Yes, Virginia, there is a magenta - Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/yes-virgina-there-is-a-magenta.ars

Magenta isn't a single color on the visible light spectrum: but it exists anyway. With diagrams.

Yes, Virginia, there is a magenta - Ars Technica

5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head. Who can you trust?!

RT @timoreilly: Post by @dalepd about how people are actually starting to prefer the sound of Mp3 http://bit.ly/sn2Yw [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1331634656]

students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music:

By Lera Boroditsky

ong time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered

Interesting recent work on Linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis related ideas in cognitive linguistics

Something to think about when you wonder if you “see” reality.

So we’re forced to realize a very interesting conclusion. The wavelength of a photon certainly reflects a color – but we cannot produce every color the human eye sees by a single photon of a specific wavelength. There is no such thing as a pink laser – two lasers must be mixed to produce that color. There are “real” colors (we call them pure spectral or monochromatic colors) and “unreal” colors that only exist in the brain.

While we consider this rather trivial today, at the time you’d be laughed out of the room if you suggested this somehow illustrated a fundamental property of light and color. The popular theory of the day was that color was a mixture of light and dark, and that prisms simply colored light. Color went from bright red (white light with the smallest amount of “dark” added) to dark blue (white light with the most amount of “dark” added before it turned black).

"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says.

GReader: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion http://ow.ly/5xUu [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1725035126]

Retweeting @copyblogger: Penn & Teller Reveal the Neuroscience of Illusion - http://is.gd/vRUV [from http://twitter.com/apoorvgadwal/statuses/1698147950]

""People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple." For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli."

The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral , the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.

Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.

うわあああこの緑と青、同じ色だって

"I'm the only conscious human..."

"Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and *think!* I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep."

haha :)

Me recuerda una frase de Ciorán: «El diálogo a solas con la idea incita al desvarío, anula el juicio y produce la ilusión de omnipotencia».

expect that examples like the rounded rectangle will strengthen the argument to ‘go the e

Fascinating or total B.S.? You decide...

Time for an expert: I asked Professor Jürg Nänni, author

rounded corners versus sharp corners

IBM research about presentation of graphs with color

Hyvä video optisista harhoista.

TED Talk, fascinating as always...

TED presentation on optical illusions - explanation that they are not failures of the senses, but simply the brain taking empirical and historical data it has gathered from other experiences that have been useful and analyzing data it receives. TL;DR - information has only the meaning we give it.

great talk about value of perception...

Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.

Summary. This article presents results from a study investigating the personality of typefaces. Participants were asked to rate 40 typefaces (from serif, sans serif, display, and handwriting classes) using semantic differential scales. Responses are shown by typeface class and individual typeface using scaled scores. These results are helpful to practitioners when deciding which typeface to use for online text.

Survey results of typefaces and their usability.

user reponses to web typefaces

40 onscreen typefaces for useability

...mirror neurons fire when you merely watch another person perform a similar act. It's as if the neuron (more strictly the network of which the neuron is part) was using the visual input to do a sort of "virtual reality simulation" of the other person's actions—allowing you to empathize with her and view the world from her point of view.

Brain stuff from VS Ramachandran

Ramachandran - recent piece (Jan. 09) on what various bizarre neurological disorders might imply about the self.

Is this what Antony is saying when he writes about Epilepsy? "Now imagine these same circuits become hyperactive as sometimes happens when you have seizures originating in the temporal lobes (TLE or temporal lobe epilepsy). The result would be an intense heightening of the patient's sensory appreciation of the world and intense empathy for all beings to the extent of seeing no barriers between himself and the cosmos—the basis of religious and mystical experiences. (You lose all selfishness and become one with God.) Indeed many of history's great religious leaders have had TLE. My colleague, the late Francis Crick, has suggested that TLE patients as well as priests may have certain abnormal transmitters in their brains that he calls "theotoxins"."

Bernard d'Espagnat: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind http://hub.tm/dkmur

Quantum reality

Reference for Demand - High vs Low Resolution

The Photographic Eye How Our Eyes See vs. How Our Cameras See

silmä vs. kamera

The human eye, with support from the brain (the fastest CPU on the planet), visually reconstructs our surroundings in real-time as we go about our days and nights. Describing the human eye and how it interprets the world around us in terms of camera optics is a tricky process to explain, and that's before we even get to the 'how does it compare to my camera' part of the story.

Как видят мир глаза и фотокамера

How Our Eyes See vs. How Our Cameras See

From Pedro on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/pedrobeltrao/ee8c9d29/seventh-graders-describe-scientists-before

[Found via Pedro Beltrão] "Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab."

percepcion de los científicos

Scientists - they CAN be col. Sweet before and after drawings of what kids think scientists are about

Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab. Lovely.

"Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab" AWESOME