Ok, this is just plain bizarre. It’s a row of faux books that, when activated by a motion sensor, move, mutter unintelligibly, and howl with electronic feedback. I laughed at the video. And I love that the book which jumps out at the victim is Silas Marner. I really would be terrified if I had to read that book again. But aren’t there more sensible choices for a haunted book, like The Turn of the Screw, or Rebecca?
via Boing Boing
1 comment July 31st, 2007
The Lady of Shalott, 1888
John William Waterhouse
I arrived at the Tate Britain (better known by its former name, the Tate Gallery) Monday morning, only to discover that their entire inventory of pre-Raphaelites had been removed from display a few hours before.
I nearly had an American temper tantrum on the spot. Adoration of the pre-Raphaelite collection (including Millais’ Ophelia, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, etc.) was my entire reason for visiting. I could have easily gone to the Tate last week had I known of the impending change. There was no warning on their website, and the museum’s rep admitted it wasn’t planned until next week. My travel karma is seriously awry!
Luckily, the excursion was salvaged. I saw one Rossetti, his late work Proserpine, and four paintings by Burne-Jones and Waterhouse, who are usually shoehorned in with Rossetti and Millais but in this case were in the next (not emptied) room over. Very lucky for me indeed, since Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott may be my favorite. painting. ever.
I know the last decade’s surfeit of pre-Raphaelite nostalgia has made everyone heartily sick of large-eyed, anguished damsels. But this painting has been part of my psyche for over twenty years, just as long as The Lord of the Rings. As with LOTR, no amount of popular abuse can diminish my affection for it.
Background on the Lady of Shalott/Elaine of Astolat
Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (text and more and more)
Waterhouse depicted this story three times. This painting is his earliest, and I think, the best, although I also love his 1894 version. I prefer Waterhouse’s versions over those of his contemporaries because all three are portraits - his Lady has a personality. She’s the legendary victim of unrequited love, of course, but she’s not passive. She chooses her own destiny (or is willfully self-destructive) when she chooses to look out the window at Lancelot. She’s haunted. She’s despairing. She’s angry. She represents the tension between the cloistered, unreal sphere of art (”I am half-sick of shadows”) and the passionate sphere of the body. And of course, fueling infinite feminist analyses, she represents how women have historically been punished for violating social constraints and embracing their independence or sexuality:
Nevertheless, it is hard to read his, or the other, images as anything but an oblique account of the confined and restricted world of the Victorian woman–accursed and prohibited by virtue of her sex alone–and the dire consequences attendant on rebellion. The rejection of seclusion in the shadowy sphere of prescribed femininity, where the approved activity is weaving or embroidery, leads immediately to ostracism and social death. The enclosed rooms in which these ladies live, looking out on inviting sunlit landscapes, and the tangled threads binding their vigorous limbs, are surely metaphors of woman’s condition, signifying the docile, passive, reflective and domestic role that dominated Victorian ideas of femininity. The lady cannot break from her constraints: her gesture of independence provokes the curse. It is interesting that most artists chose to depict this particular moment, so that their ladies are frozen forever in their decision of defiance (Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women, 1987).
At the Tate, I saw few details that my close (ok, obsessive) examination of this painting in books and posters hadn’t already revealed. But one pleasant surprise was that most of the painting, aside from the face, is almost impressionistic, thick with buttery smudges of paint. The tapestry draped from the boat is especially rough, almost coarse.
To me, the strength of the brushstrokes seemed better suited to the magnitude of the themes involved than the pretty, polished impression one gets from a reproduction. Millions of dorm room posters notwithstanding (and despite Lancelot’s insipid comment “she has a lovely face,”) this is not a pretty painting at all - it’s downright frightening. If you get what I mean by that, then you probably like the painting as much as I do.
4 comments July 31st, 2007
one of my favorite xkcds. . .
Add comment July 30th, 2007
Lead-glazed polychrome-painted earthenware dish
Workshop of Bernard Palissy, Paris, circa 1575-1600
British Museum
Just in case you didn’t find Laura Zindel’s creepy-crawly place settings unusual enough, here’s a treasure from the British Museum: an antique dish embellished with sculpted snake, insects, crayfish, and frogs.
I can’t help but wonder what you’d eat off such a plate. Would the snake’s head poke invitingly from a pile of pasta? It’s just not right! Yet Palissy was hugely popular in his own time (clients included European royalty and the Medicis) and his work enjoyed an even greater resurgence in the Victorian era.
Palissy was also an intuitive paleontologist. His observations of geology and hands-on experience making casts of natural specimens convinced him that fossils were impressions of plants and animals:
I at length found more fishes and shells in that form, petrified upon the earth, than there are modern kinds inhabiting the ocean, for which reason I have been bold enough to say to my disciples that Monsieur Belon and Rondelet had taken pains to describe and figure the fishes found by them during a voyage to Venice, and that I considered it strange that they never troubled themselves to understand the fishes that formerly dwelt and multiplied abundantly in regions of which the stones, that have congealed at the same time when they were petrified, serve now as register or original of the forms of the said fishes. (Palissy the Potter: The Life of Bernard Palissy, by Henry Morley)
Palissy’s insight aligns him with da Vinci, who also grasped the formation of fossils well ahead of the scientific pack.
Similar snake dishes by Palissy or his followers are found at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Met. Apparently the Victoria & Albert have a number of Palissy pieces as well; I’ll be keeping an eye out for them later this week when I’m in South Kensington.
Update: here’s the Palissy plate they have at V&A.
3 comments July 29th, 2007
I’m way behind on writing, my laptop power convertor blew, and I now have 3500 (!) unread posts on my feeds. Apologies, everyone! But this weekend I did get a blogger’s treat - a real-world visit with another blogger, the charming (and hospitable) Neurophilosopher. I had an excellent homemade dinner with his family last night, and today we talked each other’s ears off over lunch before visiting the Chelsea Physic Garden.
Mo also helped me locate a power adaptor so I could get back on line from my hotel and resume posting. Blogging from abroad is fraught with unforeseen hazards, but on the whole, I do recommend it. Thanks so much, Mo!
3 comments July 29th, 2007
I winced in sympathy at this account, “A biologist in Nigeria”, by Dave Ng (The World’s Fair) of his experience teaching a genetics course. The conditions were simply awful. But I’m afraid any non-biologist readers won’t understand how awful - why, you may reasonably wonder, do we insist on shiny, spotless, well-lit, glass-and-brushed-metal labs full of inscrutable gadgetry and hypnotically blinking lights? Are we striving for some kind of James Bond ubervillain aesthetic?
The answer is obviously yes. But it’s not that scientists are excessively fastidious and high-maintenance - not entirely - it’s that the techniques are so demanding. A few stray skin cells or a moment’s power surge can ruin an expensive day-long cloning experiment. Everything has to be sterile; everything has to work in a timely manner. Now imagine training students to do such experiments inside a Dumpster with broken tools, and you get some idea what Dave was facing.
Once, as an undergrad, cradled in the luxuries of a top-notch US research university,* I found my experiments contaminated time and again - despite every tool being autoclaved and every reagent brand-new. I troubleshot my protocol in the conventional way, and concluded that - I barely believe this myself - large (multi-kb) chunks of DNA were flying zeppelin-like across a large lab space into my Eppendorf tubes, contaminating my work. When I did everything inside the laminar airflow hood, the problem went away. That’s when I learned that even if you have all the right equipment, science can still go mysteriously awry.
At that time, I took everything for granted - the laminar hood, the limitless stocks of new reagents on the shelves, the bags of pristine Eppendorf tubes - and the considerable funds I spent repeating my little student experiment until I solved the problem (using that shiny sterile glass-and-brushed-metal laminar hood). Sterility, reliable power, and access to common reagents are well within reach of every US lab, even grant-poor ones. Without such infrastructure, it barely matters how imaginative or innovative a nation’s scientists are. In some countries, it is practically impossible to do molecular biology.
Nonetheless, Dave miraculously managed to make his teaching lab work - and is returning to do it all again. Afterward, there will be several dozen young Nigerian scientists who truly understand what biotechnology is, and hopefully, how to bring more of it to their nation. If only they could clone Dave, and send him out to all the other countries without clean labs or basic reagents.
*I didn’t actually attend that school, I was just there for the summer - to ogle the ubervillain labs, of course!
Add comment July 29th, 2007
Ah, the British Library. In one room: Shakespeare’s First Folio, Thomas More’s last letter to Henry III, Lewis Carroll’s diary, the Gutenberg Bible, a letter from Darwin to Wallace, a letter from Newton to Hooke, Shakespeare’s mortgage, Magna Carta, a page from Edward VI’s diary (very bad handwriting), the manuscript of Jane Eyre. I got goosebumps! The British Library is also holding a special exhibition of religious texts, called “Sacred.” The Lindisfarne Gospels alone are worth the tour, but I began to go into shock after an hour of world-class illuminated manuscripts.
My favorite document - and this surprised me - was actually a little 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It lay open to 116, probably his most famous sonnet, and one of my favorite poems. Have a guess at the first two lines?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments. . .
Sonnet 116 is actually mislabeled in the British Library’s copy - the 6 is flipped, to read 119. But there was no mistaking one of the finest love poems ever written:
Sonnet 116
William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
1 comment July 29th, 2007
Today I visited Darwin and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. Newton was there too, but he was being all standoffish behind an iron railing (possibly to deter enthusiastic fans of The Da Vinci Code, but more likely for some liturgical reason).
Quick: what’s Charles Darwin’s middle name? That’s ok - I didn’t know either. (It’s Charles Robert Darwin).
For the record, the weather in London was lovely today. Tomorrow, though, probably not so much. But I’ll be in the British Museum, so it won’t matter. (happy noise)
P.S. At least a quarter of the people on the plane over here were reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In my side row, all three of us were reading it! Unfortunately the flight was much, much longer than the book.
6 comments July 27th, 2007
I woke up yesterday in Idaho, today I’m in Seattle, and in a few hours I fly to London. Woohoo. I’m somewhat sleep deprived and I still have to pack my bags, so I’m going to drop this link and run. Let’s just say I will never read the phrase “the birds and the bees” in quite the same way again!
Lust Erotic Boutique, Copenhagen (Illustrations by Johannes Bojesen, for Grey Kobenhavn)
Add comment July 25th, 2007
Written across the rear window of a Seattle minivan: “I trust Snape.”
So do I.
3 comments July 20th, 2007
The sculptures of Theo Jansen
Via Endicott Redux
2 comments July 19th, 2007
Back when I was six or seven, my personal computer was a cassette-tape driven TRS-80, and my favorite game was Pyramid. Pyramid was an endearingly primitive choose-your-own adventure game, in which you gave the program commands it rarely understood, hoping to randomly stumble on something useful, like THROW BIRD. I made it pretty far into the game, only to discover at the heart of the infamous maze of twisty passages, a coin-operated vending machine!
I felt totally ripped off: everyone knows there were no vending machines in ancient Egypt! The game lost some of its luster from this cheap anachronism, and eventually I gave up, moving on to the more fast-paced Centipede clone, Slay the Nereis (OK, I just paused in the middle of writing this post to waste thirty minutes playing Atari’s online version of Centipede. I still get a thrill from the sound of those falling fleas, but how I miss the arcade version’s rollerball).
Anyway, it turns out that Egyptian vending machine wasn’t such a stretch after all. Ancient machines that were derided as toys or flights of fancy are now taken seriously by archaeologists and engineers. The Antikythera mechanism is the best example of this (there was an excellent article about it in the May 15 New Yorker). And Cabinet of Wonders just posted a wonderful essay and collection of links on ancient automata. It’s incredibly interesting reading.
Apparently there was a coin-operated vending machine (for holy water!) two thousand years ago - designed by the Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria (or Heron). That was long after the Pyramids were built, but who knows? Maybe Hero wasn’t the first to figure it out. The Antikythera Mechanism survived, albeit in terrible condition, but how many gadgets, including proto-computers and primitive robots, have been lost? It’s a dizzying question - but also an important reminder that biologically, we are neither more intelligent nor more creative now than our ancestors were a few thousand years ago. We’re just starting at a much higher technological baseline.
3 comments July 19th, 2007
Coeleoptera Pendant
Jennifer Trask
Ornamentum Gallery
Jennifer Trask’s reliquary-like ornaments contain natural specimens like feathers, beetles, wings, and snakeskin. She is represented in the collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and others.
Brooches
Jennifer Trask
Metalsmith Magazine profile
Add comment July 18th, 2007
from xkcd.com
A few months ago, I dreamed that I attended a cocktail party, where I mistook Simon Baron-Cohen (the neurobiologist) for his cousin Sacha Baron Cohen (better known as Borat). I don’t know why either of them was in my dream (I haven’t even seen Borat), but if the opportunity ever comes up, I would like to pick the neurobiologist’s brain over cocktails. I don’t know quite what to think about his suggestion that autism might be caused by assortative mating among technogeeks - not to mention the bit about men and women having differently abled brains.
Autism is getting more and more attention, both in the media and in research. But we still don’t understand the developmental causes of autism. We don’t know how to define what has gone awry in autistic children, much less fix it. This confusion has fueled a rash of hypotheses (and lawsuits) over possible causes - most of which are unsupported by scientific evidence. But parents want some explanation: as many as 1 in 100 of their children will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. Whether there is a new autism “epidemic,” or we’re just catching cases that twenty years ago would have gone undiagnosed, is still unclear.
For the past several years, Baron-Cohen and his collaborators have been fleshing out a genetic model for autism. Twin studies support the idea that autism is genetic - the best predictor for autism is a twin with autism. But why do children of non-autistic parents become autistic? And why is the rate of autism increasing? Unlike more straightforward genetic conditions such as Tay-Sachs or hemophilia, where a “bad” allele of a gene causes a well-defined disease, autism probably involves multiple genes with additive effects - alleles that are benign, even beneficial, in normal individuals, could contribute to autism in the right (or wrong) combinations.
As summarized in this 2003 Guardian article, Baron-Cohen maps autism along the same continuum as gender differences in cognition. So let’s start with that. According to his model, women tend to be “empathizing,” while men are more “systematizing”:
Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one’s own. (”The Systematizing Brain,” NYT, 2005)
This is, of course, a simplification - individual men and women could fall anywhere on the E-S continuum; most of us are a middling balance of E and S. But the idea is that, in bulk, most men tend to be S while most women are E.
Such claims about gender differences in mental processing are understandably controversial, especially when they reinforce cultural stereotypes. Baron-Cohen’s papers are peppered with phrases like “typical male interests (e.g., in mechanics)”. He knows he’s treading dangerous ground, and isn’t shy about it:
Two big scientific debates have attracted a lot of attention over the past year. One concerns the causes of autism, while the other addresses differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes. At the risk of adding fuel to both fires, I submit that these two lines of inquiry have a great deal in common. (”The Systematizing Brain”, NYT, 2005)
I’m not going to get into that gender-bias mudhole. But just to balance things out, here’s a typical response from his critics.
Anyway, within the E (female) - S (male) spectrum, Baron-Cohen characterizes autism as a hyper-systematizing brain (an extremely male brain). When S dominates E, the ability to form interpersonal relationships and communicate with others could be hindered. If you’d like to get a feeling for how “systematizing” you are, Baron-Cohen’s autism quotient (AQ) test (Wired) is a blunt-force gauge of autistic traits for adults. The relevant research paper is linked at the bottom of this post; the average AQ test score is supposed to be 16-17. The automatic scoring at Wired wasn’t working when I checked, but the test is also mirrored here at OK Cupid, so try there first.
Although the AQ test emphatically CANNOT diagnose autism, autistic individuals tend to have scores over 32. And as you’d expect from the previous paragraphs, AQ is also correlated with gender: men usually score higher than women do.
EQSQ also has a little systematizing/empathizing quiz: I have no idea if this one’s based on science at all, but it tries to assess if you are more S or E.
If you’d like more detail on why brains are either empathizing or systematizing, you should read this article from Entelechy, “The Biology of Imagination.” In it, Baron-Cohen hypothesizes that developmental deficits in certain brain circuits might impair the acquisition of empathy, shifting the balance toward systematizing. The general idea is that humans (and cats, dogs, etc.) can easily generate primary mental representations of the world around them. But it’s harder to handle “second-order” representations, like the imagined perspectives and feelings of other people:
Let’s define mind-reading as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to imagine the other person’s thoughts and feelings. . .
To mind-read, or to imagine the world from someone else’s different perspective, one has to switch from one’s own primary representations (what one takes to be true of the world) to someone else’s representation (what they take to be true of the world, even if this could be untrue). Arguably, empathy, dialogue, and relationships are all impossible without such an ability to switch between our primary and our second-order representations. (Entelechy)
Baron-Cohen suggests that genetic influences on the growing brain could specifically affect the development of this capability:
In the vast majority of the population, this module functions well. It can be seen in the normal infant at 14 months old who can introduce pretence into their play; seen in the normal 4 year old child who can employ mind-reading in their relationships and thus appreciate different points of view; or seen in the adult novelist who can imagine all sorts of scenarios that exist nowhere except in her own imagination, and in the imagination of her reader.
But sometimes this module can fail to develop in the normal way. A child might be delayed in developing this special piece of hardware: meta-representation. The consequence would be that they find it hard to mind-read others. This appears to be the case in children with Asperger Syndrome. They have degrees of difficulty with mind-reading. Or they may never develop meta-representation, such that they are effectively ‘mind-blind’. This appears to be the case in children with severe or extreme (classic) autism. Given that classic autism and Asperger Syndrome are both sub-groups on what is today recognized as the ‘autistic spectrum’, and that this spectrum appears to be caused by genetic factors affecting brain development, the inference from this is that the capacity for meta-representation itself may depend on genes that can build the relevant brain structures, that allow us to imagine other people’s worlds. (Entelechy)
If each person has some alleles pushing the developing brain towards E, and other alleles pushing toward S, then an imbalance of those normally harmless alleles could cause a brain to become excessively S. How would such a genetic imbalance arise? As in this article from last November’s Seed, Baron-Cohen suggests that assortative mating - strongly systematizing men preferentially choosing systematizing women, or vice versa - could, through basic genetic principles, produce even more systematizing offspring. It’s as simple as a tall couple getting together and having even taller children. And Baron-Cohen has data to support it:
First, both parents of children with autism are likely to be super-fast on attention tasks, in which the aim is to spot a detail as quickly as possible. Second, both parents have an increased likelihood of having had a father who worked in the field of engineering. Third, both parents are more likely to have elevated scores on subtle measures of autistic traits. And fourth, both parents show a trend toward a more male pattern of brain activity when measured using MRI.
The chances of both parents displaying these similarities are vanishingly small. Something must be causing two such individuals to be attracted to one another. I propose that “something” is strong systematizing—the drive to analyze the details of a system in order to understand how it works. (Seed)
Parents of autistic children score higher on the AQ test than other parents - indicating that, while not themselves autistic, they have systematizing tendencies. The higher the AQ score, the stronger those tendencies are. Scientists and engineers (both male and female) tend to score higher on the AQ test than non-scientists. (Remember, systematizing is only a detriment if taken to extremes; most of us would like to be better at pattern recognition and analysis.)
If systematizers are marrying each other in increasing numbers, and bearing increasingly systematizing children, could it explain a suspicious increase in autism in, of all places, Silicon Valley? Hmmmm.
On the AQ test, I scored a measly 20. I guess from a genetic standpoint, it would be safe for me to reproduce with an engineer, or another scientist. But on the other hand, biologists have the lowest average AQ out of several scientific disciplines tested - my score is actually high for a biologist. Even worse, according to EQSQ.com, I’m a Y-chromosome level systematizer! I’m supposedly less empathetic than the average man - which will no doubt disconcert everybody who has seen me practically burst into tears over a “sad” inanimate object, like the IKEA lamp. (it’s all alone! in the rain!)
Maybe I do have a few autistic personality quirks. But I also have a few stereotypically “male” mental tendencies, like a talent for reading maps and mentally rotating objects. I’m obviously not male. Nor am I autistic. (And I think EQSQ’s test claims I’m a systematizer because I’m rabidly curious - not because I’m systematic about my curiosity). Where exactly should we draw the line between personality quirks and symptoms? What does something like the AQ test really indicate? There seems to be some hypothetical tipping point, at which a geeky personality morphs into autistic pathology, and I have difficulty with that. Which is probably why I’m a biologist, not a psychologist.
Diagnosing Asperger syndrome (AS) is especially problematic. AS is a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, in which IQ is not compromised. But experts can’t agree on whether AS is a mild form of autism, or a related disorder. One of my professors fit the AS stereotype perfectly: brilliant, observant, obsessed with details, completely oblivious to interpersonal problems, and utterly lacking in empathy. I’d say he was illogical about people - an adjective that would never apply to his meticulous research. Did he have autism/Asperger syndrome? Or was he just a preoccupied geek with atrocious managerial skills?
What about an obsessively organized polymath like Thomas Jefferson - did he also have AS, as Norm Ledgin claims in Diagnosing Jefferson? Or was he just an eccentric genius? Baron-Cohen and his collaborator Ioan James have suggested that science’s most revered figures, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, were autistic. But not everyone buys it:
Glen Elliott, a psychiatrist from the University of California at San Francisco, is not convinced. He says attempting to diagnose on the basis of biographical information is extremely unreliable, and points out that any behaviour can have various causes. He thinks being highly intelligent would itself have shaped Newton and Einstein’s personalities.
“One can imagine geniuses who are socially inept and yet not remotely autistic,” he says. “Impatience with the intellectual slowness of others, narcissism and passion for one’s mission in life might combine to make such an individuals isolative and difficult.” Elliott adds that Einstein had a good sense of humour, a trait that is virtually unknown in people with severe Asperger syndrome. (New Scientist)
Narcissistic, isolative, difficult, wicked sense of humor, impatient with the intellectual slowness of others. . .sounds perfect!
Speaking of fictional characters, even prickly Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice has been labeled autistic, in which case autistic tendencies are catnip to tens of thousands of Darcy-loving females across America. I’m somehow skeptical.
However flawed the book’s historical premise, the Amazon reviews of Diagnosing Jefferson include some glowing, grateful comments from the parents of children with autism. These parents want to believe that their children can and will be successful (after all, if a father of our nation was autistic. . . ). Baron-Cohen seems to share their concern; he constantly emphasizes the unique perspective and gifts of autistic/AS children. It’s true that a few articulate, successful autistics, like animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, do gain unique insights from their condition. If I ever teach neurobiology again, Oliver Sacks’ essay-portrait of Dr. Grandin, titled “An Anthropologist on Mars” (Grandin’s own phrase) will be required reading. It’s a wonderful lesson in forming those second-order representations, trying to imagine an autistic individual’s perspective on the world.
Yet the diagnosis of autism is almost always a stunning tragedy for affected families. And if Baron-Cohen’s assortative mating hypothesis is correct, and autism is caused by concentrating otherwise neutral, even advantageous, “systematizing” alleles - how can we possibly prevent autism? We can’t prohibit extreme systematizers from marrying because they might have autistic children. There’s no meaningful way to measure that risk in advance, as there is for single-gene disorders. How do we combat a “disease” that’s the unpredictable product of completely normal human genetic variability? I don’t have an answer for that, and I don’t think anyone does.
Additional resources: Simon Baron-Cohen, “The hyper-systematizing, assortative mating theory of autism” (pdf)
Simon Baron-Cohen, et. al., “The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ)” (pdf)
12 comments July 16th, 2007
The famous Rotating Snakes illusion
I was in the subway yesterday when the repeating pattern of concrete blocks started messing with my head. I did a little research later, but couldn’t find anything about the illusion I experienced (probably because I can’t describe it well enough to Google it).
So I’ll just pass on this link from Dark Roasted Blend, collecting some of the best visual illusions out there. You’ve probably seen a few of them, like the rotating snakes, but I doubt you’ve seen all of them. (My favorites are the ladybugs and the spinning dancer.)
3 comments July 15th, 2007
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