Flammarion

In my December 28 post "Birds," I reported hearing Bernard Beitman talk about two trees he called the King and the Queen and having the spontaneous thought that he should have called them Roger and Camille instead. Googling those two names led me to discover Roger McGuinn, frontman for the Byrds, and his wife Camilla.

The name I had thought of was not Camilla, though, but Camille.

Today I read Doubt Not the Dream, a collection of poetry by San Antonio, Texas, poet and amateur astronomer Aline B. Carter (1892-1972). I had known of her for some decades, thanks to her famous pupil Whitley Strieber, but for whatever reason today was the day I decided to track down her poems and read them. One of her pieces, called "Trees," ends with these lines:

Infinity has chosen trees to sing

Of prophecies the rolling ages bring.

This image of trees signing made me think of Roger and Camille/Camilla, whom I had originally thought of as trees but who turned out to be a singer and his wife. Six pages later, I found an epigraph from Camille Flammarion:

"Events vanish for the place which brings them forth, but they remain in space . . . everything in an eternal permanence." -- Camille Flammarion

I know very little about Camille Flammarion, except that his name is attached to the Flammarion engraving, which he published but apparently did not create. In my July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side," I noted the Flammarion engraving's similarity to (a mirror-image of) the Rider-Waite Eight of Cups.

This past Friday, December 27, I acquired by serendipity a modern Italian Tarot deck, designed by Pietro Alligo and drawn by Antonella Platano. Doing my first one-card pull with the new deck, I drew none other than the Eight of Cups:

I was struck by the conceptual similarity of the image to Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which I recently set as my phone's wallpaper. Cropping it to fit the phone's screen had even given it the dimensions of a Tarot card:

The imagery on the Tarot card also connects with this photo, which I happened to run across this afternoon:

Here's another take on the same theme, complete with a Green Door:

This is Rex.

I note this as a very unusual sort of dream experience, unusual enough to make me think it might turn out to be precognitive or otherwise meaningful.

My entire visual field was a computer screen showing some kind of ASCII art, which I think was meant to represent a sauropod dinosaur, with a long neck on the left side of the screen and a long tail on the right. I heard the sound of someone repeatedly tapping the space bar, and the ASCII dinosaur parted like a pair of curtains, with the left half moving over to the left and the right half to the right, leaving empty white space in the middle. In this white space appeared what looked like a passport photo.

Faces are rarely well defined in my dreams, but this one was exceptionally clear and detailed, so that I could easily recognize the person if I saw him in real life. He was a Black man with very dark skin and a wide square jaw. His head was completely shaved, and he wore a shortish salt-and-pepper beard, with no mustache but otherwise a full beard. He wore a pair of glasses with round lenses, similar to the John Lennon style but a bit larger. He wasn’t exactly smiling but looked friendly.

A disembodied voice that sounded like a young White woman’s except for its rather flat “Gray”-like intonation, possibly machine-generated, said, “This is Rex. You know Rex. Or anyway, you’ll recognize him. By the way, he’s quite tall.”

Rex’s face stayed on the screen for about 15 to 20 seconds, with no further commentary from the voice, and then I woke up.

Fourier transforms and Morpho menelaus (plus Jokes with Racial Slurs)

This morning I was in a public place reading Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry. I was reading this passage on p. 111:

We should not give Galois all the credit for this transformation. He was riding a wave that had been set in motion by Lagrange, Caughy, Ruffini, and Abel.

As I read this reference to "transformation" and "a wave," in a history of mathematics, a man walked in and sat down a few tables away, facing me. He was wearing this shirt, except that his was blue rather than black:

I continued reading, and in the very next paragraph found this:

Liouville spoke to the French Academy -- the body that had mislaid or rejected Galois's three memoirs -- in the summer of 1843.

Wanting to refresh my memory of what had happened with Galois's three memoirs, I flipped back a few pages (to p. 103) and reread this:

As I mentioned, in February 1830 Galois submitted a memoir on the theory of equations to the Academy for the Grand Prize. The secretary, Joseph Fourier, took it home to give it the once-over. The ill-fortune that constantly dogged Galois's career struck again: Fourier promptly died, leaving the memoir unread.

That's Joseph Fourier, for whom the Fourier transform is named. This is a paper book and thus not searchable, but according to the index, this is the only mention of Fourier in the book.

The word transform made me think of the butterfly on the cover of Stewart's book, since this insect is famous for the transformation, or metamorphosis, it undergoes in the course of its life cycle. On a hunch, I googled fourier transform butterfly just to see what would come up. My mathematical education has been quite rudimentary, and I didn't know the first thing about Fourier transforms, but my hunch turned out to be a good one. It led me to the Wikipedia article "Butterfly diagram," which begins thus:

In the context of fast Fourier transform algorithms, a butterfly is a portion of the computation that combines the results of smaller discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) into a larger DFT, or vice versa (breaking a larger DFT up into subtransforms).

What really caught my eye was the accompanying illustration:

I would have thought that the graph's resemblance to a butterfly was pretty self-explanatory, but whoever put the article together thought it necessary to include a picture of an actual butterfly -- and not just a simple drawing of a generic butterfly, but an entomologically accurate picture of a particular species: Morpho menelaus. The caption even mentions the seemingly irrelevant fact that the butterfly pictured is a morpho.

As a reminder, what attracted me to Stewart's book in the first place was the synchronicity of finding a Morpho menelaus butterfly on the cover:

I haven't finished Stewart's book, but if the index is anything to go by, it has nothing about butterfly diagrams, and the only reference to Fourier is the one quoted above, about how he died before he could read Galois's memoir. Whatever the logic behind putting a butterfly on the cover, it presumably had nothing to do with Fourier transforms.

What prompted the Google search that led me to the butterfly diagram was the connection between butterflies and the idea of transformation. This led me to a blue morpho butterfly like that on Stewart's cover but rotated 90 degrees. A few pages later, Stewart introduces this definition of symmetry: "A symmetry of some mathematical object is a transformation that preserves the object's structure" (p. 118). Then, using an equilaterals  triangle as an example, he explains why 90-degree rotation does not preserve structure and is thus not a symmetry of that object:

Nor is it a symmetry of Morpho menelaus.

Speaking of triangles, last night I somehow ended up discovering the existence of this book on Amazon:

This a case in which you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. The free sample Amazon offers contains neither jokes with racial slurs nor instructions on how to avoid such jokes. Instead, it has jokes like this one -- which I don't think contains a racial slur, though I suppose it may, much like the punchline, have been lost in translation:

A vicar changed into speaking to one in all his parishioners. He stated "When you get to my age you spend lots extra time considering the hereafter." "What do you assert that", enquires the parishioner. The vicar replies "Well, I frequently discover myself going right into a room and wondering what did I are available pay attention after."

Kind of reminds me of this one:

You are not my mother. You are a Snort.

Yesterday’s post “Birds” included an image from the P. D. Eastman book Are You My Mother? The most memorable line from that book, the only one I can quote from memory, is the one that serves as the title of this post.

On Friday morning, I was reading a children’s book called Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth to some young students, and one of them pointed to the words “SNORT! SNORT!” in an illustration and asked me what it said.

Then this afternoon, I ran across this image on /x/:

Birds

I know vaguely who Matt Walsh is and what TikTok is, and that's about the extent of my engagement with either of those alleged cultural phenomena. But sometimes you're just at a place in your life where YouTube is like, "May we interest you in this video of Mr. Walsh doing ad reads and reviewing the worst TikToks of 2024?" and you're like, "Sure, what the heck."

I didn't get through the whole thing, but the first segment is about an alleged trend among TikTok women where you tell your husband or boyfriend that you saw a bird -- just that -- and film his reaction. If he really cares about you, of course, he will find this news intensely interesting. Matt Walsh then proceeds to hold forth at some length on the subject of why someone seeing a bird is not intensely interesting. I would comment on the interestingness of his commentary, but we wouldn't want to get too meta here. If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

I got off YouTube and went directly to Bernard Beitman's book Meaningful Coincidences. I had left off on p. 137, where Sanda Erdelez is mentioned, so I picked up from there. Two pages later, I found this:

Jungian therapist Helen Marlo expects coincidences during psychotherapy. . . . Marlos described a patient who wanted to be a bird. This wish reflected his desire for a strong mother (bird) to nourish him. The following week, the patient walked to the window and for the first time noticed a baby bird inside a nest that had been perched in an adjacent window for several weeks. At that moment, the mother bird flew to the nest to feed her baby a worm. The event helped decrease the patient's inhibitions about discussing these needs.

So he saw a bird, but it was significant. The claim that his wanting to be a bird meant he wanted "a strong mother (bird) to nourish him" reminded me of something I had read just yesterday, Michelle Stone's 2014 essay "Claiming Our Heroines – The Untold Story of Lot’s Wife." After the opening paragraph, in which she discusses our "need to come to recognize our Heavenly Mother," this illustration is inserted from P. D. Eastman's classic 1960 children's book Are You My Mother?

There is no comment on this in the text of the essay, but clearly Mrs. Stone is implicitly identifying herself with this character from a children's book.

Last night I had listened to Bernard Beitman interviewing Sanda Erdelez. Before introducing his guest, Dr. Beitman opens the show by identifying himself with a character created by P. D. Eastman's friend and mentor Dr. Seuss:

I am your host, Dr. Bernie Beitman, MD, and I'm going to talk about Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss wrote a story about a tree that was toppled by corporate greed. The Lorax, who speaks for the trees, emerges from the stump of the truffula tree and voices his disapproval of both the sacrifice of the tree and the thneed which is made from the tree. I am the descendant of the Lorax. I speak for the trees. . . . I have developed a relationship with two trees whom I call the King and the Queen. . . .

Remembering this this morning, I mentally rolled my eyes and thought, "The King and the Queen? If he really had a relationship with those trees, he would have given them real names, like Roger and Camille."

Why Roger and Camille? They just popped into my head as examples of unpretentious "real" names Wondering where they had come from, I decided to Google roger and camille to see what would come up. Autocomplete suggested roger and camilla mcguinn, so I went with that. I didn't recognize the names, but it turns out that Roger McGuinn, whose wife is called Camilla, was the frontman for the rock band The Byrds.

Sanda and Croatian taekwondo belts

As documented in "A female historian with a deep-blue belt in taekwondo," I recently dreamed about a historian whose first name I thought may have been Sandra, who held the taekwondo rank suggested by the title. Follow-up research led me twice to the word sanda. First, I tried to look up Sandra on Eldamo, but sanda was the closest I could find. Then, in the course of exploring belt ranks in various martial arts, I discovered that sanda refers to a sort of freestyle kung fu. Today, while reading Bernard Beitman's book Meaningful Coincidences, I ran across a passing reference to a "serendipity researcher" named Sanda Erdelez.

I don't think I've ever encountered the name Sanda before, so of course I looked her up. The name is Croatian. In my post-dream research, I had discovered that the Russians (and apparently only the Russians) have distinct light-blue and dark-blue belt ranks for taekwondo. I figured this was due to the fact that the Russian language treats these as two completely different colors (much like the red-pink distinction in English). I got to wondering if Croatian, being a Slavic language like Russian, might make a similar distinction both in color terms and in taekwondo ranks. I went to check the Croatian Wikipedia article on taekwondo.

The first surprise was that Croatian (Hrvatski) showed up as one of a handful of "suggested languages" for me, even though I don't think I've ever checked a single Croatian Wikipedia article in my life. The language also has a gold star next to it, which I guess means the Croats have a particularly exemplary taekwondo article.

Clicking through to the article and looking for information about belt ranks, I had an even bigger surprise:

There, in the middle of an article written entirely in Croatian, are the English words dark blue. The phrase appears once again, as dark-blu, in the paragraph below the bulleted list. No other English color words appear anywhere in the article; just that one. I had been assuming that Croatian, like Russian, probably had a native word that meant specifically "dark blue," but it looks as if, on the contrary, they have no way of expressing that color in their language and have to resort to an English loanword.

How extremely bizarre! I'm willing to bet that if I went through Wikipedia's taekwondo article in each and every language, Croatian would be the only one to include the words "dark blue" or "deep blue" -- and syncs from the dream about the deep-blue taekwondo belt led me directly to a Croatian academic named Sanda.

I have contacted Dr. Erdelez to explain these syncs and to ask if she's ever done any martial arts. I figure a "serendipity researcher" should have a high tolerance for that sort of thing.

Update (same night): I looked up Sanda Erdelez on YouTube and listened to an interview of her by Beitman. Just below it on the screen, served up by the algorithm, was a new video (posted 20 hours ago, well after my dream) with “History w/ Sandra” in the title.

Merry Christmas

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Innocence (1893)

And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms.

And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?

And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.

And he spake unto me, saying: Yea, and the most joyous to the soul.

-- 1 Nephi 11:20-23