From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2008 April 01-15
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 5:01 AM
Bittergate
Best summary of Obama's sneer:
"Xenophobia, San Francisco Style."
Have some wine and cheese, Barack.
Monday, April 14, 2008 2:00 AM
Annals of Scientism:
Classical Quantum
From this morning's
New York Times:
"John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist... died Sunday morning [April
13, 2008]....
... Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical
physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the
imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that
would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature....
'He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental
subject and took it away from the mathematicians,' said Freeman Dyson,
a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study....
... he [Wheeler] sailed to Copenhagen to work with Bohr, the
godfather of the quantum revolution, which had shaken modern science
with paradoxical statements about the nature of reality.
'You can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, but
the thing that convinced me that such people existed were the
conversations with Bohr,' Dr. Wheeler said....
... Dr. Wheeler was swept up in the Manhattan Project to build an
atomic bomb. To his lasting regret, the bomb was not ready in time to
change the course of the war in Europe....
Dr. Wheeler continued to do government work after the war,
interrupting his research to help develop the hydrogen bomb, promote
the building of fallout shelters and support the Vietnam War....
... Dr. Wheeler wondered if this quantum uncertainty somehow applied to
the universe and its whole history, whether it was the key to
understanding why anything exists at all.
'We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or
fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time,' Dr. Wheeler
wrote in 1981. 'Today we demand of physics some understanding of
existence itself.'
At a 90th birthday celebration in 2003, Dr. Dyson said that Dr. Wheeler
was part prosaic calculator, a 'master craftsman,' who decoded nuclear
fission, and part poet. 'The poetic Wheeler is a prophet,' he said,
'standing like Moses on the top of Mount Pisgah, looking out over the
promised land that his people will one day inherit.'"
--
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times,
Monday, April 14, 2008
As prophets go, I prefer
the poet Wallace Stevens:
"point A / In a perspective
that begins again / At B"
— Wallace Stevens,
"The Rock"
Sunday, April 13, 2008 8:29 PM
Annals of Religion, continued:
National
Treasure
Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 504, Evening 628.
Related material:
Today's previous entry
and entries of
5/04 (2007), and 6/28 (2007).
Happy birthday, Thomas Jefferson:
"... God to a nation
dealt that day's
dear chance.
To man, that needs would
worship
block or barren
stone...."
-- "To
what serves Mortal Beauty?,"
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J.
(Quoted here on Aug. 29, 2006)
|
Sunday, April 13, 2008 7:59 AM
Mathematics and Narrative, continued:
The Echo
in Plato's Cave
"It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in
the streets over the question of universals. The
stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to
describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any
opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the
deepest, most profound problem of philosophy."
-- Simon Blackburn, Think (Oxford, 1999)
Michael Harris, mathematician at the University of Paris:
"... three 'parts' of tragedy identified by Aristotle that transpose to
fiction of all types-- plot (mythos), character (ethos),
and 'thought' (dianoia)...."
-- paper (pdf) to appear in Mathematics and Narrative,
A. Doxiadis and B. Mazur, eds.
Mythos --
A visitor from France this morning viewed the entry of Jan. 23, 2006: "In Defense of Hilbert (On His Birthday)." That entry
concerns a remark of
Michael Harris.
A check of Harris's website reveals a new article:
"Do Androids Prove Theorems in Their Sleep?" (slighly
longer version of article to appear in Mathematics and Narrative,
A. Doxiadis and B. Mazur, eds.) (pdf).
From that article:
"The word 'key' functions here to structure the reading of the article,
to draw the reader's attention initially to the element of the proof
the author considers most important. Compare E.M. Forster in Aspects
of the Novel:
[plot is] something which is measured not be minutes or
hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not
stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles."
Ethos --
"Forster took pains to widen and deepen the enigmatic character of his
novel, to make it a puzzle insoluble within its own terms, or without.
Early drafts of A Passage to India reveal a number of false
starts. Forster repeatedly revised drafts of chapters thirteen through
sixteen, which comprise the crux of the novel, the visit to the Marabar
Caves. When he began writing the novel, his intention was to make the
cave scene central and significant, but he did not yet know how:
When I began a A Passage to India, I knew something
important happened in the Malabar (sic) Caves, and that it would have a
central place in the novel-- but I didn't know what it would be... The
Malabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take
place. They were to engender an event like an egg."
-- E. M. Forster: A Passage to India, by Betty Jay
Dianoia --
Flagrant Triviality
or Resplendent Trinity?
"Despite the flagrant triviality of the proof... this result is the key
point in the paper."
-- Michael Harris, op. cit., quoting a mathematical paper
Online Etymology Dictionary:
flagrant c.1500, "resplendent," from L. flagrantem
(nom. flagrans) "burning," prp. of
flagrare "to burn," from L. root *flag-, corresponding to PIE *bhleg- (cf. Gk. phlegein "to burn, scorch," O.E. blæc "black"). Sense of "glaringly
offensive" first recorded 1706, probably from common legalese phrase in flagrante delicto "red-handed," lit.
"with the crime still blazing."
A related use of "resplendent"-- applied to a Trinity, not a
triviality-- appears in the Liturgy of Malabar:
-- The Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement,
Chrysostom, and Basil, and the Church of Malabar, by the Rev.
J.M. Neale and the Rev. R.F. Littledale, reprinted by Gorgias Press,
2002
On Universals and
A Passage to India:
""The universe, then, is less intimation than cipher:
a mask rather than a revelation in the romantic sense. Does love meet
with love? Do we receive but what we give? The answer is surely a
paradox, the paradox that there are Platonic universals
beyond, but that the glass is too dark to see them. Is there a light
beyond the glass, or is it a mirror only to the self? The Platonic cave
is even darker than Plato made it, for it introduces the echo, and so
leaves us back in the world of men, which does not carry total meaning,
is just a story of events."
Saturday, April 12, 2008 7:00 AM
ART WARS continued:
Friday, April 11, 2008 8:35 AM
Jumpers, continued:
Friday, April 11, 2008 12:48 AM
Annals of Religion, continued:
MÉXICO D.F., 10 Abr. 08 / 10:01 am (ACI).- El
Arzobispo Emérito de México, Cardenal
Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, falleció esta mañana a
las 05:30 a.m., en su domicilio....
of literary "signature passages" --
Annals of Religion, continued:
The Date
A Xanga footprint this morning--
This links to
an
entry
containing the following:
|
Date: June 13, 2005
Related material:
A Mass for Lucero.
That web page concludes with a reference to esthetics and a
Delian palm, and was written three years ago on this date.
Today [June 13] is also the date of death for Martin
Buber, philosophical Jew.
Here is a Delphic saying in memory of Buber:
"It is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears
fruit."
-- Steven Erlanger,
New York Times story,
dateline Jerusalem, June 11
|
This, together with the online
New York Times obituaries
pictured here on April 7,
suggests further consideration
of a female date.... namely,
that of a Log24 entry,
A Yahrzeit for Virginia Woolf,
from March 28
(the date of Woolf's death).
March 28 this year was also
the date of death of another
female author,
Helen Bassine Yglesias.
Click on the image
for a larger picture
and further details.
"Attention must
be paid."
--
Linda Loman
Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:07 AM
Annals of Religion, continued:
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 6:15 AM
Annals of Religion:
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 8:00 AM
ART WARS continued:
Monday, April 7, 2008 11:07 PM
Language Game:
A year ago...
(Holy Saturday, 2007) --
From Friedrich
Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
For further details, see
Gift of the Third Kind
and
Kindergarten Relativity.
Related material:
"... There was a problem laid out on the
board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems. I
reached down and moved a knight.... I looked down at the
chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I
had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a
game for knights."
-- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Monday, April 7, 2008 1:00 PM
Raum, Zeit, Materie:
"LegacyPlus™:
The Class,
Without the Classes"
--
The New York Times
on the date of
Charlton Heston's death
"
Leave a space."
-- Tom Stoppard
in "Jumpers"
"Heaven is a state, a sort of
metaphysical state."
-- John O'Hara,
Hope of Heaven
Monday, April 7, 2008 2:20 AM
... and Knight Moves:
"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?"
-- Charles Williams, Many Dimensions
Sunday, April 6, 2008 11:07 PM
Night Moves:
Synchronicity
"Something isn't real until it's on TV."
-- Folk saying quoted, for instance,
in Postmodern Times
Time of this entry: 11:07:48 PM.
Overheard yesterday, on the night
of Charlton Heston's death:
"He's a good gun, and we aren't
heading for a church social."
-- Yul Brynner to Steve McQueen
in The
Magnificent Seven
(AMC, 8 PM ET Saturday, April 5, 2008)
"Lord, I remember!"
-- Bob Seger
Related material:
this date last year
(
Good Friday)
Sunday, April 6, 2008 2:12 AM
Judgment at Hollywood, continued:
For Sunrise
Click image to enlarge.
The above tableau, from this morning's
New York Times obituary page,
suggests the following meditations:
1. "Mickey Mouse will see you dead."
-- Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise
|
2. "Free!"
|
3. "I graduated in Alabama,
Alaska, Arizona...."
|
These three meditations are
consistent with the fable of the
mice and the lion in
The Lion,
The Witch, and the Wardrobe
and with the speech of
Aslan at
the conclusion of
The Narnia Chronicles:
"The term is over: the holidays
have begun. The dream is
ended: this is the morning."
The rather depressing
"Death Notices" box
that has attracted
Charlton Heston's gaze
in the online obituaries
pictured above might
be replaced as follows:
The Heston classic pictured
above is, let us recall,
based on a book titled
Ben-Hur: A Tale of
the Christ.
"I know this man!"
-- Charlton Heston
Time of this entry:
2:12:35.
Saturday, April 5, 2008 7:00 AM
ART WARS continued:
