The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I'm back from Odyssey 2010 but I don't have time to blog about the event yet. I'll try to do that in the next day or two. In the meantime here's a photo of something that has absolutely nothing to do with the convention, namely what was probably my favourite ever book back in the 1980s, Douglas Hoftstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (or GEB for short)... Actually there is a slight connection between this tome and Odyssey 2010, in the sense that one of the convention talks (given by a fellow named Nicholas Jackson) was about non-Euclidean geometry, which is discussed in one of GEB's many astounding sub-chapters. I'm kicking myself for missing this talk! But as a reverse demonstration of the principles in question, this photo also shows something that is non-Euclidean in regular space (a face; my face, in fact) transformed into something that is more Euclidean (though still not entirely so) via a mirrored surface...