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  • Annals of Aesthetics

    An Alternative

    to the worldview
    of Dan Brown:

    'The Soul's Code,' by James Hillman

  • Instant Review Department:

    Jennifer’s Body

    The following remark this evening by Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post serves as an instant review of today’s previous cinematic Log24 offering starring the late Patrick Swayze:

    “Watch it, forget it, move on.”

    A perhaps more enduring tribute:

  • Words and Music:

    Symbologist Robert Langdon and a corner of Solomon's Cube

    Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in  'Dirty Dancing'

    “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

  • On Wings of Song:

    Thomas Disch
    welcomes Mary Travers

    NY Times obituaries, 2:30 AM Sept. 17, 2009: Mary Travers and others

    Click to enlarge.

  • For Dan Brown, continued:

    The Found Symbol
    Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
    Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

  • Johnson’s Wake:

    In memory of
    Harvard literature professor
    Barbara Ellen Johnson
    (Oct. 4, 1947 -
     Aug. 27, 2009)

    “…one has to be willing
    to tolerate ambiguity,
    even to be crazy.”

    “Bohr’s words?”

    “The party line….”

    – Quotation from
    Secret Passages linked to on
     the date of Johnson’s death

    “Yes and no (what else?).”
    – Barbara Johnson in
    The Wake of Deconstruction

    Related material:

    Harvard Crimson obituary
    and a
    Funeral Service obituary
    with comments.

    For more on ambiguity,
    see this journal’s entries of
     March 7, 8, and 9, 2007.

    For more on craziness,
    see this journal’s entries of
    March 10, 2007.

  • For Dan Brown:

    RAIDERS
    http://www.log24.com/images/spacer12w6h.bmp
    OF THE LOST
    DINGBAT
     
    Table of Unicode dingbats

    My personal favorite:

    Dingbat 275A, 
    “heavy vertical bar“–

    Unicode symbol 'heavy vertical bar'

    Cf. March 7, 2003.

  • Back-to-School Special continued:

    Figure

    Generating permutations for the Klein simple group of order 168 acting on the eightfold cube

    The Sept. 8 entry on non-Euclidean* blocks ended with the phrase “Go figure.” This suggested a MAGMA calculation that demonstrates how Klein’s simple group of order 168 (cf. Jeremy Gray in The Eightfold Way) can be visualized as generated by reflections in a finite geometry.

    * i.e., other than Euclidean. The phrase “non-Euclidean” is usually applied to only some of the geometries that are not Euclidean. The geometry illustrated by the blocks in question is not Euclidean, but is also, in the jargon used by most mathematicians, not “non-Euclidean.”

  • In Memoriam:

    For 9/11

    Cover of 'Underworld,' by Don DeLillo, First Edition, Advance Reader's Copy, 1997

    Cover of Underworld,
     by Don DeLillo, First Edition,
     Advance Reader’s Copy, 1997

    “Time and chance
    happeneth to them all.”
    – Ecclesiastes 9:11  

    Related material:

    1. The previous entry, on
      Copenhagen physicist
    Aage Bohr, and      
    2. Notes from this journal
     from Bohr’s birthday,
     June 19th, through  
            Midsummer Night, 2007…
     including notes on   
      Faust in Copenhagen
       3. Walpurgisnacht 2008 and
     Walpurgisnacht 2009

  • Annals of Aesthetics:

    Theology
     in memory of
    physicist Aage Bohr,
    who died at 87 on
    Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009

    Swarthmore physics honors thesis, 136 pp., 2007–

    Abstract:

    “Quantum mechanics, which has no completely accepted interpretation but many seemingly strange physical results, has been interpreted in a number of bizarre and fascinating ways over the years. The two interpretations examined in this paper, [Aage] Bohr and [Ole] Ulfbeck’s ‘Genuine Fortuitousness’ and Stuckey, Silberstein, and Cifone’s ‘Relational Blockworld,’ seem to be two such strange interpretations; Genuine Fortuitousness posits that causality is not fundamental to the universe, and Relational Blockworld suggests that time does not act as we perceive it to act. In this paper, I analyze these two interpretations….”

    Footnote 55, page 114:

    “Thus far, I have been speaking in fairly abstract terms, which can sometimes be unhelpful on the issue of explaining anything about the structure of space-time. I want to pause for a moment to suggest a new potential view of the blockworld within a ‘genuinely fortuitous’ universe in more visual terms. Instead of the ‘static spacetime jewel’ of blockworld that is often invoked by eternalists to help their readers conceptualize of what a blockworld would ‘look like’ from the outside, now imagine that a picture on a slide is being projected onto the surface of this space-time jewel.

    Interpolated figure
    from Log24:

    Juliette Binoche in 'Blue'  The 24 2x2 Cullinane Kaleidoscope animated images

    Cf. August 5, 2009.

    From the perspective of one inside the jewel, one might ask ‘Why is this section blue while this section is black?,’ and from within the jewel, one could not formulate an answer since one could not see the entire picture projected on the jewel; however, from outside the jewel, an observer (some analogue of Newton’s God, perhaps, looking down on his ‘sensorium’ from the 5th dimension) could easily see the pattern and understand that all of the ‘genuinely fortuitous’ events inside the space-time jewel are, in fact, completely determined by the pattern in the projector.”

    – “Genuine Fortuitousness, Relational Blockworld, Realism, and Time” (pdf), by Daniel J. Peterson, Honors Thesis, Swarthmore College, December 13, 2007