A Santa at NASA

With the holiday season coming up and the new Covid-19 restrictions in place, Jolly ol’ Saint Nicholas is in quite the predicament. His reindeer refused to fly with him, quoting the six feet social distancing requirements, but it’s now more than ever before that the good grace of Christmas is needed. He takes this job to NASA, opting to drop gifts from space after thoroughly sanitizing them with moon rocks. Little did he know, however, that everyone and everything at NASA is all being conducted using palindromes as a standard, and Santa was hired immediately upon finding that his position at NASA would satisfy those conditions precisely. 

But what is a palindrome anyways?

A palindrome is a symmetric set of symbols, meaning that if you change the order of the objects in the set by reflection, the modified set and the original set should be the exact same. Of course, it’s never that simple. Going by that definition, sets don’t necessarily have to be one dimensional, as they typically are. What would a two dimensional palindrome look like? For text, it might look like the following:

But wait! You say. That’s not a word! It’s not, but it could be. This palindrome is symmetric in two dimensions, horizontally and vertically, and it introduces some curious ideas. When such lines become infinitely small, a palindrome could be a symmetric arrangement of points.

That means that a square is a palindrome, that this thing is a palindrome:

Cool! But what does this mean? After all, language doesn’t have infinitely small characters, at least, not coherent ones. We’ll return to that in a moment, but for now, our Santa has encountered another predicament: he doesn’t know any palindromes, and he can’t communicate with geometry! To begin to get a grasp of the situation, he looked around his workplace.

One man would incessantly introduce himself to women around the office, saying “madam I’m Adam” like a broken record. Another would sit deep in thought talking to himself, and Santa briefly overhead him asking “do geese see God?” 

The list of future projects on the geometrically patterned front wall similarly reflected the palindrome ideals.

 

To-do:

• Racecar 
• Taco cat
• Repaper
• Straw warts

 

But there was also an ominous message: “On a clover, if alive, erupts a vast, pure evil; a fire volcano!” Santa began to question the astronomical aims of the organization, but was distracted by plaque on the wall that read:

 

S T E P

T I M E

E M I T

P E T S

 

Now that was a motto he could get behind. The ideal still on his mind, he was startled by a dark blur that rushed across his vision. “Was it a cat I saw?” he asked in surprise.

“Looks like you’re getting the hang of it” replied the Manager.

With his new rough understanding of how palindromes might work, Santa got to work on his naughty and nice lists.

“Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Nedra, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Leo, Jane, Reed, Dena, Dale, Basil, Rae, Penny, Lana, Dave, Denny, Lena, Ida, Bernadette, Ben, Ray, Lila, Nina, Jo, Ira, Mara, Sara, Mario, Jan, Ina, Lily, Arne, Bette, Dan, Reba, Diane, Lynn, Ed, Eva, Dana, Lynne, Pearl, Isabel, Ada, Ned, Dee, Rena, Joel, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Arden, Noel, and Ellen sinned,” he wrote to his managers approval. Santa was ready to take to the skies.

Making palindromes isn’t easy, but the best way to make sentences out of a palindrome is to experiment. Starting with a word, reverse it and see what parts of the word seem feasible as the beginning or end of another, in essence building a phrase from words. Alternatively you can start from the middle and go out, to a similar effect. Santa however, began to appreciate the more elegant, albeit complex, form of font symmetry; ambigrams.

Ambigrams are typically the calligraphic art of symmetric fonts which most typically encompass one word, and rarely a phrase. Characteristically, these fonts have incredibly ambiguous distinctions between letters, presenting the unique challenge of making them, but also making them difficult to read. Beautifully written below the crown mold was Newton’s most famous discovery:

Santa’s adventures did not end at the top of the wall. Entering the cafeteria introduced a new plethora of palindromes, despite his disappointment at the lack of taco cats. He saw a carton of UFO tofu, and a drink labeled “murder for a jar of red rum,” perhaps the less fortunate twin of a bloody Mary. After a quick meal, Santa called it a day; but he knew there was still much to learn.

And truly, there is. Palindromes are an interesting consequence of sequential language that’s completely pointless but nonetheless quite satisfying. After all… are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Too bad I hid a boot.