Windmills
 

Upper part of above picture--

From today's New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.

Lower part of above picture--
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:

"This magical place, according
to Navajo Legend, was the home of Spider Woman, who gave the gift of weaving
to the Dineh' People.  Today's Navajos trace the excellence of their finest textiles to this
time of legends, when their patron, Changing Woman, met Spider Woman,
the first Weaver."

Vine Deloria Jr.,
 
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:

"The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot
political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the
summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the
mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off
outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment.  Don
Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for
windmills."

    "Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun
it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on
her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom
where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, 'Look, Buster, do
you want to live?'....
    Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the
door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead
to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

Bordered version
of the sigil

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark
lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a
plus sign.  It looked permanent."

-- Fritz Leiber, "Damnation Morning"

For Vine Deloria Jr., who died at 72 on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005:

        Things forgotten are shadows.
        The shadows will be as real
        as wind and rain and song and light,
        there in the old place.
        Spider Woman atop your rock,
        I would greet you,
        but I am going the other way.
        Only a fool would pursue a Navajo
        into the Canyon of Death.

Culture Wars

'Chicken Little' Lays Golden Egg
(Dean Goodman, Reuters)

'Bee Season' Anxiety
(Leonard Klady, Movie City News):

From a
Beethoven's Birthday entry:

Kaleidoscope turning...
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure...
-- Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat     

Related material:

Blue
(below),

Bee Season
(below),

Halloween Meditations,
Aquarius Jazz,
We Are the Key,
and
Jazz on St. Lucia's Day.

"Y'know, I never imagined
the competition version involved
so many tricky permutations."

-- David Brin, Glory Season

State of Grace
On this date in 1929,
Grace Kelly was born.

"...his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly... on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America,
there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather
bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical
books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection...."

-- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Chapter VI

"... when Saul does reach for a slim leather-bound volume Eliza cannot
help but feel that something momentous is about to happen.  There
is care in the way he carries the book on the short journey from its
shelf, as if it were constructed not of leather and parchment but of
flesh and blood....
    "Otzar Eden HaGanuz," Saul says.  "The Hidden Eden. 
In this book, Abulafia describes the process of permutation.... Once
you have mastered it, you will have mastered words, and once you have
mastered words, you will be ready to receive shefa."

-- Bee Season: A Novel

"In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."

-- The Gameplayers of Zan, a novel featuring games based on cellular automata

"Regarding cellular automata, I'm trying to think in what SF books
I've seen them mentioned. Off the top of my head, only three come to
mind:

The Gameplayers of Zan M.A. Foster
Permutation City Greg Egan
Glory Season David Brin"

-- Jonathan L. Cunningham, Usenet

    "If all that 'matters'
are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to
be any important difference between the actual and the possible.
(Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find
some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern.
In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)....
    ... Paul Durham is convinced by the 'logic of the dust' theory mentioned
above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular
automaton (Permutation City) started in a 'Garden of Eden'
configuration — one which isn't reachable from any other, and
which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation....  I didn't understand the need for this elaborate
set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than 'well, all
possible worlds exist, and I'm going to tell you about one of them.'"

-- Danny Yee, review of Permutation City

"Y'know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations."

-- David Brin, Glory Season, 1994 Spectra paperback, p. 408

Figure 2 "... matter is consciousness expressed in the intermixing of force and form, but so heavily structured and constrained by form that its behaviour becomes describable using the regular and simple laws of  physics. This is shown in Figure 2.     The glyph in Figure 2 is the basis for a kabbalistic diagram called the Etz Chaiim, or Tree of Life. The first principle of being or consciousness is called Keter, which means Crown. The raw energy of consciousness is called Chokhmah or Wisdom, and the capacity to give form to the energy of consciousness is called Binah, which is sometimes translated as Understanding, and sometimes as Intelligence. The outcome of the interaction of force and form, the physical world, is called Malkhut or Kingdom.  This is shown... in Figure 3."

Figure 3 "This quaternary is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-Knowable, in the sense that it the most abstract representation of God we are capable of comprehending....     God-the-Knowable has four aspects, two male and two female: Keter and Chokhmah are both represented as male, and Binah and Malkhut are represented as female. One of the titles of Chokhmah is Abba, which means Father, and one of the titles of Binah is Imma, which means Mother, so you can think of Chokhmah as God-the-Father, and Binah as God-the-Mother. Malkhut is the daughter, the female spirit of God-as-Matter, and it would not be wildly wrong to think of her as Mother Earth. And what of God-the-Son? Is there also a God-the-Son in Kabbalah? There is...." -- A Depth of Beginning: Notes on Kabbalah by Colin Low (pdf)

See also
Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures,
Mathematics and Narrative,
Deep Game,
and the previous entry.