Log24

Friday, August 23, 2019

Baseado

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:31 pm

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Anniversary

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:01 am

Today is reportedly the anniversary of the death,
in Paris in 1822, of Jean Robert Argand.

Some related material

From MacTutor

"Wessel's fame as a mathematician rests solely
on this paper, which was published in 1799,
giving for the first time a geometrical interpretation
of complex numbers. Today we call this geometric
interpretation the Argand diagram but Wessel's
work came first. It was rediscovered by Argand 
in 1806 and again by Gauss in 1831. ….

Of course it is not unreasonable to call the
geometrical interpretation of complex numbers
the Argand diagram since it was Argand's work
which was influential. It was so named before
the world of mathematics learnt of Wessel's prior
publication. In fact Wessel's paper was not
noticed by the mathematical community until 1895…."

See also Tilting at Whirligigs (Log24 on March 8, 2008)
and The Galois Quaternion.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:09 am

The Santa Fe Institute logo, together with the previous post,
suggests a review of Whirligig and Quaternion for Goldstein.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

In the Place of the Skull

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

"I CAN TELL you about my friend Andrew,
the cognitive scientist. But it’s not pretty."

— Opening of Andrew's Brain: A Novel  by
     E. L. Doctorow, Random House, Jan. 14, 2014*

"…whirligig consciousness…."
The New York Times Book Review

See also Inside the White Square  (Log 24, Feb. 15, 2015):

The X-Box Sum .

* Cf. Log24 on that date.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Raiders of the Lost Theorem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:05 pm

(Continued from Nov. 16, 2013.)

The 48 actions of GL(2,3) on a 3×3 array include the 8-element
quaternion group as a subgroup. This was illustrated in a Log24 post,
Hamilton’s Whirligig, of Jan. 5, 2006, and in a webpage whose
earliest version in the Internet Archive is from June 14, 2006.

One of these quaternion actions is pictured, without any reference
to quaternions, in a 2013 book by a Netherlands author whose
background in pure mathematics is apparently minimal:

In context (click to enlarge):

Update of later the same day —

Lee Sallows, Sept. 2011 foreword to Geometric Magic Squares —

“I first hit on the idea of a geometric magic square* in October 2001,**
and I sensed at once that I had penetrated some previously hidden portal
and was now standing on the threshold of a great adventure. It was going
to be like exploring Aladdin’s Cave. That there were treasures in the cave,
I was convinced, but how they were to be found was far from clear. The
concept of a geometric magic square is so simple that a child will grasp it
in a single glance. Ask a mathematician to create an actual specimen and
you may have a long wait before getting a response; such are the formidable
difficulties confronting the would-be constructor.”

* Defined by Sallows later in the book:

“Geometric  or, less formally, geomagic  is the term I use for
a magic square in which higher dimensional geometrical shapes
(or tiles  or pieces ) may appear in the cells instead of numbers.”

** See some geometric  matrices by Cullinane in a March 2001 webpage.

Earlier actual specimens — see Diamond Theory  excerpts published in
February 1977 and a brief description of the original 1976 monograph:

“51 pp. on the symmetries & algebra of
matrices with geometric-figure entries.”

— Steven H. Cullinane, 1977 ad in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society

The recreational topic of “magic” squares is of little relevance
to my own interests— group actions on such matrices and the
matrices’ role as models of finite geometries.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Sunday School

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Identity Crisis— Or, Tilting at Whirligigs 

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Past Tense

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:09 pm

From a post that was written for Twelfth Night

Bernhard Weiss on the philosophy of Michael Dummett—

" … debates about realism, that is, those debates that ask
whether or not one or another aspect of the world is independent
of the way we represent that aspect to ourselves. For example,
is there a realm of mathematical entities that exists fully formed
independently of our mathematical activity? Are there facts about
the past that our use of the past tense aims to capture?"

Yes and Yes.

See also The Whirligig of Time in this journal.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Center

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 pm

 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110413-CompassDetail.jpg

Compass Detail:
Moulin

(See 8 PM and Whirligig.)   

Monday, January 10, 2011

Big Time*

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

(True Grid continued)

"They're gonna put me in the movies,
They're gonna make a big star out of me…"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110110-CrazyHeart.jpg

“Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”  
Twelfth Night ,
Act V, Sc. I  [text]

See also this journal on Twelfth Night, 2011.

* Background:

   The Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber, including Big Time  and "Damnation Morning."

   The Shakespearean fool of Dec. 30 is also not without relevance.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Wednesday May 28, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Tequila
Mockingbird

(November 5, 2002):

CelebritySexNews.com
on Kylie Minogue:

“Turns out she’s a party girl
who loves Tequila:
‘Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.'”

From a web page on
Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel
Under the Volcano

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).

Kylie Minogue
Kylie

Film 'Under the Volcano'
Finney

 
Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
— Lonnie Donegan (d. Nov. 3) 
and others
 
Station of the Rock Island Line
 
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois


Related material:

Twenty-First Century Fox
(10/6/02)

Back to You, Kylie
(11/5/02)

Time, Eternity, and Grace
(11/22/02)

That Old Devil Moon
(1/1/03) and
The Shanghai Gesture
(1/3/03)

Whirligig
(1/5/03)

Harrowing
(4/19/03)

Temptation
(4/22/03)

Temptation
(4/9/04)

Tribute
,
Train of Thought,
Drunk Bird, and
From Here to Eternity
(8/17/04-8/18/04)

Heaven and Earth
(9/2/04)

Habeas Corpus

(11/24/04)

X, continued
(12/4/04)

Birth and Death
(5/28/05)

Time Travel
(5/28/06)

Timeagain and
Two-Bar Hook
(8/9/06)

Echoes
(8/11/06)

Phantasmagoria
and Tequila!
(9/23/06)

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Sunday March 9, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

Identity

The 3x3 grid as religious symbol

Click for context.

Related material:

Pictures of Nothing

Art Wars: Epiphany

Tilting at Whirligigs

Down the Up Staircase

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Saturday March 8, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Tilting at
Whirligigs

From a New York Times list

of literary “signature passages” —

Don Quixote -- 'wasteland and crossroad places'

An answer:

“The whirligig of time”
— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

and

Log24, Twelfth Night, 2006:

Hamilton’s Whirligigs

Hamilton's Whirligigs: The 8-element quaternion group as a subgroup of the 48-element group GL(2,3)

Click image to enlarge.

Related material:

Rotation in the complex plane.

The plane was discovered
in the late 1700’s by Wessel:

Caspar Wessel

by J.J. O’Connor
 and E.F. Robertson:

“Wessel’s paper [in Danish] was not noticed by the mathematical community until 1895… A French translation… was published in 1897 but an English translation of this most remarkable work was not published until 1999 (exactly 200 years after it was first published)….

We have called Wessel’s work remarkable, and indeed although the credit has gone to Argand, many historians of mathematics feel that Wessel’s contribution was [1]:-

… superior to and more modern in spirit to Argand’s.

In the [1] article the approaches by Argand and Wessel are compared and contrasted. Of course Wessel was a surveyor and his paper was motivated by his surveying and cartography work:-

Wessel’s development proceeded rather directly from geometric problems, through geometric-intuitive reasoning, to an algebraic formula. Argand began with algebraic quantities and sought a geometric representation for them. … Wessel’s initial formulation was remarkably clear, direct, concise and modern. It is regrettable that it was not appreciated for nearly a century and hence did not have the influence it merited.

However more is claimed for Wessel’s single mathematical paper than the first geometric interpretation of complex numbers. In [3] Crowe credits Wessel with being the first person to add vectors. Again this shows the depth of Wessel’s thinking but again, as the paper was unnoticed it had no influence on mathematical development despite appearing in the Memoirs of the Royal Danish Academy which by any standard was a major source of publications….

1. … Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990).

3. M.J. Crowe, A History of Vector Analysis (Notre Dame, 1967).”

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.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Monday February 11, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 am
Monolith

“A shape of some kind
for something that
  has no shape.”

The black monolith from '2001'

— Roy Scheider
  in “2010”

For further details,
 click on the monolith.

See also the Keystone State’s
lottery numbers for Sunday–
Grammy night and the
date of Scheider’s death:

PA  Lottery Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008: Mid-day 234, Evening 617

These numbers suggest
the following links.

For further details related
to death and religion, see
a version of the cheer
“1234, who are we for?”

For further details related
to Grammy night, see
6/17, 2007:

A selection from the
  Stephen King Hymnal

Alicia Keys and Scatman Crothers - 'If you could read my mind, love...'

“… it’s going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in
  the scheme of things.”

— Anne McCaffrey, 
Radcliffe ’47,
To Ride Pegasus

Monday, December 24, 2007

Monday December 24, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
 

From Saturday's entry
(Log24, Dec. 22, 2007)
a link goes to–
The five entries of June 14, 2007.

From there, the link
"One Two Three Four,
Who Are We For?"
goes to–
Princeton: A Whirligig Tour
(Log24, June 5, 2007).

From there, the link
"Taking Christ to Studio 60"
goes to–
The five Log 24 entries
prior to midnight Sept. 18, 2006.

From there, the link
"Log24, January 18, 2004"
goes to–
A Living Church.

From there, the link
"click here"
goes to–
In the Bleak Midwinter
(Internet Movie Database)…

Tagline:

The drama. The passion. The intrigue… And the rehearsals haven't even started.

Plot Summary:

Out of work actor Joe volunteers to help try and save his sister's local church
for the community by putting on a Christmas production of Hamlet…

"… were it not that
  I have bad dreams."
— Hamlet

Related material:

The New York Times online
obituaries of December 22,

 Ike Turner's
 "Bad Dreams" album
(see Log24, July 12, 2004),

"Devil Music," a composition
by H. S. M. Coxeter,

and

King of Infinite Space.

Those desiring more literary depth
may consult the G. K. Chesterton
play "Magic" for which Coxeter
wrote his "Devil Music" and
the Ingmar Bergman film
"The Magician" said to have
been inspired by Chesterton.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Thursday July 12, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Heaven was
kind of a hat

on the universe,
a lid that kept
everything underneath it
where it belonged.”

 — Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge

Texas Lottery logo: cowboy hat in air

Texas Lottery on 7/11, 2007: Mid-day 511, Evening 234

5/11:

“Going Up.”

— “Love at the  
 Five and Dime
,”
by
Nanci Griffith

234:

“One two three four,
who are we for?”

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Thursday June 14, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm
A Flag for Sunset

"Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes was [sic] exposed late in his career, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 88." —The New York Times this afternoon
 

Related material:

From a story by
Leonard Michaels
linked to on
Aaron Sorkin's
birthday, June 9:

"Induction and analogy, in which he was highly gifted, were critical to mathematical intelligence.

It has been said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Nachman wasn't against examining his life, but then what was a life? ….

… As for 'a life,' it was what you read about in newspaper obituaries. He didn't need one. He would return to California and think only about mathematics."

Mathematics:

1.  A quotation from George Polya,
     the author of
     Induction and Analogy
     in Mathematics

2.  A quotation from an anonymous
     Internet user signed
     "George Polya"–
     "Steven Cullinane is a Liar."

3.  L'Affaire Dharwadker continues
     (May 31, 2007)

4.  Geometry for Jews

The image “http://log24.com/theory/images/070614-Whirl.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"One two three four,
who are we for?"

 

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Thursday June 7, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 am
Masters of Chaos

From the May 6, 2007,
New York Times,
Charles McGrath on
Philip K. Dick:

His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. "If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double," an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'"  

 

Masters of Chaos

Click to enlarge.

As for "the thing with
three souls"–

Part I:
"Educate, Empower, Entertain"
— Motto of Yolanda King

Part II:
Three universities
(but not those of
Martin Myerson)–
Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Tuesday June 5, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:08 am
Princeton:
A Whirligig Tour

Symbol from a
website on
“Presbyterian
Creedal Standards”

The above symbol
appeared here
on 11/8/02.

Related material:

1. The remarks of
Bradley Whitford

at Princeton’s
Class Day yesterday:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070605-Whitford.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

2. An illustration from
Log 24 on 11/10/06:

Paul Robeson in
King Solomon’s
Mines

Counterchange
symmetry

3. The Whirligig of Time
(1/5/03):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070605-Whirligig.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

4. Natalie Angier, priestess of Scientism
  (5/26/07), and her new book
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of
the Beautiful Basics of Science
(available as a special from
Amazon.com):

Better Together Buy this book with
God Is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens today!

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Buy Together Today: $31.19


Customers who bought this item
also bought

God Is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Wednesday November 22, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Rock of Ages

“Who knows where madness lies?”
— Rhetorical question
in “Man of La Mancha”
(See previous entry.)

Using madness to
seek out madness, let us
  consult today’s numbers…

Pennsylvania Lottery
Nov. 22, 2006:

Mid-day 487
Evening 814

The number 487 leads us to
page 487 in the
May 1977 PMLA,
The Form of Carnival
in Under the Volcano
“:

“The printing presses’ flywheel
marks the whirl of time*
    that will split La Despedida….”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061122-Flywheel.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Flywheel

From Dana Grove,
A Rhetorical Analysis of
Under the Volcano
,
page 92:

“… In this way, mystical as well as psychological dimensions are established.  Later on, the two pass by a printer’s shop window and curiously stop to inspect, amidst wedding portraits and well in front of the revolving flywheel of the printing machines, ‘a photographic enlargement purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires.’  Significantly the picture is called ‘La Despedida,’ the Parting.  Yvonne cannot help but see the symbolic significance of the photograph and wishes with all of her might ‘to heal the cleft rock’ just as she wishes to heal the divorce….”

Some method in this madness
is revealed by the evening
lottery number, 814, which
leads to an entry of 8/14:

Cleavage Term

“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term between
hip and square, seemed to be it.”
Robert M. Pirsig 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061122-Goldstein.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Rebecca Goldstein

The 8/14 entry also deals with
Rebecca Goldstein, who
seems to understand
such cleavage
very well.

(See also today’s previous entry.)

* Cf. Shakespeare’s “whirligig of time
linked to in the previous entry.)

Monday, October 9, 2006

Monday October 9, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
ART WARS:
To Apollo

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus
(10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday
(01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur
(10/05/03)
A Form
(05/22/04)
Ineluctable
(05/27/04)
A Form, continued
(06/05/04)
Parallelisms
(06/06/04)
Ado
(06/25/04)
Deep Game
(06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen
(06/27/04)
And So To Bed
(06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah
(09/15/04)
Derrida Dead
(10/09/04)
The Nine
(11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato
(11/19/04)
Art History
(05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone
(08/06/05)
High Concept
(8/23/05) 
High Concept, Continued
(8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought
(8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking
(10/09/05)
Balance
(10/31/05)
Matrix
(11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate
(11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine
(11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ
(12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig
(01/05/06)
Cross
(01/06/06)
On Beauty
(01/26/06)
Sunday Morning
(01/29/06)
Centre
(01/29/06)
New Haven
(01/29/06) 
Washington Ballet
(02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon
(02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo
(02/05/06)
Game Boy
(08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross
(09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box
(09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave
(09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays
(09/26/06)
Symbology 101
(09/26/06)

Thursday, January 5, 2006

Thursday January 5, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:15 pm
Whirligig (continued)
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log06/saved/060105-Kalachakra2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Thus the whirligig of time
brings in his revenges.”
 
Twelfth Night,
Act V, Sc. I  [text]

See also January 5 in 2003 and 2005.

Thursday January 5, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am
Hamilton’s Whirligig

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Quaternions2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see Visualizing GL(2,p).

“Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….”

— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Saturday July 16, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 pm
Tribute

to the Dance of Kali:

  From Feb. 18, 2003

Fat Man and Dancing Girl

Dance of
Shiva and Kali

Paul Newman as
General Groves

From "The Bomb of the Blue God," by M. V. Ramana

Gita 11:32 —

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."

 See 1132 AD & Saint Brighid, and my 2003 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).

The fact that Oppenheimer thought, on this date in 1945, 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.

Related material for
Michael Flatley on his
July 16 birthday:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050716-nataraj2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Shiva as Lord of the Dance

Michael and other Irish persons
may benefit from the film
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"
as an introduction to
the Dance of Shiva and Kali.

On a more personal level:
Log24 entries of July 12 and July 13.

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

Wednesday January 5, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:11 am

Death and the Spirit

A meditation for Twelfth Night
on "the whirligig of time"

Today's New York Times obituaries feature two notable graphic artists: 
  • Frank Kelly Freas, who created, among other works, 400 portraits of saints for the Franciscans and the covers of Mad Magazine from 1958 through 1962. "I found it difficult to shift my artistic gears from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again," he said of his departure from Mad.
  • Will Eisner, "an innovative comic-book artist who created the Spirit, a hero without superpowers, and the first modern graphic novel."

Yesterday's entry provided an approach to The Dark Lady, Kali, that was, in Freas's apt word, "ridiculous."  The illustration below, "Mate," is an attempt to balance yesterday's entry with an approach that is, if not sublime, at least more serious.  It is based on a similar illustration from Jan. 31, 2003, with actress Judy Davis playing The Dark Lady.  Today it seems appropriate to replace Davis with another actress (anonymous here, though some may recognize her).  I once knew her (unlike Davis) personally.  One of my fondest memories of high school is reading Mad Magazine with her in the school lunch room.  Our lives diverged after high school, but I could happily have spent my life in her company.

Mate

– S. H. Cullinane, Twelfth Night, 2005

The image “http://log24.com/log/pix05/050105-Mate.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A diamond and its dual "whirl" figure—
or a "jewel-box and its mate"

For details, see the five Log24 entries
ending on Feb. 1, 2003, and the
perceptive remarks of Ryan Benedetti
on Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

As for Eisner and "The Spirit,"
which has been called
"the quintessential noir detective series,"
those preferring non-graphic stories
may picture Spade or his creator,
Dashiell Hammett, in the title role.

Then, of course, there are Eisner's later
  story, "A Contract With God,"
  John 4:24, and 1916 4/24.

Monday, January 5, 2004

Monday January 5, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am

Whirligig

Thus the whirligig of time
     brings in his revenges.”
Twelfth Night. Act v. Sc. 1.

Twelfth night is the night of January 5-6.

Tonight is twelfth night in Australia;
12:25 AM Jan. 5 in New York City is
4:25 PM Jan. 5 in Melbourne.

Monday, February 24, 2003

Monday February 24, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:17 am

Moulins Rouges

Today is the birthday of composer Michel Legrand (“The Windmills of Your Mind”) and of philologist Wilhelm Grimm (Grimms’ Fairy Tales).


Red
Windmill
 


Red
Mill


 Rode
 Molen

See the following past entries:

October 6, 2002: “Twenty-first Century Fox”

November 7, 2002: “Endgame”

November 8, 2002: “Religious Symbolism at Princeton”

January 5, 2003: “Whirligig”

January 5, 2003: “Culinary Theology”

January 6, 2003: “Dead Poet in the City of Angels”

January 31, 2003: “Irish Fourplay”

February 1, 2003; “Time and Eternity”

February 5, 2003: “Release Date”

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Tuesday February 18, 2003

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

Fat Man and Dancing Girl

Dance of
Shiva and Kali

Paul Newman as
General Groves

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed in the film "Fat Man and Little Boy," died on this date in 1967.

He is sometimes called the "father of the A-bomb."  He said that at the time of the first nuclear test he thought of a line from the Sanskrit holy book, the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  The following gives more details.

The Bomb of the Blue God

M. V. Ramana

Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University

Published in SAMAR: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, Issue 13

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.  Indeed, the translations of the Gita by S. Radhakrishnan, A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Nataraja Guru and Eliot Deutsch say precisely that. One exception to this, however, is the 1929 translation by Arthur Ryder. And, indeed, in a 1933 letter to his brother, Robert Oppenheimer does mention that he has "been reading the Bhagavad Gita with Ryder and two other Sanskritists." The misinterpretation, therefore, may not have been the fault of Oppenheimer or Jungk. Nevertheless, the verse does not have anything to do with an apocalyptic or catastrophic destruction, as most people have interpreted it in connection with nuclear weapons. When kAla is understood as time, the meaning is drastically changed to being a reminder of our mortality and finite lifetimes ­ as also the lifetimes of everything else in this world (including plutonium and uranium, despite their long, long, half-lives!). It then becomes more akin to western notions of the "slow march of time" and thus having little to do with the immense destruction caused by a nuclear explosion. While the very first images that arose in the father of the atomic bomb are a somewhat wrong application of Hindu mythology, his recollection of the Bhagavad Gita may have been quite pertinent. As is well known, the Bhagavad Gita was supposedly intended to persuade Arjuna to participate in the Kurukshetra battle that resulted in the killing of thousands. Thus, Oppenheimer may well have been trying to rationalize his involvement in the development of a terrible weapon.

Source: Google cache of
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/5409/samar_bluegod.pdf

See also
http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=36.
 
"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.

Sunday, January 5, 2003

Sunday January 5, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:36 pm

Culinary Theology

A comment on "Whirligig," the previous entry:

 

When I hear 'red mill,'
I think Red Mill.

Red Mill
Burgers

Posted 1/5/2003 at 5:10 am
by
HomerTheBrave.

From my favorite theologian, Jimmy Buffett:

"Well good God Almighty,
which way do I steer for my

Chorus:
Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Makin' the best of every virtue and vice (paradise)
Worth every damn bit of sacrifice (paradise)
To get a cheeseburger in paradise
To be a cheeseburger in paradise
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise!"

For some, paradise — or at least the gateway to paradise — is at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

From a one-act version (p. xvi) of
"The Night of the Iguana":

"MISS JELKES: Is this the menu? (She has picked up a paper on the table.)

SHANNON: Yes, it's the finest piece of rhetoric since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."

"Cheeseburger In Paradise, Puerto Vallarta, opened for business on November 7, 1999." — The same date, mentioned in last night's "Whirligig" entry, that Fox Studios Australia opened in Sydney with a song by Kylie Minogue. 

Sunday January 5, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:12 am

Whirligig

Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
Twelfth Night. Act v. Sc. 1.

Twelfth night is the night of January 5-6.

Tonight is twelfth night in Australia; 4 AM Jan. 5
in New York City is 8 PM Jan. 5 in Sydney.


An October 6 entry:

Twenty-first Century Fox

On Sunday, October 6, 1889, the Moulin Rouge music hall opened in Paris, an event that to some extent foreshadowed the opening of Fox Studios Australia in Sydney on November 7, 1999.  The Fox ceremonies included, notably, Kylie Minogue singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." 

 

Red Windmill

Kylie Minogue

For the mathematical properties of the red windmill (moulin rouge) figure at left, see Diamond Theory.

An October 5 entry:

The Message from Vega

"Mercilessly tasteful"
 — Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega's
"Songs in Red and Gray"


In accordance with the twelfth-night
"whirligig of time" theme,
here are two enigmatic quilt blocks:

Devil's Claws, or
Hourglass Var. 3

Yankee Puzzle, or
Hourglass Var. 5

 
One can approach these symbols in either a literary or a mathematical fashion. For a purely mathematical discussion of the differences in the two symbols' structure, see Diamond Theory. Those who prefer literary discussions may make up their own stories.
 
"Plato is wary of all forms of rapture other than reason's. He is most deeply leery of, because himself so susceptible to, the literary imagination. He speaks of it as a kind of holy madness or intoxication and goes on to link it to Eros, another derangement that joins us, but very dangerously, with the gods."
 
Rebecca Goldstein in The New York Times,
    December 16, 2002 
 
"It's all in Plato, all in Plato; bless me,
what do they teach them at these schools?"
 
— C. S. Lewis in the Narnia Chronicles 

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