The Last Enemy

Journal Notes by Steven H. Cullinane
in chronological order, Jan. 20-26, 2008

Sunday, January 20, 2008  7:00 AM

Saturday's Deaths:

Oh, What Can It Mean?

From the last entry in my
Harvard weblog-- May 21, 2005:

//www.log24.com/log/pix05/050521-Zeitung.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Franken is best known as
the author of
Lies and the Lying Liars
Who Tell Them.

Today, more from the same newspaper:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080120-HeraldZeitung.jpg
AP Top Entertainment News
At 6:09 a.m. EST

'Newhart' Actress Suzanne Pleshette Dies
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced star best known for her role as Bob Newhart's sardonic wife on television's long-running "The Bob Newhart Show," has died at age 70....

'Daydream Believer' Songwriter Dies
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- John Stewart, who wrote the Monkees' hit "Daydream Believer" and became a well-known figure in the 1960s folk music revival as a member of The Kingston Trio, has died, according to the band's Web site. He was 68....

"Oh, what can it mean
to a daydream believer
and a homecoming queen?"

Related material:
Buck Mulligan's Introibo
and The Crimson Passion

"Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly.
That will do nicely. Switch off
the current, will you?"
-- Buck Mulligan

Monday, January 21, 2008  11:30 PM

Context-Sensitive Theology, continued:

Serious Numbers

"When times are mysterious
Serious numbers will always be heard."

-- Paul Simon
Recent events in world financial markets suggest a return to this topic, considered here on October 13, 2007.

That day's entry, on mathematics and theology, may be of use to those who are considering, as their next financial move, prayer.

Some related material:
  1. The review in the Jan. 22 New York Times of a book by mathematics vulgarizer John Allen Paulos refuting arguments for the existence of God.

  2. Arguments in a less controversial area-- for and against the consistency of elementary number theory:

    FOR: Kurt     Gödel, Steven H. Cullinane, and John Dawson (See Log24-- Nov. 30 and Dec. 2, 2005--  and "Gödel, Inconsistency, Provability, and Truth: An Exchange of Letters" (pdf), in the American Mathematical Society Notices of April 2006.)

    AGAINST: E. B. Davies, King's College London (See above.)

  3. André Weil: "God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."

  4. God: "605." (NY Lottery, mid-day Jan. 20, 2008) This can, of course, be interpreted as "6/05"-- which is, in the context of yesterday's Log24 entry, perhaps a reference to "God, the Devil, and a Bridge." Or perhaps not.

Friday, January 25, 2008  4:04 AM

ART WARS continued:

Requiem for a Curator

"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question
'What is truth?'"

  -- H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
book introduction quoted
as epigraph to
Art Wars

"I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another."

-- Nabokov, Speak, Memory

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080125-Ojo.jpg

Figure by Coxeter
reminiscent of the
Ojo de Dios of
Mexico's Sierra Madre

In memory of
National Gallery
of Art curator
Philip Conisbee,
who died on
January 16:

"the God's-eye
 of the author"

-- Dorothy Sayers,
    The Mind
    of the Maker
"one complete
and free eye,
which can
simultaneously see
in all directions"

-- Vladimir Nabokov,
    The Gift   
-- A Contrapuntal Theme

Friday, January 25, 2008  5:01 PM

Prospect:

Time and the River

Harvard Class of 1964
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report:

"At this writing (November, '88), President-elect Bush has just announced his intention to name me to his Cabinet and to nominate me as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Given the state of play in Washington, I suppose I may find myself in premature retirement by the time this report is published.

That is not an entirely unattractive prospect. Kath (Kathleen Emmet, '64) and I live in an idyllic setting, overlooking the Little Falls of the Potomac, just twelve minutes upstream from the Capitol. She writes-- she's now completing a book on American writers in Paris after World War II. Our children (Willy and Jonathan) do what healthy growing twelve- and seven-year-olds do. The river works its way peacefully over the falls and riffles around a woodsy island through the Chain Bridge narrows, and then on into the familar wide mud-basin of Washington-- a wholly different world.

When I was an undergraduate, I asked all the adolescent questions. I still do: Why does the river flow the way it does? Why does one move downstream and back? The allure of such simple questions is as great for me today as when we talked of them so seriously and so long at the University Restaurant or the Casablanca, or on the steps of Widener. The only difference seems to be that I'm now a bit more willing to settle for answers that seem simpler, less profound, sometimes even trite. But only a bit."

-- Richard Darman, who died today at 64

Saturday, January 26, 2008  2:22 AM

Retrospect:

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."