The Nesting Instinct

From the New Yorker, 04/10/10

Time is Recursive

Look at this beautiful Droste-effect wristwatch:

More available at fpsurgeon’s flickr site

Patron Saint of recursion: Hofstadter or Hasselhoff?

No words can express what I feel about this and these words do not express it perfectly.

Click on the image to start:

(Where credit is due is to Geriatric Punks: the boys who used to make mix tapes for girls)

God can be funny…laugh with God.

T-shirt

If TLA is a recursive acronym, it must also be allowed that T-shirt is a self-describing word. And just look at this T-shirt:

photo credit: paulandstorm

from Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants

An image of recursion: first approximations

Inspired by recursion hell, I thought I should have a go at contriving some recursive images of my own. My plan was simple. Surely all I had to do was hook up an external monitor, open the Mac Photo Booth application and place the monitor facing the screen of the laptop. In this way I thought I should able to create an instant Droste effect. But when when I pressed the ‘take photo’ button, all I got was a white screen as if I’d overloaded the system.

In the end I had to resort to the unsatisfactory solution of using a third device, viz my camera. It was difficult to get the two screens parallel while at the same time keeping the camera out of the picture:

This next one was a bit better in terms of the angle but didn’t show the recurring image as well.

At the end of the day, I wonder if I could achieve better results more simply just by using the screen-grab feature.

…I could end up being here all night at this rate.

The Droste Effect

I remember as a child that we kept a packet of greaseproof paper on the inside of the door of a tall cupboard in the kitchen. The illustration on the packet showed a woman holding up a packet of the same greaseproof paper. On that packet you could see a much smaller image of the same woman, of course, holding up a packet of the same greaseproof paper. By about the fourth or fifth packet, the image was so small that I  couldn’t tell if the artist had drawn the woman in at all. But it seemed that even if you couldn’t see it, even if it wasn’t there, there must be an infinite series of women holding up an equally infinite number of packets.

The Droste Effect, the name given to this kind of recursive picture where an image depicts itself, comes from the name of a Dutch brand of cocoa powder. The packaging (see illustration) depicts a nurse carrying a tray on which there is a packet of the same brand of cocoa powder.

I learnt about this from the online encylopaedia Wikipedia.  When users create articles they are required to reference sources which generally seem to be online sources. I often come across pages that have been flagged as lacking citations of reliable sources. What I have yet to see is a reference in a Wikipedia article that cites an article in Wikipedia. Or better still, an article that cites itself as a source.

Meanwhile, I wonder if there is anyone reading this who can tell me the brand of greaseproof paper my family used. Or,whether there is anyone reading this who can tell me who might know which brand of greaseproof paper my family used. Or, whether there is anyone reading this who can tell me who might know who might know…

& on