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 Durante Shari Lewis

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

Sunday, May 4, 2008 A Diploma for Frank from... The Old School   -- USA Weekend, Sunday, May 4, 2008 The Old School at Tidioute: A product of the old school: 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:



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)

"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?'"

"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...."

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

Saturday, May 10, 2008  8:00 AM

ART WARS continued:

RELATED MATERIAL

Figure 1 --
Concept from 1819:


(Footnotes 1 and 2)

Figure 2 --
The Third Gift, 1837:



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:



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



Figure 5 --
Design Cube, 2006:

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

•  Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube,
•  The Eightfold Cube, and
•  Block Designs.
  

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)



"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
 

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:



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



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...    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

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:

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

Related material
from Tuesday:



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

-- Play It As It Lays   

Wednesday, May 7, 2008  7:00 AM

Review:

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



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



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)

Related material:

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





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:



Related material:

2/16,  7/25

"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:



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

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  



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:



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:



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, 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 --

"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

-- USA Weekend, Sunday, May 4, 2008

The Old School at Tidioute: A product of the old school:

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:



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."

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 x,  f 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:

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

Today's Doonesbury
   (a flashback) --

-- Ernest Hemingway,
 A Moveable Feast