Best Color Illusion I’ve Seen
From Bad Astronomy. It takes no work to see the illusion, but a lot of effort to see past it.
The "blue" and "green" swirls are exactly the same color. Don’t believe me? Verify it for yourself.
From Bad Astronomy. It takes no work to see the illusion, but a lot of effort to see past it.
The "blue" and "green" swirls are exactly the same color. Don’t believe me? Verify it for yourself.
It’s a bit depressing to see how so many news sites only seemed to cover the Iranian situation because it happens to feature Twitter and Facebook. Election fraud is so old hat, I guess, that we need a new twist to drive interest.
Well, here’s an article about some election science that should be covered everywhere. The authors were apparently too busy to tweet, but they found the Washington Post just the same.
Update: here’s a blog roundup on #iranelection/Twitter that highlights the possibility that much of the so-called Twitter revolution is actually just ye old neocons up to their old tricks. Funny how TechCrunch fanboys (editors) are going ga ga over the fact that a neocon on FoxNews claimed twitter founders should get the nobel prize for keeping their servers running through the crisis. I’ll buy that for a dollar!
I usually love Costco. I’ve been a member for close to 10 years in various states and found them to be a very well run company. But yesterday makes me really wonder if their employee training has gone to shit.
Here’s the scene. My wife and I are checking out with over $300 worth of stuff. Our 2 year old son is sitting in the cart, in the built-in child seat, still strapped in. We normally leave him in the cart during checkout and he’s generally happy. We can always get to him quickly if otherwise.
The checkout woman, a young over-eager type, apparently uses the "extra cart" technique to load checked items into. I’ve seen it before, and it’s frankly silly IMO when there are heavy items to cross-load, as was the case with us. She’s just going to hurt herself over time.
She quickly, forcefully spins the spare cart around and casts it out in front of the register area. Our son being in the next cart apparently disrupts her routine, as she can’t transfer him from cart-to-cart as easily. So she scans all of the heavy items left in our cart (the smaller ones are on the conveyor belt already) and turns my son’s cart towards the re-loading area, but not all of the way. She starts scanning smaller items from the conveyor belt and leaves my son — in the cart — out of reach.
Seeing what she did with the previous cart, I step in to the "area" to gently move my son’s cart the additional 4-5 feet to the end so I can start loading items while she scans, as I’ve done many times before (if she had a 2nd person helping her, I wouldn’t have bothered).
At this point she literally yells at me, "what are you doing?!"
"I’m moving the cart to load it," I say.
"This is an employee-only area," she yells. "Customers need to stay on that side of the register."
I look at my son alone in the cart. "I’m just helping out. You’re being incredibly rude."
"This area is dangerous," she continues scolding me. "Carts are always flying and customers could get hurt."
–only if the employees "fly" them, I think to myself. The register next to hers isn’t even open, so it’s just her alone. And if the area is really so dangerous, she probably should ask us to not to leave our children in the freakin’ carts. I’d hope she wasn’t planning to repeat her cart "flying" routine with my son, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
"This must be your first time," she says, faking a smile.
That’s two. I’m already annoyed, so I don’t tell her that I’ve probably been coming to Costco since before she started high school.
"No," I say without smiling, "it’s not." In fact, the checkers almost always appreciate the help.
I joke to my wife about our son, "maybe we should take him out of the cart now. You never know when stuff is going to fly."
But my wife is livid — stunned is more like it. As I finish paying, she goes off to find the manager to complain, only to be passed through three different people, none of whom seem to have the slightest interest in customer concerns. The last one, the actual manager, tells her to fill out an index-card customer satisfaction form to lodge her complaint.
"No thanks," she says, as we walk out.
And all this after Costco just lost a class action lawsuit that showed the company was systematically abusing their customers during renewals. My wife and I had just upgraded our membership, but I’m thinking now of a permanent downgrade. Costco clearly doesn’t take customer satisfaction seriously — or professionalism for that matter.
The idea of white roofs cutting down on interior cooling costs is nothing new. The science is so sound, we simply call it engineering. Sec. Chu points out the magnitude of the potential savings (i.e., if we had all roofs and roads in hot zones reflecting more light vs. absorbing+radiating heat) as roughly comparable to turning off every car in the world for 11 years.
The result? A conservative (by European standards) paper posts a fairly reasonable article and in the comments, the conservative US Drudge-report readers go absolutely nuts — from claiming "oil-based" paints will increase our dependence on foreign petroleum (bad assumption), to wondering if painting one’s roof white would cause one’s house to flood (inane), to many repeated comments about painting black people white (utterly racist).
Mostly, they just couldn’t help themselves but try to sound like they knew something when they clearly didn’t, the repetition of the word ‘idiot’ reaching new heights of unintentional self-mockery.
It would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that these people have some influence on what the world does or doesn’t do. I’m going to go with sad.
Here’s the link in case the embedding doesn’t work.
Interesting article from Time. Definitely something any new parents should know to watch for.
Show the average 14-month-old baby a sealed jar of cookies, and you get some pretty predictable behavior. The child will reach for the treats and, when thwarted, look beseechingly at the nearest adult. The request for help — delivered with eye contact, gestures and often with pleading sounds — is unmistakable. But some babies don’t do it. One little boy, captured on video by psychologist Wendy Stone at Vanderbilt University, repeatedly places a researcher’s hand on the cookie jar but never once looks at her face to see why she isn’t responding. Eventually, tragically, he gives up.
Show the average 18-month-old a video of toddlers at play, and you can bet that the tot will be mesmerized by scenes with strong emotion: a fight or kiss. But some babies have other interests. At the Yale Child Study Center, psychologists Warren Jones, Ami Klin and Sarah Shultz measure when toddlers stop blinking — a reliable indicator of rapt attention. The typical child will stare at the scene of a kiss, but a child with autism will be transfixed by the opening and closing of a door.
Well, at least some of it. They’ve made it hard for me to embed this more complete video, even though they put something similar on YouTube, but here’s a link to the full demo reel.
A few years ago, I complained quite extensively about the sad state of the 3D Web. Nowadays, things are entirely different, and almost exactly the same. Let me explain.
It’s easier to just download the CSV file and look at it in Excel…
On the news that United Airlines is now charging obese people for the number of actual seats they consume, some people cheer the decision, and some wonder if it makes sense. I mean, there are few people who literally require 2 or 3 full seats, but a full person is often displaced by a fattie. Not only that, but someone weighing 300lbs sure costs as much in fuel as two average-sized people.