From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane... 2008 May 01-15

Tuesday, May 13, 2008  11:00 AM

Context-Sensitive Theology, continued:

Only the Dead
Know Brooklyn


(continued from April 2004)

David Brooks in
today's New York Times:

"The mind seems to have
the ability to transcend itself
and merge with a larger
presence that feels more real."

Sometimes in rather strange ways... An example--

Sunday morning's entry Annals of Poetry was linked, via the word "tesseract," to an entry of May 12, 2006, which in turn had a link to the Log24 entries of February 1-15, 2003. From those entries:

Monday, Feb. 10, 2003

Singing-Masters

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
— William Butler Yeats

Jimmy Durante

Durante

Shari Lewis on cover of 'Party in Shariland'

Shari Lewis


Last Sunday night (May 11),
Turner Classic Movies
showed a film featuring
Jimmy Durante as a
singing-master of
Frank Sinatra:

Movie poster for 'It Happened in Brooklyn'

From earlier this month,
an entry featuring Sinatra and a
different singing-master -- not from
Brooklyn but from Tidioute --

Sunday, May 4, 2008

A Diploma for Frank from...

The Old School

Sinatra on cover of USA Weekend, Sunday, May 4, 2008
 
The Old School
at Tidioute:

The old Tidioute High School, now Tidioute Community Charter School

A product of
the old school
:

Tidioute girl

These little town blues...

"... all good things -- trout as well as
  eternal salvation -- come by grace
and grace comes by art
  and art does not come easy."

-- A River Runs Through It


Monday, May 12, 2008  12:00 AM

Time and Chance, continued:

Sunday's New York
lottery numbers:

NY Lottery Sunday, May 11, 2008: mid-day and evening numbers were both 313.

See also 3/13, 2006.


Sunday, May 11, 2008  10:31 AM

Annals of Poetry:

May and Zan

May Swenson, left, and Zan Knudson, right

May Swenson (left)
and Zan Knudson (right)


In memory of poet May Swenson and sports novelist Rozanne Ruth "Zan" Knudson:

Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times:
"It's a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn's star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in 'Pat and Mike.'

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he's in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, 'You are the wrong jockey for this chick.'

'You know, except when you're around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,' he says, later adding, 'When you're around, she's no good, she's dead, see?'"

Girl in tesseract on cover of  'The Gameplayers of Zan'

Summary of M. A. Foster's
The Gameplayers of Zan:

"Then she has a vision of herself,
enclosed by an unfolded hypercube,
and then an immense screen
behind it covered by complex,
     ever-shifting patterns...."

"Christ! What are
 patterns for?"
-- Amy Lowell   

"Does the word 'tesseract'
mean anything to you?
"
-- Robert A. Heinlein


Saturday, May 10, 2008  8:00 AM

ART WARS continued:

MoMA Goes to
Kindergarten

"... the startling thesis of Mr. Brosterman's new book, 'Inventing Kindergarten' (Harry N. Abrams, $39.95): that everything the giants of modern art and architecture knew about abstraction they learned in kindergarten, thanks to building blocks and other educational toys designed by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who coined the term 'kindergarten' in the 1830's."

-- "Was Modernism Born
     in Toddler Toolboxes?"
     by Trip Gabriel, New York Times,
     April 10, 1997

RELATED MATERIAL

Figure 1 --
Concept from 1819:

Cubic crystal system
(Footnotes 1 and 2)

Figure 2 --
The Third Gift, 1837:


Froebel's third gift

Froebel's Third Gift

Froebel, the inventor of
kindergarten, worked as
an assistant to the
crystallographer Weiss
mentioned in Fig. 1.

(Footnote 3)

Figure 3 --
The Third Gift, 1906:

Seven partitions of the eightfold cube in a book from 1906

Figure 4 --
Solomon's Cube,
1981 and 1983:


Solomon's Cube - A 1981 design by Steven H. Cullinane

Figure 5 --
Design Cube, 2006:


Design Cube 4x4x4 by Steven H. Cullinane

The above screenshot shows a
moveable JavaScript display
of a space of six dimensions
(over the two-element field).

(To see how the display works,
try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.)

For some mathematical background, see
Footnotes:

1. Image said to be after Holden and Morrison, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 1982
2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs
3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9


Friday, May 9, 2008  10:31 AM

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

Cubist Language Game

"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 


Monday:

From Log24 on
August 19, 2003
and on
Ash Wednesday, 2004:
a reviewer on
An Instance of the Fingerpost::

"Perhaps we are meant to
 see the story as a cubist
 retelling of the crucifixion."

Related material
for today's anniversay
of the birth of philosopher
Jose Ortega y Gasset:

Cubism as Multispeech

and
Halloween Meditations
(illustrated below)

Cover of 'The Gameplayers of Zan,' by M.A. Foster


"Modern art...
will always have
the masses against it."
-- Ortega y Gasset, 1925   


Friday, May 9, 2008  9:00 AM

ART WARS continued:

Kernel of Eternity
continued from April 29

 
The Klein Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity

Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):
In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.
For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and Steven Erlanger in The New York Times-- "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest."

The Klein Group as Kernel
of a Map from S4 to S3:

Portrait of O:  The Klein Group as Kernel in  the Symmetric Group of Degree Four

Click to enlarge.

For those who prefer Galois's
politics to his mathematics,
there is
MAY 68: STREET POSTERS
FROM THE PARIS REBELLION

at London's Southbank Centre
 (May 1 - June 1, 2008).


Thursday, May 8, 2008  4:48 PM

ART WARS continued:

Synchronicity,
Part Deux


Footprints at Log24 on the afternoon of May 8, 2008, including two from France

From
"On the Holy Trinity,"
the entry in the 3:20 PM
French footprint:

"...while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time...
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events...."

-- Vladimir Nabokov

From
"Angel in the Details,"
 the entry in the 3:59 PM
French footprint:

"I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose"

-- Emily Dickinson


These, along with this afternoon's
earlier entry, suggest a review
of a third Log24 item, Windmills,
with an actress from France as...

Changing Woman:

"Kaleidoscope turning...

Juliette Binoche in 'Blue'  The 24 2x2 Cullinane Kaleidoscope animated images

Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure..."
-- Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat  

"When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?"

-- For the source, see 
Joyce's Nightmare Continues.


Thursday, May 8, 2008  1:00 PM

Annals of Religion, continued:

Synchronicity

Today is the feast of
Saint Robert A. Heinlein.

Time of the above: 1:00 PM.
Update of 2:07 PM --

On the local Charlie Rose broadcast today at about 1:48 PM, Paola Antonelli, the organizer of an exhibit at MoMA, "Design and the Elastic Mind," talked about science fiction's influence (or non-influence) on the exhibit. She used the metaphor "the day after tomorrow." As I had just written a link relating design, science fiction, and May 10 (the date of the literal day after tomorrow-- click on "feast" above), I found her remarks of interest. Here is a related passage from a web page.

Paola Antonelli, curator of 'Design and the Elastic Mind' at MoMA

Paola Antonelli
Photo Credit: Andrea Ciotti

Antonelli on scientists as designers who do not call themselves designers:

"So they all try to reach out. They have that in common. Then what they have in common is this attempt to... propose something for the real future. I don't really like science fiction, but I like to think of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow."

Amen.


Thursday, May 8, 2008  12:00 PM

Annals of Religion:

Star Wars
continued from
May 25, 2003

Israel turns 60

Wed., May 7, 2008
2:23 PM EDT
By Dan Williams

"JERUSALEM, May 7 (Reuters) -
 Fireworks and military fanfare
 launched Israel's 60th anniversary
 celebrations on Wednesday..."

Related material
from Tuesday:

Mailer's 'The Time of Our Time' May 5, 1998, cover with fireworks starburst


"... someone was down sixty,
   someone was up...."

-- Play It As It Lays   



Wednesday, May 7, 2008  7:00 AM

Review:

Forms of the Rock

"point A / In a perspective
that begins again / At B"

-- Wallace Stevens,
The Rock

See also

August 2, 2002

January 20, 2003

April 8, 2003

December 5, 2004

December 10, 2004

January 11, 2006

April 30, 2006

July 29, 2006

August 25, 2006

August 26, 2006

February 6, 2007

July 23, 2007

July 24, 2007

September 30, 2007

April 14, 2008

Christmas Eve, 1981


Tuesday, May 6, 2008  11:07 AM

Mailer's Wake:

In the Dreamtime
the Point Was Ten

From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) --

Page 170:

                                             "... In her half sleep
the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the
only man that could ever reach her was the son of a
preacher man
, someone was down sixty, someone was
up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted
pony let the spinning wheel spin
.

By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for

170    

even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."

For further details
see yesterday's entries.

"In her half sleep  
     the point was ten...."
-- Play It As It Lays 

The Random House

Random House logo (color-reversed image)

signed first edition
of Norman Mailer's
The Time of Our Time
(4 pounds, 1286 pages)
was published
  ten years ago yesterday --

May 5, 1998:
Fireworks starburst
on the cover of
The Time of Our Time


Mailer's 'The Time of Our Time' May 5, 1998, cover with fireworks starburst

Also from May 5, 1998:
  File Photo in Mailer's obituary --

(Photo by Bebeto Matthews
with Mailer obituary in

Toronto Globe and Mail)

with excerpt from the obituary,
by Richard Pyle


(Associated Press
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007
at 8:20 AM EDT)

Norman Mailer, May 5, 1998 (with notes)

Related material:


Yesterday's entries and
the time of this entry:
11:07:51 AM ET

CHANGE WE MAY BELIEVE IN sign, adapted from a current political campaign

I Ching hexagram 51: The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)

51
THE JUDGMENT

SHOCK brings success.
Shock comes - oh, oh!
Laughing words - ha, ha!

in light of...
 
A:  Mailer's fireworks starburst
   
   on his book cover from
      ten years ago yesterday
     
B:  A real starburst in a story
     from ten years ago today.
 

Monday, May 5, 2008  11:07 PM

Short Story:

Time and the River

"At the edge of the meadow
flowed the river.

Nick was glad
to get to the river.

He walked upstream
through the meadow."

-- Ernest Hemingway

Pennsylvania Lottery
May 5, 2008:


PA Lottery May 5, 2008: mid-day 216, evening 725

Related material:

2/167/25

"In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today."

-- Ernest Hemingway,
Big Two-Hearted River


Monday, May 5, 2008  9:00 PM

Annals of Fear and Loathing:

"All our words from loose using
have lost their edge."
 -- Ernest Hemingway    


Look Homeward, Norman

New York Lottery
May 5, 2008:

NY Lottery May 5, 2008: mid-day 098, evening 411

The evening number,
411, may be interpreted
as 4/11. From Log24
on that date:

NYT obituaries, morning of Friday, April 11, 2008-- Carousel designer and family tribute to Norman Mailer

Click on image for further details.

Ride a painted pony
let the spinning
wheel spin.

As for the mid-day number
098, a Google search
(with the aid of, in retrospect,
the above family tribute)
 on "98 'Norman Mailer'"
yields

Amazon.com:
The Time of Our Time
(Modern Library Paperbacks ...
With The Time of Our Time (1998) Norman Mailer has archetypalized himself and in the seven years since publication, within which films Fear and Loathing in ...

From an unattributed
"editorial review" of
  The Time of Our Time
at Amazon.com:

"Surely this sense of himself
as the republic's recording angel
accounts for the structure
of Mailer's anthology...."

Related material:

From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) --

Page 170:

                                             "... In her half sleep
the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the
only man that could ever reach her was the son of a
preacher man
, someone was down sixty, someone was
up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted
pony let the spinning wheel spin
.

By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for

170    

even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."

The number 411 from
this evening's New York Lottery
may thus be regarded as naming the
"exact point in space and time"
sought in the above passage.

For a related midrash
on the meaning of the
passage's page number,
see the previous entry.

For a more plausible
recording angel,
see Sinatra's birthday,
December 12, 2002.


Monday, May 5, 2008  11:07 AM

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

Lottery Sermon

"And take upon's
the mystery of things
 as if we were God's spies"
-- King Lear  

PA Lottery Sunday, May 4, 2008: mid-day 170, evening 144

From Log24 on Aug. 19, 2003
and on Ash Wednesday, 2004:
a reviewer on
An Instance of the Fingerpost::

"Perhaps we are meant to
see the story as a cubist
   retelling of the crucifixion."

From Log24 on
Michaelmas 2007:


Kate Beckinsale (in 'Pearl Harbor') pointing to an instance of the number 144

Google searches suggested by
Sunday's PA lottery numbers
(mid-day 170, evening 144)
and by the above
figure of Kate Beckinsale
pointing to an instance of
the number 144 --

Click to enlarge:

Search for the meaning of 170 and 144, the PA lottery numbers of Sunday, May 4, 2008

Related material:

Beckinsale in another film
(See At the Crossroads,
Log24, Dec. 8, 2006):

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
-- Gravity's Rainbow  
 
Kate Beckinsale in Underworld: Evolution

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)
 
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.
-- A Wrinkle in Time 

"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."

-- Review of  
Faust in Copenhagen

From the conclusion of
Joan Didion's 1970 novel
  Play It As It Lays --

Cover of 'Play It As It Lays'

"I know what 'nothing' means,
and keep on playing."

From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) --

Page 170:

"By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
about where her body stopped and the air began,
about the exact point in space and time that was the
difference between Maria and other. She had the sense
that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for

170  

even one micro-second she would have what she had
come to get."

"The page numbers
are generally reliable."

-- Michaelmas 2007   


Sunday, May 4, 2008  10:12 AM

A Diploma for Frank from...

The Old School

Sinatra on cover of USA Weekend, Sunday, May 4, 2008
 
The Old School
at Tidioute:

The old Tidioute High School, now Tidioute Community Charter School

A product of
the old school
:

Tidioute girl

These little town blues...

"... all good things -- trout as well as
  eternal salvation -- come by grace
and grace comes by art
  and art does not come easy."

-- A River Runs Through It


Saturday, May 3, 2008  11:07 PM

Annals of Theology, continued:

"Teach us to
 number our days."


-- Psalm 90, verse 12 

The New Yorker,
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007 --

James Wood on Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms:

"At any time, God can cancel a life. 'So teach us to number our days,' as the King James Version has it, 'that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.'....

The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as 'Hell,' even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words 'victory' and 'rescue' as translations of yeshu'ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded 'salvation.' And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: 'So teach us to number our days.'"

Today's numbers from the
Pennsylvania Lottery:

PA Lottery Saturday, May 3, 2008: Mid-day 510, Evening 724

which, being interpreted,
is 5/10 and 7/24.

Selah.


Friday, May 2, 2008  12:00 PM

Mr. Holland's Week, continued:

A Balliol Star

In memory of
mathematician
Graham Higman of
 Balliol College and
Magdalen College,
Oxford,
  Jan. 19, 1917 -
April 8, 2008

From a biography of an earlier Balliol student, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889):

"In 1867 he won First-Class degrees in Classics and 'Greats' (a rare 'double-first') and was considered by Jowett to be the star of Balliol."

Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1888

Hopkins, a poet who coined the term "inscape," was a member of the Society of Jesus.

According to a biography, Higman was the founder of Oxford's Invariant Society.

From a publication of that society, The Invariant, Issue 15-- undated but (according to Issue 16, of 2005) from 1996 (pdf):

Taking the square root
  of a function

 by Ian Collier

"David Singmaster once gave a talk at the Invariants and afterwards asked this question:

What is the square root of the exponential function? In other words, can you define a function f such that for all xf 2(x) -- that is, f ( f (x)) -- is equal to e x ? He did not give the answer straight away so I attempted it...."

Another approach to the expression f(f(x)), by myself in 1982:

Inscapes II by Steven H. Cullinane: f(f(x)) and power sets

For further details,
see Inscapes.

For more about Higman, see an interview in the September 2001 newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (pdf).

"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 


Thursday, May 1, 2008  12:00 PM

For the First of May:

Back from
the Shadows


C. G. Jung on cover of 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'

                        "I sat upon the shore  
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me"

-- The Waste Land, lines 423-424

Eliot's note on line 424 --

"V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance;
chapter on the Fisher King."

From Ritual to Romance,
by Jessie L. Weston,
Cambridge University Press, 1920,
 Chapter IX, "The Fisher King"--

"So far as the present state of our knowledge goes we can affirm with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages, been associated with Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life."

Weston quotes a writer she does not name* who says that "the Fish was sacred to those deities who were supposed to lead men back from the shadows of death to life."

* The Open Court, June and July 1911, p. 168

Today's Doonesbury
   (a flashback) --


Doonesbury of May 1, 2008: Flashback to Uncle Duke on the leader of Berzerkistan

"Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake."

-- Ernest Hemingway,
 A Moveable Feast

Hemingway on the cover of LIFE magazine, 1961

Selah.