Wednesday, January 4, 2023
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Brightness at Noon*
A recent not-too-bright book from Princeton —
Some older, brighter books from Tony Zee —
Fearful Symmetry (1986) and
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (2003).
* Continued.
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Sunday, March 30, 2014
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Brightness at Noon (continued)
The eight parts of the semaphore circle
in the previous post suggest some context
for Fritz Leiber's eight-limb "spider" symbol:
See Mary Karr, Time on the Cross, and chuahaidong.org.
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Monday, June 10, 2013
Brightness at Noon (continued)
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Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Wikipedia:
The Chinese name of the gate, Tiānānmén 天安門 …
is made up of the Chinese characters for "heaven,"
"peace" and "gate" respectively, which is why the
name is conventionally translated as "The Gate of
Heavenly Peace". However, this translation is
somewhat misleading, since the Chinese name is
derived from the much longer phrase "receiving the
mandate from heaven, and stabilizing the dynasty."
Another anniversary today:
See also some related philosophy and mathematics.
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Monday, March 25, 2013
Brightness at Noon
The two symbols on the monolith from yesterday —
— may, if one likes, be interpreted as standing for
Damnation Morning and for the Windmill of Time
(alternately, as motifs for a ukara cloth).
The above explanation may help those confused by
knight's-move discourse like that described by
Jemima in The Eiger Sanction .
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Thursday, November 8, 2012
Brightness at Noon
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Monday, June 4, 2012
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Some background for this morning's post:
Margaret Masterman's Language, Cohesion and Form .
(See the morning post's footnote.)
Update of 12:25 PM EDT June 4, 2012—
See also "The Epiphany Philosophers" in the online
New York Times , a brief article dated September 19, 2008.
Jungians might enjoy a synchronistic note—
"Toward the Light," a brief post from this journal
on that same date.
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Monday, May 21, 2012
Brightness at Noon
Occultation according to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen, "Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins." (Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
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Friday, January 20, 2012
Brightness at Noon
See "harmonic analysis" in Mathematical Imagery and elsewhere in this journal.
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Friday, June 3, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
|
Hexagram 55 "Be not sad. |
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Monday, May 9, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Bright Star pictures (1 megabyte)
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Thursday, April 7, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Raiders of the Lost Tree— See Spelling the Tree, by Robert de Marrais.
See also "Bee Season" in this journal.
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Related material:
See a search for the author of
Venus on the Half-Shell .
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Sunday, February 20, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
From Epiphany Revisited —
A star figure and the Galois quaternion.
The square root of the former is the latter.
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
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Friday, February 11, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
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Thursday, February 3, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
"The predicate of bright origin"
— A phrase of Wallace Stevens from "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1950)
Perhaps the predicate Stevens means is "bright."
If so, an apt illustration can be found on the cover of
the 1943 first edition of Hesse's Glasperlenspiel—
See also Stevens's use of the phrase "heaven-haven" in "Notes" (1942),
the original plan of New Haven, and related scholia in this journal.
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
– Rubén Darío
An academic work from 2003 discusses Stevens's "Notes" as
"a perfect geometric whole."
Note that "perfect" means "complete, finished, done."
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Sunday, January 30, 2011
Brightness at Noon, continued…
A phrase suggested by last night's New York Times obituaries—
From Milton to Milton (click to enlarge)
The "green fields" is from Shakespeare.
The above author, Vinton Adams Dearing, died* on April 6, 2005. From this journal on that date, some babbling.
"Have your people call my people." — George Carlin
* See Dearing's page 34 —
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Brightness at Noon, continued–
"This is that 'once in a lifetime,'
this is the thrill divine."
— Dorcas Cochran, "Again"
Background—
Today's previous post as well as Loretta's Rainbow,
the "hole in the record" theme in The Third Wor*d War,
"Is Nothing Sacred?," and James Joyce's Birthday, 2009.
See also "the name of the story" in this journal.
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Brightness at Noon, continued
"One wild rhapsody a fake for another."
– Wallace Stevens, "Arrival at the Waldorf," in Parts of a World (1942)
"Camelot is an illusion.
That doesn't matter, according to Catherine.
Camelot is an artificial construction, a public perception.
The things that matter are closer, deeper, self-generated, unkillable.
You've got to grow up to discover what those things are."
— Dan Zak, Washington Post movie review on Feb. 27, 2009. See also this journal on that date.
See as well a note on symmetry from Christmas Eve, 1981, and Verbum in this journal.
Some philosophical background— Derrida in the Garden.
Some historical background— A Very Private Woman and Noland.
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Sunday, December 12, 2010
Brightness at Noon continued…
A picture one might view as
related to the novel An Object of Beauty
and the film "The Object of Beauty" —
"If it's a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo." — Margaret Atwood
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Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Happy birthday to Mira Sorvino (Harvard '89).
Related material: June 9 and June 10, 2008.
A more dramatic presentation, also done on June 9-10, 2008—
Alicia Keys, "Superwoman" video.
Happy dies natalis to Miles Davis—
"… nothing ever truly dies. The universe wastes nothing. Everything is simply… transformed."
— Keanu Reeves in the 2008 "Day the Earth Stood Still." (See today's 11:07 AM entry.)
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Sunday, September 12, 2010
Brightness at Noon continued
16 + 9 = 25.
See also this morning's entry and "June 25" in this journal.
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Monday, July 26, 2010
Brightness at Noon continued
Riddle
"Midnight in the Garden continued," a post of 12:00 AM July 20, posed the riddle of what the previous day's NY Lottery midday "440" might mean.
A jocular answer was given. Some background for a more serious answer—
Paul Newall, “Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy”—
“Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband’s. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski’s that ‘different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.’ With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed.”
In honor of Wye Jamison Allanbrook, author of Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, we note that 440 is Concert A.
Allanbrook died on July 15. See this journal on that date—
Angels in the Architecture,
Happy Birthday, and
Brightness at Noon.
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Thursday, July 15, 2010
Brightness at Noon, continued
"What exactly was Point Omega?"
This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—
The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."
For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified—
The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.
For related darkness at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra—
The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institution— Deconstruction in a Nutshell—
For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.
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Sunday, July 4, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Today's sermon mentioned the phrase "Omega number."
Other sorts of Omega numbers— 24 and 759— occur
in connection with the set named Ω by R. T. Curtis in 1976—
— R. T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M24,"
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. (1976), 79, 25-42
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Monday, June 28, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
See David Corfield,
"The Robustness of Mathematical Entities."
This is an abstract from a paper at a conference,
"From Practice to Results in Logic and Mathematics"
(June 21st-23rd, 2010, Archives Henri Poincaré,
University of Nancy (France)).
See also Corfield's post "Inevitability in Mathematics"
at the n-Category Café today. He links to an earlier
post, "Mathematical Robustness." From that post—
…let’s see what Michiel Hazewinkel has to say
in his paper Niceness theorems:
It appears that many important mathematical objects
(including counterexamples) are unreasonably
nice, beautiful and elegant. They tend to have
(many) more (nice) properties and extra bits
of structure than one would a priori expect….
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Friday, June 18, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
 |
Leibniz Medal Background: |
Related material— Street of the Fathers and Game Over.
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Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Brightness at Noon
David Levine's portrait of Arthur Koestler (see Dec. 30, 2009) —
See also this morning's post as well as
Monday's post quoting George David Birkhoff —
"If I were a Leibnizian mystic… I would say that…
God thinks multi-dimensionally — that is,
uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp."
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Thursday, June 10, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
Continued from Christmas 2009 and from last Sunday—
The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace."
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Friday, June 4, 2010
Brightness at Noon
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Brightness at Noon, continued
The Galois Quaternion
|
I had foreseen it all in precise detail. i = an imaginary being Here, on this complex space, |
Related material:
The Galois Quaternion
Click for context.
(See also Nativity and the end
of this morning's post.)
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Monday, December 28, 2009
Brightness at Noon, continued
This journal’s Christmas Day entry, Brightness at Noon, was in response to the Orwellian headline “Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness,” at the top of the online New York Times front page on Christmas morning.
The entry offered, as an example of brightness, some thoughts of Leibniz on his discovery of binary arithmetic.
Related material:
“To make all things from nothing, unity suffices.” So it is written on a medal entitled Imago Creationis and designed by Leibniz to “exhibit to posterity in silver” his discovery of the binary system. Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (also Leibnitz) 1646-1716. Philosopher and mathematician. Invented calculus independently of Newton. Proposed the metaphysical theory that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” He also discovered binary number system and believed in its profound metaphysical significance. He noticed similarity with the ancient Chinese divination system “I Ching.” We chose him for our patron, for Krawtchuk polynomials can be understood as a sophistication of the simple counting of 0 and 1… — Philip Feinsilver and Jerzy Kocik, 17 July 2001 |
From Mikhail Krawtchouk: Short Biography—
Anyone knowing even a little Soviet history of the thirties can conclude that Krawtchouk could not avoid the Great Terror. During the Orwellian “hours of hatred” in 1937 he was denounced as a “Polish spy,” “bourgeois nationalist,” etc. In 1938, he was arrested and sentenced to 20 years of confinement and 5 years of exile.
Academician Krawtchouk, the author of results which became part of the world’s mathematical knowledge, outstanding lecturer, member of the French, German, and other mathematical societies, died on March 9, 1942, in Kolyma branch of the GULAG (North-Eastern Siberia) more than 6 months short of his 50th birthday.
Incidentally, happy birthday
to John von Neumann.
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Friday, December 25, 2009
Brightness at Noon
New York Times online front page
Christmas morning:
"Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness"–
The photo is of Koestler in 1931 on a zeppelin expedition to the North Pole.
"The Act of Creation is, I believe, a more truly creative work than any of Koestler’s novels…. According to him, the creative faculty in whatever form is owing to a circumstance which he calls ‘bisociation.’ And we recognize this intuitively whenever we laugh at a joke, are dazzled by a fine metaphor, are astonished and excited by a unification of styles, or ’see,’ for the first time, the possibility of a significant theoretical breakthrough in a scientific inquiry. In short, one touch of genius—or bisociation—makes the whole world kin. Or so Koestler believes.”
– Henry David Aiken, The Metaphysics of Arthur Koestler, New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 1964
From Opus Postumum by Immanuel Kant, Eckart Förster, Cambridge U. Press, 1995, p. 260:
"In January 1697, Leibniz accompanied his New Year Congratulations to Rudolf August with the design of a medal with the duke's likeness on one side, and the 'image of Creation' in terms of the binary number system on the other. Concerning the inscription on this side, Leibniz writes: 'I have thought for a while about the Motto dell'impresa and finally have found it good to write this line: omnibus ex nihilo ducendis SUFFICIT UNUM [To make all things from nothing, UNITY SUFFICES], because it clearly indicates what is meant by the symbol, and why it is imago creationis' (G. F. Leibniz, Zwei Briefe über das binäre Zahlensystem und die chinesische Philosophie, ed. Renate Loosen and Franz Vonessen, Chr. Belser Verlag: Stuttgart 1968, p. 21)."
Figure from Rudolf Nolte’s
Gottfried Wilhelms Baron von Leibniz
Mathematischer Beweis der Erschaffung und
Ordnung der Welt in einem Medallion…
(Leipzig: J. C. Langenheim, 1734).
"And so that I won’t come entirely empty-handed this time, I enclose a design of that which I had the pleasure of discussing with you recently. It is in the form of a memorial coin or medallion; and though the design is mediocre and can be improved in accordance with your judgment, the thing is such, that it would be worth showing in silver now and unto future generations, if it were struck at your Highness’s command. Because one of the main points of the Christian Faith, and among those points that have penetrated least into the minds of the worldly-wise and that are difficult to make with the heathen is the creation of all things out of nothing through God’s omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing. And it would be difficult to find a better illustration of this secret in nature or philosophy; hence I have set on the medallion design IMAGO CREATIONIS [in the image of creation]. It is no less remarkable that there appears therefrom, not only that God made everything from nothing, but also that everything that He made was good; as we can see here, with our own eyes, in this image of creation. Because instead of there appearing no particular order or pattern, as in the common representation of numbers, there appears here in contrast a wonderful order and harmony which cannot be improved upon….
Such harmonious order and beauty can be seen in the small table on the medallion up to 16 or 17; since for a larger table, say to 32, there is not enough room. One can further see that the disorder, which one imagines in the work of God, is but apparent; that if one looks at the matter with the proper perspective, there appears symmetry, which encourages one more and more to love and praise the wisdom, goodness, and beauty of the highest good, from which all goodness and beauty has flowed."
See also Parable.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Eerie Twist
(Continued from Nov. 15, 2011)
Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93
See also a post of Jan. 20, 2011, and an earlier post on Twelfth Night, 2010.
A star figure and the Galois quaternion.
The square root of the former is the latter.
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
The Barnes School
Randy Kennedy in tomorrow's print edition
of The New York Times—
Art collector Albert C. Barnes "viewed his foundation
less as a museum than as a school."
Roberta Smith in the New York Times
print edition of May 18, 2012, on
art arrangements by Albert C. Barnes—
"Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening,
intoxicating and, at times, maddening as ever, maybe more so.
They mix major and minor in relentlessly symmetrical patchworks
that argue at once for the idea of artistic genius and the
pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an exhibition
unto itself— a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities…."
This journal at noon on the same day, May 18, 2012—
Balakrishnan's Banners
See also Brightness at Noon from March 25.
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Monday, February 6, 2012
Savage Logic
|
Saturday, October 16, 2010 m759 @ 12:00 PM Brightness at Noon continued – Sir William Rowan Hamilton, See also this journal on 1/09, 2010. |
This post was suggested by the date
of a user comment in Wikipedia.
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Friday, April 8, 2011
Hello Note
(Continued from yesterday's Brightness at Noon, Afternoon Delight, and Goodbye Note.)
"The Catholic Church, through the Holy Office, has declared it is not lawful 'to take part in spiritualistic communications or manifestations of any kind, whether through a so-called medium or without one, whether hypnotism is used or not, even with the best of intentions among the participants, whether for the purpose of interrogating the souls of the departed or spiritual beings, whether by listening to their responses or even in idle curiosity, even with the tacit or express protestation of not having anything to do with the evil spirits' (Denzinger 3642*).
Behind the church's attitude toward Spiritualism is the concern that a Catholic would expose himself to the risk of actually dealing with the evil spirit. The assumption is that if fraud or deception are excluded, and manifestations occur that are beyond natural explanation, the active agent in these cases is neither God nor any one of the good spirits (whether angelic or human) but demonic forces that are sure to mislead the Catholic and endanger the integrity of his faith."
* 3642 2182 Qu.: An liceat per Medium, ut vocant, vel sine Medio, adhibito vel non hypnotismo, locutionibus aut manifestationibus spiritisticis quibuscumque adsistere, etiam speciem honestatis vel pietatis praeseferentibus, sive interrogando animas aut spiritus, sive audiendo responsa, sive tantum aspiciendo, etiam cum protestatione tacita vel expressa, nullam cum malignis spiritibus partem se habere velle. Resp.: (cfirm. a S. P'ce, 26 avril): Negative in omnibus.
See also The Ecclesiastical Review , Volume 57,
by Catholic University of America, page 186.
This volume, from Harvard University, was digitized on June 19, 2008.
Katherine Neville, The Eight—
"Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door."
See also The Maker's Gift.
* Corrected Dec. 14, 2014, from "Combinatorial."
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Cramer’s Bridge
A comment yesterday at Peter Woit's weblog—
Glenn says:
March 14, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Perhaps John G. Cramer’s prediction will come true after all?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Bridge_(book)
Of course, in that case, the proof would exist on a world-line
inaccessible to any living observer.
New York Lottery—
Related material:
From the weblog of Cramer's daughter Kathryn on Feb. 28—
For 928. see the two posts from last year's 9/28 in this journal—
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Friday, November 5, 2010
Seize the Day*
From last night's post—
"… right now…. winning the day…."
— President Obama on the 16th of October (between 5:19 and 5:37 PM EDT)
This journal on the 16th of October—
Saturday, October 16, 2010Quaternion DayBrightness at Noon continued – Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Oct. 16, 1843 See also this journal on 1/09, 2010. |
Related religious material from Thomas Pynchon—
* Material related to this post's title, "Seize the Day"—
Indirectly related — an ad for the new film Black Swan
accompanying a Halloween story in yesterday's online New York Times —
More directly related —
Black Swan Theory at Wikipedia —
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Saturday, October 16, 2010
Quaternion Day
Brightness at Noon continued
— Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Oct. 16, 1843
See also this journal on 1/09, 2010.
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Saturday, July 3, 2010
Devising Entities
or, Darkness and Brightness at Noon
"Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation…. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional."
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega
GF(4) = {0, 1, ω, ω2}
— Symbolic representation of a Galois field
"One two three four,
who are we for?"
— Cheerleaders' chant
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Sunday, June 27, 2010
Bright Star (continued)
From Epiphany 2010—
The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word."
– Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
Pennsylvania Lottery yesterday—
Saturday, June 26, 2010: Midday 846, Evening 106
Interpretation—
Context:
Yesterday's morning post, Plato's Logos
Yesterday's evening post, Bold and Brilliant Emergence
Poem 846, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
"bird-song at morning and star-shine at night"
Poem 106, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
" All labourers draw home at even"
The number 106 may also be read as 1/06, the date of Epiphany.
Posts on Epiphany 2010—
9:00 AM Epiphany Revisited
12:00 PM Brightness at Noon
9:00 PM The Difference
Related material—
Plato's
Tombstone
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Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Artifice of Eternity
A Medal
In memory of Byzantine scholar Ihor Sevcenko,
who died at 87 on St. Stephen's Day, 2009–
| William Grimes on Sevcenko in this morning's New York Times:
"Perhaps his most fascinating, if uncharacteristic, literary contribution came shortly after World War II, when he worked with Ukrainians stranded in camps in Germany for displaced persons. In April 1946 he sent a letter to Orwell, asking his permission to translate 'Animal Farm' into Ukrainian for distribution in the camps. The idea instantly appealed to Orwell, who not only refused to accept any royalties but later agreed to write a preface for the edition. It remains his most detailed, searching discussion of the book." |
See also a rather different medal discussed
here in the context of an Orwellian headline from
The New York Times on Christmas morning,
the day before Sevcenko died.
That headline, at the top of the online front page,
was "Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness."
The medal, offered as an example of brightness
to counteract the darkness of the Times, was designed
by Leibniz in honor of his discovery of binary arithmetic.
See Brightness at Noon and Brightness continued.
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
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