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A visual illusion that takes advantage of the brain's perceptual reasoning skills

“Impossible figures” are visual illusions that take advantage of the brain’s perceptual reasoning skills in order to form geometrical relationships that can’t actually exist in nature. As Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde explain in this article in Scientific American,

The artist M.C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams, whereas mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle and visual scientist Dejan  Todorović created an Elusive Arch that won him Third Prize of the 2005 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest…. Several contemporary sculptors recently have taken up the challenge of creating impossible art. That is, they are interested in shaping real-world 3-D objects that nevertheless appear to be impossible. Unlike classic monuments – think of the Lincoln monument – which can be perceived by either sight or touch, impossible sculptures can only be interpreted (or misinterpreted, as the case may be) by the visual mind.

There’s a very cool slideshow that goes along with this article which explains how vantage point is exploited by sculptors in order to trick the brain into perceiving impossible figures in three dimensions.

Mmmm, tastes like.... foo foo!

I quit smoking five days ago, on Tuesday, after 36 years of smoking numerous cigarettes every day. That first day, I was scanning through the Boing Boing feed and came across this graph, which was originally posted here. Those first couple days were full of weird congruencies, reminding me of how bad tobacco is and how much I’d gain by quitting.

As Harold commented, “Begs the question: How do you know what your dog’s anus tastes like?” Not sure the answer to that, but I’m not going to smoke a cigarette to find out.

The weird thing about quitting was the response I got from both my M.D. and a cognitive psychologist I visited for advice.

My M.D. was horrified that I had quit, “cold turkey,” as he said, without consulting with him to “make a plan.” Dude, said I, I have a plan (don’t smoke) and I hardly think that I’m going into that good night cold turkey. I had bought a box of 2 mg nicotine gum the day before. Later that same day, the cognitive shrink told me pretty much the same thing. Neither of them could grasp that they should be using the past tense as regards me and smoking. Throughout our conversations, they insisted on saying “when you quit.”

I had already read that one should pick a “special day” to quit. Tuesday, of course, was the day that Chief Justice Roberts fucked up on giving the oath to President Obama (oh, joyous words!), making the day pretty damn special for me and millions of others. Quitting Bush, quitting smoking: makes sense to me. Gaining Obama, gaining a smoke-free life: ditto.

The thing about quitting is that the nicotine replacement therapy is more expensive than smoking (well, in the short term, obviously). The 2 mg gum is about 75 cents per piece. So, in search of a cheaper remedy, I contacted my insurance company. Turns out, Washington citizens are entitled to free or low-cost replacement therapy–but I guess you have to be insured, which I am. So I called Group Health and they connected me with a “quitting coach.” I had a 20-minute conversation with Tommy the Coach and he, at least, was enthusiastic that I had quit. Tommy the Coach read me the prescribed use of the gum: “You must chew at least 10 pieces per day” (about the same as the number of cigarettes I’d been smoking for the past year or so) for 30 minutes per piece. I said, “Sure, will do,” with my fingers crossed. I’ve been chewing more like four pieces per day, as I break them in half to avoid the nausea that results from a dose of nicotine entering my blood stream through my stomach rather than my lungs.

So far, so good. I figured it’d be a lot harder than it has been. The worst thing has been what I’ve been describing to friends as “the phantom limb”: the one that keeps dragging an imaginary cigarette to my lips. Makes sense, though: I’ve just amputated a habit I’ve been indulging in for 36 years. The neural pathways are deeply ingrained with that motion. But the weird, uncomfortable sensation of the phantom limb is already fading, thank Goddess, and my brain, old dog, is apparently still capable of learning new tricks.

USA Hemp Museum presents great pictures of live cannabis plants over Willie and Amy Nelson’s song, “A Peaceful Solution,” performed by Amy Nelson and Rattlesnake Annie. The bill was introduced by Cong. Barney Frank. H.R. 5842 is the 2008 version of the medical marijuana bill. Support the congresspeople who support cannabis.

Related: The Lotus Eco Elise uses a host of sustainable materials to make up the body and trim, including hemp, “eco wool,” sisal and a new high-tech, water-based paint that can be applied by hand. It’s fitted with a set of flexible solar panels on the hard top to help power the electrical systems, reducing the drain on the engine and improving efficiency. There is a new green shift light on the instrument panel that assists drivers in maximizing fuel efficiency.

All of these elements reduce the Eco Elise’s footprint throughout its lifecycle, limit the amount of energy used during production. Lotus looked to reduce the car’s environmental impact by focusing on how it is made as well as how it performs. Link.

Science Daily is a great site for weird stories. Here are some snips from the past few days.

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in “sacred mushrooms,” produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

Watermelon may have a viagra-like effect: Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Guither has a great Salon-affiliated blog which aggregates and comments on drug war news. Americans’ weird and deeply twisted propensity to treat each other as guilty until proven innocent has resulted in the highest incarceration rate among “developed” countries. Fact: the U.S. is home to about five percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of the world’s prison population. (Fat America: those figures are about the same for U.S. consumption of oil.)

In “Deep Thoughts about the Drug War,” Guither writes:

In regulated markets, disputes are handled by lawyers. In the black market, disputes are handled by guns. I have no love for lawyers, but I’d rather get hit by a stray brief than a stray bullet.

As anyone who has tried to quit smoking knows, dependence is hardest to overcome during difficult or stressful times. That must be why, when the government helps drug abusers quit, they arrest them and take away their job, possessions, and children.

And the line-drive question:

When a government uses military personnel, equipment, and tactics against its own citizens, is it time to call it a Civil War rather than a Drug War?

The percentage of Americans who regularly smoke cannabis has fluctuated, but it hasn’t significantly changed in years. Yet, again, it isn’t a political issue of any importance. At best, it gets tapped in as an invisible plank in Democratic health care policy. Cannabis continues to be the plant that dare not speak its name.

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

As Robert Anton Wilson (the man, the modality, the moonmeld) indicated in undisclosed locations known only to a select few, and as the Dogon of West Africa have known for thousands of years, cheese is of alien origin.

The phrase “the moon is made of green cheese” is not just smoke blowing from the door of an opium den. Rather, it is a literal truth, one a world-wide conspiracy has sought to suppress for many moons.

Cows are robots from space, implanted with soulful stares that have but one purpose: to disarm and befuddle the planet Earth’s population into thinking that they, and other udder-bearing beasts, are the sole source of milk and milk by-products. Which, in fact, they are. Read the rest of this entry »

I just stumbled across a truly bizarre blog called cfact. There, Dennis T. Avery (author of the wacko Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic) counters a report on the dangers of fast food with the suggestion that we “chew on some real danger foods.” Avery writes, with seeming ignorance of basic nutrition science, “There’s a new children’s book out [Avery does not name the book, always a good tactic when you want to create a diversion], telling kids that vicious food-mongers are trying to make them obese with fast food. That’s such a pathetic scare! Any food can make you fat if you eat too much.” It’s hard to imagine getting fat on lettuce, say, which requires more energy to digest than it contains, but let it go. Here’s the real nutso suggestion by Mr. Avery: eat ergot fungus! Now there’s a real “danger food”! This isn’t even comparing apples to oranges, which are both foods. Ergot, need I remind you, is not a food. Talk about a diversionary tactic: spew out a long, misinformed “history” of St. Anthony’s Fire and avoid talking about killer transfats in Micky D’s poisonous offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

For several years we’ve been hearing reports that moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages is a “heart healthy” activity. And for almost as long I’ve been saying, Follow the money. If you trace the funding for such studies back to their sources you find the wine industries of France and California footing the bill. Now it looks as though I’ve been right all along. “All those health benefits of moderate drinking may be based on nothing but a common methodological error in the studies, a meta-analysis suggested,” reports Medpage Today along with numerous other sources. A “common methodological error”? Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics? When the wine industry is footing the bill for data analysis the error is not merely methodological, which is far too neutral a term. This is the spinning of data to support an industry. Various vested interests–grape growers, wine makers, retail outlets, and especially the federal government of the United States–want you to believe that alcoholic beverages are somehow “healthy.” The tobacco industry would like you to believe the same thing about cigarettes and, historically, that industry has engaged in the same sort of data spin as the wine industry has been pulling for the past decade or so. All of this is designed to divert our dizzy little short-attention-span minds from the obvious: alcohol is a dangerous drug–but it’s legal. Meanwhile, the planet’s only safe intoxicant is demonized throughout the world. It’s time to call the bull-shitters’ bluff: make alcohol illegal and legalize cannabis.

Opium Culture

review by Brian Charles Clark

Opium Culture
by Peter Lee
Park Street Press, 2005

There is much to be appreciated about Peter Lee’s Opium Culture, and plenty more to criticize. The book is loosely organized around the theme (never stated) of “use it, but don’t abuse it.” Lee, who “lives in retirement in Thailand” and comes down firmly on the “use it” side, purports to supply users or potential users with accurate information. It should be noted, however, that with opium, as with cannabis or any number of other “illegal” intoxicants, accuracy is a misnomer: what research has left blank folklore fills in. Read the rest of this entry »