Month: November 2006

  • Grail:
    The Hermeneutics
    of Chance

    “… as Genevieve W. Foster has shown in her Jungian analysis, the eyes, the rose,
    and the star are equivalent to the ‘Grail’ of The Waste Land.”

    –  Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning.
    Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956

    The Grail also appears in legend as a stone–

    From a Nov. 6, 2006, entry in the New Zealand weblog Arcadian Functor:

    “Many modern Grail stories have a root in the early romances of von Eschenbach….

    They live from a Stone whose essence
    is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you
    here. It is called Lapsit exillis.

    A search on “lapsit exillis” leads to “Cubic Stones from the Sky“…

    These stones are often seen as the Holy Grail….

    PA lottery Nov. 5, 2006: Midday 804 Evening 008

    For 804, see
       8/04 –
    The Presbyterian Exorcist
    (in part a tribute to
    Wallace Stevens).

    For 008 and a
    “cubic stone,”
    see
    Christmas 2005.

    A poetic connection between the star
     
    of “The Hollow Men” and Christmas
    is furnished by the remarks of
    Wallace Stevens linked to in
    the previous entry from
     
    the word “information.”

  • Guy Fawkes Day:

    Twilight Kingdom

    “What he cannot contemplate is the reproach of

        …
    that final meeting
    In the twilight kingdom,

    when at length he may meet the eyes….”

    – On “The Hollow Men”

    ” … unless

    The eyes reappear

    As the perpetual star

    Multifoliate rose

    Of death’s twilight kingdom”

    Related readings from unholy scripture:

     
    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040604-Feeling.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

    B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening
    just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on
    in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went
    into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel
    of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo,
    thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying,
    even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information. 
    The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world
    never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was
    all information.”

    — Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

    C.  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it. 
    Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms. 
    The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned
    trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

    — Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

    The image and A, B, C are from Log24 on June 4, 2004.

  • Applied Finite Geometry

    Links to some applications of finite geometry to quantum information theory have been added to finitegeometry.org.

  • Birthdate of A. B. Coble

    First to Illuminate

    “From the History of a Simple Group” (pdf), by Jeremy Gray:

    “The American mathematician A. B. Coble [1908; 1913]* seems to have been the first to illuminate the 27 lines and 28 bitangents with the elementary theory of geometries over finite fields.

    The combinatorial aspects of all this are pleasant, but the mathematics is certainly not easy.”

    * [Coble 1908] A. Coble, “A configuration in finite geometry isomorphic with that of the 27 lines on a cubic  surface,” Johns Hopkins University Circular 7:80-88 (1908), 736-744.

       [Coble 1913] A. Coble, “An application of finite geometry to the characteristic theory of the odd and even theta functions,” Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 14 (1913), 241-276.

  • All Souls’ Day

    John Huston and two of his films

  • The Kerry Joke

    The Method

    Bush
    … “What did they tell you?”

    Kerry
    “They told me that you had
    gone totally insane and that
     your methods were unsound.”

    Bush
    “Are my methods unsound?”

    Kerry
    “I don’t see
    any method at all, sir.”

    Apocalypse Now, The Cage

    Karl Rove
    “Perfect, genuine,
    complete, crystalline, pure.”

  • In memory of Clifford Geertz

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061101-Geertz2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Clifford Geertz 

    Professor Emeritus,
    Institute for Advanced Study

    Savage Logic

    “Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than their individual properties considered separately). And their range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its operation. And so it is too with savage thought. Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of ‘the odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process.’

    These odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images drawn from myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore. (How, precisely, they have come into being in the first place is one of the points on which Levi-Strauss is not too explicit, referring to them vaguely as the ‘residue of events… fossil remains of the history of an individual or a society.’) Such images are inevitably embodied in larger structures– in myths, ceremonies, folk taxonomies, and so on– for, as in a kaleidoscope, one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however ill-formed or irregular. But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are detachable from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of a similar sort. Quoting Franz Boas that ‘it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments,’ Levi-Strauss generalizes this permutational view of thinking to savage thought in general.”

    – Clifford Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage: the Structural Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss,” in Encounter, Vol. 28 No. 4 (April 1967), pp. 25-32.

    Today’s New York Times
    reports that
    Geertz died on Monday,
    October 30, 2006.

    Related material:

    Kaleidoscope Puzzle,

    Being Pascal Sauvage,

    and Up the River:

    The Necessity For Story

    by Frederick Zackel

    While it’s a story that’s never been written, a suggested title– Indiana Jones Sails Up The River Of Death–

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041016-Poster2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    shows how readily we as individuals or we as a culture can automatically visualize a basic story motif. We may each see the particular elements of the story differently, but almost instantaneously we catch its drift.

    The hero sails up the river of death to discover what lies within his own heart: i.e., how much moral and physical strength he has.

    Indiana Jones sails up the River of Death.

    We are following Indiana Jones up the River of Death. We’re going to visit with Colonel Kurtz. (You may not want to get off the boat.)

    No, I am not mixing up metaphors.

    These are the Story.

    Amen.