In the first creation myth in the first book of the Hebrew Bible, God is always looking back at what he has been doing, to see whether it is any good. It always is, but he cannot have known in advance that it was going to be, and this is why he has to check his work.
So it seems to me. In any case, when we create things, part of the job is checking our work.
The new Turkish translation of Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy
with introduction by yours truly
Executive summary. An experiment has been performed to detect whether we are living in a simulation. The experiment is to tell Abraham to sacrifice his son. Whatever he does, he breaks a law. Thus there is more to the world than can be understood by natural science.
Altınova, Ayvalık, Balıkesir, Türkiye
Looking towards Lesbos, Greece
September 20, 2022
This is a report from five years ago on an art exhibit in Istanbul called “Doublethink.” I had an amusing encounter with one of the artists, and I had a conversation with the curator, who like George Orwell had attended Eton College. I wrote my report in three emails, given here with their timestamps. Because I mention some sculptures at the Nesin Mathematics Village, I have added the best photographs that I could find of them among the pictures that I have taken at the Village. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have documented the sculptures as such.
January 21, 2016
See “Nesin Matematik Köyü, Ocak (January) 2016”
This is inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. After reading this 1853 novel a second time in the summer of 2018, I put some passages I liked into a LaTeX file. I added some commentary and came up with a document more than 90 A5 pages long. I recently reread it and was reminded how much I had enjoyed the novel. I thought some of my commentary could be adapted to stand alone as a blog post – this one.
“The Sower,” 1850
Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Here is an annotated transcription of a 1981 manuscript by Charles Greenleaf Bell (1916–2010) called “The Axiomatic Drama of Classical Physics.” A theme is what Heraclitus observed, as in fragment B49a of Diels, LXXXI of Bywater, and D65a of Laks and Most:
We step and we do not step into the same rivers,
we are and we are not.ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν,
εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
Bell reviews the mathematics, and the thought behind it, of
In a postlude called “The Uses of Paradox,” Bell notes:
Forty-five years ago I decided that when reason drives a sheer impasse into an activity which in fact goes on, we have to think of the polar cleavage as both real and unreal.
I like that reference to “an activity which in fact goes on.” In youth it may be hard to recognize that there are activities that go on. We do things then, but that they will get anywhere may be no more than a dream. In any case, Bell himself goes on:
… that is a job as huge and demanding as Aristotle’s, and for me at 70, just begun.
“Look,” my friends say, “Bell’s been doing the same thing since he was 25. About that time he had a vision of Paradox as paradise, and he’s been stuck there ever since.”
The back of Bell’s Five Chambered Heart with
the front of the OCT of Aristotle’s Physics
In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.
After Wordle appeared, a number of variants came out. One of the least popular may be Zpordle, or ℤp-ordle. I imagine it could be more popular, if people knew it did not require advanced mathematics. It still involves numbers, to which some people declare an allergy. Nonetheless, I think Zpordle can be explained in elementary-school terms, and that is what I shall try to do here.
Screenshot of the Zpordle game won on May 27, 2022
Consider this a meditation on being from Generation X and growing up before the internet. Having watched a number of video accounts of bicycle trips along the Potomac River, I decided to dig up my own account; it is from twenty-eight years ago and is entirely verbal. I originally wrote it day by day with ballpoint pen in a composition book.
I had no plans for what I wrote, beyond informing myself for future trips. Nonetheless, my Uncle Bill used to talk about his friend Barry, whose failure to keep a diary may have kept him from writing a good book, at least in Bill’s judgment. The topic would have been the Presidential campaigns that Barry had covered for CBS News. They had all been losing.
We come to the end of Arendt’s chapter on action. Action has two components:
Anybody can do the first, but then the second is out of his (or her) exclusive control. This is a problem. You can try to avoid the problem, either by making other people your slaves, or by being a Stoic. You can also just recognize that the problem can be mitigated by the actions of promising and forgiving.
Yıldız Parkı, April 16, 2022
Where I did some of the next reading
Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.
If these words are themselves not empty, what are they full of? “To establish relations and create new realities” would seem to be just what George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin have tried to do in Iraq and Ukraine, even as their words are empty and deeds brutal.
I do grant, having done the next reading too, that the end of this chapter on action is very interesting.
Yıldız Parkı, April 9, 2022
Where I did some of the next reading
In the present reading, I detect the continuation of themes from last time:
Polytropy 