Brooke Shields at the 2024 Tony awards —
"As the newly elected president of Actors Equity Association,
I am so proud to be here to celebrate the entire theatrical community,"
the actress, 59, said." — People online, June 16, 2024 11:13 PM EDT
By Adam Gopnik
February 27, 2012
The New Yorker
Gopnik says that a female figure from the Book of Revelation,
"The Big Reveal,"
"suggests the women evangelists who were central
to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema
to a pious Jew like John. She is the original
shiksa goddess."
Related imagery —
This journal on sacred texts yesterday (International Dog Day) —
From Peter Woit's weblog today —
The New Yorker and the Publicity Stunt
Posted on December 12, 2022 by woit
The wormhole publicity stunt story just keeps going.
Today an article about the Google Santa Barbara lab
and quantum computer used in the publicity stunt
appeared in the New Yorker.
From The New Yorker itself —
See also a very different take from another New Yorker author —
(Cf. Log24, Plan 9 at Yale, Nov. 13, 2017).
Instagram screenshot with added note.
Easy E for an Accountant:
Not So Easy: E-Operators
"A great many other properties of E-operators
have been found, which I have not space
to examine in detail."
— Sir Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science ,
Cambridge University Press, 1935, page 271.
(This book also presents Eddington's unfortunate
speculations on the fine-structure constant.)
Update of 4:04 AM ET:
Here is the not-so-tiny-dancer in
the above Instagram screenshot.
(A sequel to D8ing the Joystick)
Adam Gopnik today in The New Yorker —
“In remote therapy sessions, with the loss of familiarly structured
therapeutic spaces, a kind of staring contest takes place.”
This journal on the above YouTube date — May 28, 2011 —
“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”
Canto IV of “It Must Change”
Update of 5:45 PM ET —
The above May 28, 2011, Stevens quotation is from a post
titled “Savage Detectives.” A related image starring Sean Young —
“Far from making us revise our fundamentals and reform our thoughts,
major historical crises almost invariably reinforce our previous beliefs,
and make us entrench deeper into our dogma. ”
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , May 1, 2020
See also Geometric Theology.
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker this morning —
" … mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction,
which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and,
for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes,
it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to
humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite
that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is,
for the first time, a startup.
… one of the human figures, we’re told, has
'a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base
of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out
to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles
the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. …' "
Related art —
Logo by Saul Bass.
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker today, quoting
the late Clive James's description of …
" … an adaptation of 'War and Peace': 'Dead ground is
the territory you can’t judge the extent of until you approach it:
seen from a distance, it is unseen. Almost uniquely amongst
imagined countries, Tolstoy’s psychological landscape is
without dead ground— the entire vista of human experience is
lit up with an equal, shadowless intensity, so that separateness
and clarity continue even to the horizon.' "
Easy E
Not So Easy: E-Operators
"A great many other properties of E-operators
have been found, which I have not space
to examine in detail."
— Sir Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science ,
Cambridge University Press, 1935, page 271.
(This book also presents Eddington's unfortunate
speculations on the fine-structure constant.)
In the spirit of the Linz website in the previous post,
the title refers to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik:
|
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
See also a search in this journal for Polarity + Correlation.
Part I: Black Magician
"Schools of criticism create their own canons, elevating certain texts,
discarding others. Yet some works – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
is one of them – lend themselves readily to all critical approaches."
— Joan Givner, review of
A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century
by Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, eds.
The Asals-Tiessen book (U. of Toronto Press, 2000) was cited today
by Margaret Soltan (in the link below) as the source of this quotation —
"When one thinks of the general sort of snacky
under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes
rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry
his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions,
his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s
consciousness wholly with a black magician’s."
A possible source, Perle Epstein, for the view of Lowry as black magician —
Part II: Mythos and Logos
Part I above suggests a review of Adam Gopnik as black magician
(a figure from Mythos ) —
|
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
— and of an opposing figure from Logos ,
Paul B. Yale, in the references below:
The Linotype Fixer
( Sequel to "The Typewriter Fixer" * )
From The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017 —
* "The Typewriter Fixer" refers to a typewriter repair shop
on New York's Upper West Side —
The Hollywood Reporter 's promotional piece above is from
Tuesday, November 7, 2017. For another meditation suited to
the Upper West Side, see this journal on that date —
|
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
The previous post suggests a review of remarks by Adam Gopnik
in The New Yorker on February 27, 2017 on "The Matrix" hypothesis—
"The thesis that we are in a simulation is, as people who
track such things know—my own college-age son has
explained it to me—far from a joke, or a mere conceit.
The argument, actually debated at length at the
American Museum of Natural History just last year, is that
the odds are overwhelming that ours is a simulated universe.
The argument is elegant."
No, it is not.
See as well my own remarks on the date of the above museum debate —
Tuesday, April 5, 2016.
From those remarks, a Halloween 2014 image that provides a
companion-piece to the "Easy E" of today's previous post —
German mathematician Wolf Barth reportedly died
on December 30, 2016.
Flashback to this journal on that date * —
|
From "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic" —
"The following June, 1945, von Neumann penned Image from von Neumann's report —
Version converted to text —
|
* And, of course, to the later post Easy E for Cullinan (Feb. 28, 2017).
Cullinan, second from left below, is the now-famous Oscars accountant.
Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer
"So, after summer, in the autumn air,
Comes the cold volume* of forgotten ghosts,
But soothingly, with pleasant instruments,
So that this cold, a children's tale of ice,
Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized."
— Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
* Update of 10:20 the same evening:
|
An alternative to The Snow Queen On The King in the Window , by Adam Gopnik —
"The book is dedicated to Adam Gopnik's son,
'A fantasy that is as ambitious in theme,
The unlikely eponymous hero is Oliver Parker,
His enemy is the dreaded Master of Mirrors,
Oliver's mission is to defeat the Master of Mirrors — Description at https://biblio.co.nz/. . . . |
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker ad
.
"And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of
a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix,
and something has gone wrong with the controllers. . . .
The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be
running our lives are having some kind of breakdown.
There’s a glitch, and we are in it.
Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else
begins to fall in order."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , Feb. 27, 2017
More recently …
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker today reacts to the startling
outcomes of three recent contests: the presidential election,
the Super Bowl, and the Oscar for Best Picture —
"The implicit dread logic is plain."
Related material —
Transformers in this journal and …
“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
See also …
The above figure is from Ian Stewart's 1996 revision of a 1941 classic,
What Is Mathematics? , by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins.
One wonders how the confused slave boy of Plato's Meno would react
to Stewart's remark that
"The number of copies required to double an
object's size depends on its dimension."
See also Gopnik in this journal.
"When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997,
it was just a year before the universal search engine
Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger,
that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library
and spends hours and hours working her way through
the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to
make a love potion."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Valentine's Day, 2011
More recently, Gopnik writes that …
"Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this
account, almost the way 'Rock Around the Clock'
displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Andrew's Day, 2015
This journal on Valentine's Day, 2011 —
"One heart will wear a valentine." — Sinatra
"… she has written a love letter to Plato, whom
she regards as having given us philosophy.
He is, in her view, as relevant today as he ever
was — which is to say, very."
— New York Times review of a book by
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, April 18, 2014
Consider the trichotomy of the title as applied to the paragraph
by Adam Gopnik in the previous post (The Raw, the Cooked,
and the Spoiled).
The following quotation seems to place Gopnik's words
among the half -baked.
"L'axe qui relie le cru et le cuit est caractéristique du passage
à la culture; celui qui relie le cru et le pourri, du retour à la nature,
puisque la cuisson accomplit la transformation culturelle du cru
comme la putréfaction en achève la transformation naturelle."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paroles données, p.54, Plon, 1984,
as quoted in a weblog.
See also Lévi-Strauss's bizarre triangle culinaire (French Wikipedia) —
The source of this structuralist nonsense —
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. “Le triangle culinaire.”
L’Arc no. 26: 19-29.
On the late French philosopher André Glucksmann,
a paragraph from The New Yorker —
The style could be overwhelming at times, and was
often a more effective instrument of intellectual
pleasure than political persuasion. But, in return,
it produced a thousand small epiphanies—
for instance, his lovely mordant point, made at length
in one of his books, that between the “raw” and the
“cooked”—the simple binary beloved of structuralism—
there was always the “pourri,” the rotting, the rotten.
Our refusal to take in the rotting as a category of its own
was, he suggested, with a delighted literary grimace,
a kind of moral blindness, part of a fake dialectic that
blinded us to the muddled, rotting truth of the world.
The real world was not composed of oscillating
dialectical forces; it was composed of actual suffering
people crushed between those forces. — Adam Gopnik
See also …
Click the above image for some backstory.
The Cube Model and Peano Arithmetic
The eightfold cube model of the Fano plane may or may not have influenced a new paper (with the date Feb. 10, 2011, in its URL) on an attempted consistency proof of Peano arithmetic—
The Consistency of Arithmetic, by Storrs McCall
"Is Peano arithmetic (PA) consistent? This paper contains a proof that it is. …
Axiomatic proofs we may categorize as 'syntactic', meaning that they concern only symbols and the derivation of one string of symbols from another, according to set rules. 'Semantic' proofs, on the other hand, differ from syntactic proofs in being based not only on symbols but on a non-symbolic, non-linguistic component, a domain of objects. If the sole paradigm of 'proof ' in mathematics is 'axiomatic proof ', in which to prove a formula means to deduce it from axioms using specified rules of inference, then Gödel indeed appears to have had the last word on the question of PA-consistency. But in addition to axiomatic proofs there is another kind of proof. In this paper I give a proof of PA's consistency based on a formal semantics for PA. To my knowledge, no semantic consistency proof of Peano arithmetic has yet been constructed.
The difference between 'semantic' and 'syntactic' theories is described by van Fraassen in his book The Scientific Image :
"The syntactic picture of a theory identifies it with a body of theorems, stated in one particular language chosen for the expression of that theory. This should be contrasted with the alternative of presenting a theory in the first instance by identifying a class of structures as its models. In this second, semantic, approach the language used to express the theory is neither basic nor unique; the same class of structures could well be described in radically different ways, each with its own limitations. The models occupy centre stage." (1980, p. 44)
Van Fraassen gives the example on p. 42 of a consistency proof in formal geometry that is based on a non-linguistic model. Suppose we wish to prove the consistency of the following geometric axioms:
A1. For any two lines, there is at most one point that lies on both.
A2. For any two points, there is exactly one line that lies on both.
A3. On every line there lie at least two points.
The following diagram shows the axioms to be consistent:
The consistency proof is not a 'syntactic' one, in which the consistency of A1-A3 is derived as a theorem of a deductive system, but is based on a non-linguistic structure. It is a semantic as opposed to a syntactic proof. The proof constructed in this paper, like van Fraassen's, is based on a non-linguistic component, not a diagram in this case but a physical domain of three-dimensional cube-shaped blocks. ….
… The semantics presented in this paper I call 'block semantics', for reasons that will become clear…. Block semantics is based on domains consisting of cube-shaped objects of the same size, e.g. children's wooden building blocks. These can be arranged either in a linear array or in a rectangular array, i.e. either in a row with no space between the blocks, or in a rectangle composed of rows and columns. A linear array can consist of a single block, and the order of individual blocks in a linear or rectangular array is irrelevant. Given three blocks A, B and C, the linear arrays ABC and BCA are indistinguishable. Two linear arrays can be joined together or concatenated into a single linear array, and a rectangle can be re-arranged or transformed into a linear array by successive concatenation of its rows. The result is called the 'linear transformation' of the rectangle. An essential characteristic of block semantics is that every domain of every block model is finite. In this respect it differs from Tarski’s semantics for first-order logic, which permits infinite domains. But although every block model is finite, there is no upper limit to the number of such models, nor to the size of their domains.
It should be emphasized that block models are physical models, the elements of which can be physically manipulated. Their manipulation differs in obvious and fundamental ways from the manipulation of symbols in formal axiomatic systems and in mathematics. For example the transformations described above, in which two linear arrays are joined together to form one array, or a rectangle of blocks is re-assembled into a linear array, are physical transformations not symbolic transformations. …"
— Storrs McCall, Department of Philosophy, McGill University
See also…
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