Saturday, May 15, 2004 4:23 AM
Language Game
In memory of
Samuel Iwry, Hebrew scholar,
who died on May 8, 2004:
From a log24 entry of May 8, 2004,
on Wittgenstein's "language games" —
"Let us imagine a language ..."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
Okay...
Moral of the story:
If you must have a
religious language,
Elvish may,
in some situations,
do as well as Hebrew.
See also
The Unity of Mathematics,
or Shema, Israel.
Saturday, May 15, 2004 2:06 AM
Popcorn Theology,
Part II:
Justice at
the Supremes' Court
LeRoy Myers, tap dancer and
road manager for the original Supremes,
died April 26, 2004.
From a log24 entry of April 26, 2004:
|
"This Way to the Egress" -- Sign supposedly written A Google search on this phrase |
Friday, May 14, 2004 11:01 PM
Popcorn Theology
Today is the birthday of Star Wars director George Lucas and also the date of Frank Sinatra's death.
Two notes that may be
suitable for the occasion —
From All Saints' Episcopal Church in Atlanta:
POPCORN THEOLOGY
"On Friday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m. in Ellis Hall, Popcorn Theology is pleased to present Chicago. This is a cautionary tale set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, told with sharp satire and black humor."
From Chicago photographer Art Shay:
His Kind of Town
"We are not saints"
— Alcoholics Anonymous
Friday, May 14, 2004 6:36 PM
Moral Hazard —
The Devil and Wallace Stevens,
continued from May 1-2 entries:
Law Day,
Readings for Law Day,
Fallen from Heaven, and
The Script
University of Southern California, Department of
Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont
(September 4 - October 21):
"The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to modern contract and organization theory. Part 1 of the course focuses upon models with moral hazard and adverse selection."
From the insurance page at
http://ingrimayne.saintjoe.edu/:
"The size of the insurance industry indicates that people are eager to pay to avoid risk. They pay and get nothing if fortune smiles on them, whereas if misfortune strikes, they break even because the insurance should just pay back the value lost in the misfortune.
Sometimes, however, people do better than break even when misfortune strikes, and this possibility has greatly interested economists. If, for example, the misfortune costs a person $1000, but insurance will pay $2000, the insured person has no incentive to avoid the misfortune and may act to bring it on. This tendency of insurance to change behavior is called moral hazard.
Sometimes moral hazard is dramatic....
People who know that they face large risks are more likely to buy insurance than people who face small risks. Insurance companies try to minimize the problem that only the people with big risks will buy their product, which is the problem of adverse selection ...."
From today's New York Times:
"Jean-Jacques Laffont, an economist known for developing mathematical models to estimate what something is worth in situations of deep uncertainty, died on May 1 in Toulouse, France. He was 57....
...Jerry R. Green of Harvard said he was 'an architect of systems' and 'a very original figure.'
Eric Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., called Dr. Laffont 'simply one of the major figures of our time.'
'Many people would say he was the leading economist in Europe,' he added, 'and that wouldn't be an unfair judgment.'
Although Dr. Laffont's models were abstruse enough to satisfy the most theoretical economists, Dr. Green said they were adapted for practical purposes by companies, as well as by public television for scheduling programs."
Thursday, May 13, 2004 12:25 AM
The Wind and the Lion
Pat Buchanan
as A Mighty Wind —
Fallujah: High Tide of Empire?
For more about The Wind as a religious symbol, see Adolf Holl's Biography of The Holy Spirit.
For more about The Lion as a religious symbol, see
Charles Krauthammer
as The Lion of Zion —
Acceptance Speech, Guardian of Zion Award.
For passionate views of the conflict between The Wind and The Lion, see
The Passion and Its Enemies
by The Wind, and
Gibson's Blood Libel,
by The Lion.
Sunday, May 9, 2004 6:06 PM
From Saturday's
9 AM Entry:
Mr. King died on
Sunday morning, May 9, 2004.
Saturday, May 8, 2004 9:00 AM
Slab!
Aphorism 2 from Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations
with commentary on the right
by Lois Shawver
| Let us imagine a language ...The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words 'block', 'pillar', 'slab', 'beam.' A calls them |
... this passage describes the prototypic primitive language-game.... There are piles of pillars, slabs, blocks and beams. The supervisor calls out "Slab!" and the worker brings a slab and sets it at the supervisor's feet. Pretty simple. Wittgenstein puts forth [this] language-game in order to try to envision a language in which Augustine's picture of language works. |
Click on pictures for details.
Saturday, May 8, 2004 12:00 AM
Royal Roads
"Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point,
-- Albert Einstein
on his "holy geometry book"
(entry of 3/14/04)
"We'll try to understand
how people decide what is true."
-- Nathaniel Miller
on his geometry course
"People make up stories
about what they experience.
Stories that catch on are called 'true.' "
-- Richard J. Trudeau
on his geometry course
|
"There is no royal road to geometry." -- Saying attributed to Euclid "The royal road to knowledge, -- Nathaniel Miller's Prison-Abuse Panel is Third -- Headline from today's "The royal road to ruin -- George W. Bush's |
Friday, May 7, 2004 11:11 AM
Religion of the Lottery:
Ground Zero Revisited
The midday New York lottery number for Thursday, May 6, 2004, the National Day of Prayer, was
000.
Since the log24 entry for the preceding day (Wednesday) was written in gratitude for a new transcription of Bach, and the log24 entry for the following day (today) has the time 11:11, signifying peace, the following seems as good a religious interpretation of yesterday's lottery as any:
"In the Mass in B-Minor, Bach constructs a twenty-one-movement symmetry in which the Crucifixus is placed precisely between the Gratias and the Dona Nobis Pacem."
-- Timothy A. Smith,
Intentionality and Meaningfulness
in Bach's Cyclical Works
"Nothing is random."
-- Mark Helprin,
Winter's Tale
Wednesday, May 5, 2004 4:00 AM
Quartets
Tuesday, May 4, 2004 12:00 AM
Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil, continued
By MARK PURDY
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Once the out-of-towners stopped talking, the people from San Jose were allowed to speak. And the honesty erupted.
"Thank you for coming," said Richard Tillman, the younger brother of Pat Tillman. "But with all respect to those who have been up here before me, Pat's not with God. He's not religious. He's dead. It was amazing to be his little brother. He was the biggest champion I've ever seen."
Commentary:
Maybe God doesn't like religious people.
See The Four Last Things (6/4/03),
With Honors (6/5/03), and
Directions Out (4/26/04).
Monday, May 3, 2004 10:01 PM
Campaign Song
Review of previous themes:
Masahiro: "Now -- music and movies are all America is good for."
Charlotte: I just don't know what I'm supposed to be.
Bob: You'll figure that out.
From The Devil and Wallace Stevens:
"Stevens pays ironic tribute to Aphrodite Pandemos, the fleshly passion, and then his respects to
Aphrodite Ouranos,
the philosopher's passion...."
From a midlife crisis:
Select the best John Kerry
campaign song from this classic
Top 10 list of Nov. 7, 1964.
To see if you have made the
right choice, click on
Campaign Song.
(Requires RealOne Player.)
Sunday, May 2, 2004 11:00 PM
The Script
Hollywood Writers, Producers
Fail to Reach Agreement
Some scripts just write themselves.
Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse
Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:
"My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin.... He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties....
Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.
The New Yorker,
online images
'Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,' he said. 'For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.'
I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: 'Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.' ”
|
"Lovely.
|
See, too, The New Yorker's press release for
on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:
"Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. 'I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,' Kerry says, 'and I realized I just didn't want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn't do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.' "
Recall the conclusion of Devil's Advocate:
"Vanity is definitely my favorite sin."
Sunday, May 2, 2004 2:00 AM
Trinity Test
Some background on the previous entry, Honorable Bird....
A note on the Michael Douglas film in that previous entry:
"This film is not to be confused with Japanese director Shohei Imamura's BLACK RAIN, which was produced around the same time. Imamura's film deals with the lives of a Japanese family who survived the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima. The phrase 'black rain,' used in both films, refers to the deadly fallout caused by the detonation of an atomic weapon."
For related material on the religion of Trinity, see Hiroshima Mayor Says US Worships Nukes, a news story quoted in Death of a Holy Man (8/10/03). The phrase "holy man" there is from John Steinbeck, who once wrote a sentence saying that sons of bitches, viewed from another perspective, are holy men.
Here is the death of another holy man, Clayton S. White, a medical researcher who developed the field of blast biology — the study of how nuclear explosions affect people immediately and over time. This holy man died on April 26, 2004. A log24 entry of that date supplies an appropriate epitaph for the holy man, dead at 91, who has now joined his younger brother, the late Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, in some region of the afterworld.
Saturday, May 1, 2004 9:29 PM
Honorable Bird
Tonight at 8:00 PM on BRAVO:
Black Rain
Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are New York detectives caught up in a gang war in Japan. Masahiro: Ken Takakura.
Masahiro: "Now -- music and movies are all America is good for."
From yesterday's entry Library:
"... this is the Idea that is put forward for our response. There is nothing mythological about Christian Trinitarian doctrine: it is analogical. It offers itself freely for meditation and discussion; but it is desirable that we should avoid the bewildered frame of mind of the apocryphal Japanese gentleman who complained:
'Honourable Father, very good;
Honourable Son, very good; but
Honourable Bird
I do not understand at all.' "
|
Music and |
Honorable |
See, too, Inscape (4/22/04), The Proof and the Lie (11/30/03), and Hatched (4/21/04), and recall that the theme of Black Rain is counterfeiting.
For a related meditation on the color black, see Kawabata's The Old Capital, quoted in an entry of Aug. 1, 2003.
Saturday, May 1, 2004 7:00 PM
Fallen from Heaven
On today's stories:
Recall, gentle readers, the reference to Lucifer in last midnight's story, "The Devil and Wallace Stevens," and the reference in yesterday's story, "Notes," to the film "2010" (1984). Here is a quote from a review of the story behind that film:
"If the coming of Lucifer in this story doesn't set your pulse racing and your mind whirring, then I don't know what will."
For some of us — students of Stephen King and Malcolm Lowry — the coming of Lucifer is not such a surprising event. See
Saturday, May 1, 2004 7:30 AM
Readings for Law Day
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life;
Storytelling: Passport to the 21st Century;
plus 1001 Arabian Stories!
(Google News, ca. 7 AM EDT, May Day 2004)
Saturday, May 1, 2004 12:00 AM
See The Devil and Wallace Stevens.
