Renvoi

I found this picture and I absolutely love it:



In art, it's called the mise-en-abime, or mise-en-abyme, depending on your spelling predilections. A famous one is the Dutch Cocoa girl:



Something like this also happens in computer science. The act of the function referring to itself is the recursive call of the lambda-calculus. This evaluation of the evaluation serves as the foundation of pretty much all computational theory.

As for the word renvoi, this is what the French call standing between two mirrors and peering into the infinity of the reflection, much like the mise-en-abime.

(Insert gratuitous snark here)

Politics makes for some very strange bedfellows.

in reference to:

"Meanwhile, on Monday a group of eight international figures, including Noam Chomsky, actor Sean Penn and South African anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu, called for Iran to release the two men."
- BBC News - Iran summons US hiker Sarah Shourd for spying trial (view on Google Sidewiki)

Jack LaLanne died :-(

I can still remember him on TV in the early 70s. As a fat kid, I thought he was the Antichrist. But now after almost a decade of exercising, I give him my total respect.

The news wires need to show more of his early photographs.

The good ole HuffPO

I'm becoming increasingly tired of this place. They're too busily involved in deleting the comments of people who don't subscribe to the party line of the P.C. nanny state. And I make this criticism as a life-long liberal.

in reference to: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post (view on Google Sidewiki)

Once bitten, twice shy

This says it all about psychiatry:

You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

via HuffPo

Sorry,

but my favorite fossils are the trilobites. For several million years, these bottom feeding scavengers were among the most populous things in the sea. And then they died, leaving only distantly related descendants.

in reference to:

"Ask someone to name their favourite fossils and the chances are they will point to the ammonites."
- BBC News - Ammonite diet revealed in X-rays (view on Google Sidewiki)

A Hall of Mirrors

I like this:



The shrinks simply hope you give up and because you don't, then you have a problem.

via bipolarblast