Month: May 2006

  • Clint Eastwood
     is 76.

    In honor of his birthday,
    a three-part meditation
    on quality:

    Part I –

    From The Quality of Diamond,

    Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:

    The Quality
    with No
    Name

    And what is good, Phaedrus,
    and what is not good…
    Need we ask anyone
    to tell us these things?

    – Epigraph to

    Zen and the Art of
    Motorcyle Maintenance

    Part II –


    From Log24 on
    Dec. 7, 2003:

    Eyes on the Prize

    Dialogue from “Good Will Hunting” –

    Will:   He used to just put a belt,
              a stick, and a wrench
              on the kitchen table
              and say, “Choose.”
    Sean:  Gotta go with the belt, there.
    Will:    I used to go with the wrench.

     Location, Location, Location

    Part III –

    From the website of
    Noam D. Elkies,

    Harvard mathematician    :

    SLUMMERVILLE
    Somerville,
    Where the livin’ is sleazy:
    Folk are humpin’
    And the chillun is high.
    Oh yo’ daddy’s rich,
    ‘Cos yo’ ma is good lookin’
    So hush, ugly baby,
    Or I’ll make you cry.

    ["Parody by Noam D. Elkies;
    not the
    original lyrics,
    of course."]

    Related material
    from Log24 on
    April 10, 2006:

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    Noam D. Elkies

    The Magic Schmuck

  • The Mathematical
    Association of America
    discusses
    finite geometry:

     The Fano Plane


    by Ed Pegg Jr.,

    May 30, 2006:

    “One thing in the Fano plane that bothered me for years (for years, I
    say) is that it had a circle – and it was described as a line. For me, a line was
    a straight line, and I didn’t trust curved or wriggly lines. This distrust kept
    me away from understanding projective planes, designs, and finite geometries for
    a awhile (for years).”

    “Against stupidity
     the gods themselves
     fight unvictorious.”

     – Schiller,* quoted as
    the epigraph to the
    chapter on Galois in
    Men of Mathematics,
    by E. T. Bell

    Related material:
    Galois Geometry

    *
    From Die Jungfrau von Orleans
     (The Maid of Orleans)    , Act III, sc. vi.
    Today is the feast of that Jungfrau.

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    Click on picture
    for details.

  • Keir Dullea
     is 70 today.

    “There are some extremely
     odd things about this mission.”

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060530-HAL.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    – HAL 

  • Lifetime
    Achievement

    In honor of
    the long and rewarding
    life of Henry Bumstead,
    Oscar-winning
    production designer,
    who died last Wednesday
    in Pasadena at 91:

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    and

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    Background for
    the above material:

    See the Log24 entries of
    March 26, 2006

    and the Log24 archive
    for Dec. 1-15, 2005.

    Related material:

    From the Log24 entries on
    May 24, the date of
    St. Henry Bumstead’s death:

    Sunrise in Death Valley

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    (Click to see the larger original,
    a photo by Michael Trezzi)

    Why “St.” Henry?
    If you need to ask, you
    don’t know what saints are.

  • For John F. Kennedy’s birthday:

    The Call Girls
    Revisited

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    See The Shining of May 29
    from 2002
    and the references to
    the marriage theorem
    in Dharwadker’s Alleged Proof
    from 2005.

    “By groping toward the light
    we are made to realize

    how deep the darkness is
    around us.”

    – Arthur Koestler,
    The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,

    Random House, 1973, page 118

    For related material on
    academic darkness, see
    Mathematics and Narrative.

  • Strange Bedfellows

    Ted Berkman, author of books about the Israeli military, died at 92 on May 12, 2006.

    Dennis Hevesi in today’s New York Times:

    “In
    World War II he served as the Middle East chief of the Foreign
    Broadcast Intelligence Service, a predecessor of the Central
    Intelligence Agency    .
    In 1946, as a radio correspondent for ABC, he provided an eyewitness
    account of the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Jewish
    terrorists.”

    He also worked as a screenwriter (with his brother-in-law Raphael Blau) on the films “Girl of the Night” (1960), starring Anne Francis, and  “Bedtime for Bonzo” (1951), starring Diana Lynn.

    These are two of my all-time favorite actresses, and I am grateful to
    Berkman for providing them with roles.  I am less grateful for his
    Zionist politics.  Who he is in bed with now, God only knows.

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    Anne Francis

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060529-DianaLynn2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
    Diana Lynn

  • Wittgenstein’s
    Passion
     

    From today’s

    London Daily Mail    :

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    Related

    Philosophy:

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    6.54  My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who
    understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has
    climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to
    speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

    He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
    rightly.

    7 
    Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

    – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1922

    Related

    Art in Our Schools:

    Wednesday, March 22, 2006

      Former President

    of Dartmouth Dies


    From today’s New York Times    :

    “In one widely publicized episode, in 1988, he condemned The Dartmouth
    Review, a conservative student newspaper, for ridiculing blacks, gay
    men and lesbians, women and Jews.”

    Related material:


    The Harvard Jesus

     in     

    The Crimson Passion

  • Time Travel

    “Since thirty mornings
        are required to make
    A day of which we say,
        this is the day
    That we desire, a day of
        blank, blue wheels,

    Involving the four corners
        of the sky,
    Lapised and lacqued
        and freely emeraldine
    In the space it fills,
        the silent motioner

    There, of clear, revolving
        crystalline;
    Since thirty summers
       are needed for a year
    And thirty years,
       in the galaxies of birth,

    Are time for counting
       and remembering….”

    – Wallace Stevens,
       “Of Ideal Time and Choice,”
       in The Necessary Angel, 1951

    “When it’s time to railroad,
      people start railroading.”

    – Robert A. Heinlein in
       The Door into Summer, 1957

    “Everybody’s doin’
     a brand new dance now…”

    – Kylie Minogue, 1987-88

    Happy birthday, Kylie.

  • For Stevie Nicks,
    whose birthday is today

    “The quidditas or essence
     of an angel is
    the same as its form.”

    – William T. Noon, Society of Jesus,
    Joyce and Aquinas, Yale, 1957

    Related material
    from Oct. 27, 2003:

    See the picture

    in the web page
    Poetry’s Bones.

    “It does, indeed,
    look more
    like Proginoskes than any of
    the pictures on the
    book jackets.”

    – Madeleine L’Engle, letter of
    November 28,
    1976

  • A Living Church
    continued from March 27

    “The man who lives in contact with what he believes
    to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and
    Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.”

    – G. K. Chesterton

    		 The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060526-JackInTheBox.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
    Shakespearean
    Fool

    Related material:

    Yesterday’s entries
    and their link to
    The Line

    as well as

    Galois Geometry

    and the remarks
    of Oxford professor
    Marcus du Sautoy,
    who claims that
    “the right side of the brain
    is responsible for mathematics.”

    Let us hope that Professor du Sautoy
    is more reliable on zeta functions,
    his real field of expertise,
    than on neurology.

    The picture below may help
    to clear up his confusion
    between left and right.

    His confusion about
    pseudoscience may not
    be so easily remedied.

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    flickr.com/photos/jaycross/3975200/

    (Any resemblance to the film
    “Hannibal” is purely coincidental.)