Archive for the ‘UUCE’ Category
an awesome work of scholarship. by a great musician and lay leader. but not my real subject. (bait-and switch.) UUUE.me . (the editor hates plain-text and wants me to learn about "block"s. not today. dates & titles; formatting not my fault.) 1/19/14 m.l. king. 6/13/14 gospel exegesis. 10/19/14 uu &uuce. 5/24/15 number mysticism. 11/15/15 schools & churches. 1/24/16 arts & sciences. 3/13/16 self-publishing. 6/12/16 how to be interesting. 3/3/19 vonnegut, uu, & me. 3/24/19 library lore. 5/5/19 maps of the world. 7/7/19 philosophy & nonsense. 8/18/19 the art of teaching. 11/3/19 notes from the hymnal. 12/18/19 uu & me. 11/12/20 2020 vision. 2/16/20 chinese philosophy. 3/15/20 confucius, lao tzu, & me.
wordpress is messing with me big-time. i may be bailing for good. i mean it this time. forced editor-“upgrade”. curses.
meanwhile. many like it, this one mine. don’t *you* steal one from *your* church (necessarily). the important features for this brief post are that in this copy, hymns 38, 205-206, 233, & 259 are “tabbed” by my hand for solo guitar.
by title, morning has broken, amazing grace!, bring a torch (jennette isabella), & we three kings. that’s it. the interface is broken again and my patience is very thin as usual.
A Short History of Chinese Philosophy: Fung Yu-Lan (Edited by Derk Bodde), 1948. Free Press Paperback Edition 1966.
Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors: Ann Paludan. Thames and Hudson, 1998.
Introducing Ancient Eastern Philosophy: Richard Osborne and Borin Van Loon; Series Editor Richard Appignanesi. Totem Books, 1995.
Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu. Translators: (to German) Richard Wilhelm (1978) & (to English) H. G. Oswald (1985). Penguin Books, 1995.
The Sayings of Confucius. James Ware translation of 1955. New American Library (Mentor imprint).
The Way of Chuang Tzu. Thomas Merton, 1965. Shambhala, 1992.
the blister and still-forming scab is a trophy
from a recent encounter with some hot pigfat.
(the pigfat won.) i knocked off the fat with
the other hand within a fraction of a second
and very soon had the wound in cold water.
& so was able to pop the blister many hours
later quite painlessly… the juice squirted
out a hole too small to see and the burnt skin
went right on lying on top of the still-healing
layer of much-less-badly-burned skin.
our text is #2681: t.~izawa’s _my_ABC_book_ (1971).
digitization has put some weird distorto-mojo on
some of the lettering (as seen on my screen).
also you can barely see my penciled-in notes
and drawings and diagrams. they’re clear enough
in the actual object (or, of course, i’d ink
’em in). anyhow, for the record, i’ve drawn
12 notes of a piano keyboard at “X” along with
“EGBDF” and “FACE”; on the first two pages i’ve
copied out the whole alphabet (and indicated
the pagination… thus providing sort of a
“table of contents”) and copied out each of
A, B, C, and D as a cartoon. the rest is left
as an exercise.
saturday night i colored in the corners of this cube.
the underlying black-and-white is based on a work of
the great dutch artist m.~c.~escher. the cardboard
cut-out version is from a collection by the american
mathematician doris schattschneider.
(_m.c._escher_kaleidocycles_).
anyhow, i’ve had the whole “5 platonic solids” set
from this work on display in the front room at home
for a while. the others are in color already, right
out of the book. i’ve had *another* set of these,
too: it’s a great “book” and might still be in print
for all i know. i had two editions, from years apart,
years ago.
i took this one to church on sunday and used it in my talk.
there wasn’t time to explain why i’d colored it the way i
did. but i *did* count the symmetry group of the cube,
two ways. any talk by me should have a theorem in it;
i’m happy to count that as a theorem.
24 because any of the 6 faces can be “face down”,
and each such choice-of-face allows for any of 4
remaining faces then to “face front” (all but the
“face-up” one *opposite* to our “chosen” face).
but also 24 because
1 identity
6 180-degree “flips” that fix two edges
(one for each pair of opposite edges)
8 120-degree “corner-turns”
(fix a pair of opposite corners;
there are 4 such; one may “turn”
right or left)
6 90-degree “face turns”
(fix opposite faces—3 ways; again,
one can go “right” or “left”)
3 180-degree face turns.
and this messy version is actually quite clear when
one is actually holding up an actual cube and pointing
at the drawing on the board. or in this case, at one’s
own sweatshirt. canvas makes a good whiteboard.
you can do it all without even mentioning “group theory”…
and i *sure* didn’t get to prove that this set of 24
“moves” gives a version of “the symmetric group on 4
objects”. anyway, part of the point is that one need
not have introduced any “math code” into the discussion
at all to arrive some some *very* useful results.
i learned the symmetry-groups-of-solids trick from an
old master. i mentioned this book in the service.
but mostly i talked about stuff like bible studies and music.
stuff that people actually show up at church *for*. bring what
you love to church and share it. food and money are particularly
welcome.
7 principles (UU; uuce) the hymnal
7 days (_genesis_ & dylan) gods & traditions
7 seals (& churches; _revelation_) pointless lies
7 planets (& 7 “sisters” [“pleiades”]) science & mysticism
7 ages of man (_as_you_like_it [act 2, scene 7]) whining schoolboy; mere oblivion
7 deadly sins (dylan again [wiburys]; PALEGAS) i’m confident, you’re proud, he’s arrogant
7 colors (ROYGBIV MRBGPYO) i quit forever; i mean it this time.
VME, alas.
quadrivium & trivium
(7 liberal arts:
arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, music,
grammar, rhetoric,
& logic)
john 1:1 at w’edia.
here’s a pdf of marta flanagan’s
we are unitarian universalists flier.
i picked up a hardcopy version on sunday;
one of those 8{1\over2}\by11 folded-twice-
-the-short-way jobs you see in flier-racks
in all manner of waiting-room-like venues,
with three, what i’ll call, “panels”
on each side of a standard sheet:
the front “panel” has white letters
on a red background and the rest have
red letters on a white background;
the only non-typographical graphic
elements being three UU “chalice” icons.
sez “WELCOME” under the chalice on the front,
tipped at a jaunty 45^{\degrees} angle like the
“banner” and “foldover” cover-elements you see on
magazines. anyhow. i can get behind most of this
stuff. mostly without much embarrassment.
in this context.
i mean, well, look: *any* statement beginning
“we” immediately calls for… or, anyway, usually
brings forth in me… the question “who is this
‘we’, you’re talking about, there, anyhow?”, but
in this case “we” more-or-less obviously means,
“we UU’s”; score one for the flier.
“we believe”? well, one has longsince learned that
people hardly ever say interesting things about
their belief systems on cue. you’ll learn more
about their inner lives by asking ’em about what
they love. but they’ll lie about that, too, usually.
ask ’em what they *don’t* like and you can get some
pretty good accuracy pretty quick sometimes, though.
anyhow. (where was i?) the flier gets a pass here
again, for the same reason: i found this in the
front room of a church, for heck sake. people
actually do show up in this building wanting
to know exactly this, “what we believe”. some
of ’em are shy to actually *ask*… i know *i*
would be, and i’ve more than hinted at one of
the reasons… so we do very well, in my opinion,
to offer suchlike fliers in plain sight.
but “we believe people should”
is something of a deal-breaker.
i’d rather not believe people “should” do *anything*.
whenever i find out one of ’em thinks *i* should do
anything, that’s usually trouble for me and i don’t
like it. golden rule; game over.
i don’t say they *shouldn’t* spend their lives thinking
about better and better ways to push people around;
that would be hypocritical. but i damn well *wish*
they’d, you know, consider in the bowels of christ
that throwing-first-stones might be, i don’t know,
deeply fucking *wrong*. so, you know, just for me,
just for today, i’m not giving anything like full
assent to any “belief” with a “should” in it (until
more context is given; “if you want to learn any
advanced math, you should think about how equations
work” doesn’t give me much trouble, for example).
back to the document at hand.
“we believe people should be encouraged to think
for themselves.”
(but, i guess evidently, by using *our* courage
to do so.)
i’ve offered such encouragement *many* (many!)
times in my working life (and a little in
“real” life, too, i suppose). heck, i’ll
even urge anybody thinking they’d like to
try teaching to do the same.
the generous error.
strange loops indeed.
uuce.net.
the schedule as of now… according to
my understanding as of now… is wrong;
i’ll *not* talk next week. but soon.
on “gospel exegesis” (as announced here).
or not.
some remarks on a talk there by me (9/2012).
thanks, rick!
“this next one’s a masterpiece”,
i’ll’ve said in introducing
the devil and mr. blake
(the words, not the tune…)
the livingston review 