In memory of Robert Morris, former chief scientist
of the National Security Agency's
National Computer Security Center—
Here is a link to a post from last Sunday, the day Morris died.
From a novel mentioned in that post—
Thursday, June 30, 2011
A Link for Sunrise
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Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Rome After Dark
For more about Rome, see two pages from Stevens suggested
by the New York Lottery numbers from today, St. Peter's Day.
The pages mention "Rome after dark" and a "disused ambit
of the soul." Those who prefer a "more severe, more
harassing master" may consult the date 8/6/79 suggested by
the New York Lottery this afternoon and, from that date,
Freeman Dyson's memoir in The New Yorker .
This evening's four-digit number, 0006, may, if one likes,
be regarded as an "artist's signature" of sorts.
The New Yorker on Dyson—
"He recalls that at age 8 he read 'The Magic City,'
by Edith Nesbit. It is the story of a crazy universe.
He now sees that this universe bears a strong
resemblance to the one we live in."
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The Shattered Mind
For St. Peter's Day
"For Stevens, the poem 'makes meanings of the rock.'
In the mind, 'its barrenness becomes a thousand things/
And so exists no more.' In fact, in a peculiar irony
that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion
of the imagination's function could develop,
the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered
into such diamond-faceted brilliance
that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought…."
—A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954)
in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes,
by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120
Related material on transforming shapes:
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011
ART WARS continued
See the signature link in last night's post for a representation of Madison Avenue.
For a representation by Madison Avenue, see today's New York Times—
"As a movement Pop Art came and went in a flash, but it was the kind of flash that left everything changed. The art public was now a different public— larger, to be sure, but less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum. Moreover, everything connected with the life of art— everything, anyway, that might have been expected to offer some resistance to this wholesale vulgarization and demoralization— was now cheapened and corrupted. The museums began their rapid descent into show biz and the retail trade. Their exhibitions were now mounted like Broadway shows, complete with set designers and lighting consultants, and their directors pressed into service as hucksters, promoting their wares in radio and television spots and selling their facilities for cocktail parties and other entertainments, while their so-called education programs likewise degenerated into sundry forms of entertainment and promotion. The critics were co-opted, the art magazines commercialized, and the academy, which had once taken a certain pride in remaining aloof from the blandishments of the cultural marketplace, now proved eager to join the crowd— for there was no longer any standard in the name of which a sellout could be rejected. When the boundary separating art and fashion was breached, so was the dividing line between high art and popular culture, and upon all those institutions and professions which had been painstakingly created to preserve high art from the corruptions of popular culture. The effect was devastating. Some surrendered their standards with greater alacrity than others, but the drift was unmistakable and all in the same direction— and the momentum has only accelerated with the passage of time."
— Hilton Kramer, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005 , publ. by Ivan R. Dee on Oct. 26, 2006, pp. 146-147
Related material— Rubik in this journal, Exorcist in this journal, and For the Class of '11.
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Signature*
"He gazed out of the window hoping that somehow everything could make sense to him."
— "Passing in Silence," by Oliver Humpage
"You gotta be true to your code." —Sinatra
Exercise: Trace a path from the June 27 NY Lottery numbers
to the above two quotations. Hint: See Cuernavaca and
Pilgrim's Progress in TIME Magazine, May 3, 1948.
For some further background, click on the CBS quote above.
I still prefer, as I did in 1948, less up-to-the-minute developments.
* The title refers to the phrase "the artist's signature."
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Monday, June 27, 2011
Galois Cube Revisited
The 3×3×3 Galois Cube
This cube, unlike Rubik's, is a
purely mathematical structure.
Its properties may be compared
with those of the order-2 Galois
cube (of eight subcubes, or
elements ) and the order-4 Galois
cube (of 64 elements). The
order-3 cube (of 27 elements)
lacks, because it is based on
an odd prime, the remarkable
symmetry properties of its smaller
and larger cube neighbors.
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Sunday, June 26, 2011
Gloomy Sunday
This evening's NY Lottery numbers were 531 and 8372.
Hermeneutics—
From a Google search for "531 Log24"—
| Log24 on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008
531 , Revelation without belief 116. Evening (Belief), Belief without… The date, 5/24, of the entries linked to in Thursday's noon Log24 entry… Pynchon on Quaternions – Log24 8. on Page 531 : "… to imps of ingenious discomfort. "Is this a stag affair, or are there likely to be one or two lady Quaternion- ists?…" |
The "531" linked to in the Sept. 21, 2008, post above is a mini-drama ending at midnight on 5/31, 2008— the conclusion of Mental Health Month.
And the above 4-digit evening number suggests a search for births on 8/3/72 that yields—
Erika Marozsán, Hungarian actress, 38.
Marozsán starred in "Gloomy Sunday—A Song of Love and Death" (A German/Hungarian film from 1999).
Wikipedia informs us that this "is inaccurately claimed to be the world's longest running film."
Whether Marozsán is a Quaternionist, I do not know.
For love, death, and quaternions, see the post Metaphor from Feb. 22 linked to in this afternoon's Sunday Dinner.
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Sunday Dinner
From "Sunday Dinner" in this journal—
"'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.'"
—Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
Some table topics—
Today's midday New York Lottery numbers were 027 and 7002.
The former suggests a Galois cube, the latter a course syllabus—
CSC 7002
Graduate Computer Security (Spring 2011)
University of Colorado at Denver
Department of Computer Science
An item from that syllabus:
| Six | 22 February 2011 | DES | History of DES; Encryption process; Decryption; Expander function; S-boxes and their output; Key; the function f that takes the modified key and part of the text as input; mulitple Rounds of DES; Present-day lack of Security in DES, which led to the new Encryption Standard, namely AES. Warmup for AES: the mathematics of Fields: Galois Fields, particularly the one of order 256 and its relation to the irreducible polynomial x^8 + x^4 + x^3 + x + 1 with coefficients from the field Z_2. |
Related material: A novel, PopCo , was required reading for the course.
Discuss a different novel by the same author—
Discuss the author herself, Scarlett Thomas.
Background for the discussion—
Derrida in this journal versus Charles Williams in this journal.
Related topics from the above syllabus date—
Metaphor and Gestell and Quadrat.
Some context— Midsummer Eve's Dream.
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Paradigms Lost
Continued from March 10, 2011 — A post that says
"If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift
from Euclidean geometry, both… the Kuhn cover
and the nine-point affine plane may be viewed…
as illustrating the shift."
Yesterday's posts The Fano Entity and Theology for Antichristmas,
together with this morning's New York Times obituaries (below)—
—suggest a Sunday School review from last year's
Devil's Night (October 30-31, 2010)—
|
Sunday, October 31, 2010 ART WARS – m759 @ 2:00 AM … There is a Cave – Paradise Lost , by John Milton
|
See also Ash Wednesday Surprise and Geometry for Jews.
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Saturday, June 25, 2011
Theology for Antichristmas
“… the formula ‘Three Hypostases in one Ousia ‘
came to be everywhere accepted as an epitome
of the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
This consensus, however, was not achieved
without some confusion….” —Wikipedia
Ousia
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The Fano Entity
The New York Times at 9 PM ET June 23, 2011—
ROBERT FANO: I’m trying to think briefly how to put it.
GINO FANO: "On the Fundamental Postulates"—
"E la prova di questo si ha precisamente nel fatto che si è potuto costruire (o, dirò meglio immaginare) un ente per cui sono verificati tutti i postulati precedenti…."
"The proof of this is precisely the fact that you could build (or, to say it better, imagine) an entity by which are verified all previous assumptions…."
Also from the Times article quoted above…
"… like working on a cathedral. We laid our bricks and knew that others might later replace them with better bricks. We believed in the cause even if we didn’t completely understand the implications.”
— Tom Van Vleck
Some art that is related, if only by a shared metaphor, to Van Vleck's cathedral—
The art is also related to the mathematics of Gino Fano.
For an explanation of this relationship (implicit in the above note from 1984),
see "The Fano plane revisualized—or: the eIghtfold cube."
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Friday, June 24, 2011
Just One More Thing…
Moonshine and Lion
are left to bury the dead.
DEMETRIUS
Ay, and Wall too.
BOTTOM
[Starting up] No assure you;
the wall is down
that parted their fathers.
Click image for details.
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The Cube
Click the above image for some background.
Related material:
Skateboard legend Andy Kessler,
this morning's The Gleaming,
and But Sometimes I Hit London.
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For Stephen King Fans
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Midsummer Night Comedy
This evening's New York Lottery number was 776.
From this journal's post number 776—
ART WARS:
Lindsay Lohan was back in court today.
"The judge… ordered Lindsay may have no more than one friend
over at a time for the remainder of her house arrest" —Star Magazine
"Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call"
— Eustace Tilley
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Thursday, June 23, 2011
Script Magic…
In a Jewish Cathedral
From The New York Times Magazine of Sunday, April 6, 1986—
"David Rayfiel's Script Magic" by Alex Ward
WHEN THE CALL came last year to revise ''The Morning After,'' Rayfiel was working on a screenplay about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire for Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda. He has now resumed work— as the principal writer, not the reviser— on that script. But chances are good that he will have further interruptions. Pollack will probably call and say, as he usually does, ''David, I need access to your brain.'' And Rayfiel will probably say, as he usually does, ''That's O.K., I'm not using it.'' He will revise another script, and be reluctant about taking credit for it.
''I guess it's like the medieval stonecutters who worked on the cathedrals,'' he says. ''There's all that elaborate work. The saints were carved by one guy, the cherubs by someone else. They didn't care about getting credit, they knew what they'd done. I'm like that. I'm the guy who does the cherubs.''
Related material:
Proginoskes in this journal and Abracadabra from the midnight of June 18-19.
See also Rayfiel's obituary in today"s Times .
For some quite different work, also from April 1986, see—
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011
ART WARS continued
This evening's New York Times obituaries—
A work of art suggested by the first and third items above—
I prefer a work of art that is structurally similar—
and is related to a picture, Portrait of O, from October 1, 1983—
For a recent unexpected Web appearance of Portrait of O,
aee Abracadabra from the midnight of June 18-19.
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A Flag for Sunrise
Thomas N. Armstrong III, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, died at 78 on Monday in Manhattan.
William Grimes in this morning's New York Times—
"… Mr. Armstrong set about strengthening the museum’s permanent collection, buying Frank Stella’s 1959 black painting “Die Fahne Hoch!” for $75,000 in 1977…."
See also "Fahne Hoch" in this journal and the following from the date of Armstrong's death—
"Sunrise — Hast thou a Flag for me?" — Emily Dickinson
Related material: Piracy Project and, from Flag Day,
"Dawn's Early Light" and "Expressionistic Depth."
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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Longest Day Continues
The AND Publishing weblog page referred to in
a Sunday post has been changed to reflect the
source— my finite-geometry website— of pages
copied and altered by London artist Steve Richards
that are a large part of his contribution to the
AND Publishing Piracy Project.
The new version is as follows—
Note, however, that the cover page is a figure titled
by Richards "metalibrarianship" that has nothing
whatever to do with the concepts in the pages he copied
from my site, finitegeometry.org/sc.
Other pages within Richards's contribution to the
Piracy Project are similarly completely unrelated to
the content of my own site, which deals with geometry.
The image on the cover page also appears, it turns out,
on a website called intertwining.org.
At that site, it occurs in the following resume item:
The links in the resume item do not work,
but some background is available at a page titled
"Circularity, Practicality and Philosophy of Librarianship, or
The Making of 'The Nitecki Trilogy'" by Joanne Twining.
Other images in Richards's contribution to the Piracy Project also occur
in Twining's webpage "Dimensional Advances for Information Architecture."
I never heard of Twining or Nitecki before I encountered Richards's
Piracy Project contribution, and I do not wish to be associated
again in any way with Twining, with Nitecki, or with Richards.
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Truth, Beauty, Bullshit
This post is for the Stonehenge solstice crowd, who might,
like the London artist Steve Richards, confuse bullshit
with scholarship and inspire the same confusion
in others.
The image, apparently an epigraph put there
by the author, is from the Forgotten Books edition
of Cassirer's Substance and Function:
And Einstein's Theory of Relativity .
This is a scanned copy of the 1923 original.
The egg-figure above, however, is from the publisher's
prefatory notes and not from the original.
A check of other Forgotten Books publications
shows that the motto and the Bacon
attribution are those of Forgotten Books and
not of the authors they reprint — in particular,
not of Ernst Cassirer, who would probably
be dismayed to have this nonsense associated
with his work.
Why nonsense? The attribution to Francis Bacon is
false. The lines are from "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
by William Shakespeare.
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Vorspiel
This post was suggested by a book advertised
above A. Whitney Ellsworth's obituary in tonight's
online New York Times .
See also the following illustrations—
From this journal on June 1, 2008:
From artist Steve Richards on January 14, 2010:
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Requiem for a Publisher
In memory of A. Whitney Ellsworth, first publisher of
The New York Review of Books , who died at 75
on Saturday—
The Review has sometimes been cited in this journal.
See also posts from the date of Ellsworth's death—
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Piracy Project
Recent piracy of my work as part of a London art project suggests the following.
From http://www.trussel.com/rls/rlsgb1.htm
The 2011 Long John Silver Award for academic piracy
goes to ….
Hermann Weyl, for the remark on objectivity and invariance
in his classic work Symmetry that skillfully pirated
the much earlier work of philosopher Ernst Cassirer.
And the 2011 Parrot Award for adept academic idea-lifting
goes to …
Richard Evan Schwartz of Brown University, for his
use, without citation, of Cullinane’s work illustrating
Weyl’s “relativity problem” in a finite-geometry context.
For further details, click on the above names.
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Monday, June 20, 2011
The Search for Invariants
The title of a recent contribution to a London art-related "Piracy Project" begins with the phrase "The Search for Invariants."
A search for that phrase elsewhere yields a notable 1944* paper by Ernst Cassirer, "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception."
Page 20: "It is a process of objectification, the characteristic nature
and tendency of which finds expression in the formation of invariants."
Cassirer's concepts seem related to Weyl's famous remark that
“Objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms.”
—Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 1952, page 132)
See also this journal on June 23, 2010— "Group Theory and Philosophy"— as well as some Math Forum remarks on Cassirer and Weyl.
Update of 6 to 7:50 PM June 20, 2011—
Weyl's 1952 remark seems to echo remarks in 1910 and 1921 by Cassirer.
See Cassirer in 1910 and 1921 on Objectivity.
Another source on Cassirer, invariance, and objectivity—
The conclusion of Maja Lovrenov's
"The Role of Invariance in Cassirer’s Interpretation of the Theory of Relativity"—
"… physical theories prove to be theories of invariants
with regard to certain groups of transformations and
it is exactly the invariance that secures the objectivity
of a physical theory."
— SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 42 (2/2006), pp. 233–241
A search in Weyl's Symmetry for any reference to Ernst Cassirer yields no results.
* Published in French in 1938.
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Sunday, June 19, 2011
The London Piracy Project
My work has been pirated by an artist in London.
An organization there, AND Publishing, sponsors what it calls
"The Piracy Project." The artist's piracy was a contribution
to the project.
The above material now reflects the following update:
|
UPDATE of June 21, 2011, 10:00 PM ET: The organization's weblog (a post for 19th June) In this weblog, changes have been made to correct my "AND Publishing is not sponsored by the art school. |
As this post originally stated…
The web pages from the site finitegeometry.org/sc that
the artist, Steve Richards, copied as part of his contribution to
the AND Publishing Piracy Project have had the author's name,
Steven H. Cullinane, and the date of composition systematically removed.
See a sample (jpg, 2.1 MB).
Here is some background on Richards.
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Metalibrarianship
This screenshot was suggested by the word "metalibrarianship" in a Bloomsday 2011 post by artist Steve Richards.
Note the words in the search field.
The phrase "Dublin Core metadata" refers to a city in Ohio, not in Ireland.
Related material— The highlighted phrase below is in the epigraph to Borges's "The Library of Babel"—
"I would, for these causes, wish him that is melancholy, to use both humane and divine authors, voluntarily to impose some taske upon himself, to divert his melancholy thoughts; to study the art of memory, Cosmus Rosselius, Pet. Ravennas, Scenkelius Detectus, or practise brachygraphy, &c. that will aske a great deal of attention: or let him demonstrate a proposition in Euclide in his five last books, extract a square root, or studie Algebra: than which, as gClavius holds, in all humane disciplines nothing can be more excellent and pleasant, so abstruse and recondite, so bewitching, so miraculous, so ravishing, so easie withal and full of delight, omnem humanum captum superare videtur . By this means you may define ex ungue leonem , as the diverbe is, by his thumb alone the bigness of Hercules, or the true dimensions of the great hColossus, Solomons temple, and Domitians amphitheater, out of a little part. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…."
g Ad. 2. definit.2. elem. In disciplinis humanis nihil praestantius reperitur: quippe miracula quaedam numerorum eruit tam abstrusa et recondita, tanta nihilo minus facilitate et voluptate, ut, &c.
h Which contained 1080000 weight of brass.
— The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 4
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Abracadabra (continued)
Yesterday's post Ad Meld featured Harry Potter (succeeding in business),
a 4×6 array from a video of the song "Abracadabra," and a link to a post
with some background on the 4×6 Miracle Octad Generator of R.T. Curtis.
A search tonight for related material on the Web yielded…
Weblog post by Steve Richards titled "The Search for Invariants:
The Diamond Theory of Truth, the Miracle Octad Generator
and Metalibrarianship." The artwork is by Steven H. Cullinane.
Richards has omitted Cullinane's name and retitled the artwork.
The author of the post is an artist who seems to be interested in the occult.
His post continues with photos of pages, some from my own work (as above), some not.
My own work does not deal with the occult, but some enthusiasts of "sacred geometry" may imagine otherwise.
The artist's post concludes with the following (note also the beginning of the preceding post)—
"The Struggle of the Magicians" is a 1914 ballet by Gurdjieff. Perhaps it would interest Harry.
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