How to reconcile the mind-blowing originality, the stunning imagination and the self-referential, self-indulgent, slightly hokey imagery at the end?
Self-referential jokes aside, Hendren also brought a great deal of light to the idiocy of social branding.
Earlier work had shown how assigning fuzzy values to self-referential sentences could give rise to mathematical chaos.
However, if the church remains closed in on itself, self-referential, it gets old.
"We have to avoid the spiritual sickness of self-referential church, " the cardinal said in an interview to an Italian journalist last year.
Between a church that suffers accidents in the street, and a church that's sick because it's self-referential, I have no doubts about preferring the former.
Imprisoned in our delusional social media bubbles, our Facebook saturated world has become a self-referential stream of real-time updates about what we just ate for breakfast.
CNN: Opinion: Facebook threatens to 'Zuck up' the human race
Those who like their fairy tales served up subversive -- or at the very least hip and self-referential like "Shrek" -- would do well to look elsewhere.
He is a keen evangelist, criticising what he has called "the spiritual sickness of a self-referential Church" - and calling for the Church to "get out into the street".
They are, with their rational basis in math and science and their clean modernist aesthetic, the perfect antidote to the postmodern, self-referential and celebrity art of the early aughts.
Meanwhile, outside the self-referential Cult of Neo-Keynesianism, in the past two years a dramatic shift in the international elite opinion stream is bringing the gold option back into consideration.
FORBES: Signs Of The Gold Standard Are Increasingly Emerging...Worldwide
But more complicated self-referential paradoxes are trickier to resolve.
By the end of my visit I would have been happy to see photographs of kittens or even some grandiloquent paintings by Julian Schnabel, anything not so proud of being self-referential and small time.
Mr. Ayoade, the writer-director, is anything but self-referential.
Indeed, the pair show that any set of self-referential sentences that assert complete truth or falsity about one another are exactly half-true. (Though other solutions are possible as well.) Other fractional truth-values arise when the sentences themselves make fuzzy assertions.
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