Hello,
Someone asked me the following, and I couldn't find it anywhere--so thought I would check the collective knowledge:

"Palindromes are the word and sentences that are the same forwards and backwards--mom,dad, bob,etc. Is there a word for words that when flipped upside down turn into another word? For example: WOW/MOM, PIP/bib "

Any thoughts?

Mike

If there is such a word you might find it here

http://onelook.com/?w=*&loc=revfp2&clue=word+upside+down

...if you're determined and patient

dale, why do you continue to do this when you know, by now, you have a better chance at OneLook by limiting your search string. in this case, you'd be better off with 'upside down' because of all the useless hits you'll generate with 'word'.

mrbaldwin,

Scott Kim used to do a lot of these for Discover Magazine. He called them "inversions."

Douglas Hofstadter also had a column in Scientific American where he posted some of Scott's work. He called them ambigrams.

http://www.scottkim.com/inversions/index.html

there are many types of ambigrams, link ; those which form different words when turned upside-down are called rotational ambigrams. e.g., the abbrev. for down, dn, yields up.

whitney this one is quite interesting. You can stop the movement at the intersection of the diagonals when it drives you crazy. (it quickly does)

Mike,
I used to really love admiring these things. I mentioned that you might find some examples in old issues of Discovery Magazine. Also, you can find a few in Hofstadter's old columns in Sci Am titled "Metamagical Themas" (an anagram of his predecessor, Martin Gardner's column "Mathematical Games"). Also DH had a few books, "Goedel, Escher, Bach," for example, that has some, IIRC. This one also contains other kinds of related ideas. I actually read it, but I think it would be nice to browse as a coffee table book.

speaking of coffee table books, "Metamagical Themas" were collected in an 800-page tome, which I picked up a few years back at a used book store (I'm still wading through these).

here's a link to what we're on about: ambigrams by Hofstadter

Would go well with a book of Escher prints.

I've been trying to get through I Am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter, but the math in just puts me to sleep. great concepts(not all of which I agree with), but.

Most excellent everybody--thank you!

Some neat things to follow-up on, and to pass-on.

Happy Trails, Mike

I've just finished this myself. after a while, he has done with the math. in the latter part of the book some fascinating thought experiments are posed, including this one: you are teletransported from Earth to Mars; the Scanner here on Earth destroys your brain and body while copying the exact state of all of your cells, transmits the data to Mars, traveling at the speed of light the data reaches Mars in about three(3) minutes where the Replicator creates, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like yours. there are variations on this theme -- in one, the system is improved such that it is no longer destructive and a copy of you is produced on Mars; in another, two copies are produced, one on Mars and one on Venus. the question posed, in all of these cases, is "what happens to the (inveterate) self?!"

M, is there some reason you didn't use 'original' instead of 'inveterate'? Just askin'.

I say that in the first scenario, you die. With the same inveterateness I assert that a tree falling in a forest does make a noise, I say that "exactly like" does not equal "the same".