Thursday, May 31, 2007  8:06 PM

L'Affaire Dharwadker continues:

From Wikipedia on 31 May, 2007:

Shown below is a list of 25 alterations to Wikipedia math articles made today by user 122.163.102.246.

All of the alterations involve removal of links placed by user Cullinane (myself).

The 122.163... IP address is from an internet service provider in New Delhi, India.

The New Delhi anonymous user was apparently inspired by an earlier blitz by Wikipedia administrator Charles Matthews. (See User talk: Cullinane.)

Related material:

Ashay Dharwadker and Usenet Postings
and Talk: Four color theorem/Archive 2.
See also some recent comments from 122.163...
at Talk: Four color theorem.

May 31, 2007, alterations by
user 122.163.102.246:

1. 17:17 Orthogonality (rm spam)
2. 17:16 Symmetry group (rm spam)
3. 17:14 Boolean algebra (rm spam)
4. 17:12 Permutation (rm spam)
5. 17:10 Boolean logic (rm spam)
6. 17:08 Gestalt psychology (rm spam)
7. 17:05 Tesseract (rm spam)
8. 17:02 Square (geometry) (rm spam)
9. 17:00 Fano plane (rm spam)
10. 16:55 Binary Golay code (rm spam)
11. 16:53 Finite group (rm spam)
12. 16:52 Quaternion group (rm spam)
13. 16:50 Logical connective (rm spam)
14. 16:48 Mathieu group (rm spam)
15. 16:45 Tutte–Coxeter graph (rm spam)
16. 16:42 Steiner system (rm spam)
17. 16:40 Kaleidoscope (rm spam)
18. 16:38 Efforts to Create A Glass Bead Game (rm spam)
19. 16:36 Block design (rm spam)
20. 16:35 Walsh function (rm spam)
21. 16:24 Latin square (rm spam)
22. 16:21 Finite geometry (rm spam)
23. 16:17 PSL(2,7) (rm spam)
24. 16:14 Translation plane (rm spam)
25. 16:13 Block design test (rm spam)

The deletions should please Charles Matthews and fans of Ashay Dharwadker's work as a four-color theorem enthusiast and as editor of the Open Directory sections on combinatorics and on graph theory.

There seems little point in protesting the deletions while Wikipedia still allows any anonymous user to change their articles.

-- Cullinane 23:28, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Wednesday, May 30, 2007  10:00 PM

The Nature of Evil--

"Evil is a negation, because
it is the absence of truth."

-- Mary Baker Eddy,
founder of Christian Science,
in Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures,
(Boston, 1906,
page 186, line 11)

M. Scott Peck on evil:

"There are quite popular
 systems of thought these days,
such as Christian Science
or the Course in Miracles,
which define evil as unreality.
It is a half-truth. The spirit of evil
is one of unreality, but it itself
is real. It really exists."

"We must not fall back into Saint
Augustine's now discarded doctrine
of the 'privatio boni,' whereby evil
was defined as the absence of good.
Satan's personality cannot be
characterized simply by
an absence, a nothingness."

-- People of the Lie:
The Hope for Healing Human Evil,
by Morgan Scott Peck, 1986.
(Touchstone paperback,
2nd ed., 1998, page 208)

Al Gore on M. Scott Peck:

Al Gore trains a global army - USATODAY.com "Peck wrote that 'Evil is the absence of truth,' " Gore says, his fingers laced together at the waist, eyes scanning eager faces as he wraps up his remarks ... www.usatoday.com/news/nation/ 2007-04-24-gore-trainees_N.htm - 55k

-- Google search 5/30/07

He did?



"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
was convincing the world he didn't exist."
-- Verbal Kint in "The Usual Suspects"

Monday, May 28, 2007  5:00 PM

Notes on the I Ching:

The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin.

The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China's I Ching.

There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube.  This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2).  This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams.

See

Finite Geometry of
the Square and Cube



and

Saturday, May 26, 2007  1:09 PM

Reply to...

"To set one up (which I have not done because I don't want anyone to know what I think)," ... William Safire regarding "blogs".

I still don't know what you think.  Yet ... I try, try, try.

Here's one thing that I think-- today-- based on my "Hate Speech for Harvard," on "Devil in the Details" (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on

1. last evening's PA lottery number 005,
   
2. the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
   
3. the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:

Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07

Commentary on the cover
by the PA lottery
on 5/25/07
in the form of the
evening number, 005.
In the I Ching, this
is the number of

HSU:
WAITING
(NOURISHMENT)

See also the previous entry
and Natalie Angier's sneer
at a politician's call for
prayer, which, she
said, involved the
"assumption that prayer is
some sort of miracle
Vicks VapoRub."

Detail from the
5/21/07 New Yorker:



THE IMAGE



Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of WAITING.
Thus the superior man
eats and drinks,
Is joyous and
of good cheer.

AMEN.

Saturday, May 26, 2007  9:13 AM

Philosophy Wars continued:

On the Religion of Scientism

Recently, believers in the religion of Scientism have become increasingly militant.  Christians, though seldom able, like Jesus, to love their enemy, might at least try, like Don Vito Corleone, to know their enemy.

"Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge." --Nabokov

Steven Pinker at The New York Times,
review of a new book by Natalie Angier,
a priestess of Scientism,
online today but dated May 27, 2007

Jesse Tisch at JBooks.com,
interview with Angier, undated, 2007

Harvey Blume at The Boston Globe,
interview with Angier, May 13, 2007

Marcela Valdes at Publishers Weekly,
interview with Angier, March 5, 2007

Angier at The New York Times,
"Confessions of a Lonely Atheist,"
Jan. 14, 2001

Angier at The American Scholar,
"My God Problem," Spring 2004

For other recent background,
see the May 21 New Yorker.

Friday, May 25, 2007  7:11 AM

A Rite of Spring:

Square Dance:

This "telling of what
I know" will of course
mean little to those
who, like Emerson,
have refused to learn
through quotations.

For those less obdurate
than Emerson --

Harold Bloom
on Wallace Stevens
and Paul Valery's
   "Dance and the Soul"--

"Stevens may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is 'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valery's Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular, in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:

A cold and perfect clarity is a poison impossible to combat. The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously....[...] To a handful of ashes is the past reduced, and the future to a tiny icicle. The soul appears to itself as an empty and measurable form. --Here, then, things as they are come together, limit one another, and are thus chained together in the most rigorous and mortal* fashion.... O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is.

Valery's formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be cured only by what Valery's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid observer.'" --Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

* "la sorte... la plus mortelle":
    mortal in the sense
   "deadly, lethal"

Other quotations

(from March 28,
the birthday of
Reba McEntire):

Logical Songs



Logical Song I
(Supertramp)

"When I was young, it seemed that
Life was so wonderful, a miracle,
Oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees,
Well they'd be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me"

Logical Song II
(Sinatra)

"You make me feel so young,
You make me feel like
Spring has sprung
And every time I see you grin
I'm such a happy in-
dividual....

You and I are
Just like a couple of tots
Running across the meadow
Picking up lots
Of forget-me-nots"

Thursday, May 24, 2007  9:29 AM

Happy Birthday, Patti LaBelle

Born Again

"Lady Marmalade"
was a 1974 hit featured
in the film "Moulin Rouge":

This agrees with the birth date
in a Log24 entry of 10/4/02,
The Agony and the Ya-Ya.

It now, however, appears that
LaBelle was born
on today's date, May 24.

My apologies to Charlton Heston,
the archangel Michael,
and the city of New Orleans--
all featured in the Ya-Ya entry.

Congratulations to
Bob Dylan and Rosanne Cash
on their new birthday-mate.

Related material:

1. An entry from last year
on this date,  the
pilgrimage day of St. Sarah
 
2. An entry from another
religious holiday, the opening
 date of the real Moulin Rouge

3. The works of Robert Langdon,
author of "the renowned
collegiate textbook
Religious Iconology"

"Gitchi gitchi ya-ya, Dada...."

Thursday, May 24, 2007  4:00 AM

Mental Health Month

Day 24

"The miraculous enters...."
 


Discuss.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007  7:00 AM

Strong Emergence Illustrated:

The mid-day number 515 may be taken as a reference to 5/15. (See the previous entry, "Angel in the Details," and 5/15.)

The evening number 062, in the context of Monday's entry "No Royal Roads" and yesterday's "Jewel in the Crown," may be regarded as naming a non-royal road to geometry: either U. S. 62, a major route from Mexico to Canada (home of the late geometer H.S.M. Coxeter), or a road less traveled-- namely, page 62 in Coxeter's classic Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):

The illustration (and definition) is
of regular tessellations of the plane.

This topic Coxeter offers as an
illustration of remarks by G. H. Hardy
that he quotes on the preceding page:

One might argue that such beauty is strongly emergent because of the "harmonious way" the parts fit together: the regularity (or fitting together) of the whole is not reducible to the regularity of the parts.  (Regular triangles, squares, and hexagons fit together, but regular pentagons do not.)

The symmetries of these regular tessellations of the plane are less well suited as illustrations of emergence, since they are tied rather closely to symmetries of the component parts.

But the symmetries of regular tessellations of the sphere-- i.e., of the five Platonic solids-- do emerge strongly, being apparently independent of symmetries of the component parts.

Another example of strong emergence: a group of 322,560 transformations acting naturally on the 4x4 square grid-- a much larger group than the group of 8 symmetries of each component (square) part.

The lottery numbers above also supply an example of strong emergence-- one that nicely illustrates how it can be, in the words of Mark Bedau, "uncomfortably like magic."

(Those more comfortable with magic may note the resemblance of the central part of Coxeter's illustration to a magical counterpart-- the Ojo de Dios of Mexico's Sierra Madre.)

Wednesday, May 23, 2007  5:15 AM

Details, continued

Wednesday, May 23, 2007  4:29 AM

Details

Tuesday, May 22, 2007  7:11 AM

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

Jewel in the Crown



The Crown of Geometry
(according to Logothetti
in a 1980 article)

The crown jewels are the
Platonic solids, with the
icosahedron at the top.

Related material:

"[The applet] Syntheme illustrates ways of partitioning the 12 vertices of an icosahedron into 3 sets of 4, so that each set forms the corners of a rectangle in the Golden Ratio. Each such rectangle is known as a duad. The short sides of a duad are opposite edges of the icosahedron, and there are 30 edges, so there are 15 duads.

Each partition of the vertices into duads is known as a syntheme. There are 15 synthemes; 5 consist of duads that are mutually perpendicular, while the other 10 consist of duads that share a common line of intersection."

-- Greg Egan, Syntheme

The above note shows
duads and synthemes related
to the diamond theorem.

See also John Baez's essay
"Some Thoughts on the Number 6."
That essay was written 15 years
ago today-- which happens
to be the birthday of
Sir Laurence Olivier, who,
were he alive today, would
be 100 years old.





"Is it safe?"

Monday, May 21, 2007  4:00 PM

Euclid, Peirce, L'Engle:

Illustration from a
1980 article at JSTOR:

Related material:

Day Without Logic
(March 8, 2007)
and
The Geometry of Logic
(March 10, 2007):



There may be
no royal roads to
geometry or logic,
but...

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
-- Madeleine L'Engle, 
A Wrinkle in Time

Monday, May 21, 2007  4:48 AM

ART WARS continued

Down the
Up Staircase

Commentary on a
Jonathan Borofsky
painting in the
May 21 New Yorker:


 
Commentary --

"... Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite
or any other form of matter.
They are talking about about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal...."

-- Rosalind Krauss

Sunday, May 20, 2007  7:00 PM

Glory Road, continued

Robert A. Heinlein,
Glory Road:

"Rufo's baggage turned out
to be a little black box
about the size and shape
of a portable typewriter.
He opened it.
And opened it again.
   And kept on opening it...."
 

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD – MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte’s dream is to put a laptop computer into the hands of every child as an educational aid. Lesley Stahl reports on his progress in Cambodia and Brazil. Catherine Olian is the producer.

Related material:
Log24 entries of 11/18/05

Sunday, May 20, 2007  8:00 AM

A Hollow Victory

"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
-- Hamlet

From today's newspaper:

Notes:

For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.

For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006.

For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
 "hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"

For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.

Saturday, May 19, 2007  9:29 AM

ART WARS continued...

"In a sense, too, Wallace Stevens has spent a lifetime writing a single poem. What gives his best work its astonishing power and vitality is the way in which a fixed point of view, maturing naturally, eventually takes in more than a constantly shifting point of view could get at.

The point of view is romantic, 'almost the color of comedy'; but 'the strength at the center is serious.'  Behind Wallace Stevens stand Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and, surprisingly enough, La Fontaine and Pope. This poetic lineage is important only in so far as it proves that a master can claim the world as ancestor. Knowing where he stands, the poet can move as a free man in the company of free men."

Friday, May 18, 2007  3:00 PM

Mount St. Helens Day

Making a Difference:

 
Reba McEntire:

 

"Kids who may never
get out of their town
will be able to see
the world through books.
But I'm talking about
my passion. What's yours?"

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Happy May 18, Reba.

 

Friday, May 18, 2007  8:00 AM

Culture Wars

not up against...

Friday, May 18, 2007  6:29 AM

A Song in Red and Gray:

May 21, 2007
New Yorker cover


 
Detail

The detail suggests
the following
religious images from
Twelfth Night 2003:

Devil's Claws, or Hourglass Var. 3

Yankee Puzzle, or Hourglass Var. 5

 
"Mercilessly tasteful"
 
-- Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega's
"Songs in Red and Gray"

Friday, May 18, 2007  5:18 AM

Shine On continued:

Selections from
The Stephen King Hymnal

Log24, April 21:

Shine on... shine on...  
There is work to be done
     in the dark before dawn

-- Daisy May Erlewine of
    Big Rapids, Michigan

And from
the granddaughter of
Nobel-Prize-winning
physicist Max Born:

Thursday, May 17, 2007  7:31 AM

An Unholy Trinity continued:

Logos
 
for
Yolanda King,
who died May 15,
the birthday of
L. Frank Baum:

Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow



Symbols of, left to right,
Philip K. Dick (see 3/2/06),
Robert Anton Wilson (see 6/11/03),
and Kurt Vonnegut (see Palm Sunday,
an Autobiographical Collage).
See also An Unholy Trinity (5/6/07).
The "sunrise" logo at top,
  along with the three-part motto
"Educate, Empower, Entertain,"
is Yolanda King's own.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007  3:37 PM

Another Country:

"... líbranos de mal" --

Wednesday, May 16, 2007  11:22 AM

American Idols

From the five log24 entries
ending with "Dinner Theater?"
(linked to in yesterday afternoon's
Perspective on the News):

Frank Rich has the last word:

"A 'moral values' crusade
that stands between a TV show
this popular and its audience
will quickly learn the limits
of its power in a country
where entertainment is god."

Wednesday, May 16, 2007  4:01 AM

Victory

"Don't underestimate the Force."