Log24

Saturday, December 5, 2020

At the Still Point

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:16 pm

The photo of Lauren German from “Standing Still” (2005) in the
previous post suggests some related material for comedians:

The above character-creator name “Neil Gaiman” occurs here
in a post from June 2013 —

The above footnote refers to . . .

More merriment:  Lauren German in a video of the related song
“Another One Bites the Dust.”

The Devil Likes Metamorphoses.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

The Devil Likes Metamorphoses.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Spectral Theory

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 8:00 am

“And we may see the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline” — Johnny Mercer

“At another end of the sexual confusion spectrum….”

IMAGE- Frank Langella and Liam Neeson in 'Unknown'

The devil likes metamorphoses.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Romancing the Junction

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110418-StoneJunction.jpg

From Thomas Pynchon's 1997 Introduction to Stone Junction

"He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel's life's tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don't learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we've come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel's unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below— by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensable literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel— though it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us— after 'To know, to will, to dare' as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic— we must keep silent."

"The devil likes metamorphoses." —The Club Dumas

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Let No Man
Write My Epigraph

(See entries of June 19th.)

"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality."

Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction…. the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005

"… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"

— Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)

"… donc Dieu existe, réponse!"

— Attributed, some say falsely,
to Leonhard Euler
 
"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

"Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen.
The drawing is one of
many by George Gamow
illustrating the script."
Physics Today

 

"Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'"

The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)


"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."

The Innermost Kernel
 (previous entry)

And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry
"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the
International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have

The Epigraph–

Weyl on automorphisms
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")

Also from the
Cameron paper:

Local or global?

Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?  A structure M is homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global."

Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)–

Global and Local:
One Small Step

and mathematically–

Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic
(4/30/07):

This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels–

Alice Devillers

"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is which have
  as many symmetries as possible."

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

Madeleine L'Engle 

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Wednesday July 26, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:44 pm
Partitions,
continued

"Mistakes are inevitable and may be either in missing a true signal or in thinking there is a signal when there is not. I am suggesting that believers in the paranormal (called 'sheep' in psychological parlance) are more likely to make the latter kind of error than are disbelievers (called 'goats')."

— "Psychic Experiences:
     Psychic Illusions,"
     by Susan Blackmore,
     Skeptical Inquirer, 1992

For Harvard mathematician
Frederick Mosteller,
dead on Sunday, July 23, 2006:
 
"… a drama built out of nothing
but numbers and imagination"

— Freeman Dyson, quoted in Log24
on the day Mosteller died

From Log24 on
Mosteller's last birthday,
December 24, 2005:

The Club Dumas

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

One by one, he tore the engravings from the book, until he had all nine.  He looked at them closely.  "It's a pity you can't follow me where I'm going.  As the fourth engraving states, fate is not the same for all."

"Where do you believe you're going?"

Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

"To meet someone" was his enigmatic answer. "To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso."

"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"
(Faust, Part Two)

Carl Gustav Jung,   
born on this date

Today's other birthday:
Mick Jagger

"Pleased to meet you,
hope you guess my name."

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Saturday December 24, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:08 am
The Stone of Power

“Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers…. often depicted as a dazzling light.  It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy.  It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists….”

Foucault’s Pendulum 
by Umberto Eco,
Professor of Semiotics

The Club Dumas

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

(Paperback, pages 346-347):

One by one, he tore the engravings from the book, until he had all nine.  He looked at them closely.  “It’s a pity you can’t follow me where I’m going.  As the fourth engraving states, fate is not the same for all.”

“Where do you believe you’re going?”

Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

“To meet someone” was his enigmatic answer. “To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher’s stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.”

“Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
‘Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation'”
(Faust, Part Two)

Carl Gustav Jung  

Sunday, January 9, 2005

Sunday January 9, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:10 pm

Light at Bologna

“Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers…. often depicted as a dazzling light.  It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy.  It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists….”

Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco,
Professor of Semiotics at
 Europe’s oldest university,
 the University of Bologna.

The Club Dumas

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

(Paperback, pages 346-347):

One by one, he tore the engravings from the book, until he had all nine.  He looked at them closely.  “It’s a pity you can’t follow me where I’m going.  As the fourth engraving states, fate is not the same for all.”

“Where do you believe you’re going?”

Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

“To meet someone” was his enigmatic answer. “To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher’s stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso. From Faust’s black dog to the false angel of light who tried to break down Saint Anthony’s resistance.  But most of all, stupidity bores him, and he hates monotony….”

Eclogues: Eight Stories

by Guy Davenport

Johns Hopkins paperback, 1993, page 127 —

Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna, VI:

“In 1603, at Monte Paderno, outside Bologna, an alchemist (by day a cobbler) named Vicenzo Cascariolo discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, catalyst in the transformation of base metals into gold, focus of the imagination, talisman for abstruse thought.  Silver in some lights, white in others, it glowed blue in darkness, awesome to behold.”


The Discovery of Luminescence:

The Bolognian Stone

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050109-Bologna.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Bologna, 16th Century

“For the University of Bologna hosting an International Conference on Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence has a very special significance. Indeed, it is in our fair City that modern scientific research on these phenomena has its earliest roots….

‘After submitting the stone
to much preparation, it was not
the Pluto of Aristophanes
that resulted; instead, it was
the Luciferous Stone’ ”

From one of the best books
of the 20th century:

The Hawkline Monster

by Richard Brautigan

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050109-Hawkline.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
“The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world.  Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain.  There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C.

There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas.

Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar.  Witchcraft and modern science, the latest of discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar.  There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis….

… they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by a mutated light in The Chemicals. a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind.”

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