familiar to many parents: he accompanied his 17-year-old daughter to New York as she got ready for her first year of college. But his daughter, Nicole, barely experienced being a freshman at Parsons The New School For Design, near Union Square. She died early Friday [August 27, 2010] after falling 22 floors from a high-rise apartment building in Herald Square after a night out that led her and friends to a party at the high-rise…. |
The Thailand and Design links above are the Times's.
The August 27 link is not.
Clicking on the Times's Design link leads to…
June 25 – September 12, 2010
Opening reception: June 24, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
|
This journal, June 24, 12:31 p.m.— … Todo lo sé por el lucero puro – Rubén Darío |
"The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness."
— Camille Paglia in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education
Wedding of Eleanor Powell
and Glenn Ford, 1943
Ford died on this date four years ago.
“I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, opening sentence
"We are not saints." — Bill Wilson
Eleanor Powell, on the other hand….
Wikipedia—
Dos Equis is a lager that was originally brewed by the German-born Mexican brewer Wilhelm Hasse in 1897. The brand was named “Siglo XX” (“20th century”) to commemorate the arrival of the new century, and the bottles were marked with the Roman numerals “XX”, or “Dos Equis” (two Xs).
A rival for the Dos Equis “most interesting” title—
— ams.org/journals/bull/1928-34-05/….
See also Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate… “It happened in Monterrey, a long time ago….”
Actually, according to some sources, the Dos Equis brand began in or near Veracruz.
“On April 22, 1519, Hernan Cortez disembarked on Chalchihuecan beach, where he decided to found a village and form the first colonial settlement in Mexico. That day was Good Friday, the day of Holy Week known as the day of La Vera Cruz (True Cross)— hence he chose the name of La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz.” — Ad copy
(A sequel to Rally Round the Flag and Gotta Know the Territory)
Click here for a bigger picture.
See also, in this journal, "a corpse will be transported by express."
Band pioneer William P. Foster died on Saturday, the Feast of St. Augustine.
Related material—
"Mexico, the place you thought you knew"— an ad in this morning's NY Times obituaries—
and the following literary passage—
Willy Loman, Meet Forrest Gump
Related material—
Camp Germania
(Click for Source)
* From the song Rock Island.
Chaplin's Great Dictator—
Related material—
That X (August 25) as interpreted on August 18 by Benjamin Kaplan and Martin Dannenberg.
Narrative Sequence
In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller by Kevin Guilfoile. The Thousand is in the manner of Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .
From the review—
What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with the triangle theorem that we learned in school).
As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones, part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….
The plot involves, in part,
… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….
Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post) or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.
Or— Childhood's Rear End
This post was suggested by…
Related material:
The Zeppelin album cover, featuring rear views of nude children, was shot at the Giant's Causeway.
From a page at led-zeppelin.org—
See also Richard Rorty on Heidegger—
Safranski, the author of ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy,'' never steps back and pronounces judgment on Heidegger, but something can be inferred from the German title of his book: ''Ein Meister aus Deutschland'' (''A Master From Germany''). Heidegger was, undeniably, a master, and was very German indeed. But Safranski's spine-chilling allusion is to Paul Celan's best-known poem, ''Death Fugue.'' In Michael Hamburger's translation, its last lines are:
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith.
No one familiar with Heidegger's work can read Celan's poem without recalling Heidegger's famous dictum: ''Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.'' Nobody who makes this association can reread the poem without having the images of Hitler and Heidegger — two men who played with serpents and daydreamed — blend into each other. Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come, but the smell of smoke from the crematories — the ''grave in the air'' — will linger on their pages.
Heidegger is the antithesis of the sort of philosopher (John Stuart Mill, William James, Isaiah Berlin) who assumes that nothing ultimately matters except human happiness. For him, human suffering is irrelevant: philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw the history of the West not in terms of increasing freedom or of decreasing misery, but as a poem. ''Being's poem,'' he once wrote, ''just begun, is man.''
For Heidegger, history is a sequence of ''words of Being'' — the words of the great philosophers who gave successive historical epochs their self-image, and thereby built successive ''houses of Being.'' The history of the West, which Heidegger also called the history of Being, is a narrative of the changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task, he said, is to ''preserve the force of the most elementary words'' — to prevent the words of the great, houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being banalized.
Related musical meditations—
Shine On (Saturday, April 21, 2007), Shine On, Part II, and Built (Sunday, April 22, 2007).
Related pictorial meditations—
The Giant's Causeway at Peter J. Cameron's weblog
and the cover illustration for Diamond Theory (1976)—
The connection between these two images is the following from Cameron's weblog today—
… as we saw, there are two different Latin squares of order 4;
one, but not the other, can be extended to a complete set
of 3 MOLS [mutually orthogonal Latin squares].
The underlying structures of the square pictures in the Diamond Theory cover are those of the two different Latin squares of order 4 mentioned by Cameron.
Connection with childhood—
The children's book A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle. See math16.com. L'Engle's fantasies about children differ from those of Arthur C. Clarke and Led Zeppelin.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper hardcover, 1962, p. 262—
"…the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve
the force of the most elemental words…."
Heidegger was quoted, in a different translation, by Richard Rorty in 1998
in a review of Ein Meister aus Deutschland.
Related material: an August 18 death and this journal on that date—
"… it is impossible that there should be time if there is no soul,
except that there could be that X which time is…."
— Aristotle, Physics, IV.14, translated by Edward Hussey
See also Berlinerblau in this journal on August 10.
From Doonesbury today—
From this journal (September 20, 2009)—
|
scheinen
Quine, Pursuit of Truth,
Google search:
|
…And for the late Kenny Edwards
(Feb. 10, 1946 – Aug. 18, 2010)—
See also Quarter to Three (Aug. 20, 2010)
and Home from Home (Oct. 29, 2007)—
Continued from Halloween 2005 —
An image suggested by three articles found online today—
Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars
(Chronicle of Higher Education )
Searching for Planet X
(New York Times )
Deep in Rural Appalachia —
(New York Times )
For another disaster for scholars, see Naturalized Epistemology.
The Diamond 16 Puzzle and the Kaleidoscope Puzzle can now be downloaded in the normal way from a browser, with the save-as web-page-complete option, and have their JavaScript still work— if the files are saved with the name indicated in the instructions on the puzzles' web pages. (There was a problem with file names in the JavaScript that has been fixed.)
The JavaScript pages Design Cube 2x2x2 and Design Cube 4x4x4 have not been changed. To download these, it is necessary to…
The result is a folder containing both image files and the HTML page, just as it is on the Web.
There is a remarkable correspondence between the 35 partitions of an eight-element set H into two four-element sets and the 35 partitions of the affine 4-space L over GF(2) into four parallel four-point planes. Under this correspondence, two of the H-partitions have a common refinement into 2-sets if and only if the same is true of the corresponding L-partitions (Peter J. Cameron, Parallelisms of Complete Designs, Cambridge U. Press, 1976, p. 60). The correspondence underlies the isomorphism* of the group A8 with the projective general linear group PGL(4,2) and plays an important role in the structure of the large Mathieu group M24.
A 1954 paper by W.L. Edge suggests the correspondence should be named after E.H. Moore. Hence the title of this note.
Edge says that
It is natural to ask what, if any, are the 8 objects which undergo
permutation. This question was discussed at length by Moore…**.
But, while there is no thought either of controverting Moore's claim to
have answered it or of disputing his priority, the question is primarily
a geometrical one….
Excerpts from the Edge paper—
Excerpts from the Moore paper—
Pages 432, 433, 434, and 435, as well as the section mentioned above by Edge— pp. 438 and 439
* J.W.P. Hirschfeld, Finite Projective Spaces of Three Dimensions, Oxford U. Press, 1985, p. 72
** Edge cited "E.H. Moore, Math. Annalen, 51 (1899), 417-44." A more complete citation from "The Scientific Work of Eliakim Hastings Moore," by G.A. Bliss, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Volume 40, Number 7 (1934), 501-514— E.H. Moore, "Concerning the General Equations of the Seventh and Eighth Degrees," Annalen, vol. 51 (1899), pp. 417-444.
"They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man’s tuning…."
And one more for the road.
For Kathrin Bringmann, who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for a Fields Medal.
The four Fields medal winners were announced today at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India. Bringmann was not among them.
Bringmann was, however, the winner of the 2009 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize—
See The Hindu of September 30, 2009 and this journal on that date—
For more about Bringmann's work, see an article on what has been called Ramanujan's "final problem."
For another problem with a claim to this title, see "Mathematician Untangles Legendary Problem" and search in this journal for Dyson + crank.
Sir Frank Kermode died yesterday (British time) at 90.
“Time cannot exist without a soul (to count it).” — Aristotle
— Passage quoted on the title page of Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press, 1967)
The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, Lloyd P. Gerson, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 208—
“Although Aristotle seems in general to regard time as something independent of the soul and objective, he occasionally gives a leading role to soul. He says, for example, that time cannot exist without a soul to number it (Phys. 223a21-9)….”
Soul Riff for Sir Frank— See
Call and Response
“One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation….”
— The Glass Bead Game
Today’s New York Times has an obituary for Bernard Knox, classics professor. Knox died on July 22. On that date this journal happened to have a post, “Soul Riff,” featuring a professor— shown below. Click on the professor for a very relevant classical quotation.
The Soul Riff post also contained the above secondary title—
|
For a response from the next day, |
The following, from Wikipedia, is an image of Utopia 14, the 1954 paperback reissue of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano.
Commentary from Wikipedia—
“A player piano is a modified piano that ‘plays itself.’ The piano keys move according to a pattern of holes punched in an unwinding scroll…. Like its counterpart, a player piano can be played by hand as well. When a scroll is run through the ghost-operated instrument, the movement of its keys produce the illusion that an invisible performer is playing the instrument.”
See also last night’s “The Game“—
“One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation….”
— as well as Vonnegut in this journal yesterday and the following from the August 14 post Iconic Notation—
A question from Ivan Illich
(founder of CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation,
in Cuernavaca, Mexico)—
“Who can be served by bridges to nowhere?“
For more about nowhere, see Utopia.
For more about Cuernavaca and ghosts, see a recurring motif in this journal.
“We shall now give a brief summary of the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game. It appears to have arisen simultaneously in Germany and in England. In both countries, moreover, it was originally a kind of exercise employed by those small groups of musicologists and musicians who worked and studied in the new seminaries of musical theory. If we compare the original state of the Game with its subsequent developments and its present form, it is much like comparing a musical score of the period before 1500, with its primitive notes and absence of bar lines, with an eighteenth-century score, let alone with one from the nineteenth with its confusing excess of symbols for dynamics, tempi, phrasing, and so on, which often made the printing of such scores a complex technical problem.
The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. And as we have said, it was played both in England and Germany before it was ‘invented’ here in the Musical Academy of Cologne, and was given the name it bears to this day, after so many generations, although it has long ceased to have anything to do with glass beads.
The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, a rather eccentric but clever, sociable, and humane musicologist, used glass beads instead of letters, numerals, notes, or other graphic symbols. Perrot, who incidentally has also bequeathed to us a treatise on the Apogee and Decline of Counterpoint, found that the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach — although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.
Bastian Perrot in all probability was a member of the Journeyers to the East. He was partial to handicrafts and had himself built several pianos and clavichords in the ancient style. Legend has it that he was adept at playing the violin in the old way, forgotten since 1800, with a high-arched bow and hand-regulated tension of the bow hairs. Given these interests, it was perhaps only natural that he should have constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it; it was imitated and became fashionable in England too. For a time the game of musical exercises was played in this charmingly primitive manner. And as is so often the case, an enduring and significant institution received its name from a passing and incidental circumstance. For what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.“
“For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”
— “Albertus Secundus,” epigraph to The Glass Bead Game
From DownloadThat.com—
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010 —
"What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?
For James Carroll, an ex-priest and dissenting Catholic
in Boston (he is the author of Practicing Catholic ,
published in 2009), it would look like the Sunday dinners
of his childhood. These were big formal meals,
held at 2 p.m. every Sunday….
'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"
The Usual Suspects —
For some background, see Java Jive and Today's Theology.
See also the java jive in this journal on Sunday, July 18—
A Tale of Two Cities, Du Sucre , Sermon, and Darkness at Noon.
Lead news item tonight at the website of the American Mathematical Society—
AMS Research Journals Archive Is Digitized
"The American Mathematical Society has established a complete digital archive of its mathematical research journals. Over 34,000 articles are available from more than one hundred years of high-quality mathematical research in Journal of the AMS, Mathematics of Computation, Proceedings of the AMS, Transactions of the AMS, and Bulletin of the AMS. All back issues, starting with each journal's inaugural issue through 2005, are now freely available in electronic format. Researchers can browse the contents of each journal to find articles and authors in each volume and issue and search across the entire archive by journal or group of journals. View the abstract, references (with links to MathSciNet), bibliographic information, and Mathematics Subject Classifications for each article or view a PDF of the full article. The AMS makes the digitized archive of these important research journals freely available to all mathematicians through the generosity of an anonymous donor."
Intercultural Documentation
From this date four years ago—
Cleavage Term
“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term
between hip and square, seemed to be it."
|
Hilarious in his high city — Anne Carson's new translation of |
One possible answer—
"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard."
Continued from Friday the 13th—
Related material—
Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted from an earlier (1984) edition
A question from Ivan Illich
(founder of CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation,
in Cuernavaca, Mexico)—
"Who can be served by bridges to nowhere?"
For more about nowhere, see Utopia. See also http://outis.blogspot.com.
Now online— Lavery's "God, Death, and Pizza"
This suggests a look at Ivan Illich, at Mother Jerome, at a note from the date of death of the former, and at an image from the date of death of the latter.
Note from December 2, 2002— Pilate's Question
Image from June 27, 2006—
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