Word: escher
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Mitsumasa Anno has been called the Escher of Japan because of his ability to trick the eye and educate the mind. In Anno's Flea Market (Philomel; $11.95), two old peasants wheel a cart across a medieval square. Horseless carriages suddenly appear in the background. A stagecoach is on display, and African explorers have arrived with a cache of ivory tusks. In Anno's crowded canvas, allusions are everywhere: the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, the paintings of Monet, the films of Rene Clair reach across the years. With his panoramic, limitless cast, this flea market constantly renews...
Hackers, says Turkle, are social misfits who construct digital Utopias, hang out in pancake houses and admire the recursive art of M.C. Escher. At M.I.T their nerdy abdication from society is "sport death"-programming for up to 30 hours without sleep before "crashing." Alex, a dedicated hacker, describes it as feeling "totally telepathic with the computer...
...computer scientist, and his collaborator Daniel C. Dennett, a philosophy expert, avoid technical jargon and esoteric language throughout the book. Hofstadter is, or course, well practiced at writing for the layman; he authors a regular column in Scientific American and won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Godel, EScher, and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Working with Hofstadter, Dennett--author of Branistorms:- Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology--expands on his own explanations of artificial intelligence, computers and the unity or divisibility of the soul...
...Great Names in the annals of symmetry and self-reference. "MARTIN GARDNER" and "ASIMOV" both preserve their shape upside-down. Read "BORGES" a second time: It's "JORGE" written over "LUIS." And in a tip of the hat to Inversions's literary soulmate, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, Kim has created a series of appropriate representations of those three names...
Douglas R. Hofstadter, an assistant professor of computer science at Indiana University and Pulitzer-prizewinning author (Gödel, Escher, Bach), writes in the March issue of Scientific American: "If you are destined to solve the unscrambling problem at all, it will take you somewhere between five hours and a year." Among other hazards, Hofstadter lists Cubitis magikia, "a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact" with the cube. Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, a former mayor of Manchester, England, had to be operated on for tendinitis of the thumb after...