Blitz by anonymous
New Delhi user

From Wikipedia on 31 May, 2007:

Shown below is a list of 25 alterations to Wikipedia math articles made today by user 122.163.102.246.

All of the alterations involve removal of links placed by user Cullinane (myself).

The 122.163... IP address is from an internet service provider in New Delhi, India.

The New Delhi anonymous user was apparently inspired by an earlier
blitz by Wikipedia administrator Charles Matthews. (See User talk: Cullinane.)

Related material:

Ashay Dharwadker and Usenet Postings
and Talk: Four color theorem/Archive 2.
See also some recent comments from 122.163...
at Talk: Four color theorem.

May 31, 2007, alterations by
user 122.163.102.246:

1. 17:17 Orthogonality (rm spam)
2. 17:16 Symmetry group (rm spam)
3. 17:14 Boolean algebra (rm spam)
4. 17:12 Permutation (rm spam)
5. 17:10 Boolean logic (rm spam)
6. 17:08 Gestalt psychology (rm spam)
7. 17:05 Tesseract (rm spam)
8. 17:02 Square (geometry) (rm spam)
9. 17:00 Fano plane (rm spam)
10. 16:55 Binary Golay code (rm spam)
11. 16:53 Finite group (rm spam)
12. 16:52 Quaternion group (rm spam)
13. 16:50 Logical connective (rm spam)
14. 16:48 Mathieu group (rm spam)
15. 16:45 Tutte–Coxeter graph (rm spam)
16. 16:42 Steiner system (rm spam)
17. 16:40 Kaleidoscope (rm spam)
18. 16:38 Efforts to Create A Glass Bead Game (rm spam)
19. 16:36 Block design (rm spam)
20. 16:35 Walsh function (rm spam)
21. 16:24 Latin square (rm spam)
22. 16:21 Finite geometry (rm spam)
23. 16:17 PSL(2,7) (rm spam)
24. 16:14 Translation plane (rm spam)
25. 16:13 Block design test (rm spam)

The deletions should please Charles Matthews and fans of Ashay Dharwadker's work as a four-color theorem enthusiast and as editor of the Open Directory sections on combinatorics and on graph theory.

There seems little point in protesting the deletions while Wikipedia still allows any anonymous user to change their articles.

-- Cullinane 23:28, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

A Baffled Reader

A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):

"To set one up (which I have not done because I don't want anyone to know what I think)," ... William Safire regarding "blogs".

I still don't know what you think.  Yet ... I try, try, try.

Here's one thing that I think-- today-- based on my "Hate Speech for Harvard," on "Devil in the Details" (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on

1. last evening's PA lottery number 005,
2. the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
3. the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:

Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07

On the Religion of Scientism

Recently,
believers in the religion of Scientism have become increasingly
militant.  Christians, though seldom able, like Jesus, to
love their enemy, might at least try, like Don Vito Corleone, to know their enemy.

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

Steven Pinker at The New York Times,
review of a new book by Natalie Angier,
a priestess of Scientism,
online today but dated May 27, 2007

Jesse Tisch at JBooks.com,
interview with Angier, undated, 2007

Harvey Blume at The Boston Globe,
interview with Angier, May 13, 2007

Marcela Valdes at Publishers Weekly,
interview with Angier, March 5, 2007

Angier at The New York Times,
"Confessions of a Lonely Atheist,"
Jan. 14, 2001

Angier at The American Scholar,
"My God Problem," Spring 2004

For other recent background,
see the May 21 New Yorker.

Square Dance:

This "telling of what
I know" will of course
mean little to those
who, like Emerson,
have refused to learn
through quotations.

For those less obdurate
than Emerson --

Harold Bloom
on Wallace Stevens
and Paul Valery's
   "Dance and the Soul"--

"Stevens
may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's
end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early
spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is
'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the
negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valery's
Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate
consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this
realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular,
in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives
life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As
Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:

A
cold and perfect clarity is a poison impossible to combat. The real, in
its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously....[...] To a handful
of ashes is the past reduced, and the future to a tiny icicle. The soul
appears to itself as an empty and measurable form. --Here, then, things
as they are come together, limit one another, and are thus chained
together in the most rigorous and mortal* fashion.... O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is.

Valery's
formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into
what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be
cured only by what Valery's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to
act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue
us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid
observer.'" --Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

* "la sorte... la plus mortelle":
    mortal in the sense
   "deadly, lethal"

Other quotations

(from March 28,
the birthday of
Reba McEntire):

Logical Songs

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....

There are, however, various non-royal roads.  One of these is indicated by yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery numbers:

The mid-day number 515 may be taken as a reference to 5/15. (See the previous entry, "Angel in the Details," and 5/15.)

The evening number 062, in the context of Monday's entry "No Royal Roads" and yesterday's "Jewel in the Crown,"
may be regarded as naming a non-royal road to geometry: either U. S. 62, a major route
from Mexico to Canada (home of the late geometer H.S.M. Coxeter), or a
road less traveled-- namely, page 62 in Coxeter's classic Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):

The illustration (and definition) is
of regular tessellations of the plane.

This topic Coxeter offers as an
illustration of remarks by G. H. Hardy
that he quotes on the preceding page:

One might argue that such beauty is strongly emergent
because of the "harmonious way" the parts fit
together: the
regularity (or fitting together) of the whole is not reducible to the
regularity of the parts.  (Regular triangles, squares, and
hexagons fit together, but regular pentagons do not.)

The symmetries of these regular tessellations
of the
plane are less well suited as illustrations of emergence, since they
are tied rather closely to symmetries of the component parts.

But the symmetries of regular tessellations of the sphere-- i.e., of the five Platonic solids-- do emerge strongly, being apparently independent of symmetries of the component parts.

Another example of strong emergence: a group of 322,560 transformations acting naturally on the 4x4 square grid-- a much larger group than the group of 8 symmetries of each component (square) part.

The lottery numbers above also supply an example of strong emergence-- one that nicely illustrates how it can be, in the words of Mark Bedau, "uncomfortably like magic."

(Those more comfortable with magic may note the resemblance of the
central part of Coxeter's illustration to a magical counterpart-- the Ojo de Dios of Mexico's Sierra Madre.)

See the Dickinson poem quoted here on May 15 (the date, as it happens, of Dickinson's death) in the entry "A Flag for Sunrise."  See also Zen and Language Games and a discussion of a detail in a Robert Stone novel.