Women's History Month

1997’s surprise best-seller, Cold Mountain, is the first novel of North Carolina native and travel writer, Charles Frazier. Two ancient Greek authors shape and drive the novel, set in the post-war Southern Appalachians of 1865. Homer's Odyssey frames the novel: the hero Inman undergoes epic adventures after the war, has his own Penelope waiting, and travels back to a land as remote as any island, Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But fragments of an anonymous philosopher who can be identified as Heraclitus alienate Inman from the Homeric world around him and determine his fate. Ada, his Penelope, also casts off her shroud of tradition: impatient with the 'glorious war,' no longer content to wait, Ada plunges into the new business of living. And just as the archaic, post-Homeric Greek world produced new ways of living and thought, as exemplified by Heraclitus, so too does the post-bellum world of Cold Mountain, as exemplified by Inman and Ada; their struggle, and the novel's tension, speak to and about all those caught between two worlds, epic and philosophic, whether driven by love or strife."

Annals of Religion:

I Have a
Dreamtime
 

Noting today that the time was 11:32 (AM ET),  a portentous number in Finnegans Wake, I decided to practice a bit of chronomancy (use of time for augury).  My weblog's server infomed me when I pressed "enter" that it thought the exact time was 11:32:39.  Consulting (as in Symmetry and Change in the Dreamtime) the I Ching for the meaning of (hexagram) 39, I found the following:

The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us.... One must join forces with friends of like mind and put himself under the leadership of a man equal to the situation: then one will succeed in removing the obstacles.

For the abyss and the mountain, see the five log24 entries ending on July 5, 2005, with "The Edge of Eternity." As for "friends of like mind," see the previous entry's references to July 2005.  "The leadership of a man equal to the situation" is more difficult to interpret.  Perhaps it refers, as a politician recently noted, to "a king who took us to the mountain-top and pointed the way to the promised land." Or perhaps to a different king.

Click on image for details.
Note the time: 11:32 (of 13:09).
The moment is that of the syllable
"mount" in the quotation above.

Physics and Finite Geometry:

This illustration makes clear the
close relationship of MUB's to the
finite geometry of the 4x4 square.

See also "Reflections on Symmetry,"

"Quantum Information Theory Related to Finite Geometry,"

and a comment at The n-Category Cafe,

On Spekkens' toy system and finite geometry.

The Wootters talk was on July 20, 2005. For related material from that July which some will find more entertaining, see "Steven Cullinane is a Crank," conveniently reproduced as a five-page thread in the Mathematics Forum at groupsrv.com.

Miles to Go...

For Scarlett:



A campaign song
in memory of
Buddy Miles:



Click on image for details.  

With a wink to Lois Wyse    
and a nod to Woody Allen --

"Listen, I tell you a mystery...."

Philosophy Wars continued:

What you mean "we"?

"After the credits, a close-up of a lottery list shows the winning numbers drawn in the Mexican National Lottery, dated February 14, 1925. The camera pulls back to the hands of a man holding a lottery ticket and comparing his number with the posted winners."

-- Review of  
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
by Tim Dirks at filmsite.org

"One heart will  
 wear a valentine."
-- Sinatra