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[ by Charles Cameron — the Trinity and National Security, Game Boards and Mathematics, Japanese wave patterns, Maestro Harding on the interconnectedness of “all branches of human knowledge and curiosity, not just music” — plus Blues Clues at the tail end ]
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Not only have the last couple of days been riotous in Washington, with more news to track than I have eyes to see, but today, still reeling under the weight of Mattis‘ resignation, McConnell‘s statement in support and other matters, I found myself with a richesse of board-game and graph-related delights.

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Trinitarian NatSec:

Followers of this searies will be familiar with the Trinitarian diagram juxtaposed here with its equivalents from classical Kabballah and Oronce Fine:

That little triptych is from my religion and games avenues of interest, but of course I’m also interested in matters of national security, as befits Zenpundit, the strategy & creativity blog. You can imagine my surprise and delight, then, in coming across a natsec version of the trinity diagram, in a tweet from Jon Askonas.

Here’s my comparison:

My own attention was first drawn to the Trinitarian diagram as a result of reading Margaret Masterman‘s brilliant cross-disciplinary work, “Theism as a Scientific Hypothesis”, which ran in four parts in a somewhat obscure and difficult to find journal, Theoria to Theory, Vol 1, 1-4, 1966-67.

See:

Margaret Masterman, George Boole and the Holy Trinity

Margaret Masterman’s “Theism as a Scientific Hypothesis”

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Game Boards and Mathematics:

I could hardly fail to be intrigued by Calli Wright‘s piece titled The Big List of Board Games that Inspire Mathematical Thinking, eh? And look, the first game they show is a graph-based board game, Achi:

Dara also looks somewhat relevant.

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Japanese wave designs:

Again, those familiar with my games will know of my juxtaposition of Von Kármán with Van Gogh as a DoubleQuote — but let me quote from an earlier post, Sunday’s second surprise — the Van Gogh DoubleQuote:

Here’s the Von Kármán / Van Gogh DQ, which I value in light of Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game as a clear bridge between one of the crucial dualities of recent centuries — the needless and fruitless schism between the arts and sciences, which has given rise not only the rantings of Christopher Hitchens and his less elegant disciple Bill Maher, but to such other matters as the Papal condemnation and “forgiveness” 359 years later of Galileo Galilei, Charles Babbage‘s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Andrew White‘s A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in ChristendomW, and CP Snow‘s The Two Cultures:

And finally, here’s an ugraded version of the other DQ of mine that seeks to bridge the arts and sciences — featuring Hokusai‘s celebrated woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (upper panel, below) and Jakob aka nikozy92‘s fractal wave, which I’ve flipped horizontally to make its parallel with the Hokusai clearer (lower panel) — Jakob‘s is a much improved version of a fractal wave compared with the one I’d been using until today:

That brings me to the Met’s marvelous offering, to which J Scott Shipman graciously pointed me:

Here’s where you get the collection:

You Can Now Download a Collection of Ancient Japanese Wave Illustrations for Free

Rich pickings!

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Maestro Harding and the Glass Bead Game:

Finally, I’ve been delighted today to run across a couple of vdeos of my nephew, Maestro Daniel Harding, conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra some years back in programs exploring the interplay of mathematics and other disciplines and music:

and:

Daniel is not working the graph-based angle that my games explore, but his thinking here is pleasantly congruous with my own. His work with the SRSO has, he says in the first video here, “to do with all branches of human knowledge and curiosity, not just music — because everything is connected”.

You can’t get much closer in spirit to Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game than that!

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Earlier in this series:

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: preliminaries

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: two dazzlers

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: three

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: four

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: five

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: six

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: seven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eight

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: nine

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: ten

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eleven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: twelve

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BTW:

I really want to believe the only American television Kim Jong Un has watched is Blues Clues and that’s just what he thinks all American mail looks like. pic.twitter.com/wL9ek5csch

— Delaney Strunk (@delaknee) June 2, 2018

NatSec, yes, and a DoubleQUote. Too good to miss. Thanks again to John Askonas..

[ by Charles Cameron — next in the long series beginning with sports and game metaphors, and extending to include miscellaneous memorable items — nb, includes a Tibhirine section, Jim Gant pls note ]
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Here’s a DoubleQuote in images of considerable interest, from David Metcalfe — with the esteemed William Dalrynple DoubleQuoting goddesses in Kerala:

“… when the goddesses visit each other, the sacrifice in the church is just like the one we have here…”

The Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati, sisters and goddesses – @DalrympleWill on Christianity in India:https://t.co/OZUfsJVTMf

Link courtesy of @hipbonegamer pic.twitter.com/gS6XIGGXHv

— David Metcalfe (@davidbmetcalfe) December 9, 2018

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Ancilliary to my interest in mapping complex realities..

My @tapestryconf talk is now in video form: A biased tour of the uncertainty visualization zoo. If you liked the version with just slides, you'll love (?) the version with me talking over slides 🙂 https://t.co/hSdczZlgKW

— Matthew Kay (@mjskay) December 7, 2018

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First “siege warfare” metaphor:

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Something to read alongside John Kiser‘s superb The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria :

For what I mean by the "issues" in the Trappist monks case in #Algeria, see here: https://t.co/DIXBkV2cGs

— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) December 9, 2018

For what I mean by the "issues" in the Trappist monks case in #Algeria, see here: https://t.co/DIXBkV2cGs

— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) December 9, 2018

I would be most happy to publish any comments John Kiser has on Kyle Orton‘s blog post, Algeria’s ‘Years of Blood’: Not Quite What They Seem on ZP should he or Jim Gant notice this somewhat obscure entry..

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Good grief:

Irish woman who married ghost of 300-year-old pirate says they have split up https://t.co/yuDeiiGkKB via @theirishpost

— Hassan Hassan (@hxhassan) December 9, 2018

Key comment:

I will explain all in due course but for now all I want to say is be VERY careful when dabbling in spirituality, it’s not something to mess with.

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And how’s this?

Trump Channels the Worst of China to Beat China

A double ouroboros, methinks: the Worst of China to Beat China, arguably, and self-defeating, axiomatically, no?

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Venkatesh Rao, Quiver Doodles:

I don’t know if this is still true, but I once read about exploited workers in the ship-breaking industry who were worked so hard, and paid so little, they could not even afford to buy enough calories to sustain themselves. They were slowly starving to death. I call this phenomenon entropic ruin, a generalization of the idea of gambler’s ruin to open-ended games that can be non-zero-sum and need not involve gambling. In this case, it’s a deterministic death march. If you systematically consume fewer calories than you expend long term, you will die a premature death.

Via John Kellden

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Did Venkatesh mention “the idea of gambler’s ruin“? How about nuns’ ruin as a subset?

Two nuns allegedly stole $500,000 for trips to Las Vegas

We do know that they had a pattern of going on trips, we do know they had a pattern of going to casinos, and the reality is, they used the account as their personal account,” Marge Graf, an attorney representing St. James, told a group of parents at a meeting last Monday night, according to the Beach Reporter.”

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Mask dancers, Bhutan:

21 Breathtaking Photos Of Isolated Tribes From All Around The World

The dancers are gorgeous, but look to the left and see the monasteries perched on plateaus in a towering rock-face..

I’m pretty sure “isolated tribes” are of particular interest about now because of the evangelical boundary-pusher killed (martyred? now there’s a koan) because he hoped to bring the gospel to Andaman tribal peoples whose isolation is protected by the Indian government.. see my tweet:

"He reprimands himself for removing the arrow that was shot into his waterproof Bible. He should have kept it, he wrote. Instead, he handed it back to the boy who shot at him, then paddled away." https://t.co/cfett1cBRb
John Chau’s Death on North Sentinel Island ..

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) December 9, 2018

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A whole lot more..

This Nancy Pelosi chyron, for instance:

Which brings me to #2 below:

— with #3 also deserving a metaphor-mention..

And we might as well go for the revolt chyron here:

And that in turn allows for a splendid graphic with both metaphorical and real resonance..

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That should be enough. I’ll collect further items of interest in the comments section.

[ by Charles Cameron — Halloween greetings, and a pre-midterm reminder of what demagoguery brings ]
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The box is a box of Halloween humor, a slight thing and entirely innocent, designed to delight with a nostaligic frisson on Halloweens past.. Spooky Halloween Feel Boxes for Adults: Put your hand in — preferably with eyes averted or blindfold — and feel, as in touchy-feel..

Among the sensations you are invited to feel.. cold spaghetti.. worms in a fishing box.. you get the idea.

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My first association, when I saw a pointer to this article was the Gom Jabbar in Dune — a box containing pain, increasing pain. Should the candidate withdraw his hand from the box, he dies by cyanide needle, and the only means of survival is the ability to overcome instinct, which Paul Atreides manages by recitation of the Litany against Fear:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

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Here’s the movie version:

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Black boxes..

The very idea of boxes filled with feelings is, to my mind, a fine one to explore, in humor, as in the New Yorker piece, or in deadly earnest, as in Frank Herbert‘s masterpiece, Dune.

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But then, reading Colin Stokes and Ellis Rosen‘s NYorker humor piece, I came inevitably to this image:

I said inevitably, perhaps unavoidably would have been keener to the point. I couldn’t avoid my second association.

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That second association was to Carolyn Forché:‘s prose-poem The Colonel from her second volume, The Country Between Us.

On reading her poem itself again after so many years, after reading it aloud to audiences on various occasions, after one miraculous night in the early eighties when I heard her read in LA, after reading her American Poetry Review piece about the experiences inn Al Salvador that lead to this particular poem and others — The Memory of Elena with its unforgettable paella among them — that second and more powerful association was to:

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

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Shattering.

Humor has darkened to tragedy — tragedy does not suffice to speak of this horror — the box of touchy-feelies has become the Colonel’s grocery sack spilled on the floor, dried apricots are dried peach halves — despite the differences, the associative leap was, for me, inevitable.

And far too All Hallows Eve appropriate for comfort..

Far too apt for the upcoming midterms, too..