Haircut

I asked my hairdresser how one learns to cut hair. He told me that there are 8 basic haircuts he learnt. Then you learn to combine them to make other effects, and you learn to read haircuts (seen on the train, etc) as combinations of the basic cuts.

This reminds me of eigenfaces: the basic building blocks used in face recognition and construction:

… or the sensation I’ve occasionally had in large cities that people are combinations of other people, such that sometimes you see someone who is like a different version of a friend of yours, and you want to ask them how their life has compared:

So, we learn the basic vocabulary as a series of archetypes (like those stone figures), and then life consists in recombining them in interesting combinations, like a (remixed) collage.