Mark Bourne says: So my wife Elizabeth and I are googling up possibilities for our long trip to England next year. Checking out London sites and so on. An acquaintance suggested staying for a few days in the Cotswolds, a scenic Middle Earthy region west of London. That’s how we found a page about the town of Bourton.
You just gotta love this text, which blends Ye Olde Scepter’d Isle with sci-fi gee-wizardry:
You will probably have noticed that when you take a branch from certain trees (some conifers for example), the branch looks like a miniature version of the tree, and when you break a piece off the branch, that looks like a tree too. Mathematicians call this property self-similarity.
Bourton has a wonderful example of self-similarity: it contains a 1/10 scale model of itself. Because the 1/10 scale model is a complete model of the town, it must contain a model of itself, and it does, a 1/100th. scale model of Bourton, and because the 1/100th. scale model is also a complete model of Bourton, it must also contain a 1/1000th. scale model of the scale model of the scale model of Bourton.
And it does. It is only a matter of time before a team of nano-technicians turn up in the town to etch a sub-micron scale model of Bourton on a silicon wafer, complete with mill, waterwheel, and a highly imaginative interpretation of the River Windrush as a stream of electrons.