Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Recursive Function

.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines recursive, in a linguistic sense, as "of, relating to, or constituting a procedure that can repeat itself indefinitely ." Computer science often uses the term recursive function, which means "a function that calls itself during its execution. This enables the function to repeat itself several times, outputting the result and the end of each iteration," as U "R" Us, computer scientist par excellence, will verify. So what the heck does that have to do with this post? I'm standing in a gallery at the St. Louis Art Museum taking a picture of the paintings and another guy who is standing in a gallery at the St. Louis Art Museum taking a picture of the paintings. If we were in luck, there would be another person standing behind that panel in the center taking... You get the idea. Wow, I must have had a long day at work. (Well, I did.) Actually, here's a better example of a recursive function. Nice light in this gallery, anyway.

WHAT I THINK I NEED TO DO TONIGHT:
read a book instead of staring at this computer screen. One that's not about photography.


TOMORROW:
Thursday Arch Series (lurid HDR division) and a new companion post on Gateway.

7 comments:

Olivier said...

on se demande ce que photographie le monsieur.
one wonders what photography sir.

Anonymous said...

I like this art gallery. Wow. Impressive.

I still have the old blogs but I also have new ones Abe Lincoln Blogs and also look at Abraham Lincoln's Blog

Virginia said...

I love this gallery. The color of the paintings is wonderful. Artists? Afraid I don't know. I like your perspective on this one as well B. I like Escher as well.
V

U "R" Us AKA Captain Crowe said...

Your link to info on recursive functions didn't work. Anyway, it's one of the CS concepts that first captured my imagination. A recursive function is like a little machine that, when set up correctly, you feed an input and it works on it until a defined stopping point, outputting a particular result. At some point you just have to turn it on with some degree of faith that it works like you think it should.

Julie said...

Like those adverts for Honda cars where the ball starts and goes through a massive series of tasks, opening doors, etc until the engine starts because it knocked the right lever ...

The Escher hands are a particular favourite. We had a jigsaw of it when the kids were young. The jigsaw was framed when finished.

Anonymous said...

I love these gallery shots. Brilliant stuff as usual sir.

Pat said...

I am intrigued by this museum and would love to pop through my screen to visit it on this snowy Belgrade day.