"… an abandoned Norwegian space vessel" is a phrase from
a review of the recent film "Ad Astra."
Related material — Bester's "The Stars My Destination."
Book cover (adapted) —
See also the previous post.
Monday, January 13, 2020
Abandoned Norwegian Space Vessel
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Monday, December 9, 2019
Plan 9 from Deep Space
A search for "deep space" in this journal yields
the following meditation:
|
Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger!:
|
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Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Cube Geometry Continues.
An illustration from the April 20, 2016, post
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group —
"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
of several different subjects in mathematics."
— Chuanming Zong, Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society , January 2005
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Thursday, April 21, 2016
Purple Requiem
See as well "The Stars My Destination" in this journal.
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The Alchemist’s Chessboard
Material related to the previous post and to Alfred Bester's
1981 followup to The Stars My Destination titled The Deceivers —
|
The Lapis Philosophorum :
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe." And from Bester's The Deceivers : Meta Physics "'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.' 'I don't know it.' 'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.' 'That doesn't sound like much.'" Related material : |
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Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group
The reference in the previous post to the work of Guitart and
The Road to Universal Logic suggests a fiction involving
the symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168.
See The Diamond Archetype and a fictional account of the road to Hell …
The cover illustration below has been adapted to
replace the flames of PyrE with the eightfold cube.
For related symmetric generation of a much larger group, see Solomon’s Cube.
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Saturday, January 23, 2016
Hard
"Hard Science Fiction in the era of short attention spans,
crowd-sourcing, and rapid obsolescence"
— May 26, 2012, Dragon Press Bookstore symposium
Related material: Posts now tagged Black Diamond.
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Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Soul Notes
See pages 36 and 37 of Suzanne Gieser's The Innermost Kernel
as well as PyrE in The Stars My Destination and Old St. Patrick's*
in "Gangs of New York."
For some related aesthetic remarks, see a New Yorker essay
published onlne today and this journal's previous post.
* The older version of the "Old St. Patrick's"
of The Stars My Destination . (Update of 4/21/16.)
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Drama Club
Julianne Moore at the Screen Actors Guild awards
on Sunday evening:
"When I was 17, I decided I wanted to be
an actor. It didn't seem possible because
I'd never met a real actor," Moore said.
"So I want to say to all the kids in the
drama club, you guys are the real actors."
On the main character of the new film "Birdman"—
"Thomson is clearly talented, yet unable to get out of
the shadow of his superhero role. He is filled with
a simmering rage as Robert Downey Jr. appears
on the TV, arguably the highest profile actor alive
courtesy of a role in the Marvel films."
— Grant Pearsall at The Snapper
A midrash for Robert:
See The Stars My Destination and Cube of Ultron.
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Thursday, February 13, 2014
Winter’s Game*
Part I: Continued from January 20 — "Arising Heaven" —
Part II: The Stars My Destination in this journal
Part III: Ender's Game —
* The title refers to a character, Rogue Winter, in Alfred Bester's
1981 novel The Deceivers .
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Sunday, April 14, 2013
Space Itself
From The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens ,
John N. Serio, ed., "Stevens's Late Poetry," by B.J. Leggett,
pp. 62-75, an excerpt from page 70:
Click the above image for further details.
See also Nothingness and "The Rock" in this journal.
Further readings along these lines:
For pure mathematics, rather than theories of the physical world,
see the properties of the cube illustrated on the second (altered)
book cover above.
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Saturday, May 26, 2012
Talk Amongst Yourselves
Hard Science Fiction weekend at Dragon Press Bookstore
Saturday May 26:
11am-noon Playing with the net up:
Hard Science Fiction in the era of
short attention spans, crowd-sourcing,
and rapid obsolescence
( Greg Benford, James Cambias, Kathryn Cramer)
….
3pm-4:30 Technological optimism and pessimism;
utopia and dystopia; happy endings & sad endings:
what do these oppositions have to do with one another?
Are they all the same thing? How are they different
from one another? Group discussion.
My own interests in this area include…
(Click image for some context)
The above was adapted from a 1996 cover—
Vintage Books, July 1996. Cover: Evan Gaffney.
For the significance of the flames,
see PyrE in the book. For the significance
of the cube in the altered cover, see
The 2×2×2 Cube and The Diamond Archetype.
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Thursday, October 13, 2011
Now, Here’s My Plan
"Plan 9 is an operating system kernel but also a collection of accompanying software."
— Webpage pointed out by the late Dennis Ritchie,
father of the programming language C
and co-developer of Unix, who reportedly died on October 8.
From Ritchie's own home page—
"A brief biography, in first person instead of obituary style."
From that biography—
"Today, as a manager of a small group of researchers, I promote exploration of distributed operating systems, languages, and routing/switching hardware. The recent accomplishments of this group include the Plan 9 operating system…."
Another operating system is that of Alfred Bester.
My laptop now includes his classic The Stars My Destination ,
downloaded this morning…
Not much compared to Widener Library (see this morning's Lost Cornerstone),
but sufficient for present purposes…
"Simple jaunt." — "The Comedian as the Letter C"
See also Plan 9 from Outer Space in this journal.
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Saturday, July 9, 2011
Gleaming the Cube (continued)
The New York Times has a skateboarder obit with a URL date of July 9.
Here is an earlier version from the LA Times—
By Keith Thursby, Los Angeles Times
Chris Cahill, one of the original Dogtown Z-Boys
who brought seismic changes to skateboarding
with their style and attitude, has died. He was 54.
Cahill was found June 24 at his Los Angeles home,
said Larry Dietz of the Los Angeles County
coroner's office. A cause of death has not been
determined and tests are ongoing, Dietz said.
Related material from Midsummer Day, June 24, the day Cahill was found dead—
The Gleaming and The Cube.
An illustration from the latter—
The above was adapted from a 1996 cover—
Vintage Books, July 1996. Cover: Evan Gaffney.
For the significance of the flames,
see PyrE in the book. For the significance
of the cube in the altered cover, see
The 2×2×2 Cube and The Diamond Archetype.
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Friday, June 24, 2011
The Cube
Click the above image for some background.
Related material:
Skateboard legend Andy Kessler,
this morning's The Gleaming,
and But Sometimes I Hit London.
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Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Burning Patrick —
Notes on Mathematics and Narrative
Background—
- The Burning Man in Bester's classic The Stars My Destination,
- The not-so-classic Hitler Plans Burning Man, and
- The cult film The Wicker Man
Commentary on The Wicker Man—
Originally The Wicker Man was not well-received by critics in the UK. It was considered
to be bizarre, disturbing, and uncomfortable, with the hasty editing making the story confusing
and out of order…. Today this movie is considered a cult classic and has been called
the “Citizen Kane of horror films” by some reviewers. How did this film become a cult classic?
Real estate motto— Location, Location, Location.
Illustration— The fire leap scene from Wicker Man, filmed at Castle Kennedy—
In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller
by Kevin Guilfoile. The Thousand is in the manner of Dan Brown's
2003 The Da Vinci Code or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .
From the review—
What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization
called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician
and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with
the triangle theorem that we learned in school).
As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones,
part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….
The plot involves, in part,
… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of
individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….
Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post)
or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.
A brief prequel to the above dialogue—
In lieu of songs, here is a passage by Patrick Blackburn
more relevant to the art of The Thousand—
See also the pagan fire leaping in Dancing at Lughnasa.
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Sunday, December 13, 2009
Ein Kampf
(Click on image for video.)
See also Tyger! Tyger! and
The Stars My Destination.
Hitler's Peer Review–
See also Abstract 79T-A37
and Scientific American.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Saturday September 5, 2009
For the
Burning Man
Burning Man
(Cover slightly changed.)
Background —
SAT
Part I:
Part II:
 |
Part III:
From August 25th —
"Boo, boo, boo,
square root of two."
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Saturday, January 31, 2009
Saturday January 31, 2009
Catholic Schools Week
Today is the conclusion of
Catholic Schools Week.
From one such school,
Cullinane College:
Cullinane students
display school spirit
Related material:
|
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.
That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:
He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? |
|
Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger!:
|
"Guilty! Read the Charge!"
— Quoted here on
January 29, 2003
The Prisoner,
Episode One, 1967:
"I… I meant a larger map."
— Quoted here on
January 27, 2009
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Thursday, February 21, 2008
Thursday February 21, 2008
Class
Galore
Galore
The New Yorker's Anthony Lane reviewing the new film "Jumper"–
"I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class."
The "Jumper" theme, teleportation, has been better developed by three other writers– Bester, Zelazny, and King–
"As a long-time fan of both Alfie Bester and Roger Zelazny, I was delighted to find this posthumous collaboration. Psychoshop is, I think, true to both authors' bodies of work. After all, Bester's influence on Zelazny is evident in a a number of works, most notably Eye of Cat with its dazzling experimental typography so reminiscent of what Bester had done in The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination."
— Amazon.com customer review
"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,' the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal."
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
|
From another "Jaunt-701"– Log24, Feb. 7:
The Football
Mandorla New York Lottery, 2008: "He pointed at the football "The |
"What happened?"
one of the scientists shouted….
"It's eternity in there,"
he said, and dropped dead….
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
As
for Ernst
Gombrich, see
his link in the
Log24 entries
of June 15,
2007.
for Ernst
Gombrich, see
his link in the
Log24 entries
of June 15,
2007.
Related material:
the previous entry.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Wednesday June 6, 2007
It is now 3:07 AM
June 7 in New Zealand.
Today at Cullinane College:
June 7 in New Zealand.
Today at Cullinane College:
Examination Day
(For the college curriculum,
see the New Zealand
Qualifications Authority.)
If Cullinane College were Hogwarts–
Last-minute exam info:
The Lapis Philosophorum
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
— Aion, by C. G. Jung"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
And from Bester's The Deceivers:
Meta Physics
"'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.'
'I don't know it.'
'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.'
'That doesn't sound like much.'
'So the rajah said. …'"
Related material:
Comments Off on Wednesday June 6, 2007
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Sunday October 2, 2005
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens
Readings for today:
At the Wallace Stevens online concordance, search for X and for primitive.
In the e-book edition of Bester's The Deceivers, search for X.
"We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air."
— Wallace Stevens,
Oct. 2, 1879 – Aug. 2, 1955,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
IX.1-18, from The Auroras of Autumn,
Knopf, NY (1950)
Related material:
(Added Monday, Oct. 3, 8:45 AM)
"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?
He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.
Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."
— Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005
Presenting…
Spear Daddy!
Continuing Bester's Maori theme,
students from Cullinane College:
(See Literature and Geography.)
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Monday, August 22, 2005
Monday August 22, 2005
The Hole
Part I: Mathematics and Narrative
Apostolos Doxiadis on last month's conference on "mathematics and narrative"–
Doxiadis is describing how talks by two noted mathematicians were related to
"… a sense of a 'general theory bubbling up' at the meeting… a general theory of the deeper relationship of mathematics to narrative…. "
Doxiadis says both talks had "a big hole in the middle."
"Both began by saying something like: 'I believe there is an important connection between story and mathematical thinking. So, my talk has two parts. [In one part] I’ll tell you a few things about proofs. [And in the other part] I’ll tell you about stories.' …. And in both talks it was in fact implied by a variation of the post hoc propter hoc, the principle of consecutiveness implying causality, that the two parts of the lectures were intimately related, the one somehow led directly to the other."
"And the hole?"
"This was exactly at the point of the link… [connecting math and narrative]… There is this very well-known Sidney Harris cartoon… where two huge arrays of formulas on a blackboard are connected by the sentence ‘THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.’ And one of the two mathematicians standing before it points at this and tells the other: ‘I think you should be more explicit here at step two.’ Both… talks were one half fascinating expositions of lay narratology– in fact, I was exhilarated to hear the two most purely narratological talks at the meeting coming from number theorists!– and one half a discussion of a purely mathematical kind, the two parts separated by a conjunction roughly synonymous to ‘this is very similar to this.’ But the similarity was not clearly explained: the hole, you see, the ‘miracle.’ Of course, both [speakers]… are brilliant men, and honest too, and so they were very clear about the location of the hole, they did not try to fool us by saying that there was no hole where there was one."
Part II: Possible Worlds
"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer
Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:
"The concept of possible worlds dates back to a least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."– Voltaire
Background:
Modal Logic in Wikipedia
Possible Worlds in Wikipedia
Possible-Worlds Theory, by Marie-Laure Ryan
(entry for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory)
Part III: Modal Theology
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
"'What is this Stone?' Chloe asked….
'…It is told that, when the Merciful One made the worlds, first of all He created that Stone and gave it to the Divine One whom the Jews call Shekinah, and as she gazed upon it the universes arose and had being.'"
'…It is told that, when the Merciful One made the worlds, first of all He created that Stone and gave it to the Divine One whom the Jews call Shekinah, and as she gazed upon it the universes arose and had being.'"
— Many Dimensions, by Charles Williams, 1931 (Eerdmans paperback, April 1979, pp. 43-44)
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
— Aion, by C. G. Jung, 1951 (Princeton paperback, 1979, p. 236)
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, 1956 (Vintage hardcover, July 1996, p. 216)
|
"We symbolize
logical necessity with the box  )and logical possibility with the diamond  ).
"The possibilia that exist,
— Michael Sudduth, |
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Thursday, February 17, 2005
Thursday February 17, 2005
Modal Theology
"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box )
and logical possibility
with the diamond ).
— Keith Allen Korcz,
(Log24.net, 1/25/05)
And what do we
symbolize by 
?
On the Lapis Philosophorum,
the Philosophers' Stone –
"'What is this Stone?' Chloe asked….
'…It is told that, when the Merciful One
made the worlds, first of all He created
that Stone and gave it to the Divine One
whom the Jews call Shekinah,
and as she gazed upon it
the universes arose and had being.'"
– Many Dimensions,
by Charles Williams, 1931
(Eerdmans paperback,
April 1979, pp. 43-44)
"The lapis was thought of as a unity
and therefore often stands for
the prima materia in general."
– Aion, by C. G. Jung, 1951
(Princeton paperback,
1979, p. 236)
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that
he had produced the equivalent of
the primordial protomatter
which exploded into the Universe."
– The Stars My Destination,
by Alfred Bester, 1956
(Vintage hardcover,
July 1996, p. 216)
"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
a necessary being…."
— Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
Regius Professor of Divinity
at Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)
See also
The Diamond Archetype.
For more on modal theology, see
Kurt Gödel's Ontological Argument
and
The Ontological Argument
from Anselm to Gödel.
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Saturday July 10, 2004
Oxford Word
From today's obituary in The New York Times of R. W. Burchfield, editor of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary:
"Robert William Burchfield was born Jan. 27, 1923, in Wanganui, New Zealand. In 1949, after earning an undergraduate degree at Victoria University College in Wellington, he accepted a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.
There, he read Medieval English literature with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien."
For more on literature and Wanganui, see my entry of Jan. 19. 2003, from which the following is taken.
|
"Cullinane College is a Catholic co-educational college, set to open in Wanganui (New Zealand) on the 29th of January, 2003." The 29th of January will be the 40th anniversary of the death of Saint Robert Frost. New Zealand, perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet, is noted for being the setting of the film version of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien. For other New Zealand themes, see Alfred Bester's novels The Stars My Destination and The Deceivers. The original title of The Stars My Destination was Tyger! Tyger! after Blake's poem. For more on fearful symmetry, see the work of Marston Conder, professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. |
Sunday, January 19, 2003
Sunday January 19, 2003
|
Literature “Literature begins |
|
“Cullinane College is a Catholic co-educational college, set to open in Wanganui (New Zealand) on the 29th of January, 2003.”
The 29th of January will be the 40th anniversary of the death of Saint Robert Frost.
New Zealand, perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet, is noted for being the setting of the film version of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien.
Here is a rather Catholic meditation on life and death in Tolkien’s work:
Frodo: “…He deserves death.”
Gandalf: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
Personally, I prefer Clint Eastwood’s version of this dialogue:
The Schofield Kid: “Well, I guess they had it coming.”
William Munny: “We all have it coming, Kid.”
For other New Zealand themes, see Alfred Bester’s novels The Stars My Destination and The Deceivers.
The original title of The Stars My Destination was Tyger! Tyger! after Blake’s poem.
For more on fearful symmetry, see the work of Marston Conder, professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Comments Off on Sunday January 19, 2003