I like optical illusions because they remind us that seeing is not a passive experience of experiencing faithfully what is out there but involves a considerable amount of processing by the brain. Via Mark Frauenfelder here is another one that I found intriguing where just by placing pieces of paper in an arrangement, a regular checkerboard can be made to look as if it is bulging.
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Cheryl Eddy lists what she describes as the ten most notorious paranormal hoaxes in history. I was familiar with almost all of them. I had heard of the Amityville Horror but thought it was just a fictional film and did not know that it was based on a supposed real event. I had also not heard of the Ghostwatch.
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The Wall Street Journal has a chart of the rates of obesity by classes of professions. Kevin Drum looked at the chart and noted that the category that includes economists, scientists, and psychologists have the lowest rates of 14.2%, well below the national average of 27.7% and far, far below the highest category of police officers, firefighters, and security guards which is 40.7% He is puzzled why this should be so and asks why it might be that economists are so low in weight.
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It was thought that one source of the water that is found on Earth was that it arrived via comets. But the Rosetta probe that has been orbiting comet 67P since August (and whose lander Philae came to rest on the surface in November) had remote sensing devices and found signs of water there but scientists who studied the data say that this water seems to be from a different source than the water on Earth.
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I came across this nice demo that labels itself ‘the world’s simplest electric train’. It is very clever. I would never have thought of it. It is fun to think about the physics behind it.
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I remember well how when cell phone usage in the US was just at the beginning stages, taking a trip to Sri Lanka and seeing cell phones all over the place, with people from all walks of life like street vendors, taxi cab drivers, plumbers, electricians, and other small scale businesspeople all using them.
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In films, the star is often replaced by a double in many situations, either because the task involved is too dangerous to risk injury or the star simply cannot or will not do what the role requires. We in the audience almost never notice the switching back and forth. One might think that this is solely due to the care that the film makers take to make sure the double has the same build as the star and is made up to have the same exterior appearance in terms of clothes and hair, and by avoiding close ups of the face.
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Robert Adler has a nice article with the title Why is there something rather than nothing?explaining what our best theories say about why the universe exists at all and why it has the properties it does, such as being so flat and uniform.
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The peer review system, one of the bedrocks of academic publishing that helps to ensure the quality of research papers, is in trouble. For those not familiar with the system, when a researcher wants to publish the results of their labors, they send the finished manuscript to their journal of choice. The editors in turn have three choices: choose on their own to publish or reject if they feel they have the expertise to judge, or send it out to one or more reviewers who are experts in the same field to obtain their opinion first. The last option is the most common one.
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Myths are tenacious. Many of us get frustrated in our attempts to try and set things straight because it seems like people will believe them against all the evidence. Trying to convince them they are wrong does not seem to work. But maybe we are going about it the wrong way, two authors argue, with the result that we end up actually strengthening the belief rather than weakening it.
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