Month: July 2018

A collection of quotes:

Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-great Hermes” “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” Book of the 24 Philosophers.

Alain of Lille “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Pascal: “The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God that imagination loses itself in that thought.”

Also apparently, “Let him contemplate all nature in its awful and finished magnificence; let him observe that splendid luminary, set forth as an eternal lamp to enlighten the universe; let him…

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore posts Poe’s 1845 essay, “Anastatic Printing”, in full here.

My observations here.

The quest path

I will leave my beloved city,

Houses and roofs torn to rip,

Prisoner of the bloodthirsty barbarians,

Desperate, flee in this clear night of pain,

Together, we will leave this gulf,

With our powerful eternal love,

I would write the suffering endured,

To punish those who terrified us,

Long time, fighting without counting,

Caregiver my body trembling and wobbly,

Sometimes martyr or great warrior,

Witness of my monstrous battles,

Follow me, shocked victims,

Behind us our fate crumpled,

Here is the path of our happiness,

Let’s run to our good quest.

Poetic Letter. Inspiration about series. Thanks for your fidelity.

At this point, I think it will be useful to introduce an idea from geometry that is very helpful in pure mathematics, and that I find helpful for understanding the geometry of data sets. This idea is difference between the intrinsic structure of an object (such as a data set) and its extrinsic structure. Have you ever gone into a building, walked down a number of different halls and through different rooms, and when you finally got to where you’re going and looked out the window, you realized that you had no idea which direction you were facing, or which side of the building you were actually on? The intrinsic structure of a building has to do with how the rooms, halls and staircases connect up to each other. The extrinsic structure is how these rooms, halls and staircases sit with respect to the outside world. So, while you’re inside…

“Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective” – William S. Burroughs

I knew this Earl thing would go badly… You probably woke up this morning thinking, “It would be great to be a 16^th Century Irish Earl.” No? Just me, I guess. Turns out it might not have been such a good gig after all. Sure, it beat being a peasant what with the starvation, poverty, and general lack of hygiene, but it had its share of headaches. Well, beheadings actually, but I figure that’s on the far end of the range of possible headaches. Starting in the 9^th Century, you had those pesky Viking raids on the coast of Ireland. From about the 11-14^th Century, Norman invasions from England were fairly regular, but declined due to the arrival of the Black Death. Not exactly a good bargain, but…

“I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult” – Rita Rudner

Maybe now I can get a cameo on the History Channel.

I’m an Olympic channel surfer, a skill honed by years of insomnia.  I wouldn’t mind a relative inability to sleep soundly if I could be productive, but when it’s three o’clock in the morning, and the carnival has once again erupted inside my head, the only thing to do, should I wish to have a small existential footprint and avoid waking the wife and kids, is mindlessly consume the numbing pabulum graciously provided by modern media, from cable television to Twitter.  Luckily, this is highly conducive to reinforcing my interest in cataloging strange phenomena, since we tend to relegate our monsters and mysteries to the wee hours of the dawn.  You certainly don’t want your anomalies loitering about after the sun has…

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats” – Voltaire

This seems like a safer way to fish.

Life is uncertain, or in the vernacular, “Shit Happens”.  As this is not a particularly robust philosophy of existence, we tend to putter through life with a distinctly asymmetrical notion of probability.  That is, we confidently attribute repeated successes to our good looks, charm, and wit, but strings of tragedies to bad luck, jinxes, and curses.  Psychologist Thomas Gilovich, in his How We Know What Isn’t So pointed out, “If a person has experienced such a large number of positive outcomes that it is worthy of comment, an additional success is not, by itself, terribly noteworthy.  A subsequent failure on the other hand, violates the typical pattern of success and thus stands out in the person’s experience.  Examples of earlier jinxes are therefore…

“We’re all of us haunted and haunting” ― Chuck Palahniuk

Brown Lady of Raynham Hall – Captain Hubert C. Provand – Country Life, 1936

Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) was a British Royal Navy officer, who after distinguished service retired to a literary life, regaling Victorians with nautical narratives that would serve as the prototypes for later popular maritime novelists such as C.S. Forester (the Horatio Hornblower series) and Patrick O’Brian (The Aubrey-Maturin series e.g. Master and Commander), known for his evocative descriptions of life at sea in the 19^th Century based on his own experiences.

One has to have a measure of courage to willingly crew a wooden ship likely to endure numerous canon fusillades.  I mean, it’s not high on my list of ways to live a long and healthy life.  Then again, joining the 19^th Century British Navy is not for the meek in most…