Month: March 2007

  • Women's History Month Ends

    And the Oscar
    goes to...

    Obituaries in the News



    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


    Filed at 7:24 a.m. ET

    Maria Julia Hernandez

    SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) -- Renowned human rights activist
    Maria Julia Hernandez, who aided victims of El Salvador's civil war,
    died Friday [March 30, 2007]. She was 68.

    Hernandez died of a heart attack, friends and colleagues said.

    She was best known as director of the Roman Catholic Church-sponsored
    group Legal Protection, which aids impoverished victims of El
    Salvador's 12-year civil war, and she had worked alongside the late
    Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

    Hernandez had been hospitalized since March 9 for heart problems,
    and suffered a heart attack Wednesday night in addition to the fatal
    one on Friday.

    She worked with Romero on some of the conflict's first rights cases,
    said Jose Roberto Lazo, a lawyer for Legal Protection. Romero was
    assassinated in 1980 after he urged the military to halt the death
    squads that killed thousands of suspected guerrillas and leftist
    opponents of the government.

    Born to Salvadoran parents in the Honduran town of San Francisco
    Morazan in 1939, Hernandez and her family moved to El Salvador days
    later. She dedicated her life to social work in the church and never
    married.

    Source:
    The New York Times,
    Saturday,
    March 31, 2007

  • A Text for the Times:

    Rings

    "Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something
    a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...."

    -- Bernard Holland in
       The New York Times
           Monday, May 20, 1996

    The headline for Edward Rothstein's "Connections" column in The New York Times of Monday, March 26, 2007, was
    "Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic."

    Here is such a text.

    The New York Lottery,
    Friday, March 30, 2007:

    Mid-day 002
    Evening 085


    Continuing yesterday's lottery meditation, let us examine today's New
    York results in the light of Rothstein's essay.  The
    literary "ring" structure he describes is not immediately apparent in
    Friday's numbers, although the mid-day number, 002-- which in the I Ching signifies yin, the feminine, receptive principle-- might be interpreted as referring to a ring of sorts.

    Illustration from
    an entry of
    March 2, 2004

    For the evening number, 085, see the list of page
    numbers in last year's Log24 entry (cited here last night) for today's date, March 30.  Page 85, in the
    source cited here a year ago, begins...

    "A random selection from Hopkins's journal shows how the sun acts as a focus...."

    See also last night's picture:

    Trigram Sun: Wind, Wood
     
    Last night's reference to last
    year's entry on this date provides,
    like the last and first pages of
    Finnegans Wake, an example
    of literary "ring" structure.

    Today's New York evening number,
    85, reinforces this "ring" reference.

    For related material, see
    an entry for Reba McEntire's
    birthday four years ago    .

  • Women's History Month continues...

    A Year of

    Magical Thinking

    12:07:57 AM ET
    March 30, 2007

    Trigram Sun: Wind, Wood

    See also this date
    last year.

  • Magical Thinking:

    Plato, God, Stories

    Peter Woit's latest weblog entry links to a discussion of Plato's cave
    and the modular group, which in turn suggests a second look at an entry linked to, indirectly, at the end of Saturday's Log24 entry: Natasha's Dance.  This leads to the following:

    "To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are
    woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether
    surpasses our comprehension."

    -- Freeman Dyson, "Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight," The New York Review of Books, issue dated five years ago today-- March 28, 2002.

    If Dyson's "recognition" is correct, why should mind and intelligence not be woven into the fabric of the Pennsylvania Lottery?

    PA Lottery March 28, 2007: Mid-day 226, Evening 826

    The practiced reader of Log24 will have little
    difficulty in constructing a story based on these numbers.  Briefly, the story is... 2/26 and 8/26.  The
    way the story was written may "surpass our comprehension," but the story itself need not.

    Those more interested in the writing than the story may consult Edward Rothstein's piece in the March 26 New York Times,
    "Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic."  There they will find a brief discussion of,
    appropriately, the Bible's Book of Numbers.

  • Happy Birthday, Reba

    Logical Songs

    Reba McEntire, Saturday Evening Post, Mar/Apr 1995

    Logical Song I
    (Supertramp)

    "When I was young, it seemed that
    Life was so wonderful, a miracle,
    Oh it was beautiful, magical
    And all the birds in the trees,
    Well they'd be singing so happily,
    Joyfully, playfully watching me"

    Logical Song II
    (Sinatra)

    "You make me feel so young,
    You make me feel like
    Spring has sprung
    And every time I see you grin
    I'm such a happy in-
    dividual....

    You and I are
    Just like a couple of tots
    Running across the meadow
    Picking up lots
    Of forget-me-nots"

  • Crown Affair:

    Gambit

    Chess game in The Thomas Crown Affair

    For Steve McQueen's
    birthday, three chess links:

    A Game of Chess,

    Queen's Gambit,

  • The Composer Takes a Bow

    Stein died on March 15.
    It is not known whether he
     
    wrote the musical theme
    for Log24 on that day,
    "Boink, Boink."

  • The Aesthetic Object:

    Savage Scrutiny

    "They sang desiring an object that was near,
    In face of which desire no longer moved,
    Nor made of itself that which it could not find...
    Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times
    The thrice concentred self, having possessed

    The object, grips it in savage scrutiny,
    Once to make captive, once to subjugate
    Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim
    The meaning of the capture, this hard prize,
    Fully made, fully apparent, fully found."

    -- "Credences of Summer," VII,
        by Wallace Stevens, from
        Transport to Summer (1947)

    Clifford Geertz on Levi-Strauss, from The Cerebral Savage:

    "Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns.... "

    Related material:

    The kaleidoscope puzzle and "Claude Levi-Strauss and the Aesthetic Object," a videotaped interview with Dr. Boris Wiseman.

  • A Game for Letterman

    Chess Letter:
    x

    Queen sacrifice

    Click on a picture
    for the meaning of
    the chess notation.
     
    "Shakespeare, Rilke, Joyce,
    Beckett and Levi-Strauss are
    instances of authors for whom
    chiasmus and chiastic thinking
    are of central importance,
    for whom chiasmus is a
    generator of meaning,
    tool of discovery and
      philosophical template."
     

  • ART WARS continued:

    Art Appreciation

    A rectangle in memory of
    Harvard mathematician
    George Mackey:

    The five Log24 entries ending at
    7:00 PM on March 14, 2006,
    the last day of Mackey's life:


    A rectangle in memory of
    artist Mark Rothko:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070321-Rothko.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
    Sotheby's

     

    Rothko Painting
    Is Up for Auction

     By CAROL VOGEL of
    THE NEW YORK TIMES,
    March 21, 5:35 PM ET

    "David Rockefeller plans to sell
    a seminal painting
    by Mark Rothko
    for what Sotheby's hopes will be
    more than $40 million.
    Above,
    a detail from the painting."

    From the story:

    "Mr. Rockefeller has owned the
    painting since 1960, when he
    bought it for less than $10,000....
    He said that in November, during a
    periodic appraisal of his art
    collection,
    he noticed to his surprise that of all
    his paintings, the
    Rothko had
    appreciated in value the most.
    'That got me thinking,' he
    said."

    Art appreciation:

    When Crayolas worked, I dreamed an
    angel,
    a bar of light, your messenger,
    beckoning from a wallpaper corner,
    blushing in the porcelain gas glow.

    When Crayolas worked and chariots
    swung low,
    and America was beautiful and time was slow.

    Then all that died in life's
    longer year.
    Autumn came, colors turned sere.
    Brittle Crayolas crumbled when touched.
    The friends of life were cold and hushed.

    Still you were there, shining and
    warm
    behind snow clouds, safe from our harm.
    The seed I am again burst out,
    drank your heat, suckled your light

    in another fair spring to live
    again
    on billowing oceans of bottomless green.

    -- Excerpt from C. K. Latham's
       When Crayolas Worked,
       from Shiva Dancing:
       The Rothko Chapel Songs,
       1972-1997