"QUANTUM SHOT" #228 Article by Stefan Van den Bergh & Avi Abrams
Your eyes see one thing, your mind believes another!
Welcome our guest blogger Stefan Van den Bergh, who runs the "Planet Perplex" website. He writes: "I've been fascinated by illusions and everything like it for as long as I remember. Over the years I've made several sites about them, and built an extensive collection." It's been long since we had an article about optical illusions, so it's time for another installment in this highly popular series.
These don't move
Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a famous creator of moving illusions. That is, they seem to move but they don't.
Warning : these illusions are so strong that sensitive observers might feel sick. You will understand when you see them full-screen.
The first example is probably the most famous of them all and a favorite in poster stores: Rotating Snakes ! Make sure you click to enlarge.
When watching this picture, you might want to check if your flatscreen is still flat. Maybe it actually IS rippling.
These rotating ladybugs are rather unknown but extremely convincing. You just can't believe this is not an animation. (Watch fullscreen, bigger is better.)
The last not-quite-moving one is also a classic but too good to leave it out. Stare at the black dot and move your head back and forth from the screen. The wheels will start turning ...
These do move - in strange ways
This little animation is fast becoming very popular - and no wonder: when you first look at the spinning girl, her rotation is probably clockwise. But if you start to concentrate on her shadow instead, suddenly her rotation switches to counter-clockwise! It may take some time, but the moment it happens, you are going to be genuinely surprised... (first seen here)
This ferris wheel animation is similar to the one above. Look at the left side of the wheel, and it will rotate to the left. Look at the right and it will rotate there. If you play around with it, you can make it turn wherever you want. Try it!
Unique Stereo Pictures can be created using a simple animation effect. This pool animation has only two frames, but looks convincingly three-dimensional.
Have a look at this photograph of Neuchatel, Switzerland. How long would it have taken Felice Varini to put the red lines there ? Five minutes, with a pencil and a ruler ?
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I don't know exactly but it would have been much, much longer. You see, the red lines are actually painted on the buildings. He just took buckets of red paint and got into town, as you will see below. This illusion only works from one exact point of view.
Here are some more examples of his work (there are dozens more at his site)
Another superb example of Varini's 3-D work is the Cardiff's Harbor, where the whole site became a "canvas" for Felice Varini's shapes, which could be discovered only from a specific viewpoint...
3-D Transformations
Shigeo Fukuda is another great point-of-view artist, "Master of Transformations". See for example his "Underground Piano". It looks like a large pile of junk, but when seen in a mirror just right, it's a perfect image of a piano.
Here is "Encore" sculpture, which changes into different musicians, depending on your point-of-view. (via Growabrain)
Shadow Sculptures
Again, by Shigeo Fukuda - watch this video to see the shadows transform a pile of junk.
Our illusions coverage will be incomplete if we don't mention other "shadow sculptures" - see a superb page here
But point-of-view illusions can also happen just by accident. And when they do, the result can be hilarious ...
For an interesting case of "cover-up" viewing-angle illusion (and a study of Medieval morals) see this page
Now you see it ...
Now a bit of magic - let's make some stuff disappear. The first illusion is a classic, but keeps baffling me every time. Stare at the black cross in the center. Within seconds, a green ball will appear. And a few seconds after that, the green ball starts eating the purple balls, until there's nothing left !
This one has no moving parts. Just look at the black cross and see the colored fluff fade away until everything is gray. See how easy your eyes are fooled ?
Speaking about elusive color... This link is simply mind-boggling. Follow the instructions to see the color appear out of black-n-white image of the castle. Click here
Adding to more well known images (see our first part), here is a variation of "shading illusion" - these two cubes are the SAME color!
Illusions in Advertising
Discover darker meaning in this fine example of "hidden image" advertising:
For those with a lot of time on their hands, here is a great image from Mighty Optical Illusions - try to find all 82 Absolut vodka bottles in this drawing: (click to enlarge)
San Francisco Red Cross awareness ad campaign is slightly shocking, depicting the same street-scape after some kind of cataclysm: (seen here)
A bit nicer locations are shown on the following Club Med ads - with a cute face in each one.
Sometimes there is no need to "enhance" Mother Nature with a Photoshop job: check out this "portrait" of the actual rainforest insect: (courtesy Darlyne Murawski)
Article by Stefan Van den Bergh, "Planet Perplex" (with Avi Abrams) for Dark Roasted Blend. - (want to join our team of writers? contact us, see guidelines here)
I had seen those shadow sculptures about a month ago and decided to try and achieve one myself. I created the shadow of a cat. There is a picture located here: http://nicolerae365.blogspot.com/2007/07/shadow-art.html
No matter how hard I try, I can't see that girl spinning clockwise, but I think it's actually a mental map problem in my case. You see, I know how to dance, so the only logical way to spin is with the leg trailing, so my brain automatically rejects the alternate interpretation.
The Ferris Wheel right after it works fine, but the green dot doesn't get to eat all the magenta ones— tricksy little guys keep popping back up.
its indeed cheaper to recover any lost data in Africa than in the west send your damaged Drives,Corrupt RAID Servers to East African Data Handlers, ITS CHEAPER TO RECOVER YOU ALL YOUR LOST DATA!
B.Durbin it sounds like the problem is that you are looking at it as the same leg. Don't think of it as one leg either trailing or leading, rather think of it as the right leg trailing for it to spin in one direction, then think of it as the left leg trailing and it will spin in the other direction.
The trick with the spinning girl is to concentrate on the shadow of her toes on the leading foot.If you catch it just as it comes into view on the left side, she reverses direction...then on the right side, she reverses direction again. Quite an amazing little illusion. Thanks, Stephen B.
Oh my. After staring at the spinning girl for about 15 minutes, I was able to make her switch directions whenever I wanted 'her' to. The downside is, I now have a bad headache.
The second "Nameless" wonder is M-505 Adams Brothers Probe 16 made in 1969. It was used as a Durango 95, a stolen sport car, in Staley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" movie.
Why does Dave Major keep ruining perfectly good Isettas?
I suspect the black, unidentified propeller car is heavily modified, but it looks more like a Tatra than anything else, especially in the rear of the greenhouse.
Sigivald is absolutely right. The black unidentified propeller car is indeed a Tatra 77 from the middle 1930's. It was a car with a rear air-cooled V8 engine, but with a not-so-good performance, capable only of 100 miles per hour.
The car of the foto is not a much modified 77, except for the propeller mounting. Remember that most of the cars of that time used several bodymakers for the same model, and so, the style varied somewhat.
I love art cars and that is why I started my own. I have a 1981 Mercedes Benz 300SD covered in close to 6000 pens. I call it Mercedes Pens and I am The Pen Guy
This car you can´t identify is made from TATRA 805 or maybe TATRAPLAN...that is the base for the showed tunning... the cars were producted in Czechoslovakia... in the Company Museum in the hometown (Koprivnice) of the Tatra factory is even very similar snow-car drove by a propeler and - additionaly and optionaly(in the case of very haevy terain) by a belt-track...
Don't forget the biggest difference between prison and your cubicle -
In prison, you never get to leave and go home. you have no freedom, no possessions, no money, and no choice in where you live or what you eat. And no one particularly cares if you are terrorized, molested, or beaten - or if you die from anything anyone does to you.
there is a small addendum to that story of the 5 failed safeties (out of six) .. unfortunately i never could find independent confirmation except in the book of a very respected austrian journaillist ... but perhaps a blogger can help ..
that incident prompted the US government to start a masive research project to improve the safeties in nuclear devices .. the results of this research project were quickly incorporated in the existing bombs .. AND .. here it comes:
the results were also supposedly leaked to the government of the CCCP because of the fear that a similar accident in russia could perhaps start an accidental war ..
Very cool, Anonymous! Wish I had that info when I did the piece -- would have been a great addition. I, for one, am packing my beans and heading for the hills .. and that's NOT taking into account the technological 'expertise' of countries like Russia, France, Pakistan, India (shudder)
I do kinda hate to break it to you, but a drop, collision, or even explosion won't create the nuclear fission/fusion explosion that is the worry about nuclear weapons. The basic idea of a fission explosion is wrapping a sphere with explosives so the sphere will implode quickly enough that it will explode. Thermonuclear added more stages to create a bigger secondary explosion. But the difficultly in creating a spherical implosion is what prevents the average terrorist from making one. The Rosenburgs were executed when they passed secrets dealing with this to the Russian. That same difficulty is what prevents an accidental nuclear explosion. Don't spread FUD. There are very legitimate fears you sort of addressed: Random weapons-grade materials and pre-made bombs missing, and the possibility of the conventional explosives spreading radioactive particles that really could cause alot of death. Plutonium has a lethal toxicity easily ranked in the parts per billion. So there is definately legitimate concerns - just don't blow them to far out of porportion. I'd hate to see you have to get sued to pay alot of people's laundry bills.
The only way to set off a fission bomb is for the outer shell of conventional warheads to all detonate within a few microseconds of each other. This just wont happen in the case of a drop or some other mishap. These devices require finely tuned electronic circuits to initiate simultaneous detonation.
I like your government-bashing energy, but please use it somewhere where the government is actually at fault.
My dad dropped a nuclear bomb while loading it on a plane on a Turkish runway during the Vietnam War. It rolled down the runway before they caught up to it. The officer who saw it said not to tell any one, because such accidents make it all the way to the president.
But your post is alarmist. It's clear that you're trying to maximize fear. I don't think that's very responsible, and it shows a clear misunderstanding of the technologies you discuss.
The public's fear of the atom is reminiscent of the fear of electricity in the late 19th and early 20th century. Why don't you write a post about the dangers of electricity and associated accidents?
We're not going to be driving hydrogen cars tomorrow. Get used to the fact that harnessing the power of the atom is the most promising way forward /right now/.
I worked with one of the guys on the crew at the silo near Little Rock, AR, and he tells a bit of a different story.
Basically, someone dropped a huge wrench from the top of the silo, and as it bounced between the wall and the missile, it punctured the fuel tank. As the rocket fuel leaked out, the tank lost pressure and the rocket finally lost its support, crumpled, and exploded.
But this didn't happen suddenly. The leak took hours and hours to hit that critical drop in pressure. They evac'd the silo and everyone near it, but said nothing to the people living just miles away.
This is like saying a society is violent and dangerous because people get angry, even if the murder rate is zero.
BTW: Bombs decay and become non fissionable over time, especially if they are banged around and older than 15 years. So the fear mongering over the one's out there isn't even founded in reality.
this article shows a complete lack of understanding of how nuclear warheads work, as well as a blatant misuse of the word "thermonuclear" (that only applies to fusion, not fission). It's completely inaccurate to imply that any of those had a chance of going off.
You couldn't be more wrong on the story about two bombs landing in waterlogged famrland. A quick internet search reveals thatwhile two weapons were lost when the plane malfunctioned, the second one is not out there going "tick tick tick". In fact, they found the impact crater the bomb made and recovered a substantial portion of the material from the bomb after digging up to 22'. Heavy rainfall forced the abandonment of the recovery and the Air Force bought the land to prevent further digging. See this link for a factual description of events, it's much than this bullshit. http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/hansen_doc.html
As JJ said, it is extremely difficult for a nuclear or thermonuclear weapon to go off accidentally. Unless every segment of the explosive shell is triggered simultaneously to create a uniform implosion wave that smoothly compresses your fissionable core to supercriticality, you're going to just get a messy conventional explosion that tosses fissionable material around. (Worst case is a fizzle where you get momentary criticality and a yield equivalent to a few tons.) Any weapon that's been sitting underwater for any length of time is going to be in much too bad a shape to have any meaningful risk of fission detonation.
This refers to implosion weapons, of course -- uranium-gun weapons are more rugged and mechanically straightforward, but they're also inefficient and have not been a part of the US arsenal for many decades.
Accidental detonation of a fusion weapon is even more vastly unlikely, since it requires a clean and efficient detonation of the fission primary to reach the temperatures necessary to initiate a fusion burn in the deuterium fuel.
Two other points: David Kraft, if only we had safe thermonuclear energy! So far the only way anyone's figured out to get more energy out a fusion reaction than you put in is a bomb, and the practical applications are limited. We've got plenty of (more or less safe) nuclear power, but no thermonuclear.
And, regarding leaking safeguard technology to the Soviets: certainly sounds plausible enough. I know that after PAL (Permissive Action Link) technology was developed in the US to prevent unauthorized launch or detonation of weapons, it was quite intentionally leaked to the Soviet Union, and to China when they began to develop their arsenal. The idea was to minimize the chance of a rogue military commander launching his weapons at the U.S. without authorization.
Thanks to all of you great folks for your fun and/or informative comments on my little piece on nuclear weapon boo-boos. I especially appreciate the technical info that’s been put out, especially since I’m a writer and not an engineer. Avi is quite correct to place an amendment to the piece about how unlikely an actual nuclear detonation is. I also just learned (thanks Jon) that the supposedly “tick, tick, ticking” bomb that was dropped on North Carolina was recovered – though that it impacted at 700 mph doesn’t make me feel any better.
However (and didn’t you know this was coming) I still feel the spirit of the piece is still very much intact. I am not anti-government, anti-military, anti-nuclear, anti-America, or anti-much-of-anything: I just wanted to share with folks who are into odd and unusual history that there have been a considerable number of pants-staining mistakes made regarding the most dangerous device ever created.
Or, to put it in bad movie language: “I don't know what's scarier, losing a nuclear weapon or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it,” from Broken Arrow, starring the world’s favorite Scientologist, John Travolta.
In a follow-up piece I’ll be talking about something REALLY scary: screw-ups involving biological and chemical weapons.
Wow ... as scary as the article itself is, I can't believe the sheer naivete of the comments here. The people who've said either that losing nukes is no biggie, or that nuclear power is safe, need to do more research &/or seek professional help.
Nukes are not candy. Once lost, they can easily fall into the hands of unsavoury folks ... or simply leak extremely dangerous & long-lived isotopes into the environment. Explode, no - but they can still kill.
We have yet to invent a foolproof storage system for n-waste, & I doubt any such system is even physically possible. Wind, tidal & solar are all cheap & clean alternatives. We have no excuses left for continuing to neglect them in 2007.
Go tell former residents of Chernobyl how "safe" nuclear power is - they'll be relieved to hear it - the ones not dead of cancer yet, that is. The immediate death toll from that ONE accident is unknown, but indirect deaths from carcinomas likely number in the millions.
We need to avoid use of a technology that's both deadly & obscenely expensive, while we still can.
jim, no one has said that losing nukes is "no biggie". Most of these are reasonable comments pointing out that fears of a nuclear explosion from dropping a warhead are unfounded.
And before you cast stones, you should get your own facts straight. Regarding Chernobyl, you say "The immediate death toll from that ONE accident is unknown, but indirect deaths from carcinomas likely number in the millions."
Rubbish. While certainly a horrible tragedy that should never have happened, the death toll is estimated to be less than 10,000.
Your "glowing" test area is nothing more than a broad, largely empty desert valley with some roads and an old farm house. Of course, if you know the history of it, it really is amazing, but at first glance it is nothing much to look at.
I love the whiners crying "waa FUD waa". Wonder how many "terrists" would love to get their hands on one, just for the scrap inside? You FUD-monkeys would shit your panties if one was found on your block.
I loved reading all of this. My husband worked at Ellsworth with the trailers & equipment they use to load & repair the B-1b Lancer. Not nuke carrying capable right now, but in 24hrs they can convert the whole fleet back to being able to carry nukes. :P
Bombs in general, information & such is interesting to me at the moment, My husband is going through EOD school here at Eglin AFB. For those of you who do not know what EOD is, it is Explosive Ordinance Disposal. Them guys who disarm those roadside bombs, IEDs and all that sort of stuff.
So I get to hear about the various things he can tell me, without breaking the rules. Interesting to say the very least!
Avi, maybe one of your folks who do articles or yourself could do one specifically on our EOD troops?
My favorite "Oops..." was during the early days of the hydrogen bomb, when they were massive devices.
A bomber parked on the apron at an Air Force base in Alaska was undergoing some minor maintenance when a short released the shackles on a fusion device.
The bomb crashed through the bomb bay doors and partially embedded itself in the tarmac. Making recovery a bit difficult. They knew where it was, but how do you pry a multi-tonne hydrogen bomb out of the pavement? (Very carefully. :-)
I have a short article on fission and fusion weapons here:
At first I was thinking:: "Ha, I'll just live up in the space station......" But noooooooo..... Than I read the other article about one-in-a-million collisions. Now I'm not so much thinking as building an underground facility to survive.
Is anyone else terrified at the thought of all of our deserts covered in solar panels? Although the areas are not productive for humans, they are an important ecosystem and we should not assume that it's useless land we can manipulate in any way without harming it!
I'm a sevillian and I think the Solucar plant is a great idea. We have more than 300 sunny days in the year and someone has done something with all that sun :D
Great images, but I'm confused as to why you placed a nuclear power plant under the "bad" energy sources -- nuclear power is one of the better choices; you get more bang for your buck, and it's far cleaner than coal (which puts out more radiation than nuclear). New pebble bed reactors make a meltdown literally impossible.
Check out this US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State energy consumptions, demographics and State energy offices, State Taxes and more...
A bit more about the Solar Tower project in Australia. It is quite different to the other examples given, in that it has no mirrors and heating of water to steam.
It relies on a large green-house-like heating area to heat air that then flows inwards, past wind turbines and up a 1km-tall chimney (the tower).
There's a big difference between tidal and wave power.
All your pictures show tidal systems NOT wave systems.
Tidal would seem to be the far better bet because it is totally predictable and doesn't require some kind of reciprocating device to make it work: A conventional axial turbine is perfect
The panels used with the solar tower are not photovoltaic solar collectors, they are simply steel reflectors mounted on motors which rotate them to follow the sun (heliostatic). The cost of 600 PV panels of THAT size would be pretty damn high, and the idea is to reflect sunlight, not absorb it.
From one of the pixels, As a pixel in Spencer's work many times now I can say Spencer is very much trying to show the humanity of the models, though not the individuality-except in his portraits of individuals. To read accounts by those of us who pose, to see more of Spencer's work, including some of his lesser known individual portraits, come to http://www.spencertunickforum.org
I'm impressed. I work for a photography company, and you know how much of a pain in the butt it is to get a class of high school seniors to form something as simple as a 0 or a 7?
Incidentally, I highly recommend the book Legends of Caltech and its sequel More Legends of Caltech. Utterly chock-full of various pranks, as well as an apparent guide to those scriptwriters who created Real Genius.
Though I have to say that the ones a particular friend of the family was involved in were not written up, probably because nobody would break silence, and so there must be many more pranks which have never made it into print.
Air Force Photo: The other side of the story: On a hot Sat (our day off) we were told to put on white T shirts and fall out. We were marched to the drill field and told were to stand...and that is all. Some guy in a tower took our photos. Some time later these photos were for sale in the BX. Where we told anything...NO, did we get any free photos...NO were we even thanked...of course not we were all Pvt's. Pvt James R. Garrity, Sq BN 4, Fl 2100, Lackland AFB, Tex...some 61 years ago...of ya it was very hot out
...fails to mention the possible adverse effects that such high-powered installations can have on weather and atmospheric patterns.
Perhaps because there really aren't any: "The intensity of the HF signal in the ionosphere is less than 3 microwatts per cm2, tens of thousands of times less than the Sun's natural electromagnetic radiation reaching the earth and hundreds of times less than even the normal random variations in intensity of the Sun's natural ultraviolet (UV) energy which creates the ionosphere."
And the total power is 3.6MW; at least two radio transmitters have been 2.5MW, and commercial radio in the US, on the high end, can exceed 100KW.
Given the aggregate of the radio output worldwide, I wouldn't worry about one 3.6MW array hurting the environment - they don't mention it on the website because there's no reason to believe it does so in any way.
These are amazing! The only gripe I have is that you appear to have caught the disease that makes people, when they're sharing superb photos, feel that viewers will click out if there aren't some "funny" captions.
You know, that picture of Tesla sitting in the middle of the room with all the electricity surrounding him is a double exposure. Nobody would survive something like that.
And that giant Tesla Coil near the bottom was going to power the entire world, until Tesla ran out of funds for complicated reasons. (Partly due to the fact that they thought he was mad.) He swore to his dying day that it would've worked. He turned it on just before it was destroyed despite the fact that it was incomplete and it created an aurora in the sky. Makes you wonder...
Actually theres nothing particularly dangerous about high voltages - the spark that happens occasionally when you touch a car or doorhandle an be in excess of 30,000 volts. As my electronics teacher used to say, "Its the Volts that make your hair stand on end, but its the Amps that kill you" Mr. Tesla would have been quite save so long as the amperage was low enough. The sparks are spectacular but mostly harmless. Better to worry about the carcinogenic ozone given off.
"QUANTUM SHOT" #228
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14 Comments:
I had seen those shadow sculptures about a month ago and decided to try and achieve one myself. I created the shadow of a cat. There is a picture located here: http://nicolerae365.blogspot.com/2007/07/shadow-art.html
Please tell me what you think!
Elliot, nice kitty there.
must be hard to set up these things...
No matter how hard I try, I can't see that girl spinning clockwise, but I think it's actually a mental map problem in my case. You see, I know how to dance, so the only logical way to spin is with the leg trailing, so my brain automatically rejects the alternate interpretation.
The Ferris Wheel right after it works fine, but the green dot doesn't get to eat all the magenta ones— tricksy little guys keep popping back up.
Try to concentrate on the tip of her shoe (the one closest to the ground), then blink and shift your gaze - seems to work for me.
I also can't see the spinning girl change direction, not matter how hard I try. The ferris wheel is impressive though.
B. Durbin,
Whether she is spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise, the leg is still trailing. Blows my mind.
-Hal
whats the hidden image in the poison ad? and how am i meant to see it?
Hi Princess... it's a skull. Really scary, actually.
the 2 cubes aint the same colour, open it in paint and join them together and you'll see
Paul: true, but the "lighter" cube is actually darker!
its indeed cheaper to recover any lost data in Africa than in the west send your damaged Drives,Corrupt RAID Servers to East African Data Handlers, ITS CHEAPER TO RECOVER YOU ALL YOUR LOST DATA!
B.Durbin it sounds like the problem is that you are looking at it as the same leg. Don't think of it as one leg either trailing or leading, rather think of it as the right leg trailing for it to spin in one direction, then think of it as the left leg trailing and it will spin in the other direction.
The trick with the spinning girl is to concentrate on the shadow of her toes on the leading foot.If you catch it just as it comes into view on the left side, she reverses direction...then on the right side, she reverses direction again. Quite an amazing little illusion.
Thanks, Stephen B.
Oh my. After staring at the spinning girl for about 15 minutes, I was able to make her switch directions whenever I wanted 'her' to. The downside is, I now have a bad headache.
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