See the circle of keys.
Related material: The links in a Log24 search for Doctor Sax.
* For the title, see posts tagged Dante Time.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Let the Dead Bury the Dead
For a religion writer who reportedly died Sept. 22,
a tune from a sax player who reportedly died today.
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Quotes for Michaelmas
A search in this journal for material related to the previous post
on theta characteristics yields…
"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased
novel in progress by American author Dan Brown.
The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the
character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon,
of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and
The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia
"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."
— "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups,"
by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen,
May 5, 2008, preprint.
"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."
— Review of
Faust in Copenhagen
"The page numbers
are generally reliable."
For further backstory, click the above link "May 5, 2008,"
which now leads to all posts tagged on080505.
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Geometry for Michaelmas
See searches for "theta characteristics" in Google and in this journal.
A definition of particular interest for finite geometry —
The Grushevsky-Manni paper above was submitted to the arXiv
on 9 Dec. 2012. For some synchronistically related remarks
suitable for Michaelmas, see this journal on that date.
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Curvitas
Part I — Donjon
(Notices of the American Mathematical Society , October 2015)
Part II — Curvitas!
(Detail from yesterday afternoon)
Related material: Digital Member.
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Monday, September 28, 2015
Cracker Jack Prize
From a post of July 24, 2011 —
A review —
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”
A feeble attempt at a purely mathematical "decoding device"
from this journal earlier this month —
For some background, see a question by John Baez at Math Overflow
on Aug. 20, 2015.
The nonexistence of a 24-cycle in the large Mathieu group
might discourage anyone hoping for deep new insights from
the above figure.
See Marston Conder's "Symmetric Genus of the Mathieu Groups" —
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Intruders for Mira
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Hypercube Structure
Click to enlarge:
For the hypercube as a vector space over the two-element field GF(2),
see a search in this journal for Hypercube + Vector + Space .
For connections with the related symplectic geometry, see Symplectic
in this journal and Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986.
For the above 1976 hypercube (or tesseract ), see "Diamond Theory,"
by Steven H. Cullinane, Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1,
Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7.
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Sunday, September 27, 2015
She Said Carefully
A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:
|
From the 1959 Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning" — She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, “The person you killed or doomed is still in the room.” An aching impulse twisted me a little. “Maybe I should try to go back––” I began. “Try to go back and unite the selves . . .” “It’s too late now,” she repeated. “But I want to,” I persisted. “There’s something pulling at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Of course there is,” she said. “It’s the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.” |
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Box Office
This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012). That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.
See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .
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Strings
The dateline from a slide at a string-theory conference:
See also this journal on that date.
A related "string theory," for those who like to compare and contrast:
A paper on the late Michael Weinstein by Robert L. Oprisko —
"Strings: A Political Theory of Multi-Dimensional Reality."*
From the abstract:
"An 'unfaithful' interpretation of Michael Weinstein's oeuvre
illuminates a complex, interpenetrative system of realities
that reflects the lived experience of his vitalist ontology."
* Theoria & Praxis: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought ,
Vol 2, No 2 (2014): On the Concept of Globality.
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Saturday, September 26, 2015
Symbols, Local and Global
Local:
Global:
Photo by Brendan Smialowski today
Msgr. Mark Miles, the Pope's translator, at
Independence Hall in Philadelphia today.
What, if anything, the Church means by the symbol
he holds is not clear, but presumably its meaning,
if there is one, is more global than local.
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Posthumous Man
The above book, a tribute by admirers of the late Michael Weinstein
(not, as a campus obituary states, by Weinstein himself),
was reportedly published by Routledge on December 19, 2014.
This journal on that date had a post on an early Greek philosopher who
supposedly was killed because he discovered irrational numbers.
A later approach to academic life —
Emma Stone being directed by Woody Allen in the recent "Irrational Man":
Fans of Allen and Stone may also enjoy Magic in the Moonlight.
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Friday, September 25, 2015
A Great Moonshine
|
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Introduction to Yau
|
A note on the somewhat distant relation —
See also Kummer in this journal.
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“May I aid you, travelers?”
A file photo of Mark and Debby Constantino on Oct. 24, 2011.
The couple, who worked as paranormal investigators, were often
featured in the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures .
As the above screenshot shows, this post's title is from
"Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World" (1988).
Related material, quoted here on Oct. 24, 2011 —
"Deja vu all over again." — Yogi Berra
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Thursday, September 24, 2015
Sparks News
On an incident in Sparks, Nevada, on
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015:
"Reno and Sparks police then approached the apartment
just before 11 a.m. and knocked on the door in an effort
to check on Debra Constantino’s welfare, Sparks police
said. That’s when officers heard gunshots."
— Marcella Corona, Reno Gazette-Journal
(Tuesday 11 a.m. PDT in Sparks was Tuesday 2 p.m. EDT.)
"A file photo of Mark and Debby Constantino taken on
Oct. 24, 2011 near their home in northwest Reno.
The couple worked as paranormal investigators
specializing in EVP voice recordings and were often
featured in the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures ."
(Photo: Reno Gazette-Journal file)
Synchronicity check: Log24 on the date of the above photo.
"… a bee for the remembering of happiness" — Wallace Stevens
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Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Villanueva
The previous post honored Maurice, one of yesterday's
saints. A note on another —
See Log24 searches for Villanova and Villanueva.
The latter search leads to a link to some posts tagged 922,
from St. Thomas of Villanova's feast day, Sept. 22.
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Epismetology for Yogi
"In the Latin language, pompatus is an actual word
meaning 'done with pomp or splendor.'
It is the masculine perfect participle of the Latin
root word pompo ." — Wikipedia
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Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Saints of the Day
St. Thomas of Villanova, Sts. Maurice and Companions.
See CatholicCulture.org.
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Geometry for Jews
Remarks by an ignorant professor quoted here
yesterday suggest a Log24 search for "Lost in Translation."
That search yields instances of the following figure:
See also the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).
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Monday, September 21, 2015
Here and Now
From an essay by Mark Edmundson,
University Professor at the University of Virginia,
who was granted a Ph.D. by Yale in 1985 —
|
The American Scholar The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?
By Mark Edmundson “Aren’t you a Catholic?” People often ask me that question in a gotcha tone. It’s as though they’re saying: I see through you. You pretend to be an intellectual, a more or less secular guy who can maybe lay claim to some sophistication. You want to pass as someone (here’s the rub) who has grown up and is not a child anymore. But I see through all that, the questioner implies. I can tell that you live under the old dispensation. You’re a creature not of light and intellect, light and truth, but of guilt and fear. Light and truth, lux et veritas , was the motto of the university where I went to graduate school. It signifies the power of enlightened intellect to remake the world—or at least to transform and elevate the individual. Religions don’t generally have mottoes, and it is probably not a good idea when they do. But if the Roman Catholic Church had a motto, it surely would not be light and truth. I spent 12 years, give or take, in the faith, the most influential years of my life. And I was surely a Catholic. But what if anything remains of that immersion? What value does it have here and now? |
An example of vincible ignorance:
Edmundson's remarks above, in light of …
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Sunday, September 20, 2015
Misgiving
"Charles Kenneth Williams was born on Nov. 4, 1936,
in Newark. His father, Paul, sold office machines,
and, as he prospered, moved with his wife, the former
Dossie Kasdin, and his two sons to suburban South Orange.
Mr. Williams’s conflicted relationship with his parents
takes up much of his 2000 memoir, Misgivings: My Mother,
My Father, Myself . " — NY Times obituary this evening
Near the Haunted Castle
A poem by C. K. Williams
"This is a story. You don't have to think about it,
it's make-believe. / It's like a lie, maybe not quite a lie
but I don't want you to worry about it. . . . ."
For a more interesting cinematic haunting, see the new film "Pay the Ghost."
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Orange Mass
"Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously."
In memory of Jackie Collins, a post on Sinatra's favorite color.
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In Memoriam
From related literary remarks linked to here yesterday —
"Sloane’s writing is drum-tight, but his approach
is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins
turning up the heat. He understood that before
a pot can boil, it must simmer." — Stephen King
From this journal last July —
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Saturday, September 19, 2015
Language Game
"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams." — Hamlet
The New York Review of Books , in a review
of two books on video games today, quotes an author
who says that the Vikings believed the sky to be
“the blue skull of a giant.”
See as well posts tagged The Nutshell.
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A Certain Term
"I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night…."
— Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
Related imagery —
Detail:
Closer detail:
Exegesis:
A Certain Term: Not English, Not Chinese —
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Philosophy and Art
The current issue (dated Oct. 8, 2015) of
The New York Review of Books has two
(at least) items related to philosophy —
-
"Was Plato ‘Churlish’?", a letter on Joyce Carol Oates's
recent NYRB essay, and a response by Oates
-
"What Philosophers Really Know," a review by
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein of a new book
by Colin McGinn, Philosophy of Language:
The Classics Explained
See also Backstory, a Log24 post of Nov. 22, 2010:
"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
that they just can’t seem to do without.'
He was a symbolic logician.
That was his career…."
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