Symmetry: new ambigram

by | Friday, May 31, 2013

I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence,

This is a sentence.

This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less well-mannered… in fact some sentences can be downright pathological. For instance consider this one:

This sentence contains two erors.

At first blush, it appears that this sentence has only one error – namely the spelling of the word “error” which has been erronously been spelt “erors.” But wait a minute… there is a second error. The fact that it mistakenly claims two errors when actually there is just one! Hmm… so the sentence does have two errors (one of spelling and the other of miscounting the errors).

But… but… but… if it does count the error in counting errors, that means there is just one error in the sentence – which means that the sentence actually mis-counts the number of errors!

Hmmm… I guess we are stuck in a nice little paradox! A paradox that emerges out of self-referential nature of the sentence, a sentence that talks about itself. What fun!

So what does all this have to do with ambigrams? Well ambigrams are usually symmetric – so a nice self-referential ambigram would speak to its symmetric nature in some way. So here it is, an ambigram for the word “symmetric” – which is itself (rotationally) symmetric!

Topics related to this post: Ambigrams | Art | Creativity | Fun | Mathematics | Personal | Puzzles | Representation | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Trans-disciplinary creativity takes root (slowly)

I wanted to bring attention to two articles that came across my desk today. The first was in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Creativity: a Cure for the Common Curriculum on efforts at range of universities seeking "to train students in how innovative thinkers...

The recurring cycle of hype and despair around ed tech

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana (1905, p. 284) The Atlantic has an article titled "Why tech still hasn't solved education's problems" focusing on the failed promise of MOOCs and asks the question Why has the promised...

Designing the futures of STEM education

Designing the futures of STEM education

“What knowledge is of most worth?” is a question asked over a 100 years ago by the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer. His unequivocal answer was—science. This question (and his answer) resonates even today, though the context within which it is asked, and how we...

TPACK Newsletter Issue #19, March, 2014

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #19: March, 2014Welcome to the nineteenth edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you, our...

Phoenix rising

Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National...

Top 10 tips for doctoral failure!

Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at the University of Brighton, has an essay in the Times Higher Education, titled How not to write a PhD thesis, providing her top ten tips for doctoral failure. Though the essay is geared towards dissertations in media...

On Being (in)Disciplined: New journal article on creativity & learning

I just found out that our next article in the series on Technology and Creativity is now published. You can find a link and the complete reference below. Written this time with Dr. Danah Henriksen, with help from the Deep-Play Research group, in this paper we extend...

The carving of Carver

Creativity and collaboration. Authorship and editorial prerogative, who has the final say, and who should receive the credit? Here is an article in Drexel University's Magazine "The Smart Set" about the role Raymond Carver's editor played in "finalizing" his stories....

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *