Tuesday, August 31, 2004 7:31 PM
Symmetry and Change, Part 1...
Early Evening,
Shining Star
Click on picture
for details.
The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to...
|
"What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men... The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening.... smiles when I say I don't know. And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world's notions of time and space, once leaned down... to ask me... ragged freshman... at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed." For the thoughts on time |
Tuesday, August 31, 2004 10:01 AM
For student
Anthony Fonseca,
Harvard '04-'05:
Michael (Studio della Robbia, ca. 1475)
For teacher
Margaret Casey:
The Green and
Burning Tree, by
Chesca Potter
For the Voice of Gollum,
Peter Woodthorpe:
For further details, click on
any of the pictures above.
... y eres tú y soy yo
y es un caminarte en círculo
dar a tus hechos dimensión de arco
y a solas con tu impulso decirte la palabra.
dimensión de arco
(This last picture, taken by
Andrew from London,
was added at
11:30 AM ET Aug. 31, 2004.
For the excellent story that
accompanies the picture, see
"Early Evening, the Light
Beginning to Fade.")
Monday, August 30, 2004 4:01 PM
Agon
for Penelope Doob,
Radcliffe '64:
"How much story do you want?"
-- George Balanchine
Monday, August 30, 2004 12:07 PM
Q.E.D.
A Log24 entry of Aug. 17, 2004, on the
three Semitic (or "Abrahamic") religions:
|
From Scotsman.com News Ex-Priest Sentenced By Pat Hurst, PA News, in Athens An ex-priest who lives in Britain was given a 12-month suspended sentence today for disrupting the men's Olympic marathon in Athens. Cornelius Horan, 57, a former Catholic priest living in London, appeared before a Greek judge this morning, local police said. He was sentenced and released from custody but his whereabouts are unknown. Irishman Horan, originally from Kerry, dashed from the sidelines to attack the marathon front-runner during yesterday's event. He told officers he staged the disruption to "prepare for the second coming". A police spokesman said: "He has got mental problems. He is not very well. "His only explanation for his behaviour was that it was for the second coming." Horan also disrupted last year's Silverstone Formula One Grand Prix by dashing across the track. Leslie Broad, of Deunant Books, which publishes Mr Horan's books on its website, said: "We publish two of his books on biblical prophecies and he seems to be fairly convinced that the second coming is due fairly shortly. "After the incident at Silverstone, he did say he would never do anything like that again. "He comes across as a shy, very intelligent and compassionate man but as is often the way with people who are very intelligent, it sometimes manifests itself in very strange ways. "I think he found prison a fairly uplifting experience. He came out feeling that he had met a lot of people he wouldn't normally have met, people who had committed serious crimes." Horan’s victim yesterday, Vanderlei De Lima, from Brazil, was at the head of the race just three miles from the finish. Horan grabbed him and bundled him into spectators at the side of the road. After a scuffle, the runner managed to get away, but he was clearly ruffled and finished third. The Brazilian Olympic Committee put in an official complaint to the Greeks and at one point the final medal ceremony to be staged during the closing ceremony was in doubt. Horan was arrested and taken to the General Police Division of Attica, where he stayed overnight. |
Author biography
from Deunant Books:
Father Cornelius ("Neil") Horan
Horan
"Neil Horan was born in 1947, in Scartaglen, County Kerry, in the Republic of Ireland. After schooling in Ireland he was ordained a Catholic Priest in Saint Mary's Cathedral, Killarney, in 1973.
He has served all his priestly life in the Southwark Diocese, covering London south of the River Thames and Kent, his first Parish being Bexley in Kent. His interest in Bible prophecy began when he attended a lecture in 1974, given by the Apostolic Fellowship of Christ, a group which had originated with the Christadelphians. Meaning 'Brothers in Christ', the Christadelphians were a small Church formed in 1861 by Dr John Thomas. Father Horan says he owes a debt of gratitude to the Christadelphian tradition for the understanding of the Bible which they gave him. He regards the Bible as the greatest Book in the world and has devoted his life to making it better known, especially the Prophecies.
He is not a prophet, considering himself to be merely an interpreter, has never received a Divine message or vision, and God has never spoken to him. He feels that he is right only in so far as he interprets the Book of Books correctly.
He is still a Catholic Priest, listed in the Catholic Directory under his full name of Cornelius Horan. Cornelius, a Centurian [sic] in the Roman army, was the first Christian convert; Father Horan is proud to bear that name and hopes to meet his famous namesake soon, when Jesus comes."
A Glorious New World
by Father Neil Horan
"Are there passages in the Bible that foretell events that were, at the time it was written, far in the future? Father Neil Horan argues eloquently, knowledgeably and persuasively in this book, first published in 1985, that this is so. It is easy to scoff at predictions of events that were, according to the book, to have taken place a few years ago but which have not happened, but to do that would be wrong. With only the most subtle changes of emphasis in interpretation, it could just as easily be argued that events in the Middle East particularly have to a large degree fulfilled the prophecies for the years since 1985.
Then there are the events yet to come. They are, according to the author and his sources, to be the most significant in the history of mankind, and are going to happen soon. With a little thought, certain current-day world figures are a disconcertingly comfortable match for some of the characters who will act out the earth-shattering dramas to come. Even the most hardened cynic will get that prickly feeling down the back of his neck as he reads this book.
Taken together with Father Horan's later work 'Christ Will Soon Take Power From All Governments' (also available from Deunant Books) the two books represent one of the most remarkable and significant bodies of work seen in this field for many, many years."
|
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Grammar and Geometry:
For more on Wittgenstein, theology, and grammar, see the Log24 Related material: |
Sunday, August 29, 2004 11:07 AM
Olympic Arc
Thomas Becker, president of Chautauqua Institution, on Friday, Aug. 27, 2004:
"I'm really proud of this lecture platform this year. We started with Phil Wilcox on the first day of the season and finished with Sandra Day O'Connor. The arc of participation between them was really amazing."
Phil Wilcox: See
Israel and Palestine:
Let's Separate Myth from Reality,
by Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., President,
Foundation for Middle East Peace,
Chautauquan Daily, June 28, 2004
Sandra Day O'Connor: See
The Majesty of the Law:
Reflections of a
Supreme Court Justice,
by Sandra Day O'Connor
The O'Connor link above is to a page at the Chautauqua Bookstore.
For Justice O'Connor:
Reflections on Themis
(Log24, Aug. 17, 2004)
For Wilcox:
The Zen of Abraham
(Same entry, different title.)
I personally was at Chautauqua only one day this season -- Friday, the 13th of August. My stops of course included the Chautauqua Bookstore, where I purchased the following:
Human cultural activity is mostly what Walker Percy astutely called "symbol-mongering." Of the three books above, the central one offers the best symbols.
My own version of a
Chautauqua "Versus" symbol:
For further details, see the
For an "arc" symbol, see
Saturday, August 28, 2004 5:01 PM
History of Mathematics
On the history of the relationship between orthogonality (in the Latin-square sense) and skewness (in the projective-space sense)--
See the newly updated
Orthogonal Latin Squares as Skew Lines.
Thursday, August 19, 2004 5:01 AM
5:01:58 AM ET:
A link for Jill St. John's birthday --
The Geometrics of Brilliance
Twinkle, twinkle...
Beach reading for
brilliant redheads...
and for everyone else:
Click on pictures for details.
Thursday, August 19, 2004 3:09 AM
Angel of the
First Degree
 |
Honey Blonde She's as sweet as tupelo honey She's an angel of the first degree. She's as sweet as tupelo honey Just like honey, baby, from the bee. -- Van Morrison, 1971 |
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET
Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004
LOS ANGELES (AP)-- Elmer Bernstein, the versatile, Oscar-winning composer who scored such movie classics as "The Ten Commandments," "The Magnificent Seven,"' "To Kill a Mockingbird,"' "The Great Escape" and "True Grit," died Wednesday. He was 82.
Bernstein died in his sleep at his Ojai home.
That, M.C.C., is what
Fritz Leiber means by
Thursday, August 19, 2004 1:06 AM
Instantia Crucis
"Francis Bacon used the phrase instantia crucis, 'crucial instance,' to refer to something in an experiment that proves one of two hypotheses and disproves the other. Bacon's phrase was based on a sense of the Latin word crux, 'cross,' which had come to mean 'a guidepost that gives directions at a place where one road becomes two,' and hence was suitable for Bacon's metaphor."
-- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
The high notes hit by Harriet Wheeler, Jen Slocumb, and Alanis Morissette can, I am sorry to say, be excruciating. (See previous entry.) I greatly prefer the mellow tones of Mary Chapin Carpenter:
|
"I guess you're never really all alone, |
From an entry of 12/22/02:
|
|
|
A white horse comes as if on wings.
-- I Ching, Hexagram 22: Grace
See also
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star,
Shining Forth, and
Music for Pegasus.
Carpenter's song quoted above
is from the album
Between Here and Gone,
released April 27, 2004.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004 11:25 PM
A Cross Between
"The only way to describe her voice is a cross between Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays & Alanis Morissette."
-- Review of Jen Slocumb of Martha's Trouble by Diane Matay
"Apostrophe Theory is a cross between."
-- Ian Lee, The Third Word War
Wednesday, August 18, 2004 11:07 AM
Dyer, Part II:
From Here to Eternity
"Dying, at its best, might be something like this. Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come."
-- Geoff Dyer, quoted (in part of an entry, Dyer, for yesterday-- the day mathematician Shizuo Kakutani died) by Ruth Franklin in
A Koan for Kakutani--
on a random walk, a bird, death, time, and eternity--
In a comment on the previous entry, a Xangan asks,
"How many drunk men could migrate to Argentina without a map?"
My answer: At least one.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004 3:00 AM
Drunk Bird
T. Charles Erickson
Shizuo Kakutani
in the 1980's
"A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever."
-- Shizuo Kakutani, quoted by J. Chang in Stochastic Processes (ps), p. 1-19. Chang says the quote is from an R. Durrett book on probability.
Meaning:
A random walk in d dimensions is recurrent if d = 1 or d = 2, but transient if d is greater than or equal to 3.
From a web page on Kylie Minogue:
Turns out she's a party girl
who loves Tequila:
"Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes."
Kylie sings
"Locomotion"
From a web page on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano:
The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that "A corpse will be transported by express!" (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).
For further literary details in memory of Shizuo Kakutani, Yale mathematician and father of book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, see
Of course, Kakutani himself would probably prefer the anti-Santa, Michael Shermer. For a refutation of Santa by this high priest of Scientism, see
(Scientific American, July 26, 2004).
Wednesday, August 18, 2004 2:18 AM
Train of Thought
Kylie sings
"Locomotion"
"Oh, my Lolita. I have only words
to play with!" (Nabokov, Lolita)
"This is the best toy train set
a boy ever had!"
(Orson Welles, after first touring
RKO Studios, quoted in Halliwell)
"As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will 'play with' in crafting their narratives."
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 7:29 PM
Tribute
"Un train peut encacher un autre."
Modern Times:
ART WARS September 27, 2002 --
From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, October 2002, p. 563:
"To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns. Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications. Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things. These explorations led to.... [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story)."
-- David W. Henderson, Cornell University
From an earlier Log24.net note:
John Frankenheimer's "The Train" --
Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 7:11 PM
Dyer
"Dyer's writing is searching and melancholic and sometimes profound. In the beautiful title essay, he has a fling with a girl named Kate on a beach in Thailand: for her it is a one-night stand, for him something more. 'There is something about leaving a place on a small boat--something about the movement of the waves, the noise of the engine: it is like you are leaving your life behind and yet, since you are part of the life you have left behind, part of you is still there,' he writes after they have said good-bye. 'Dying, at its best, might be something like this. Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come.'"
-- Journey Without Maps, by Ruth Franklin, The New Republic Online, posted Friday the 13th of August, 2004
"The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals, but gives a sign."
-- Adolf H., The Left Hand of God, p. 50
Note the time in the Log24 illustration for Monday, August 16, 2004, and consult the entry for 12/05, 2003.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 12:00 AM
The Zen of Abraham
Today's Zen Chautauqua, prompted by the fact that this is Abrahamic week at the real Chautauqua, consists of links to
Happy Birthday, Kate and Kevin.
The real Chautauqua's program this week is, of course, Christian rather than Zen. Its theme is "Building a Global Neighborhood: The Abrahamic Vision 2004." One of the featured performers is Loretta Lynn; in her honor (and, of course, that of Sissy Spacek), I will try to overcome the fear and loathing that the Semitic (i. e., "Abrahamic") religions usually inspire in me.
To a mathematician, the phrase "global neighborhood" sounds like meaningless politico-religious bullshit -- a phrase I am sure accurately characterizes most of the discourse at Chautauqua this week. But a Google search reveals an area of
This article includes the following:
Given the sophistication of his writing, I am surprised at Schlansker's Christian background:
A good omen for the future is the fact that Schlansker balances the looney Semitic (or "Abrahamic") teachings of Christianity with good sound Aryan religion, in the form of the goddess Themis.
Themis, often depicted as "Justice"
For those who must have an Abraham, Schlansker's paper includes the following:
A Themis figure I prefer to the above:
For more on religious justice
at midnight in the garden of
good and evil, see the Log24
entries of Oct. 1-15, 2002.
For material on Aryan religion that is far superior to the damned nonsense at Chautauqua, New York, this week, see
Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, with an excursus on the ritual forms preserved in Greek tragedy by Gilbert Murray and a chapter on the origin of the Olympic games by F. M. Cornford. Rev. 2nd ed., Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1927.
Those who prefer the modern religion of Scientism will of course believe that Themis is purely imaginary, and that truth is to be found in modern myths like that of Carl Sagan's novel Contact, illustrated below.
Jodie Foster (an admirer of
Leni Riefenstahl) and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics
"Heraclitus.... says: 'The ruler whose prophecy occurs at Delphi oute legei oute kryptei, neither gathers nor hides, alla semainei, but gives hints.'"
-- An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press paperback, 1959, p. 170
"The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals, but gives a sign."
-- Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God, Doubleday, 1998, p. 50
Monday, August 16, 2004 12:00 AM
Classic to Romantic
"Ben Webster is probably best known for his eloquent ballad playing. On JAZZ 'ROUND MIDNIGHT, we are treated to no less than 15 ballads, all of which are performed superbly. Webster is one of the great jazz romantics...."
