Log24

(Continued from Epiphany 2010)

For a Languid Janitor

Today is Commencement Day at MIT.

A song by Joni—

"Who needs the static?" Well might you ask, Joni.

"The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather…."

"We are not saints."

* Click for name.

Continued from May 8
(Feast of Saint Robert Heinlein)

“Wells and trees were dedicated to saints.  But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden.  Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.”

— Charles Williams, Witchcraft, Faber and Faber, London, 1941

Why "Saint" Robert? See his accurate depiction of evil– the Eater of Souls in Glory Road.

For more on Williams's "other capacities," see Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy."

A related story– Fritz Leiber's "The Mind Spider." An excerpt:

The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate
gabfest—proceeded.

"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,"
Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the
trivia of the past twenty-four hours.

The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather
Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain
waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was
too much danger of complete loss of individual personality

—once Grandfather Horn had "become" his infant daughter
as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged
mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own
subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall be-
- hind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar
to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently
always enclosed.

In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and
emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness
was as real and as mysterious—and as incredible—as
thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel-cloud
dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference
was as warm and intimate and tart as any actual family
gathering in one actual room around one actual table.
Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness
that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for
comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that
pervades the cosmos.

Evelyn continued, "Your boxes were all working, of
course, so I couldn't get your thoughts—just the blurs of
your boxes like little old dark grey stars. But this time
if gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider
Crawling down my—Grayl! Don't feel so wildly! What
Is it?”

Then… just as Grayl started to think her answer…
something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite
cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the
Horns.

Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had
ttie curling too-keen edge of hysteria. "There are six of
us now! There should only be five, but there are six.
Count! Count, I tell you! Six!"

To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing
across the web of their thoughts….

See also this journal on May 30– "720 in the Book"– and on May 31– "Memorial for Galois."

("Obnoxious nerds"— a phrase Martin Gardner recently applied to Galois— will note that 720 (= 6!) is one possible result of obeying Leiber's command "Count! Count, I tell you! Six!")

Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde’s
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art –

“Trickster,” says Hyde, “feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” (71) As Hyde says, “…  almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters,” (158), although the reverse is not the case. “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.” (159)

What is “the next world”? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

See also George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner, Trickster.

"I wonder if there's just been a critical mass
of creepy stories about Harvard
in the last couple of years…
A kind of piling on of
    nastiness and creepiness…"

– Margaret Soltan, October 23, 2006

Harvard University Press
  on Facebook—

	Harvard University Press
Martin Gardner on demythologizing mathematicians: "Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd"
http://ping.fm/YrgOh
May 26 at 6:28 pm via Ping.f

The book that the late Gardner was reviewing
was published in April by Harvard University Press.

If Gardner's remark were true,
Galois would fit right in at Harvard. Example—
  The Harvard math department's pie-eating contest—

Wikipedia—

"On June 2, Évariste Galois was buried in a common grave of the Montparnasse cemetery whose exact location is unknown."

Évariste Galois, Lettre de Galois à M. Auguste Chevalier—

Après cela, il y aura, j'espère, des gens qui trouveront leur profit à déchiffrer tout ce gâchis.

(Later there will be, I hope, some people who will find it to their advantage to decipher all this mess.)

Martin Gardner on the above letter—

"Galois had written several articles on group theory, and was merely annotating and correcting those earlier published papers."

– The Last Recreations, by Martin Gardner, published by Springer in 2007, page 156.

Leonard E. Dickson—

"It is a melancholy pleasure that what may be [Martin] Gardner’s last published piece, a review of Amir Alexander’s Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics, will appear next week in our June issue."

– Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, May 23, 2010.

The Gardner piece is now online.  It contains…

On Misplaced Concreteness—

An excerpt from China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry, by Brantly Womack (Cambridge U. Press, 2006)—

The book is intended to be a contribution to the general theory of international relations as well as to the understanding of China and Vietnam, but I give greater priority to “the case” rather than to the theory. This is a deliberate methodological decision. As John Gerring has argued, case studies are especially appropriate when exploring new causal mechanisms.²  I would argue more broadly that the “case” is the reality to which the theory is secondary. In international relations theory, “realism” is often contrasted to “idealism,” but surely a more basic and appropriate meaning of “realism” is to give priority to reality rather than to theory. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead defined the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness as “neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought.”³ In effect, the concept is taken as the concrete reality, and actual reality is reduced to a mere appendage of data. Misplaced Concreteness may well be the cardinal sin of modern social science. It is certainly pandemic in international relations theory, where a serious consideration of the complexities of real political situations is often dismissed as mere “area studies.” Like the Greek god Anteus who was sustained by touching his Mother Earth, theory is challenged and rejuvenated by planting its feet in thick reality.

² John Gerring, "What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?"
   American Political Science Review  98:2 (May 2004), pp. 341-54
³ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
   (New York: Harper, 1929), p. 11

Remarks—

"Whitehead defined the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness…."

The phrase "misplaced concreteness" occurs in the title of a part of an exhibition, "Theme and Variations," by artist Josefine Lyche (Oslo, 2009). I do not know what Lyche had in mind when she used the phrase. A search for possible meanings yielded the above passage.

"In international relations theory, “realism” is often contrasted to “idealism….”

For a more poetic look at "realism" and "idealism" and international relations theory, see Midsummer Eve's Dream.

Today is commencement day at Princeton.

Sunday's A Post for Galois was suggested, in part, by the fact that the founder and CEO of Amazon.com was that day's Princeton baccalaureate speaker. The Galois post linked to the Amazon reviews of one Christopher G. Robinson, a resident of Cambridge, Mass., whose Amazon book list titled "Step Right Up!" reflects a continuing libertine tradition at Harvard.

For Princeton's commencement day, it seems fitting to cite another Amazon document that reflects the more conservative values of that university.

I recommend the review Postmodern Pythagoras, by Matthew Milliner. Milliner is, in his own words, "an art history Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University."

See also Milliner's other reviews at Amazon.com.

"For every kind of libertine,
there is a kind of cross."

– Saying adapted from Pynchon

… and for Louise Bourgeois

"The épateurs  were as boring as the bourgeois,
two halves of one dreariness."

– D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent

Evariste Galois, 1811-1832 (Vita Mathematica, V. 11)

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Birkhäuser Basel; 1 edition (December 6, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3764354100
• ISBN-13: 978-3764354107
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  (1 customer review)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #933,939 in Books

Awarded 5 stars by Christopher G. Robinson (Cambridge, MA USA).
See also other reviews by Robinson.

Galois was shot in a duel on today's date, May 30, in 1832. Related material for those who prefer entertainment to scholarship—

"It is a melancholy pleasure that what may be [Martin] Gardner’s last published piece, a review of Amir Alexander’s Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics, will appear next week in our June issue." –Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, May 23, 2010.

Today is, incidentally, the feast day of St. Joan of Arc, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. (See "against stupidity" in this journal.)

"Princeton's Baccalaureate service is an end-of-the-year ceremony focused on members of the senior class. It includes prayers and readings from various religious and philosophical traditions."

One such tradition— the TV series "Lost."

Another— the Pennsylvania Lottery—

For some context,
see May 6, 2010.

See also this journal's post
"The Omen" on the date 6/6/6.

"Greater East Asia" (大東亜, Dai-tō-a)
was a Japanese term
(banned during the post-war Occupation)
referring to Far East Asia. –Wikipedia

Related historical remarks from Wikipedia—

"From the Japanese point of view, one common principal reason stood behind both forming the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and initiating war with the Allies: Chinese markets. Japan wanted their 'paramount relations' in regard to Chinese markets acknowledged by the U.S. government. The U.S., recognizing the abundance of potential wealth in these markets, refused to let the Japanese have an advantage in selling to China."

"Shine on, shine on,
there is work to be done
in the dark before the dawn."

– Daisy May Erlewine

"The exhibition title Theme and Variations
hints at the analytical-intellectual undertone
Josefine Lyche takes this time, but
not without humorous touches."

"Perfect, genuine,
complete, crystalline, pure."

See also The Cruciatus Curse.

Significant Passage:
On the Writing Style of Visual Thinkers

"The words are filled with unstated meaning.
They are (the term is Ricoeur's) 'packed'
and need unpacking." –Gerald Grow

From the date of Ricoeur's death,
May 20, 2005—

“Plato’s most significant passage
    may be found in Phaedrus  265b…."

From Sept. 30, 2004—

Mozart's K 265 is variations on the theme
now known as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

For darker variations on the Twinkle theme,
see the film "Joshua" and Martin Gardner's
Annotated Alice  (Norton, 2000, pp. 73-75).

Joshua

For darker variations on the asterisk theme,
see Darkness Visible (May 25)
and Vonnegut's Asterisk.

Happy Birthday,
Carey Mulligan

Star of "An Education"

In "An Education," Mulligan's character
applies for admission to Oxford.

Today's New York Times:

For Memorial Day Weekend:

Finn, again!

See also Time and Chance: Log24 Posts of Oct. 24, 2006*, which include a link to the work of Msgr.^✝ Robert Sokolowski of the Catholic University of America.

_{* For the connection between Finnegans Wake  and the date October 24, 2006, see Polyglot Joyce, p. 223, and Phrase Finder.}

_{^✝ From the posts of Saturday, May 22— "The Lyche Gate was the covered gateway at the entrance of the church yard, where the corpse was rested until the priest issued from the church to meet the procession."}

_{– Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture, by Frank Wills, published by Stanford and Swords, 1850}

Charles Isherwood on the death last Saturday of a fellow theater critic—

"...as it happened, I heard about his death just as I was entering the Lunt-Fontanne to see 'The Addams Family.' For a second time. By myself.

Now, there are happier ways to spend a Saturday night than attending a show you didn’t particularly like for the second time, by yourself. (Long story.) But then there’s no happy way to spend the night a friend dies."

For what it's worth—  night thoughts from this journal, Saturday night to Sunday morning—

• Annals of Conceptual Art (2:02 AM ET Sunday)
• Annals of Philosophy (3:33 AM ET Sunday)
• Sunday School (9:00 AM ET Sunday)

From "Sunday School"—

"Nine tailors make a man."
– Dorothy Sayers

"You ain't been blue; no, no, no.
 You ain't been blue,
 Till you've had that mood indigo."
 – Song lyrics, authorship disputed

Indigo (web color) (#4B0082)

"Pigment indigo (web color indigo) represents
 the way the color indigo was always reproduced
 in pigments, paints, or colored pencils in the 1950s."

Related mythology:

Indigo Children and the classic
1964 film Children of the Damned

Related non-mythology:

Colored pencils—

For a former editor of Humpty Dumpty—

Click to enlarge.

"Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers,
was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars….

Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood's sokaparlour…."

– Finnegans Wake

To counteract the darkness of today's 2:01 AM entry—

Part I— Artist Josefine Lyche describes her methods—

A— "Internet and hard work"
B— "Books, both fiction and theory"

Part II— I, too, now rely mostly on the Internet for material. However, like Lyche, I have Plan B— books.

Where I happen to be now, there are piles of them. Here is the pile nearest to hand, from top to bottom.

(The books are in no particular order, and put in the same pile for no particular reason.)

1. Philip Rieff— Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. I: My Life Among the Deathworks
2. Dennis L. Weeks— Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams
3. Erwin Panofsky— Idea: A Concept in Art Theory
4. Max Picard— The World of Silence
5. Walter J. Ong, S. J.— Hopkins, the Self, and God
6. Richard Robinson— Definition
7. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, eds.— An Introduction to Poetry
8. Richard J. Trudeau— The Non-Euclidean Revolution
9. William T. Noon, S. J.— Joyce and Aquinas
10. Munro Leaf— Four-and-Twenty Watchbirds
11. Jane Scovell— Oona: Living in the Shadows
12. Charles Williams— The Figure of Beatrice
13. Francis L. Fennell, ed.— The Fine Delight: Centenary Essays on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
14. Hilary Putnam— Renewing Philosophy
15. Paul Tillich— On the Boundary
16. C. S. Lewis— George MacDonald

Lyche probably could easily make her own list of what Joyce might call "sisteen shimmers."

Darkness Visible

The inevitable tribute to Martin Gardner
has now appeared at the AMS website—

Related Imagery—

The following is an image from Saturday morning—

See also Art Wars and
Mathematics and Narrative.

The weekend's posts in this journal coincided,
more or less, with the finale of the TV series "Lost."
Recalling each story brings to mind
the subtitle of Heinrich Zimmer's classic
  The King and the Corpse —

Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil.

Here, in the spirit of "The Fifth Element," is a
brief graphic summary of such a conquest—

The Soul

(Click for details)

Evil

(from Saturday morning)

Cannes Festival Readies for Awards Night

Uncertified Copy

The pictures in the detail are copies of
figures created by S. H. Cullinane in 1986.
They illustrate his model of hyperplanes
and points in the finite projective space
known as PG(3,2) that underlies
Cullinane's diamond theorem.

The title of the pictures in the detail
is that of a film by Burkard Polster
that portrays a rival model of PG(3,2).

The artist credits neither Cullinane nor Polster.

"Mathematics is forever."
– Gian-Carlo Rota   

"Nine is a very powerful
  Nordic number."
– Katherine Neville    

 "Nine tailors make a man."
– Dorothy Sayers 

Busy Night at the Lyche Gate

"When Death tells a story, you really have to listen."
 

Josefine Lyche's
  "Theme and Variations" (Oslo, 2009)—

Some images in reply—

  Frame Tale

Click on images for further details.

"In the name of the former
and of the latter
and of their holocaust.
  Allmen."

– Finnegans Wake

Today's New York Times—

Catch-22 in Doonesbury today—

From Log24 on Jan. 5, 2010—
   Artifice of Eternity—

A Medal

In memory of Byzantine scholar Ihor Sevcenko,
who died at 87 on St. Stephen's Day, 2009–

Thie above image results from a Byzantine
meditation based on a detail in the previous post—

"This might be a good time to
call it a day." –Today's Doonesbury

"TOMORROW ALWAYS BELONGS TO US"
Title of an exhibition by young Nordic artists
in Sweden during the summer of 2008.

The exhibition included, notably, Josefine Lyche.

From an interview with artist Josefine Lyche (see previous post) dated March 11, 2009—

- Can you name a writer or book, fiction or theory that has inspired your works?
- Right now I am reading David Foster Wallace, which is great and inspiring. Others would be Aleister Crowley, Terence McKenna, James Joyce, J.L Borges, J.D Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and Plato to mention some. Books, both fiction and theory are a great part of my life and work.

This journal on the date of the interview had a post about a NY Times  story, ”Paris | A Show About Nothing."

Related images—

“Space: what you damn well have to see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses

From an art exhibition in Oslo last year–

The artist's description above is not in correct left-to-right order.
Actually the hyperplanes above are at left, the points at right.

Compare to "Picturing the Smallest Projective 3-Space,"
a note of mine from April 26, 1986—

Click for the original full version.

Compare also to Burkard Polster's original use of
the phrase "the smallest perfect universe."

Polster's tetrahedral model of points and hyperplanes
is quite different from my own square version above.

See also Cullinane on Polster.

Here are links to the gallery press release
and the artist's own photos.

Update of NY Times Art & Design
(See today's earlier posts
Annals of Conceptual Art and View.)

The architecture award ceremony was
at Ellis Island on Monday evening.

Arakawa died Tuesday.

Related material:

— And He Built a Crooked House

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

Related material:

A Handful of Dust
by J. G. Ballard

New York Times  Art & Design section, morning of Thursday, May 20, 2010—

Arakawa, Whose Art Tried to Halt Aging, Dies at 73

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Published: May 19, 2010

Arakawa, a Japanese-born conceptual artist and designer, who with his wife, Madeline Gins, explored ideas about mortality by creating buildings meant to stop aging and preclude death, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 73.

He had been hospitalized for a week, said Ms. Gins, who declined to give the cause of death.

Perhaps it was white space—

Click to enlarge.

Photo caption in NY Times  today— a pianist "preforming" in 1967. (See today's previous post.)

The pianist's life story seems in part to echo that of Juliette Binoche in the film "Bleu." Binoche appeared in this journal yesterday, before I had seen the pianist in today's Times  obituaries. The Binoche appearance was related to the blue diamond in the film "Duelle " (Tuesday morning's post) and the saying of Heraclitus "immortals mortal, mortals immortal" (Tuesday afternoon's post).

This somewhat uncanny echo brings to mind Nabokov—

Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

Whether sense or nonsense, the following quotation seems relevant—

"Archetypes function as living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." –C.G. Jung in Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, the section titled "On the Concept of the Archetype."

That section is notable for its likening of Jungian archetypes to Platonic ideas and to axial systems of crystals. See also "Cubist Tune," March 18 —

The Concert à Quatre  "was Messiaen's last work, left unfinished on his desk at his death. His widow undoubtedly followed his wishes and style in completing the orchestration." –Leslie Gerber

Related material:

See also yesterday's Stone Junction, this morning's note on Heidegger 's Geviert, and Moulin Bleu from Beethoven's birthday, 2003—

Juliette Binoche in "Bleu"

"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty
 when we see how the theorem 'fits'
 in its place, how it sheds light around itself,
 like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods."

 – Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

Here Rota is referring to a concept of Heidegger.

Some context—

"Gestalt Gestell Geviert: The Way of the Lighting,"
 by David Michael Levin in The Philosopher's Gaze

  "This is in point of form Heraclitus' masterpiece,
   the most perfectly symmetrical of all the fragments."

    — Charles H. Kahn

The Philosophers' Stone
according to
  The New York Times—

Related material
from French cinema—

"a 'non-existent myth' of a battle between
goddesses of the sun and the moon
for a mysterious blue diamond
that has the power to make
mortals immortal and vice versa."

See also

   Word and Image—

* The title is a reference to Jim Dodge's 1989 novel Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler.

A Google search suggested by Dexter Gordon's "Round Midnight" yields…

• m759 on Xanga – Weblog – Archives – May 2007

  Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday in Brazil "Dare to struggle, dare to win!" "Dare to guzzle Gordon's gin." — dialogue from Masks of the Illuminati …
  m759.xanga.com/archives/2007/5/ – Cached

• тексты,статьи,артефакты эпохи венца бредоносия и трансмутации …

  4 posts - 1 author - Last post: Aug 19, 2009

  Dare to guzzle Gordon's gin, Joyce added. Je suis Bovary, Flaubert said looking embarrassed. Je suis Molly Bloom, Joyce said unembarrassed. …
  psytribe.ru/index.php?topic=14001.0

May 18 update — The Russian link has been replaced by a link to a cached copy of the relevant content.

A new NY Times column:

Today's New York Times
re-edited for philosophers:

See also

Eightfold Symmetry,

John Baez's paper
Duality in Logic and Physics
(for a May 29 meeting at Oxford),

The Shining of May 29, and

Lubtchansky's Key, with its links
to Duelle (French, f. adj., dual)
and Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday.

Richard Kiley in "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)

Step Two

Cartoon by S.Harris

In memory of David Randolph, longtime director of Manhattan's St. Cecilia Chorus. Randolph died at 95 on May 12. (See May 12's "Soul Song.")

A book by Randolph and other remarks
related to St. Cecilia, whose
  feast day is November 22—

A recently created Wikipedia article says that  "The Miracle Octad Generator [MOG] is an array of coordinates, arranged in four rows and six columns, capable of describing any point in 24-dimensional space…." (Clearly any  array with 24 parts is so capable.) The article ignores the fact that the MOG, as defined by R.T. Curtis in 1976, is not  an array of coordinates, but rather a picture of a correspondence between two sets, each containing 35 structures. (As a later commentator has remarked, this correspondence is a well-known one that preserves a certain incidence property. See Eightfold Geometry.)

From the 1976 paper defining the MOG—

"There is a correspondence between the two systems of 35 groups, which is illustrated in Fig. 4 (the MOG or Miracle Octad Generator)." —R.T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M₂₄," Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society  (1976), 79: 25-42

Curtis's 1976 Fig. 4. (The MOG.)

The Wikipedia article, like a similar article at PlanetMath, is based on a different definition, from a book first published in 1988—

I have not seen the 1973 Curtis paper, so I do not know whether it uses the 35-sets correspondence definition or the 6×4 array definition. The remarks of Conway and Sloane on page 312 of the 1998 edition of their book about "Curtis's original way of finding octads in the MOG [Cur2]" indicate that the correspondence definition was the one Curtis used in 1973—

Here the picture of  "the 35 standard sextets of the MOG"
is very like (modulo a reflection) Curtis's 1976 picture
of the MOG as a correspondence between two 35-sets.

A later paper by Curtis does  use the array definition. See "Further Elementary Techniques Using the Miracle Octad Generator," Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society  (1989) 32, 345-353.

The array definition is better suited to Conway's use of his hexacode  to describe octads, but it obscures the close connection of the MOG with finite geometry. That connection, apparent in the phrases "vector space structure in the standard square" and "parallel 2-spaces" (Conway and Sloane, third ed., p. 312, illustrated above), was not discussed in the 1976 Curtis paper.  See my own page on the MOG at finitegeometry.org.

Today's top New York Times obituary
mentions Irving Berlin's 1919 tune
"A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody."

("That's show business." — Berlin)

I prefer a different song —

Related material —

Garden of the Soul and
A Mass for Lucero.

William Lubtchansky, a cinematographer, was born on October 26, 1937, and died on May 4, 2010.

Yesterday's post included an illustration from this journal on the date of his death.

Here is a Log24 entry from last year on the date of his birth—

Clicking on the Shift Lock key leads to the following page—

–The Philosopher's Gaze,
by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999

Related images—

Detail from May 4 image:

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:

(http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Exterior.html)

See also Lubtchansky's Duelle and
Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday, 2003.

Paul Robeson in
"King Solomon's Mines," 1937—

The image above is an illustration from
  "Romancing the Hyperspace," May 4, 2010.

This illustration, along with Georgia Brown's
song from "Cabin in the Sky"—
"There's honey in the honeycomb"—
suggests the following picture.

"What might have been and what has been
   Point to one end, which is always present."
– Four Quartets

School Book Depository
(Revisited)

Pro-Truth

Pro-Lies

The Ninth Gate

Friday's post "Religion at Harvard" continues…

This list may be of some use to
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who, like Prothero,
spoke recently at Harvard Book Store.

See also Rosalind Krauss on Grids,
An Education, and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Readers more advanced than Harvard audiences
may wish to compare yesterday's linked-to story
"Loo Ree" with the works of Alison Lurie–
in particular, Imaginary Friends and Familiar Spirits.

Or, "Get me rewrite!"

Today's New York Times online–

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein imagines a story about academics discussing literary theory—

"Rumors had reached us of a doctrine called Theory emanating from distant corners of the university. We in the Department of Philosophy understood it immediately as a grand hoax. I will not dwell on my particular amusement, in which I was so tragically at odds with my collaborator, Theo Rhee….

… It was at this moment that Hans Furth appeared and ambled over…."

And thanks to Google Books, here he is—

"…I can imagine the decisive evolutionary beginnings of humans and societies… not in an adult version, but in the playful mentality of children…. An unlikely story? Perhaps. I am looking out for a better story."

– Hans G. Furth, Desire for Society: Children's Knowledge as Social Imagination, published by Springer, 1996, p. 181

As am I. (See previous post.) One possibility, from 1943— "Mimsy Were the Borogoves."

Another possibility, from 1953—  not Theo Rhee, but rather "Loo Ree."

The Unreliable Narrator Meets the Unreliable Reader

Aaron Diaz at Dresden Codak

Comment by John Farrier on a list of 42 contrived plot devices –
"My favorite is the Unreliable Reader — a counterpart to the Unreliable Narrator."

Vladimir Nabokov — "Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge."

• Harvard Registrar's Office –
  2010 Spring Reading Period Ends–  May 6 (Th).
   
• Press release about a Harvard Square event at 7 PM Thursday –

  "Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome religion scholar and bestselling author STEPHEN PROTHERO for a conversation about his new book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter." ….

  Prothero's book avoids "the naive equating of them all as merely different paths to the same summit."
   

• Harvard Crimson photo caption today –

  "Religion scholar and bestselling author Stephen Prothero speaks at the Harvard Book Store last night about his new book 'God Is Not One' in which he seeks to demonstrate how differences in paths leading to the same destination can enrich, not prevent, dialogue and cooperation."

Leg-Pulling

"… to make the author manifestly unreliable"

Not to mention the reader.

Related material —

But seriously…

Click to enlarge.

"If you can bounce high, bounce for her too."

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Happy birthday, George.

From Google yesterday —

For example…

Everything and More

A metaphor for "Everything" –

A metaphor for "More" –

The Unfolding

A post for Florencio Campomanes,
former president of the World Chess Federation.

Campomanes died at 83 in the Philippines
at 1:30 PM local time (1:30 AM Manhattan time)
on Monday, May 3, 2010.

From this journal on the date of his death —

"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
– Madeleine L'Engle

Image by Christopher Thomas at Wikipedia —
Unfolding of a hypercube and of a cube —

Related material from a story of the Philippines —

From a post of Peter J. Cameron today —

"… I want to consider the question: What is the role of the symmetric group in mathematics? "

Cameron's examples include, notably, parallelisms of lines in affine spaces over GF(2).