Month: November 2008
-
Annals of Aesthetics:
Frame TalesFrom June 30 –
(“Will this be on the test?”)Frame Tale One:
Summer Reading
Frame Tale Two:Barry Sharples
on his version of the
Kaleidoscope Puzzle –Background:
“A possible origin of this puzzle
is found in a dialogue
between Socrates and Meno
written by the Greek philosopher,
Plato, where a square is drawn
inside a square such that
the blue square is twice the area
of the yellow square.
Colouring the triangles
produces a starting pattern
which is a one-diamond figure
made up of four tiles and there are
24 different possible arrangements.”
“The king asked, in compensation for his toils during this strangest of all the nights he had ever known, that the twenty-four riddle tales told him by the specter, together with the story of the night itself, should be made known over the whole earth and remain eternally famous among men.”
Frame Tale Three:“The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.” -
Rhyme and Reason
“Beauty is a riddle.”
– Dostoevsky
“Seven is Heaven
Eight is a Gate
Nine is a Vine”– Folk rhyme
-
ART WARS, Aesthetics Division:
Roman Religion
ET SUPER HANC PETRAM
AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM
MEAM ET PORTAE INFERI
NON PRAEVALEBUNT
ADVERSUS EAMBenedict XVI, before he became Pope:
“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”
“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….
One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….
The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”
Related material:Log24 on
August 24,
October 5, and
November 8. -
Annals of Theology…
From a
Cartoon Graveyard ”That corpse you planted
last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?”— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land“
“In the Roman Catholic tradition, the term ‘Body of Christ’ refers not only to the body of Christ in the spiritual realm, but also to two distinct though related things: the Church and the reality of the transubstantiated bread of the Eucharist….
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘the comparison of the Church with the body casts light on the intimate bond between Christ and his Church. Not only is she gathered around him; she is united in him, in his body….’
….To distinguish the Body of Christ in this sense from his physical body, the term ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ is often used. This term was used as the first words, and so as the title, of the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi of Pope Pius XII.”
Pope Pius XII:“83. The Sacrament of the Eucharist is itself a striking and wonderful figure of the unity of the Church, if we consider how in the bread to be consecrated many grains go to form one whole, and that in it the very Author of supernatural grace is given to us, so that through Him we may receive the spirit of charity in which we are bidden to live now no longer our own life but the life of Christ, and to love the Redeemer Himself in all the members of His social Body.”
Related material:Log24 on this date in 2002:
Religious Symbolism
at Princetonas well as
and a
“striking and wonderful figure”
from this morning’s newspaper–
-
ART WARS continued:
The Sincerest Form
of FlatteryAt a British puzzle website today I found this, titled “Tiles Puzzle by Steven H. Cullinane”–
The version there states that
“there are 322,560 patterns made by swapping rows, swapping columns and swapping the four 2×2 quadrants!”
Actually, only 840 patterns can be made in this version. These are formed by 322,560 permitted permutations of the 16 tiles. This is also true in my Kaleidoscope Puzzle. For a display of all 322,560 permutations as pairs of (orthogonal) patterns, see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.Update of Nov. 10, 2008: The error has been corrected.
-
Happy Birthday:
Billy Graham is 90.
Joni Mitchell is 65.Buen fin de semana a todos.
– Desconvencida -
For St. Steve McQueen’s Day:
The GetawayLog24 on St. Luke’s Day this year:
An example of lifestyle coverage at The New York Times– a 2006 story on visual art in Mexico that included a reference to…
For descriptions of such life, I prefer the literary art of Robert Stone– in particular, Stone’s novel A Flag for Sunrise.
Credit must be given to the Times for an excellent 1981 review of that novel.
The review’s conclusion:
“A Flag for Sunrise is
the best novel of ideas
I’ve read since Dostoyevsky
escaped from Omsk.”The author of that review, John Leonard, died Wednesday, Nov. 5. This morning’s Times has his obituary.
-
Final Arrangements, continued:
Death of a Classmate
Michael Crichton,
Harvard College, 1964
Authors Michael Crichton and
David Foster Wallace in today’s
New York Times obituariesThe Times’s remarks above
on the prose styles of
Crichton and Wallace–
“compelling formula” vs.
“intricate complexity”–
suggest the following works
of visual art in memory
of Crichton.“Crystal”–
“Dragon”
(from Crichton’s
Jurassic Park)–
For the mathematics
(dyadic harmonic analysis)
relating these two figures,
see Crystal and Dragon.Some philosophical
remarks related to
the Harvard background
that Crichton and I share–
Hitler’s Still Point
and
The Crimson Passion.
