h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the best book of the "Science for the layman" kind (you know, Brief history of time, emperor's new mind etc.) that i ever read, was Douglas R Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach - The eternal Golden Braid" ,which is a sort of exposition of modern mathematical philosophy and its relation to the music of Bach and the art of Escher. Great book for people interested in stuff like computing, logic, artificial intelligence etc. Its full of Escher's work.
Expensive, though.(I lost it from my college library,I should know.)

I agree, 's a lovely book

Bit heavily mathematical in places for some, but you can always skip those bits...

Nice article, too

I agree, too! Exept that I haven't read the book, but it sounds extremely interesting! Wonder if I, being a musician, would understand it at all?

Being a musician, you'd be in a better position to understand it than a non-musician, believe me. Buy it and read it, I promise you'll be glad you did.

H.

I'm not a musician but am a Quilt Artist. For many years, I've been fascinated by Escher's Tesselations trying to find various techniques which could be used to adapt his work to fabric. I've been sucessful in a few attempts and am always thinking of other methods. There is a wonderful book written by Jinny Beyer called Designing Tessellations which uses Escher's mathematical foundations in order to teach others "How To" The book is written in a way that those who are not mathematically inclined -like myself- in order to teach people how he may have designed some of his works. Escher is perhaps my favourite artist. His work is eerie, bizare, thought provoking and brilliant. Although from what I have seen, his work is predominately black and white, his coloured illustrations are equally as haunting and in some cases, whimsical. When reading your entry I must confess that I didn't know that Escher's image of himself was so dark and unforgiveing.

I feel strange. I have often seen these cool pictures that I had no idea who made. Then in a letter a few days ago a friend mentioned Escher, and I found out he was the one who had made them. Then the day after or so I was looking at Astronomy Picture of the day. There they also mentioned Escher. And now today I come here and he's on the front page. Spooky.

Nice pictures though, probably what Lovecraft would have done if he was a painter.

i remember there was this one day when i saw a cartoon in TIME about a guy speaking on a phone to a newspaper company " I wish to make a
correction , i am not Dead!". then i read the paper ,and there was this story of how Mark Twain claimed that his obituary which had appeared in a local paper was slightly exaggerated. Then, in the evening i saw a M*A*S*H* episode where Hawkeye tries to convince everyone that despite what the military said, he wasnt dead.Well, im not usually a believer in omens and stuff, but i was like calling up my friends and going "btw,if you read about my death in the papers..".
Definitely wierd. maybe it has something to do with the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

BTW you say that only rectangulars and hexagons can do tesselation. What about triangles? They should be able to, either by putting them together to form hexagons or by putting them upside down next to each other in rows.

Didn't he say the same about equilateral triangles, too? I guess that means the ones that have three sides of equal length. ("like-sided" in Norwegian, much easier! )

Oh damn!

http://www.paverdepot.com/3-dstone/3-d-stone.html

I want some of those!

H.

Me, too!

Uh yeah, definitly better than the usual.

Somebody else should know too... especially people who never got to read the book and lost it at the hands of others....!

ouch that hurt.....
RL, you're mean .Besides you virtually stole 12 books(Knuth among others ) from my room as 'punishment'.So now it's even.