Tuesday, September 1, 2026
“To Pass Beyond Your Understanding
and Make Yourself Master of the Universe”
— www.fields.utoronto.ca/about/fields-medal
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and Make Yourself Master of the Universe”
— www.fields.utoronto.ca/about/fields-medal
and Make Yourself Master of the Universe”
— www.fields.utoronto.ca/about/fields-medal
Friday, February 20, 2026
Toronto Mythspace
"It is through myths that man makes sense of the world,
that he experiences it in some coherent fashion,
that he confronts its irremediably contradictory,
divided, alien presence." — George Steiner
in "Nostalgia for the Absolute," the Massey lectures
on CBC radio in 1974
Some will prefer the thoughts quoted here on the above YouTube date —
Thoughts of the young Carl Reiner as rendered above in 1967 —
“Somewhere, someplace… there must be a lost horizon…
A Shangri-La where a man can find peace, happiness,
and lots of naked ladies.”
Voilà.
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Monday, September 8, 2025
At Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 4-14)
‘Nuremberg’ Wows TIFF
Related material from the script of "Miller's Girl" —
INT. JONATHAN MILLER'S CLASSROOM - MORNING
Inspirational posters line the walls.
A VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY banner hangs
above a dry erase board, on which is
written MR. MILLER - CREATIVE WRITING . . . .
|
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Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Plan 9 from Toronto
This 1950 use of Galois coordinates on a grid
foreshadows their later use by Cullinane to construct
the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis and to
illustrate, as below, point-line duality in the Fano plane.
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Thursday, September 26, 2024
The Toronto Plot
For more amusement from Toronto, see today's Toronto Sun .
Related material — Last Sunday's post in this journal
Annals of Substance Abuse:
Timothy Leary as Sparkle Plenty .
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Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Toronto Memory Expert
Return of the well-dressed man with a beard —
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Friday, September 15, 2023
Poolman! (Toronto International Film Festival Review)
"Eureka!"
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Monday, July 10, 2023
Plan 9* from Toronto: Egalitarian Elegies
From the August 2023 Notices of the American Mathematical Society —
"He worked tirelessly towards a more egalitarian world…."
"Chandler’s egalitarian spirit infused the workshops."
— Memorial Tribute: Remembrances of Chandler Davis
* See yesterday's Log24 post "Egalitarian Plan 9."
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Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Toronto Word Problem
The phrase "funk to a reality" in the previous post suggests …
For the Toronto Star —
DECODING MATHEMATICS AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
"Dissecting a passage of text in a language other than one's
native language is a daunting task and requires a strategy.
When dissecting mathematical language, readers are faced
with the same challenges, whether the mathematics is in
the form of an equation or in the form of a word problem."
— https://www.jstor.org/stable/20876351
The problem, in this case, is with the word "functoriality."
The solution: See the following article.
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Tuesday, May 21, 2019
The Toronto Plot*
* A title for Harlan Kane, suggested by obituaries
from The New York Times (this afternoon) and from
CBC News (on May 14, below) . . .
. . . as well as by illustrations shown here on May 13 and by
a screenwriter quoted here on May 12 —
“When I die,” he liked to say, “I’m going to have written
on my tombstone, ‘Finally, a plot!’”
— Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times
Another quote that seems relevant —
“I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”
— Paul Simon
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Saturday, December 31, 2016
Toronto Star Quality
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Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The Toronto Problem
A search in this journal for "Toronto Star" yields A Problem.
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Friday, September 16, 2011
Art, Jung, Toronto
Related art—
Midnight's Icons,
and…
(Wikipedia figure)
"Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as
four diamonds forming an X…."
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Thursday, July 8, 2010
Toronto vs. Rome
or: Catullus vs. Ovid
(Today's previous post, "Coxeter vs. Fano,"
might also have been titled "Toronto vs. Rome.")
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
Explicatio
Image by Christopher Thomas at Wikipedia —
Unfolding of a hypercube and of a cube —
The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock.
— Steven H. Cullinane, "Endgame"
The current New Yorker has a translation of
the above line of Catullus by poet Anne Carson.
According to poets.org, Carson "attended St. Michael's College
at the University of Toronto and, despite leaving twice,
received her B.A. in 1974, her M.A. in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1981."
Carson's translation is given in a review of her new book Nox.
The title, "The Unfolding," of the current review echoes an earlier
New Yorker piece on another poet, Madeleine L'Engle—
Cynthia Zarin in The New Yorker, issue dated April 12, 2004–
“Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated,
‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it
until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t
exist until it’s folded– or it’s a story without a book.’”
(See also the "harrow up" + Hamlet link in yesterday's 6:29 AM post.)
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Sunday, November 1, 2009
Indignation and Laughter in Toronto
St. Robertson Davies of Toronto on All Hallows' Eve, 1990— "Nevertheless, our forbears are deserving of tribute for one indisputable reason, if for no other: without them we should not be here. Let us recognize that we are not the ultimate triumph but rather we are beads on a string. Let us behave with decency to the beads that were strung before us, and hope modestly that the beads that come after us will not hold us of no account merely because we are dead. Today and tomorrow are the proper days for such reflection. It need not detain us for more than a few minutes, but it should be sincere. A few gentle thoughts or even — I hardly know how to put it without moving you to indignation or laughter — a brief prayer would not come amiss, and might turn your thoughts in a fruitful direction." Having had a few thoughts for the forbears, let us turn in the direction of Goldilocks.
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Friday, September 4, 2026
Tally Ho!
260904-Top_Ten_Tech_Talent_Tally.jpg
Linked from https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/04/tech/
toronto-ai-hub-geoffrey-hinton .
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Saturday, July 11, 2026
The Three Cubes
Quote adapted from a famous young-adult novel . . .
"There is such a thing as affine group generation
by permutation of parallel subspaces."
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Sunday, June 28, 2026
The Crimson Passion, Part n
Hooligan Productions presents . . .
Against Dryness — Starring . . .
Jaime King and the Precious Bodily Fluids!
Blood, Sweat & Tears
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Thursday, June 25, 2026
Highway Sign
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Monday, March 16, 2026
Epigraphy* Parable
Epigraph by George Steiner —
"There is an Hassidic parable which tells us that God created man
so that man might tell stories. This telling of stories is, according
to Lévi-Strauss, the very condition of our being. The alternative
would be total inertia or the eclipse of reason. The mediative,
ordering capacity of myths, their ability to 'encode' — another
Lévi-Strauss word — to give coherent expression to reality, points
to a profound harmonic accord between the inner logic of the brain
and the structure of the external world."
— "Nostalgia for the Absolute," CBC Massey Lectures, Toronto, 1974
* See Whatmough in this journal.
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Monday, February 23, 2026
Dies Natalis Art Supplies
The following Log24 illustration from Ash Wednesday was
suggested by yesterday's New York Times report of a dies natalis
on that day —
Those who do not observe Ash Wednesday may prefer
a "dust to dust" post from Oct. 23, 2025 —
the publication date of Philip Pullman's novel
The Rose Field (The Book of Dust, Volume Three).
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Friday, February 20, 2026
Reindeer Games: In Search of the Lost Harmonica Chord
Epigraph by George Steiner —
"There is an Hassidic parable which tells us that God created man
so that man might tell stories. This telling of stories is, according
to Lévi-Strauss, the very condition of our being. The alternative
would be total inertia or the eclipse of reason. The mediative,
ordering capacity of myths, their ability to 'encode' — another
Lévi-Strauss word — to give coherent expression to reality, points
to a profound harmonic accord between the inner logic of the brain
and the structure of the external world."
— "Nostalgia for the Absolute," CBC Massey Lectures, Toronto, 1974
♫ "Rudolf with your nose so bright …."
Search for a meditative "harmonic accord" —
More seriously . . .
From T. S. Eliot's "timeless" zone . . .
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Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Thursday, February 12, 2026
DJ School Today: The Erection
"Suggest an improvement to earn IQ" . . .
Update at 9:06 AM EST —
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Saturday, September 20, 2025
For Art Heist Fans:
Was “Veritas” Lost in Translation?
The relevant name here is not that of Jonathan Miller . . .
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Was “Veritas” Lost in Translation?
Was “Veritas” Lost in Translation?
Monday, September 8, 2025
Winning Combination
Cinematic Offering for Toronto Film Festival . . .
Guitar Case Study
Stiff competition . . .
Double Bass and a Nudie Suit
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Thursday, April 24, 2025
Uniting the Three Cubes
Note that the number 8, a cube, may be represented as
either a literal "eightfold cube" — a 2x2x2 array — or as,
in the manner of R. T. Curtis, a 4-row 2-column "brick."
Related art . . .
Some will prefer a more dramatic approach to uniting three cubes . . .
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Thursday, October 3, 2024
Philosophy
Thesis —
A 1911 essay by T. E. Hulme,
"Romanticism and Classicism" —
"There is a general tendency to think that verse means
little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion.
People say: 'But how can you have verse without sentiment?'
You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival
to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death
of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap
caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should
have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry
is utterly inconceivable to them."
Antithesis —
A 1961 reaction against Hulme,
"Against Dryness" —
"Against the consolations of form, the clean crystalline
work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the
destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic
idea of character.
Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is
destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination."
— Iris Murdoch, January 1961
Synthesis —
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