From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2008 December 01-15
Monday, December 15, 2008 3:09 PM
Church of the Forbidden Planet:
Happy Birthday,
Julie Taymor
"Julie Taymor... will be directing Helen Mirren in a big-screen
adaptation of
The Tempest. Dame Helen, in a gender-switch
from the original, will be playing Prospera, the usurped Duchess
possessed of a vast library and magical powers."
-- John Murphy at
Bardolatry.com
on November 21, 2008
A vast library...
On searching for
Garden
of Eden patterns (GEP's):
"The grid is a staircase to the Universal...."
-- Rosalind Krauss, quoted here
on
Weyl's birthday, 2004
"I find the whole topic of GEPs a deeply interesting one, from many
viewpoints: mathematical, philosophical, physical....
... the obvious problem is, that the required computational time is
growing rapidly with the size of the grid, and even for a small grid,
like 4x4 (=16 cells) there are 2
16=
65536
possible patterns...."
--
cateye
at
RichardDawkins.net
... and magical powers
The date of cateye's post was Sunday, October 21, 2007.
For related material see Log24 on
Sunday,
October 21, 2007.
Sunday, December 14, 2008 4:00 PM
Two Weeks:
Epigraphs
The
New York Times of Sunday, May 6, 2007, on a writer of pulp
fiction:
His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were
published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in
one, with a lurid cover for each. "If the Holy Bible was printed as an
Ace Double," an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two
20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos'
and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'"
Epigraph for Part One:
"Ours
is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane."
-- James
A. Michener
Lurid cover:
The Pussycat
Epigraph for Part Two:
"Beware
lest you believe that you can comprehend the Incomprehensible...."
-- Saint
Bonaventure
Lurid cover:
The Owl
Click on the image for a
relevant Wallace Stevens poem.
Sunday, December 14, 2008 11:00 AM
Today's Sermon:
Ideas and Steps
"Somehow it seems to
fill my head with
ideas--
only I don't exactly know
what they are!.... Let's have
a look at
the
garden first!"
-- A passage from
Through the Looking-Glass
"... it's going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment of
the
Talented
in the scheme of things."
-- Anne
McCaffrey
On the seven steps of
Charles
Williams:
"If we assume Williams was responding to a
psychological need to express himself, then we may also assume that
Williams wrote these seven steps in compliance with Jung's theory that
an author, who believes strongly enough in some set of
ideas,
has to write about them."
-- Dennis L. Weeks (a
former
student of
Walter
J. Ong, S. J.) in
Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of
Coinherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams (New
York, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991), page 9
On the twelve steps of Christmas:
So set 'em up,
Joe...
Sunday, December 14, 2008 2:00 AM
ART WARS for MoMA:
Saturday, December 13, 2008 1:06 PM
For St. Lucy's Day:
Friday, December 12, 2008 6:34 PM
Voiceless and Voiced:
In memory
of
Van
Johnson:
"The
Voiceless Sinatra."
In memory of
Cardinal
Avery Dulles:
"The
God Factor."
Friday, December 12, 2008 3:09 PM
Garden Party, continued:
On the Symmetric Group S8
Wikipedia on Rubik's 2×2×2 "Pocket Cube"--
"Any permutation of the 8 corner cubies is possible (8! positions)."
Some pages related to this claim--
Simple
Groups at Play
Analyzing
Rubik's Cube with GAP
Online
JavaScript Pocket Cube.
The claim is of course trivially true for the unconnected subcubes of
Froebel's Third Gift:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Friday, December 12, 2008 12:24 PM
For Sinatra's Birthday:
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-- only I don't exactly
know what they are!.... Let's have a look at the garden first!"
-- A passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass.
The "garden" part-- but not the "ideas" part-- was quoted by Jacques
Derrida in Dissemination
in the
epigraph to Chapter 7, "The Time before First."
"'For you... he... we aren't meaning...' She was almost stammering, as
if she were trying to say several things at once.... Suddenly she gave
a little tortured scream. 'O!' she cried, 'O! I can't keep up! it keeps
dividing! There's too many things to think of!'"
-- A passage from Charles Williams's The
Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.
"He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out
of nothing and followed each other-- what was to will? Will was
determination to choose-- what was choice? How could there be choice,
unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no
choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring
nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by
taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it
indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all
that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen
thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not... So swiftly the
questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing
coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than
intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed
into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on
an unceasing and serpentine journey."
-- A passage from The
Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.
"Do
you like apples?"
-- Good Will Hunting
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:00 PM
Annals of Philosophy, continued:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 3:26 PM
Annals of Philosophy:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 10:00 AM
For Nobel Day:
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 7:00 PM
Day of the Fathers:
The Simplest Terms
"Broken down in the simplest terms, the story centres around two
warring factions, the 'Fathers' and the 'Friends.'"
-- Summary
of "Wild Palms"
Today's birthdays:
Kirk Douglas,
Buck Henry,
John Malkovich.
In a nutshell:
The
Soul's Code and
today's
previous entry.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 2:45 AM
True to His Code:
Monday, December 8, 2008 10:12 AM
Mathematics and Narrative:
Sunday, December 7, 2008 11:00 AM
Today's Sermon:
Space and
the Soul
On a
book by Margaret
Wertheim:
"She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante.
Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial
space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace." --Joe
J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago, in Library
Journal, 1999 (quoted at
Amazon.com)
There are also other sorts of space.
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Saturday, December 6, 2008 11:30 PM
An Indiana Jones Xmas:
X
Marks the Spot
Saturday, December 6, 2008 2:01 PM
But wait, there's more!
Another Opening,
Another Show
"While feasts of Saint Nicholas are not observed
nationally, cities with strong German influences like Milwaukee,
Cincinnati, and St. Louis celebrate St. Nick's Day on a scale similar
to the German custom." --
Wikipedia
A footprint from Germany:
The link in the above footprint leads
to
an entry of
July 5, 2006.
The access method:
|
"The Python urllib module
implements a fairly high-level
abstraction for making any web object with a URL act like a Python
file: i.e., you open it, and get back an object...." |
For more pictures and discussion
of the object fetched by Python,
see
Anti-Christmas
2007.
For a larger and more sophisticated
relative of that object,
see
Solomon's
Cube and
the related three presents
from the German link's target:
Saturday, December 6, 2008 11:30 AM
For St. Nick's Day:
Surprise Package
Saturday, December 6, 2008 12:09 AM
ART WARS:
Shining Forth
Abstraction
and Faith
On Kirk Varnedoe's National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott,
Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003):
"Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about
faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as
a kind of anti-religious faith in itself."
|
et
lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt
Mihai
Spariosu on Heidegger:
... the mirroring ...
is to be conceived of as
a shining forth, a play of mirror flashes,
as it were.... The four "mirrors"
emerge into presence as light
at the same time that they converge....
The above image:
Axes of Reflection
and
Annunciation,
the latter being a detail
of a fresco by Giotto
on the cover of
The
Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.
Happy
Feast of St. Nicholas.
Friday, December 5, 2008 4:30 PM
ART WARS...
Continued from
Monday:
A Version of
Heaven's Gate
in memory of
Alexy
II, the Russian Orthodox
patriarch who
died
today in Moscow:
The Pearly
Gates of Cyberspace:
From Geoffrey Broadbent,
"Why a Black Square?" in Malevich
(London, Art and Design/
Academy Group, 1989, p. 49):
"Malevich's
Black Square seems to be
nothing more, nor less, than his
'Non-Objective' representation
of Bragdon's (human-being-as) Cube
passing through the 'Plane of Reality.'!"
Friday, December 5, 2008 1:06 PM
Annals of Aesthetics:
Thursday, December 4, 2008 10:31 PM
Annals of Philosophy:
The Dormouse of Perception
This evening I noticed in the New York Times the
obituary of Oliver Selfridge, an early writer on artificial
intelligence and machine perception. Selfridge apparently died
yesterday. The author of the obituary is John Markoff, who
wrote a book on the early development of the personal computer in the
San Francisco area-- What the
Dormouse Said. The title quotes Grace Slick.
For the dormouse himself, see the
previous entry.
Thursday, December 4, 2008 12:00 PM
Script:
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 7:00 PM
Another Opening...
Another Show
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 2:18 AM
Memorial:
O is for Odetta
The New Yorker,
issue dated Nov. 17, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 11:09 AM
Annals of Journalism:
Smiley
A Penny
for My Thoughts?
by Maureen Dowd
"If an online newspaper in Pasadena, Calif.,
can outsource coverage to India, I wonder how long can it be before
some guy in Bangalore is writing my column...."
-- New York Times teaser for a column
of Sunday, November 30, 2008 (St.
Andrew's Day)
|
DH
News Service, Bangalore, Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008:
"Monday evening had a pleasant surprise in store for sky-watchers as
the night sky sported a smiley, in the form of a crescent moon flanked
by two bright planets Jupiter and Venus..." |
Meanwhile, at
National Geographic:
Jupiter,
Venus, Moon Make "Frown"
A Midrash for Maureen:
Related material on
Pasadena:
Happy birthday,
R. P. Dilworth.
Related material on
India:
The Shining of
May 29 (2002) and
A
Well-Known Theorem (2005).
"Sometimes a line of mathematical research
extending through decades can be thought of as one long conversation in
which many mathematicians take part. This is fortunately true at
present...."
-- Barry Mazur
in 2000
as quoted today at
the
University of St. Andrews
Monday, December 1, 2008 8:48 PM
On Conceptual Art:
A Version of
Heaven's Gate
in memory of
G.
H. Hardy,
who died on
this date in 1947
C. P. Snow on
Hardy:
"He was living in some of the best intellectual company in the world--
G.E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Trevelyan, the high Trinity
society which was shortly to find its artistic complement in
Bloomsbury."
For a rather different artistic complement, see
the
previous entry.
Monday, December 1, 2008 12:00 PM
ART WARS continued:
From Braque's
birthday, 2006:
"The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the
mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives."
-- Georges Braque,
Reflections on Painting, 1917
Those who wish to follow Braque's advice may try the following exercise
from a book first published in 1937:
Hint: See the following
construction of a tesseract:
