Rolling Stone

Raiders of the
 Lost Stone

Continued from 3/10.

Click on picture for details.

For an interpretation
of 588, see

Guy Fawkes Day: Twilight Kingdom,
Grail: The Hermeneutics of Chance,
Camelot: The Legend Continues,
A Case for Indiana Jones,
Spots of Time Revisited.

For an interpretation
of 715, see
7/15, Ein Bild: 

"Und was fur
ein Bild des Christentums 
ist dabei herausgekommen?"

The number 588 above
is clearly a MacGuffin.
Whether it represents
any deeper reality is
an open question.

 "It is a very difficult
philosophical question,
 the question of
  what 'random' is."

-- Herbert Robbins, co-author
   of What is Mathematics?

Monday, November 13, 2006  8:23 PM

Time and Chance, continued

Cognitive Blend:

Casino Royale
and
Time in the Rock


 
In today's cognitive blend,
the role of Casino Royale
is played by the
Pennsylvania Lottery,
which points to 7/26,
Venus at St. Anne's
(title of the closing chapter
of That Hideous Strength).

The role of
Time in the Rock
is played by a
Log24 entry of 3/29,
Diamond Theory in 1937.

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

Monday, November 13, 2006  11:07 AM

Raiders of Lost Youth

Prime Suspect: 007



Left:   An ad from a page     
             on the new Bond film    
   Right:  From PBS last night,      
   "Prime Suspect 7"

Sunday, November 12, 2006  8:00 PM

Casino Royale

Time in the Rock
 

... "Well," said the inmate, "down in the prison library there's only one joke book. We've all read the book so many times that we don't waste time telling the joke, we just call out its number."

Related material:

August 25 and 26

(and, of course, 2/17).

Sunday, November 12, 2006  3:10 PM

On the other hand...

Grace
 
Today in History, by
The Associated Press

On this date:

"In 1929, Grace Kelly--
the future movie star
and Princess of Monaco--
was born in Philadelphia."

Today's mid-day lottery
in the State of Grace:

361





Happy birthday.

No se puede vivir
sin amar.

Sunday, November 12, 2006  2:00 PM

Keillor Meets Thompson

The Height
of
Folly



An interpretation:

762 feet is the height
of Honolulu's
Diamond Head.

2/06 is the date of
a Log24 entry quoting
Indiana Jones:

"Legend says that when the
stones are brought together
 the diamonds inside of them
will glow."

Sunday, November 12, 2006  12:25 AM

Spots of Time Revisited

Instance

Log24, Feb. 25, 2004:

From a review by Adam White Scoville of Iain Pears's novel titled An Instance of the Fingerpost:

• Barabbas emerging from prison as if from Plato's cave, and Barabbas's vision of Christ in blinding sunlight: "Flung into the sunlight, he stands blinking at a young man in white robes; is it merely the unaccustomed light that dazzles his eyes, or does he really see a radiance streaming from the young man's face?" --TIME Magazine, 1962
  
  
• 1 Peter 2 on Christ as the "living stone"
  
  
• The cover of the novel Stone 588 shown in Friday's 11:20 PM entry
  

Friday, November 10, 2006  11:20 PM

A Case for Indiana Jones

Today's
numbers:



Today is the day that
Stanley found Livingstone.


Click on picture for details.

"Stone 588,
   I presume?"

Related material:

This afternoon's entry
on color symmetry

and


Click on picture for details.

See, too, the following from
  a Log24 entry of last Monday--

"To von Eschenbach, the Grail
was never really a material cup,
but a jewel like the
jewel in the lotus,
a symbol of enlightenment,
of something intangible
and always beyond reach."
-- Arcadian Functor

-- in this context:

"Philosophers ponder the idea

of identity: what it is to give
something a name
on Monday
and have it respond
to that name
  on Friday...."
 
  -- Bernard Holland in
  The New York Times
  Monday, May 20, 1996

Friday, November 10, 2006  7:00 PM

The Professionals

Veterans



Jack Palance as Jesus Raza,
Lee Marvin as Henry "Rico" Fardan
in "The Professionals" (1966).

Both Palance and Marvin
were World War II veterans.
Palance died today.

Friday, November 10, 2006  3:31 PM

Color Symmetry

Livingstone

On this date:

In 1871, journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley found Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had not been heard from for years, near Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.

Thursday, November 9, 2006  7:20 PM

For CBS News

Thursday, November 9, 2006 
3:00 AM/12:48 PM

Related material
from Aug. 6, 2006:

Game Boy     Click on picture for details. "Nine is a very powerful Nordic number." -- Katherine Neville http://www.dict.cc/?s=Einsatz:   to put one's back into something bei etwas Einsatz zeigen to up the ante den Einsatz erhöhen to debrief den Einsatz nachher besprechen to be on duty im Einsatz sein mil.to be in action im Einsatz sein to play for high stakes mit hohem Einsatz spielen

* "Wolf" -- See the etymological notes
in The Shining of May 29.

Wednesday, November 8, 2006  8:00 PM

Review

Tuesday, November 7, 2006  9:00 PM

For clues to interpreting
today's Keystone State
mid-day lottery number,
023, see
The Prime Cut Gospel.

For clues to interpreting
today's Keystone State
evening lottery number,
666, see
the "Apocalypse Now"
quotations on
All Saints' Day, 2006.

Tuesday, November 7, 2006  12:00 AM

A Game of Chess

"And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of these same men and women."

-- C. S. Lewis,
The Great Divorce

I Ching chessboard

Related material:

"At the still point,
there the dance is"

and

Monday, November 6, 2006  11:00 AM

Camelot: The Legend Continues

Today's Birthdays:
 
Mike Nichols,
director of "Spamalot,"
and Maria Shriver

Yesterday evening's entry, "Grail," continued:

"To von Eschenbach, the Grail was never really a material cup, but a jewel like the jewel in the lotus, a symbol of enlightenment, of something intangible and always beyond reach.

I must confess that the reason I know this is because I'm a bit of an opera fan. The work of von Eschenbach was a source for Wagner...."

-- From the weblog Arcadian Functor, Nov. 6, 2006

West Coast Story:
A musical adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet

Featuring
"A Girl Named Maria"



and

"Bring Us Together"



(Official inaugural ball
theme of Richard M. Nixon)

Sunday, November 5, 2006  8:00 PM

Grail:
The Hermeneutics
of Chance

On "The Hollow Men" --

"... as Genevieve W. Foster has shown in her Jungian analysis, the eyes, the rose, and the star are equivalent to the 'Grail' of The Waste Land."

--  Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956

The Grail also appears in legend as a stone--

From a Nov. 6, 2006, entry in the New Zealand weblog Arcadian Functor:

"Many modern Grail stories have a root in the early romances of von Eschenbach....

They live from a Stone whose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called Lapsit exillis.

A search on "lapsit exillis" leads to "Cubic Stones from the Sky"...

These stones are often seen as the Holy Grail....

For 804, see
   8/04 --
The Presbyterian Exorcist
(in part a tribute to
Wallace Stevens).

For 008 and a
"cubic stone,"
see
Christmas 2005.

A poetic connection between the star
  of "The Hollow Men" and Christmas
is furnished by the remarks of
Wallace Stevens linked to in
the previous entry from
  the word "information."

Sunday, November 5, 2006  12:00 PM

Guy Fawkes Day:

Twilight Kingdom

"What he cannot contemplate is the reproach of

    ... that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom,

Saturday, November 4, 2006  2:15 PM

Applied Finite Geometry

Links to some applications of finite geometry to quantum information theory have been added to finitegeometry.org.

Friday, November 3, 2006  9:00 AM

Birthdate of A. B. Coble

First to Illuminate

"From the History of a Simple Group" (pdf), by Jeremy Gray:

"The American mathematician A. B. Coble [1908; 1913]* seems to have been the first to illuminate the 27 lines and 28 bitangents with the elementary theory of geometries over finite fields.

The combinatorial aspects of all this are pleasant, but the mathematics is certainly not easy."

* [Coble 1908] A. Coble, "A configuration in finite geometry isomorphic with that of the 27 lines on a cubic  surface," Johns Hopkins University Circular 7:80-88 (1908), 736-744.

   [Coble 1913] A. Coble, "An application of finite geometry to the characteristic theory of the odd and even theta functions," Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 14 (1913), 241-276.

Thursday, November 2, 2006  4:28 PM

All Souls' Day

Wednesday, November 1, 2006  9:48 PM

The Kerry Joke

The Method

Bush
... "What did they tell you?"

Kerry
"They told me that you had
gone totally insane and that
 your methods were unsound."

Bush
"Are my methods unsound?"

Kerry
"I don't see
any method at all, sir."



Karl Rove
"Perfect, genuine,
complete, crystalline, pure."

Wednesday, November 1, 2006  8:24 AM

In memory of Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz 

Professor Emeritus,
Institute for Advanced Study

Savage Logic

"Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than their individual properties considered separately). And their range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its operation. And so it is too with savage thought. Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of 'the odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process.'

These odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images drawn from myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore. (How, precisely, they have come into being in the first place is one of the points on which Levi-Strauss is not too explicit, referring to them vaguely as the 'residue of events... fossil remains of the history of an individual or a society.') Such images are inevitably embodied in larger structures-- in myths, ceremonies, folk taxonomies, and so on-- for, as in a kaleidoscope, one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however ill-formed or irregular. But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are detachable from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of a similar sort. Quoting Franz Boas that 'it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments,' Levi-Strauss generalizes this permutational view of thinking to savage thought in general."

-- Clifford Geertz, "The Cerebral Savage: the Structural Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss," in Encounter, Vol. 28 No. 4 (April 1967), pp. 25-32.

Today's New York Times
reports that
Geertz died on Monday,
October 30, 2006.

Related material:

Kaleidoscope Puzzle,

Being Pascal Sauvage,

and Up the River:

The Necessity For Story by Frederick Zackel While it's a story that's never been written, a suggested title-- Indiana Jones Sails Up The River Of Death-- shows how readily we as individuals or we as a culture can automatically visualize a basic story motif. We may each see the particular elements of the story differently, but almost instantaneously we catch its drift. The hero sails up the river of death to discover what lies within his own heart: i.e., how much moral and physical strength he has. Indiana Jones sails up the River of Death. We are following Indiana Jones up the River of Death. We're going to visit with Colonel Kurtz. (You may not want to get off the boat.) No, I am not mixing up metaphors. These are the Story.