Friday, January 31, 2020
Notes for a Blue Guitar
Gravatar at the weblog of Peter J. Cameron —
Same Gravatar in blue —
Synchronology check —
Click Lukasiewicz for further remarks.
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Thursday, January 30, 2020
Poster Boy
Cover Design: Will Staehle / Unusual Co.
This post is in memory of "Wes Wilson, Psychedelic Poster Pioneer,"
who died at 82 on January 24, according to the NY Times today.
Related material — This journal on January 24.
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Wednesday, January 29, 2020
The 2013 Simplicity Conference…
… is reviewed by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in
the February 2020 issue (online Jan. 27) of the AMS Notices :
See as well Simplicity Conference in this journal.
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The Newman Prize
From "Point," a Log24 post on St. Andrew's Day 2012 —
"….mirando il punto 
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti"
— Dante, Paradiso , XVII, 17-18
For instance…
Related material —
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Jewel-Box* Song
|
From University Diaries by Margaret Soltan Farewell mein Lieber herr Goodbye mein Lieber herr It was a fine affair but now it's over And though we made you Chair You're not allowed to share We're better off without you mein herr Your talent was a Thousand Talents wide mein herr Your chemistry with China mesmerized mein herr It's really no surprise to find you lied mein herr But that's why FBI Watched you spy... |
* See "Jewel Box" in this journal.
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On the Road
From Mosaic Logic, a post of September 3, 2017 —
“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical. Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”
—Many Dimensions (1931), by Charles Williams
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Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Once Upon a Time in Laurel Canyon
In memory of a screenwriter who reportedly died today —
“Ms. Frank… lived in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills….”
— The New York Times today
“Here, under the shadow of the great tree, I have found peace.”
— Mike Nichols in 1965
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The Varieties of Transformative Experience
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Very Stable Kool-Aid
Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM post …
Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to …
|
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dear Dr. Szasz: Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun. The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry. I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century. It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty. . . . . |
The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.
Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."
— Tim Doody in The Morning News web 'zine on July 26, 2012**
Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's
"jewel box" post …
A 4-dimensional hypercube H (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces. In its incarnation as a Galois tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of 2,304 affine transformations.
Similar remarks apply to the I Ching In its incarnation as
a Galois hexaract , for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.
* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.
** See also this journal on that date — July 26, 2012.
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Monday, January 27, 2020
Jewel Box
The phrase "jewel box" in a New York Times obituary online this afternoon
suggests a review. See "And He Built a Crooked House" and Galois Tesseract.
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A Line for Rose the Hat
"Hum a few bars, Steely Dan."
Related material — "For 6 Prescott Street" and "SAT."
_________________________________________________________________
Links' thumbnail previews —
"SAT"
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Sunday, January 26, 2020
Looking Glass Meets Rabbit Hole
The New York Times promoting paranoia on Jan. 24, 2020 —
"The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call
'surveillance capitalism.' Its success depends upon one-way-mirror
operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of
misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. . . ."
"It’s not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling
White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland
where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion."
|
Block those metaphors. |
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Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City
Alan Portner on Jan. 24, reviewing a current Kansas City production
of David Auburn's 2000 play "Proof" —
"PROOF is a term from the world of
high level theoretical mathematics.
It is a mathematical expression that
describes a new conceptual idea."
My reaction to this production and to the review —
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Harmonic-Analysis Building Blocks
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Duke Blocks
The Wall Street Journal Jan. 24 on a Duke University professor —
"Dr. Daubechies is best known for her work on mathematical structures
called wavelets; her discoveries have been so influential, in fact, that
these are referred to in the field as Daubechies wavelets. She describes
them as 'mathematical building blocks' that can be used to extract the
essential elements of images or signals without losing their quality—
in effect, a new universal language for scientists and researchers."
See also this journal on January 20-21, and …
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Saturday, January 25, 2020
Friday, January 24, 2020
Oettinger Quote
Quote Investigator on May 4, 2010* —
"QI has traced the core of the quotation
to the work of an early researcher in
artificial intelligence, Anthony Oettinger,
who was trying to get a computer to
manipulate the English language."
See as well Oettinger in 1963.
"And that was the state of the art."
— Adapted from Stephen Sondheim
* Cf. this journal on that date.
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Smart Jewish Girl*…
… Suggests the word dreamlogic. And so …
"You are getting sleepy, very sleepy …"
"In this state of free-association, each new thought
resembles or overlaps or somehow connects-to
the previous thought. As our alertness continues to fall —
as we continue to grow more tired — we lose contact with
external reality.
'The sweetness/ of the gentle world you had made for him
dissolving beneath/ his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of
sleep — .' (Rilke, transl. Stephen Mitchell.) Eventually we
sleep and dream."
— Edge.org, "Dream-logic, the Internet and Artificial Thought,"
by David Gelernter [7.7.10]
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Exploring Fiction
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Thursday, January 23, 2020
Exploring Schoolgirl Space…
"Old men ought to be explorers." — T. S. Eliot.
Rose the Hat in her younger days.
See as well Barsotti in this journal.
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The Demarcation of Nothing
"… nothing could be demarcated as 'hors d'oeuvre'…"
— Geoffrey Hartman in his Haskins Lecture for 2000
(quoted here on Columbus Day, 2004).
See also May Day 2016 and Gap Dance.
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Adversarial
And now for something completely different . . .
"With Mr. Lehrer reporting from Washington and Mr. MacNeil
from New York, the program sought to represent all sides of
a controversy by eliciting comments from rivals for public
attention. But the anchors deliberately drew no sweeping
conclusions of their own about disputed matters, allowing
viewers to decide for themselves what to believe.
The approach had its drawbacks. An extended presentation
of authoritative voices offering conflicting viewpoints left
some viewers dissatisfied, if not confused. Many found the
technique elitist and dull, and even some critics called it
boring — or, worse, a willful refusal by Mr. Lehrer and Mr.
MacNeil to make hard judgments about adversarial issues
affecting the public interest."
See also the previous two posts.
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Columbus Day 2004
A followup to the previous post:
Related material — A web page on chess cached for use in a
Log24 post on the date of the above post, Columbus Day, 2004.
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Obit et Orbit Continues.
In memoriam —
"Doug co-founded the Secure Machine Learning research group
in 2004, focused on defining how adversaries can influence and
manipulate machine learning algorithms and how to make them
robust against such attacks, culminating in a recently published
book, Adversarial Machine Learning , with a colleague and two
former students."
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Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Gap Dance
From Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar":
IX
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made . . . .
"Arrowy, still strings" from the diamond theorem
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