A strange loop is a phenomenon in which, whenever movement is made upwards or downwards through the levels of some hierarchical system, the system unexpectedly arrives back where it started. Hofstadter (1989) uses the strange loop as a paradigm in which to interpret paradoxes in logic (such as Grelling's paradox, the liar's paradox, and Russell's paradox) and calls a system in which a strange loop appears a tangled hierarchy....Here's a graphic example of a strange loop:
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| Drawing Hands M.C. Escher, 1948 | |
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And here's FT Alphaville:
Rally Monkey gets sucked into the self-referential vortex of psychologically important thresholds
Cue the already-deflating* bubble in a) people pointing out that the Dow hit 13,000, then b) people who point out the irrelevance of the Dow’s crossing 13,000, followed by c) people who get annoyed at people who point out the irrelevance of the Dow’s crossing 13,000 because it’s so bleeding obvious, which of course then leads to — oh hell, never mind....MORE
