Webster's Images and Ideas

The eye is not merely a window on the world, but a camera and the mind does a lot of processing to produce the world as we see it.  To illustrate this idea, MICHELLE STARR at ScienceAlert has compiled a great set of mindbending optical illusions: Strangest Otical Illusions Known to Science     Here are the pictures mentioned and further information on each one: The Dress - Do you see white and gold or blue and gold?   Wikipedia Article on the Dress  The Non-Red Strawberries Matt Lieberman's Twitter Page on the Strawberries  The cafe wall illusion   Illusion Index Page on the Cafe Wall Illusion  The Illusion Index site also provides information on many other illusions. Curvature blindness illusion Original Article by the discoverer: Curvature Blindness Illusion by Kohske Takahashi   The Spinning Dancer Ragu Kattinakere: Spinning Lady Illusion Explained The...

Two identical street pictures placed side by side suddenly become two different perspectives: The Daily Mail prepared a short video to show these are indeed exactly the same picture:   The informative Daily Mail article goes on to compare this to the famous cafe wall optical illusion where horizontal lines appear to taper or bend: Can You See It? Incredible Optical Illusion Tricks Your Brain     Michael Bach has a fascinating and informative page on the cafe wall illusion: Michael Bach on the Cafe Wall Illusion This page is part of Michael Bach's excellent compendium of visual illusions which is well worth exploring:   Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions     This illusion is yet another good reminder that the eye is not merely a window.  What we are seeing is in fact a projection within our brains which is influenced by the way our brains work...  Optical illusions show how we see | Beau Lotto ...

Carceri d'Invenzione (1745-1761) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi    The imaginary prisons of Piranesi have haunted many (even some who had never seen them!) since they were etched in the 18th century. Here is a famous reference to them by Thomas de Quincy:   Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome , Mr Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pullies, levers, catapults,.&c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceive a staircase: and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, ...

Virtuosity of Complex Numbers     Virtuosity of complex numbers is demonstrated by conversion into geometrical form of the formula that relates e (the natural base of logarithms), pi and the square root of negative one. The equation can be expressed as the sum of a series of vectors. When these are added and plotted on a complex plane, they form a spiral that strangles the point equal to negative one.    - Philip J. Davis, Number , Scientific American, September 1964. The square root of negative one was a useful but self-contradictory nuisance to mathematicians until they discovered that it was the portal into a whole new dimension of numbers.  In 1797 a geometric interpretation of complex numbers was developed by the Norwegian surveyor, Caspar Wessel (1745-1818). He showed that complex numbers involving the root of negative one are equivalent to real number pairs, and thus to points on a two dimensional plane: one...

The Kiss photographed by Oliviero Toscani, 1991 One of those provocative ads that United Colors of Benetton ran in magazines. They have photo galleries showing these ads in the Press area of their web site. The Kiss    What smouldering senses in death’s sick delay Or seizure of malign vicissitude Can rob this body of honour, or denude This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day? For lo! even now my lady’s lips did play With these my lips such consonant interlude As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay. I was a child beneath her touch,—a man When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,— A spirit when her spirit looked through me,— A god when all our life-breath met to fan Our life-blood, till love’s emulous ardours ran, Fire within fire, desire in deity. by Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Kiss by Rodin

...nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality, and hence there are exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men. "Every man's wisdom is peculiar to his own individuality," and there is no other kind of wisdom: reality is as much in the eye of the beholder as beauty is said to be. Northrop Frye (quoting William Blake), Fearful Symmetry , p. 19

A visual or concrete poem I wrote a long while back. I resurrected it because Kenny made it into a song. Only he would have the audacity to try this: Guns and Laughter (the song) Typed on a very old typewriter that had been passed down through the generations. It came out gun metal gray on my old scanner which doesn't photocopy text very well, but the color suits it, I thought. I was whacking the keys harder and harder so that the letters would get darker and darker. That doesn't seem to work on my computer keyboard, where I can whack the keys as hard as I like and it makes no difference at all.