Tag Archives: 2014

The Parabola

October 8, 2014 – 11:19 am

I do not now recall my specific inspiration; but in January of 2012, sitting at home in Istanbul, I cut up a cardboard box in order to make a model of a parabola quâ conic section.

January 14, 2012

January 14, 2012


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By David Pierce | Posted in Conic Sections, Exposition, History, Mathematics, Nesin Mathematics Village | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Graffiti grammar

September 15, 2014 – 1:32 pm

I happened to notice the words in the photograph below, written on a sidewalk box near the Özel Fransız Lape Hastanesi (the private Hôpital de la Paix), which has apparently been run by the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul since 1858. These must be the Sisters whom I occasionally see on the street.

It seems Gomidas was a patient at the Peace Hospital after his breakdown: a breakdown resulting from his deportation from Istanbul with other Armenian intellectuals in 1915. Gomidas was saved in body, not in spirit. Such is the history of the streets I walk daily.

Are the clouds descending on us?

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The words in the photo:

Buraya Gri Boya Gelecek → Geliyor → Gelemedi

To here grey color will come → is coming → could not come

It could only come so far!

By David Pierce | Posted in History, Istanbul, Language, Tourism, Turkish | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

Precautions

September 8, 2014 – 4:39 pm

On Monday morning, September 1, 2014, the car that was to take us to Atatürk Airport for a flight to Tbilisi for the Caucasian Mathematics Conference was late. The dispatcher said there had been a breakdown, but he was sending another car. To wait for this was frustrating; but the new car did come, and we made it to the airport in plenty of time. Indeed, our driver said the roads would be clear (and they were), because a lot of traffic had been tied up on the Bosphorus Bridge. This had been closed, because of a threatened suicide.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Istanbul, Nature, Psychology, Turkey | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Cosmopolitanism

August 14, 2014 – 12:27 pm

A discussion elsewhere, provoked by the Israel–Gaza conflict, has moved me to recall one and then another article in Katrina vanden Heuvel, ed., The Nation, 1865-1990: Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990). As I recall, I ordered this anthology, having recently started subscribing to The Nation. I found the best way to read the anthology was backwards, thus starting with what I knew best.

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Having now transcribed passages from the anthology, I record them here also.

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By David Pierce | Posted in History, Philosophy | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Freedom

August 4, 2014 – 12:31 pm

How do our thoughts age?

Having written recently that natural science was not history of nature, I looked back at Collingwood’s posthumous Principles of History for his arguments about this. I read his discussion of freedom as what distinguishes history from natural science. I recalled that his earlier writing was more concerned with removing distinctions than drawing them.

This is something that I investigate here. I occasionally encounter denials that we have “free will.” I find such denials bizarre; but evidently some people believe them, or at least believe they are worthy of consideration. I find Collingwood’s own account of freedom to be worthy of consideration. But then, considering this along with the rest of his œuvre, I have to conclude that everything is free. This conclusion is not really new to me; I drew such a conclusion as an adolescent. It may be a common thought. Wordsworth seems to have had such a thought, according to his Ode:

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Education, Facebook, Freedom, History, Nature, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Science | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (13)

Istanbul, August 1, 2014

August 1, 2014 – 11:52 am

This is my first full day in Istanbul for three weeks, and I have four observations, on the color of the sky, on the habits political rulers, on public treatment of space, and on the value of art. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Istanbul, Nature, Turkey, Visual Art | Comments (0)

Facts (NL IX, ‘Retrospect,’ first 6 paragraphs)

August 1, 2014 – 9:43 am

Index to this series

A certain person says,

I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.

How should one hear these words: as an eminently reasonable expression of benevolent humility such as any of us might honorably make? Well, no matter how qualified, the command obey me might be a warning sign. The words are in fact from a recently published video, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly (Vol 190 No 5, 11–17 July 2014, p. 4). The speaker is the man whose nom de guerre is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on whose head the Department of State of the United States of America placed a ten-million-dollar bounty in 2011. He now styles himself Ibrahim, Caliph of the Islamic State, a new entity that is supposed to restore the lost Muslim glory of past centuries. This restoration is to be achieved through war. War requires military discipline, with punishments meted out for infractions like insubordination, not to mention the slaughter of those perceived as enemies. So al-Baghdadi’s request to be advised and halted if seen to be in the wrong must be interpreted rather carefully.

It is difficult to know how to interpret somebody’s words. With that I pass to the transitional chapter in the first part, “Man,” of Collingwood’s New Leviathan.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Grammar, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Turkish, Visual Art | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

Şirince 2014

July 19, 2014 – 7:01 am

This is about our second visit to the Nesin Mathematical Village in Şirince this year. The first visit was to attend the Summer School Around Valuation Theory, May 22–26. Now we have come back to teach, as usual, in the Turkish Mathematical Society Undergraduate and Graduate Summer School. This time we are teaching not just one week, but two: July 14–27. My own course, as several times in the past, is on nonstandard analysis. Each course meets every day but Thursday, two hours a day.

The Math Village only increases in beauty every year, as I mean to suggest by posting a few photographs below.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Education, Mathematics, Nesin Mathematics Village, Turkey | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (10)

Two women

June 30, 2014 – 2:43 pm

On the left, Vincent van Gogh, Mousmé, 1888, National Gallery of Art, Washington. On the right, Stephen Chambers, Woman (Green Background), 2006, private collection, London; currently on display at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, where I saw it on Saturday, June 21, 2014, and made the (slightly tilted) photograph on the right below.

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The van Gogh image, I downloaded from the National Gallery website. I cropped and resized the Chambers image to be the same height as the van Gogh; then I juxtaposed the two with convert +append van-gogh-la-mousme.jpg chambers-woman.jpg two-women.jpg

I did not know of the artist Stephen Chambers before. The green background of his Woman, and her expression, caused me to think of van Gogh’s Mousmé. The Mousmé’s head is round, but her dotted skirt is as flat as the blouse of the Woman.

By David Pierce | Posted in Istanbul, Visual Art | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Interconnectedness

June 30, 2014 – 1:19 pm

Note added January 13, 2019. This essay concerns a letter I once wrote about

  • teaching;
  • the infinitely large and small, as contemplated by Pascal in that one of the Pensées headed Disproportion de l’homme;
  • Zen Buddhism.

Since the ideas of Collingwood often dominate this blog, one may ask why they influence me. My old letter provides some evidence, since I wrote it before I had read anything by Collingwood but The Principles of Art.

The present essay has the first of this blog’s several mentions of the slogan

Verba volant scripta manent,

which may not mean what we tend to think today.

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By David Pierce | Posted in “God is a circle …”, Collingwood, Contradiction, Education, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Principles of Art, West Virginia | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)