Log24

Friday, August 9, 2019

The Next Thing

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:00 am

From posts tagged The Next Thing

an apt illustration can be found on the cover of
the 1943 first edition of Hesse's Glasperlenspiel 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110203-Glasperlenspiel1943-Detail.jpg

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.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110203-Scholia.jpg

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."

 

Sunday, June 5, 2016

The Shining of May 29…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Continues .

A death on May 29,  from The Fresno Bee —

See as well "La Diadema de la Muerte."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120108-CardinalPreoccupied.jpg

"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Joining the Cavalcade

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:48 am

The author featured in the previous post, one "Stephen Marlowe,"
reportedly died on February 22, 2008.

From his New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox —

"Mr. Marlowe was born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn
on Aug. 7, 1928. He received his bachelor’s degree
in philosophy from the College of William and Mary
in 1949. Under his original name, he began his
career in the early 1950s writing science fiction.

In the late ’50s, Mr. Lesser legally changed his name
to Stephen Marlowe, one of several pen names he
regularly used. (Among the others were Andrew Frazer,
Darius John Granger, C. H. Thames, Stephen Wilder,
Jason Ridgway and Adam Chase. In his 1961 novel
Dead Man’s Tale , Mr. Lesser joined the cavalcade of
ghostwriters who published under the name Ellery Queen.)"

From this journal on the date of Marlowe's reported death —

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte

— Rubén Darío

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Star Wars (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:29 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110219-SquareRootQuaternion.jpg

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.
"

– Rubén Darío

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Rhetorical Answer

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

NOW ENJOY BRILLIANT COLLEGE COURSES
IN YOUR HOME OR CAR!

The sun was burning down….

There was a trembling in the air as the unnamed colors
and landforms took on definition, a clarity of outline and extent….

This is where we sat through his hushed hour, a torchlit sky,
the closeness of hills barely visible at high white noon.

— DeLillo, Don, Point Omega 

Midi là-haut, Midi sans mouvement 
En soi se pense et convient à soi-même… 
Tête complète et parfait diadème, 
Je suis en toi le secret changement.

— Valéry, Paul,  "Le Cimetière Marin"

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

— Darío, Rubén, "Los Tres Reyes Magos"

Friday, August 26, 2011

Abel Prize

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:57 pm

The previous posts, Design and Solomon's Labyrinth,
refer, respectively,  to concepts of Tits ("buildings") and
of Thompson (imagining a future Origin of Groups ).

This suggests a review of Norway's 2008 Abel Prize,
presented to Thompson and Tits on May 20, 2008.

Poster display before the 2008 Abel Prize ceremony—

Click to enlarge.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110826-PosterDisplay.jpg

A poster of sorts in this journal on the same day, May 20, 2008—

Bright Star –

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte

– Rubén Darío  

Bright Star and Crystal Skull

Image adapted from
Blue Star Traders

Related material— Epiphany Revisited, Four Winds,
and Where Entertainment is God (continued).

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Brightness at Noon (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

From Epiphany Revisited

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110219-SquareRootQuaternion.jpg

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.

Rubén Darío

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Brightness at Noon (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"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

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110203-Glasperlenspiel1943-Detail.jpg

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.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110203-Scholia.jpg

… 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."

Monday, August 30, 2010

Re-Imagining

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:01 pm

A New York Times  story from the Feast of St. Augustine
("A version of this article appeared in print on August 28, 2010,
on page A17 of the New York edition.") —

22-Story Fall in Manhattan
Kills Daughter of U.S. Envoy

By AL BAKER and KAREN ZRAICK

With summer winding down, Eric G. John, the United States ambassador to Thailand, made a trip familiar to many parents: he accompanied his 17-year-old daughter to New York as she got ready for her first year of college.

But his daughter, Nicole, barely experienced being a freshman at Parsons The New School For Design, near Union Square.

She died early Friday [August 27, 2010] after falling 22 floors from a high-rise apartment building in Herald Square after a night out that led her and friends to a party at the high-rise….

The Thailand and Design links above are the Times's.
The August 27 link is not.

Clicking on the Times's Design link leads to…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100830-Parsons.jpg

Re-Imagining Orozco

June 25 – September 12, 2010

Opening reception: June 24, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

This journal, June 24, 12:31 p.m.

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

– Rubén Darío

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Star Wars

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100627-TahomaAster.jpg

The above asterisk, from the Tahoma font, suggests
a figure from "Diablo Ballet" (Jan. 21, 2003)—

“At the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot

Another asterisk figure,  
from Twelfth Night 2010—

Kenneth Nolad, 'Play,' 1960. Noland died on January 5, 2010.

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Bright Star

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:31 pm

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

– Rubén Darío

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

For Twelfth Night

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Nativity

Kenneth Nolad, 'Play,' 1960. Noland died on January 5, 2010.

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío

See also diadema and an obituary
for Noland, who died today.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Friday July 3, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 am
Damnation Morning
continued

“The tigers of wrath are wiser
    than the horses of instruction.”

Blake

“… the moment is not
properly an atom of time
 but an atom of eternity.
 It is the first reflection
 of eternity in time, its first
attempt, as it were, at
       stopping time….”
 
Kierkegaard

Symmetry Axes
of the Square:

Symmetry axes of the square

(Damnation Morning)

From the cover of the
 Martin Cruz Smith novel
Stallion Gate:

Image of an atom from the cover of the novel 'Stallion Gate'

A Monolith
for Kierkegaard:


Images of time and eternity in memory of Michelangelo


Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío

Related material:

The deaths of
 Ernest Hemingway
on the morning of
Sunday, July 2, 1961,
and of Alexis Arguello
on the morning of
Wednesday, July 1, 2009.
See also philosophy professor
Clancy Martin in the
London Review of Books
(issue dated July 9, 2009)
 on AA members as losers
“the ‘last men,’ the nihilists,
 the hopeless ones.”

Friday, January 16, 2009

Friday January 16, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 am
Academy Award

“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

“I feel very happy to be a part of Mind Champions Academy.”

— A winner at a chess awards ceremony in India on Monday

John Mortimer, who wrote the TV version of Brideshead Revisited, died today. In his memory:

Todo lo sé
 por el lucero puro
que brilla en
 la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío    

King's Moves

King’s Moves,
adapted from
a figure by
F. Lanier Graham

Related material:
Will this be  
  on the test?

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Thursday May 29, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:14 am
The Diadem
of Death

Washington Post Death Notices:

Dead on
St. Sarah’s Day,
May 24 —

Sophie B. Altman

Star of David in Washington Post death notice of Sophie B. Altman

Sophie B. Altman at Christmas 2006 dinner at DeCarlo's

Mother-in-law of
Wonder Woman
Lynda Carter
and founder and
producer of TV’s
It’s Academic

In Memoriam:

LOS TRES REYES MAGOS
Rubén Darío

—Yo soy Gaspar. Aquí traigo el incienso.
Vengo a decir: La vida es pura y bella.
Existe Dios. El amor es inmenso.
¡Todo lo sé por la divina Estrella!

—Yo soy Melchor. Mi mirra aroma todo.
Existe Dios. El es la luz del día.
¡La blanca flor tiene sus pies en lodo
y en el placer hay la melancolía!

—Soy Baltasar. Traigo el oro. Aseguro
que existe Dios. El es el grande y fuerte.
Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

—Gaspar, Melchor y Baltasar, callaos.
Triunfa el amor, ya su fiesta os convida.
¡Cristo resurge, hace la luz del caos
y tiene la corona de la Vida!

THE THREE KINGS

I am Caspar. I bring with me the myrrh,
And have this to say: Life is pure and beautiful.
There is a God. His love is immense.
I can see all by the divine Star!

I am Melchior. My frankincense perfumes the air.
There is a God. He is the light of day.
The whitest flower has its stem in the mire
And in joy is also found sorrow!

I am Balthasar. I bring the gold. And I
Assure you: There is a God, great and mighty.
And I know this from the pure light
That radiates from the Diadem of Death.

Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar — say no more.
Love is triumphant, and beckons you to His feast:
Christ is born! The Chaos He has turned to light,
And he wears the crown of Life!

Midrash:

Wonder Woman and the Secret of the Magic Tiara

Wonder Woman and the Secret of the Magic Tiara-- The End

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Tuesday May 20, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 pm
The Unembarrassed Peddler

(For readers of
the previous entry
who would like to
know more about
purchasing the
Brooklyn Bridge)


From yesterday’s New York Times, in an obituary of a teacher of reporters:

“He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: ‘Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady’s ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'”

Spelling Your Way
To Success

Chapter I:
“gnawing on a  
  desiccated potato”

From the website
Blue Star Traders:
How the ancient crystal skull Synergy came to the Western World…

This skull first came to light when it was acquired about two and a half decades ago by a European businessman and avid hiker, as he traveled around Central and South America.  He acquired the skull from a very old native man, in a tiny village in the Andes, near the borders of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. He was just passing through, and had come upon the small settlement while looking for a place to stay for the night.  He wandered into the village and was greeted with smiles and an invitation to share a meal.

This gentleman, George, speaks several languages, and he usually has at least a few words in common with most of the people he meets in his travels– enough to get by, anyway.  Although he didn’t speak the same language as most of the people in this isolated village, there was an instant connection between them, and they managed with the smattering of Spanish and Portuguese that a few of them knew. In need of shelter for the night, George was offered a spot for his sleeping bag, near the fire, in the dwelling of an elderly man.

After a peaceful evening in the old man’s company, George gratefully accepted a simple breakfast and got ready to take his leave.  As he thanked the man for his generous hospitality, the elder led George to an old chest. Opening the crumbling wooden lid, he took out the crystal skull, touched it reverently, and handed it to George.  Awed by an artifact of such obvious antiquity, beauty and value, yet uncertain what he was expected to do with it, George tried to hand it back.  But the old man urged it upon him, making it clear that he was to take it with him. 

Curious about the history of such a thing, George tried to find out what the villagers knew about it. One young fellow explained in halting Spanish that  the skull had come into the possession of a much loved Catholic nun, in Peru.  She was quite old when she died in the early 1800’s, and she had given it to the old man’s “Grandfather” when he was just a boy.  (Note: It’s hard to say if this was really the man’s grandfather, or just the honorary title that many natives use to designate an ancestor or revered relative.)  The nun told the boy and his father that the skull was “an inheritance from a lost civilization” and, like the Christian cross, it was a symbol of the transcendence of Soul over death.  She said that it carried the message of immortal life and the illumination that we may discover when we lose our fear of death.  She gave it to the boy and his father, asking them to safeguard it until the “right” person came to get it– and share its message with the world.  It had been brought to that land from “somewhere else” and needed to wait until the right person could help it to continue its journey. “Your heart will know the person,” she said. 

“What a strange story,” thought George.

From elespectador.com:

“… ‘Supercholita’  tiene sobre todo una clara vocación divulgadora de la cultura andina. No en vano Valdez recibió su primer premio por explicar mediante este personaje cómo se cocina el ‘chuño,’ una típica patata deshidratada muy consumida en el altiplano boliviano.”

Chapter II:
“gazing on the symmetry
 of a lady’s ankle”

From “Sinatra: A Man
and His Music, Part II”
(reshown. prior to
“It Happened in Brooklyn,”
by Turner Classic Movies
on Sunday, May 11, 2008):

“Luck, be a lady tonight.”

From wordinfo.info:

astragalo-, astragal-
(Greek: anklebone, talus ball of ankle joint; dice, die [the Greeks made these from ankle bones])

astragalomancy, astragyromancy
Divination with dice, knuckle bones, stones, small pieces of wood, or ankle bones which were marked with letters, symbols, or dots. Using dice for divination is a form of astragalomancy.

Chapter III:
“unparalleled ecstasy”


Bright Star —

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte

— Rubén Darío  

Bright Star and Crystal Skull

Image adapted from
Blue Star Traders


Related material:

The New York Lottery
  mid-day number yesterday–
719– and 7/19.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Thursday March 6, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

This note is prompted by the March 4 death of Richard D. Anderson, writer on geometry, President (1981-82) of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and member of the MAA's Icosahedron Society.

Royal Road

"The historical road
from the Platonic solids
to the finite simple groups
is well known."

— Steven H. Cullinane,
November 2000,
Symmetry from Plato to
the Four-Color Conjecture

Euclid is said to have remarked that "there is no royal road to geometry." The road to the end of the four-color conjecture may, however, be viewed as a royal road from geometry to the wasteland of mathematical recreations.* (See, for instance, Ch. VIII, "Map-Colouring Problems," in Mathematical Recreations and Essays, by W. W. Rouse Ball and H. S. M. Coxeter.) That road ended in 1976 at the AMS-MAA summer meeting in Toronto– home of H. S. M. Coxeter, a.k.a. "the king of geometry."

See also Log24, May 21, 2007.

A different road– from Plato to the finite simple groups– is, as I noted in November 2000, well known. But new roadside attractions continue to appear. One such attraction is the role played by a Platonic solid– the icosahedron– in design theory, coding theory, and the construction of the sporadic simple group M24.

"By far the most important structure in design theory is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24)."

— "Block Designs," by Andries E. Brouwer (Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics, Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham, Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))

This Steiner system is closely connected to M24 and to the extended binary Golay code. Brouwer gives an elegant construction of that code (and therefore of  M24):

"Let N be the adjacency matrix of the icosahedron (points: 12 vertices, adjacent: joined by an edge). Then the rows of the 12×24 matrix (I  J-N) generate the extended binary Golay code." [Here I is the identity matrix and J is the matrix of all 1's.]

Op. cit., p. 719

Related material:

Finite Geometry of
the Square and Cube

and
Jewel in the Crown

"There is a pleasantly discursive
treatment of Pontius Pilate's
unanswered question
'What is truth?'"
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
introduction to Trudeau's
"story theory" of truth

Those who prefer stories to truth
may consult the Log24 entries
 of March 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

They may also consult
the poet Rubén Darío:

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.


* For a road out of this wasteland, back to geometry, see The Kaleidoscope Puzzle and Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Friday February 22, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am
Philosophers Ponder

“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 in
   The New York Times
  
Monday, May 20, 1996

Associated Press,
Today in History,
Monday, Feb. 18, 2008:

On this date:

In 1564,
artist Michelangelo
died in Rome.

Images of time and eternity in a 1x4x9 black monolith

Non ha l’ottimo artista in se alcun concetto,
Ch’un marmo solo in se non circoscriva
Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva
La man che ubbidisce all’intelletto.
(The best artist has in himself no concept
in a single block of marble not contained;
only the hand obeying mind will find it.)
— Michelangelo, as quoted
by Erwin Panofsky in

Idea: A Concept
in Art Theory

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte

— Rubén Darío

Related material:
Yesterday’s entry
and Anthony Lane
in this week’s
New Yorker:

“… the whole of ‘Jumper’ comes across as vastly incurious about the cultures at its command. When David takes Millie (Rachel Bilson), a school friend from Michigan, for a dirty day out in Rome, she stands in awe before the Colosseum. ‘This place is amazing,’ she declares. ‘It’s so cool.’ I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich….”

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Wednesday February 20, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:48 am
 About Five Years Ago:

M. V. Ramana on a famous quotation–
 
"Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit at Berkeley so as to read the Gita in the original; he always kept a worn pink copy on the bookshelf closest to his desk. It is therefore likely that he may have actually thought of the original, Sanskrit, verse rather than the English translation. The closest that fits this meaning is in the 32nd verse from the 11th chapter of the Gita.

 kalosmi lokaksaya krt pravrddho

This literally means: I am kAla, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kAla by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kAla, a more common one is time."

"KAla" (in the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme) is more familiar to the West in the related form of Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla, time, according to one website, as "the force which governs and stops time."  See also the novel The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.

The fact that Oppenheimer thought of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.

 See 1132 A. D. & Saint Brighid, and my weblog entries of January 5 (Twelfth Night and the whirligig of time), January 31 (St. Bridget's Eve), and February 1 (St. Bridget's Day), 2003

The custom-made asterisk
above may be regarded
as a version of
the "Spider" symbol
of Fritz Leiber.

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte
.

Rubén Darío

Related material:

The previous five entries
and the entries of
this date three years ago.

Time of this entry:

11:48:17 AM.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Thursday January 31, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 am
From G. K. Chesterton,
The Black Virgin
 
As the black moon
of some divine eclipse,
As the black sun
of the Apocalypse,
As the black flower
that blessed Odysseus back
From witchcraft; and
he saw again the ships.

In all thy thousand images
we salute thee.

Earlier in the poem….
 
Clothed with the sun
or standing on the moon
Crowned with the stars
or single, a morning star,
Sunlight and moonlight
are thy luminous shadows,
Starlight and twilight
thy refractions are,
Lights and half-lights and
all lights turn about thee.

 
From Oct. 16, 2007,
date of death of Deborah Kerr:

"Harish, who was of a
spiritual, even religious, cast
and who liked to express himself in
metaphors, vivid and compelling,
did see, I believe, mathematics
as mediating between man and
what one can only call God."
R. P. Langlands

From a link of Jan. 17, 2008
Time and Eternity:

Abstract Symbols of Time and Eternity

Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus
Jean Simmons (l.) and Deborah Kerr (r.)
in "Black Narcissus" (1947)

and from the next day,
Jan. 18, 2008:

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867

Related material:

Dark Lady and Bright Star,
Time and Eternity,
Damnation Morning

Happy birthday also to
the late John O'Hara.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Saturday January 26, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:22 am
Working Backward

Those who have followed the links here recently may appreciate a short story told by yesterday’s lottery numbers in Pennsylvania: mid-day 096, evening 513.

The “96” may be regarded as a reference to the age at death of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter (see yesterday morning’s links). The “513” may be regarded as a reference to the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry, 5:01, plus the twelve minutes discussed in that entry by presidential aide Richard Darman, who died yesterday.

These references may seem less fanciful in the light of other recent Log24 material: a verse quoted here on Jan. 18

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.


Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867

— and a link on Jan. 19 to the following:

The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe:

 

“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

Friday, January 18, 2008

Friday January 18, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:00 am

Nativity

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867

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