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"Unsheathe your dagger definitions."

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

The entry of 12:06 PM Thursday, July 23, contained a link to the journal Red Kite Prayer. The "red kite" is the red flag posted near the end of the Tour de France.

Thanks for a definition are due to the journal Flahute. A quotation from that journal:

"There's only one shot that's in harmony with the field. The home of your authentic swing. That flag... and all that you are."

-- The Legend of Bagger Vance

See also yesterday's Log24 post.

On Chris Hipp, who died of an apparent heart attack at 47 on July 14 (Bastille Day), 2009:

"'He was the father of blade technology when he was with RLX,' Jim Hall, president of the Blade System Alliance, said in an interview. 'He invented the blade server.'"

"Hall said Hipp was a natural inventor who wanted to be on the cutting edge."

-- Jeffrey Burt at eWeek.com

Epitaph by a friend:

"He was known as a determined, fearsome and fair competitor."

-- Red Kite Prayer

Hipp's motto was "pounding idiots."*

From a website celebrating the life and family (cf. previous two entries) of Leonard Shlain, author of Art & Physics and pioneering surgeon:

"Shlain n: unique last name of Russian origins. Possible meanings: 1: Sound sword makes as it’s pulled from sheath" --Shlain.com

A more authentic sound:

"The blade actually does sing. When it is withdrawn from the sheath it makes a 'Tshuiiing' sound as one hears in the movies. It rings like a bell."

Steel Addiction, Custom Knives

A less authentic sound:

* The residents of Id (as in the above cartoon) are known, affectionately, as Idiots.

A Tangled Tale

Proposed task for a quantum computer:

"Using Twistor Theory to determine the plotline of Bob Dylan's 'Tangled up in Blue'"

One approach to a solution:

"In this scheme the structure of spacetime is intrinsically quantum mechanical.... We shall demonstrate that the breaking of symmetry in a QST [quantum space-time] is intimately linked to the notion of quantum entanglement."

-- "Theory of Quantum Space-Time," by Dorje C. Brody and Lane P. Hughston, Royal Society of London Proceedings Series A, Vol. 461, Issue 2061, August 2005, pp. 2679-2699

(See also The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.)

For some less technical examples of broken symmetries, see yesterday's entry, "Alphabet vs. Goddess."

That entry displays a painting in 16 parts by Kimberly Brooks (daughter of Leonard Shlain-- author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess-- and wife of comedian Albert Brooks (real name: Albert Einstein)). Kimberly Brooks is shown below with another of her paintings, titled "Blue."

Click image to enlarge.

"She was workin' in a topless place
 And I stopped in for a beer,
 I just kept lookin' at the side of her face
 In the spotlight so clear.
 And later on as the crowd thinned out
 I's just about to do the same,
 She was standing there in back of my chair
 Said to me, 'Don't I know your name?'
 I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,
 She studied the lines on my face.
 I must admit I felt a little uneasy
 When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,
 Tangled up in blue."

-- Bob Dylan

Further entanglement with blue:

The website of the Los Angeles Police Department, designed by Kimberly Brooks's firm, Lightray Productions.

Further entanglement with shoelaces:

"Entanglement can be transmitted through chains of cause and effect-- and if you speak, and another hears, that too is cause and effect.  When you say 'My shoelaces are untied' over a cellphone, you're sharing your entanglement with your shoelaces with a friend."

-- "What is Evidence?," by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Today's Readings:

• The White Itself

  Plato and the "concrete universal"--
  Log24 on Thursday, July 16, 2009

• Edged with Brown

  Context for a Log24 entry of July 16:
  
  "So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
  Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
  To look down into the drained pool.
  Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
  And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
  And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
  The surface glittered out of heart of light...."

• Signifying Nothing

  An essay on Harvard professor
  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
  

• Professor Gates Arrested

  A racial incident in Cambridge
  on Thursday, July 16, 2009
  

• New England White

  Race relations in Academia

• Notes on Mathematics
  and Narrative

  "... the glue that binds the brotherhood
  is ultimately made not of
  love and interracial harmony,
  but of something stronger and more
  enduring: shame, fear, and greed."
  
  -- Review of New England White

• Don't Forget Hate

  Cf. Eugene Burdick and The Word, 1966.
  More recently, Tom Wolfe and The Word 
  and Pig and Rat Get Lost.

Blaise Pascal:

"L’unité jointe à l’infini ne l’augmente de rien, non plus qu’un pied à une mesure infinie. Le fini s’anéantit en présence de l’infini, et devient un pur néant....

Nous connaissons qu’il y a un infini, et ignorons sa nature. Comme nous savons qu’il est faux que les nombres soient finis, donc il est vrai qu’il y a un infini en nombre. Mais nous ne savons ce qu’il est: il est faux qu’il soit pair, il est faux qu’il soit impair; car, en ajoutant 1 unité, il ne change point de nature; cependant c’est un nombre, et tout nombre est pair ou impair (il est vrai que cela s’entend de tout nombre fini). Ainsi...."

"Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing....

We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd; for the addition of a unit can make no change in its nature. Yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this is certainly true of every finite number). So...."

-- Pensées (trans. W. F. Trotter), Courier Dover Publications, 2003

"Le fini s’anéantit
 en présence de l’infini,
      et devient un pur néant...."

Un Pur Néant:

"So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil's Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
'In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
'Let there be light!'
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'"

-- Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
   Slate's "High Concept" department

Illustration:

Ainsi....

"In the Garden of Adding
 live Even and Odd...."
-- E. L. Doctorow  

Illustration:

  4 + 5 = 9.