## Friday, April 24, 2009

### The Droste Effect

Click the image for a whole article at the Wolfram blog, with many additional conformal transformations of this picture.

The Droste Effect (the term comes from Dutch) involves images within larger images that are similar to the original ones. However, conformal mapping may be used to generate more fascinating images. For example, can you tell which girl on the picture is real and which girl is a level-n image? Well, "n" is continuous in this case. See also a movie. ;-)

It's too late now but it could be fun to play with similar algorithms a little bit later.

By the way, Wolfram Alpha will be presented on Tuesday 3:00 pm at the Harvard Law School.

A story of a Chrome bug

Finally, a computer event unrelated to Stephen Wolfram. For quite some time, I was pushing the creators of Google Chrome to fix a bug: in blogger.com, one couldn't expand the "mini-previews" of postings (or slow comments) in the list, by clicking a triangle or the nearby title: see the screenshot. This bug, being the most frequent reason for me to run Firefox or MSIE, became the issue 8536.

Fifteen minutes ago, it was fixed. It was enough for them to modify the default answers to some XML requests from Undefined to Null - but the details how they found it and where they found it clearly look more technical than what your humble correspondent could comprehend.