Middle East Peace Potential through Dynamics in Spherical Geometry

August 21, 2014 10:33 AM

Middle East Peace Potential through Dynamics in Spherical Geometry: Engendering connectivity from incommensurable 5-fold and 6-fold conceptual frameworks. This is an exploration of the hypothesis that unique belief systems depend for their coherence on distinctive patterns typically embodied in geometrical symbols in two dimensions. On the basis of that assumption, the case tentatively explored here is that of the "incommensurability" of the 5-fold Star of Islam and the 6-fold Star of David of Judaism...Mathematically these patterns cannot be readily combined. This issue is described in mathematics in terms of tiling...A set of hexagons and pentagons can however be uniquely fitted together as a particular three-dimensional polyhedron, namely the truncated icosahedron.

"The key question for this argument -- given the truncated icosahedral pattern explored above -- is whether "resonance" in some form, and "cyclical edge-connectivity", have implications for the viability of structures reconciling the differences between the "hexagonal" and "pentagonal" mindsets assumed here to be fundamental to the dynamics in the Middle East. The challenge might well be framed as one of reframing the pattern of edges to form a larger whole...should the challenges of the Middle East be understood as a problem of resonance -- calling for the quality of thinking applied to resonant structures?...
Of particular interest to this approach is the use of a Schlegel diagram by those exploring resonance within the truncated icosahedron as the polyedral form of the basic fullerene C60."

posted by leahwrenn (31 comments total)

See also: Soccer ball.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 10:37 AM on August 21, 2014 [4 favorites]

Given that the five-fold Star of Islam is also found--repeated 50 times!--in the more secular US flag, I think we can confidently predict unity and mutual respect between the US and the Islamic Middle East.
posted by mittens at 10:45 AM on August 21, 2014 [8 favorites]

From the Time Cube Institute of International Peace Studies, I take it?
posted by yoink at 10:47 AM on August 21, 2014 [29 favorites]

Less Time Cube-y than I expected.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 10:47 AM on August 21, 2014

reconciling the differences between the "hexagonal" and "pentagonal" mindsets assumed here to be fundamental to the dynamics in the Middle East.

"assumed here" to be the important phrase, but of course, assumed nowhere else.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:50 AM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

This site. This site. Oh my. The list of recent papers is like if Terrence McKenna worked for RAND Corp. This entire domain might be a Euclid-class SCP.
posted by theodolite at 10:54 AM on August 21, 2014 [12 favorites]

At least Time Cube was entertainingly insane. This is just... bland in its cargo-cult dedication to dry academic style.

I hope they realize that modern academic scholarship is merely educated stupid, and feel free to go wildly off the rails in their next effort.
posted by narain at 10:54 AM on August 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

should the challenges of the Middle East be understood as a problem of resonance -- calling for the quality of thinking applied to resonant structures?

no
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:02 AM on August 21, 2014 [6 favorites]

At least Time Cube was entertainingly insane.

Maybe was, but he fell off whatever ledge he had landed on before when Obama entered the presidential race, and has gone full racist since.
posted by effbot at 11:13 AM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

At least they've got really pretty pictures of zonohedra related to the truncated icosahedron. I was just looking for a wireframe model of the great icosidodecahedron (you know, like you do) and then this was there.
posted by leahwrenn at 11:14 AM on August 21, 2014

It may not be the most authoritative of sources, but according to Wikipedia the Magen David wasn't widely regarded as a Jewish symbol until the 19th Century. It was used here and there before then, but may have only been decorative (it turns up on a couple of cathedrals, even). Similarly, the five-pointed star may not have been associated with Islam until the time of the Ottomans; it's also been associated with a crapton of other disparate groups before then.

In short: increase your dosage.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:22 AM on August 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

Maybe was, but he fell off whatever ledge he had landed on before when Obama entered the presidential race, and has gone full racist since.

Oh dang, I wasn't aware of that. Shit, why couldn't he just have remained a batshit insane but harmless loony, instead of turning into a batshit insane harmful loony?
posted by narain at 11:33 AM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

I COULD FUCKIN TALK BOUT HEDRONS ALL DAY YO
posted by Mister_A at 11:34 AM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also the crescent is more strongly associated with Islam, with the star as a companion. ALSO neither of these is really a religious symbol, as Islam is officially not OK with religious symbols and icons.
posted by Mister_A at 11:36 AM on August 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

I, for one, support all of the science coming out of the Large Hedron Collider.
posted by Earthtopus at 11:45 AM on August 21, 2014

Which is what makes some Sufi (anti-)symbolism so interesting. (I'm not sure it's really "anti", just that it has to fit into a culture with a prohibition on overtly religious symbols.)
posted by sneebler at 11:45 AM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is quite bizarre, but it reminded me of this, from Giorgio Agamben's "We, Refugees":

Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is sufficient here to suggest one possible direction. As is well known, one of the options considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that it become the capital, contemporaneously and without territorial divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this would imply could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we could look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations," whose catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).

This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory, nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories, making holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this new space, the European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality, would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the world. Today, in a sort of no-man's-land between Lebanon and Israel, there are four hundred and twenty-five Palestinians who were expelled by the state of Israel. According to Hannah Arendt's suggestion, these men constitute "the avant-garde of their people." But this does not necessarily or only mean that they might form the original nucleus of a future national state, which would probably resolve the Palestinian problem just as inadequately as Israel has resolved the Jewish question. Rather, the no-man's-land where they have found refuge has retroacted on the territory of the state of Israel, making holes in it and altering it in such a way that the image of that snow-covered hill has become more an internal part of that territory than any other region of Heretz Israel. It is only in a land where the spaces of states will have been perforated and topologically deformed, and the citizen will have learned to acknowledge the refugee that he himself is, that man's political survival today is imaginable.

posted by mbrock at 11:54 AM on August 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

Is this stuff translated from the French thinkers of the recent past?
posted by Postroad at 12:04 PM on August 21, 2014

Reminds me of the brilliant/insane/unreadable horror(?) novel, Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anomalous Materials by Reza Negarestani. Everybody should, well, not read it, but at least take a look. No thin line between genius and insane in this one...
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:15 PM on August 21, 2014 [5 favorites]

This is an exploration of the hypothesis that unique belief systems depend for their coherence on distinctive patterns typically embodied in geometrical symbols in two dimensions.

That's a terrible hypothesis because it's constituted exclusively of wild and unproven assumptions, and "exploring" a completely off-the-wall hypothesis is much less interesting than testing it.

A certain amount of internal coherence is important for belief systems, but I don't see any empirical reason to assume that those systems' efficacy, durability, or persistence is itself dependent on some kind of "coherence." That, all by itself, is a huge sociological assumption that I don't feel entirely convinced by and don't see any evidence for. I stop even entertaining anything that comes after that, because the assumptions are so sweeping and naïve.
posted by clockzero at 1:24 PM on August 21, 2014

Mister_A: "... Islam is officially not OK with religious symbols and icons."

"But what have the iconoclasts ever done for us?"
posted by symbioid at 1:28 PM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also neither star meshes nicely with a smiley face. COINCIDENCE?!?
posted by Mchelly at 1:43 PM on August 21, 2014

"First, we need to assume that all Middle Eastern countries are spherical and residing in a vacuum..."
posted by surazal at 1:46 PM on August 21, 2014

I mean, honestly, at this point, I'm willing to try just about anything to resolve that conflict.
posted by Tomorrowful at 1:49 PM on August 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

At least Time Cube was entertainingly insane.

Someone linked to that site recently and it's a lot more disturbing than I remembered it. He's talking about kids being blessed for killing adults who don't accept wibbley wobbly timey wimey now.
posted by Hoopo at 2:25 PM on August 21, 2014

I mean, honestly, at this point, I'm willing to try just about anything to resolve that conflict.

Yeah I mean what we're doing now isn't working, so

Let's put him in a room with Likud and Hamas

Like, a big room
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:39 PM on August 21, 2014

The take on Wikileaks is, ah, interesting.

Acting in a fatherly capacity, under the aegis of the Patriot Act, any "spying" by US then amounts to a form of sexual voyeurism in relation to the UN as its child.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:02 PM on August 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

Acting in a fatherly capacity, under the aegis of the Patriot Act, any "spying" by US then amounts to a form of sexual voyeurism in relation to the UN as its child.

Very interesting find, BungaDunga.

Maybe that provides us a parallax view of what's gone wrong with this guy: the comparison between fivefold and six-fold symmetries offers a metaphor for describing putative incompatible world views of Arabs and Jews; and, as possibly the most important of the nations which established the UN, the US is metaphorically the father of the UN.

But having made such metaphorical connections in his own mind, Mr Judge then comes to believe that every absurd thing that can be squeezed out of those metaphors, no matter how many turns of the screw he has to make in order to produce it, is a real and true characteristic of the thing the metaphor merely loosely describes -- and I suspect that deep identity between the metaphor and the thing itself is what he means by "resonance."
posted by jamjam at 7:50 PM on August 21, 2014

For what it's worth, here's the author's wikipedia page. (Written by him, I would guess.)
posted by forgetful snow at 12:09 AM on August 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

For what it's worth, here's the author's wikipedia page. (Written by him, I would guess.)

Looks like it was mostly written by a French thinker.

You should probably add a "weird wikipedia" warning to that link, btw. Clicking through may hurt your brain.

(But I have to admit that I found it somewhat amusing to learn that Guardian once reviewed this entry in Mr Judge's "Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential", a work once described by the ALA as "a problematic monument to idiosyncrasy, confusion, and obfuscation that certainly is not worth purchasing at any price.")
posted by effbot at 4:00 AM on August 22, 2014

So this is this generation's "Ebony and Ivory", only not hummable?
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:53 AM on August 22, 2014