Don't shoot until you see the persons of their eyes!

Douglas R. Hofstadter is one of my favorite mathematicians, magicians, wits (or should that be "whites"?), authors, you name it.

HUH? you say ... whites? OK, fair enough - nobody can grok this until they have read one of his better essays, "A Person Paper on Purity in Language," written under the nom de plume "William Satire." Check it out, and this post will make sense. Coincidentally (and rather oddly), this essay also connects to my earlier posts about racism...

He authored two of my favorite works: "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" and "Metamagical Themas." The latter is the title of his column in Scientific American (and, interestingly, is an anagram of Martin Gardner's columns in SciAm, "Mathematical Games"). If you ever come across these books, don't be scared off by their length - instead, please make a point of attacking them. I promise your thoughts will be provoked!

A "learnable" moment?

Wave, particle, whatever!

I also came across some ambigrams - the one on the right is Hofstadter's, while the one on the left is by Scott Kim, "Mr. Ambigram," - another person I admire - but that's another post for another time. Example to the left of me, example to the right of me, here I go again, caught in the middle with you...