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Here's the better example I was looking for: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnake.gif

If /. started nesting things like that then I could be sickened, not only mentally with all the Jobs/Apple discussion flame spirals, but visually as well.

Ponies wouldn't got nuffin' on dat!

It's this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjMVsTFVX10

I don't think we can slashdot youtube :).

Anyway, I find if I shift some attention to the dots while looking at the centre dot, even though the whole thing rotates I can still notice that the dots are changing colour.

It is normally more important for the brain to notice that the "whole thing is rotating together" than the dots changing colour. The big picture is more important.

That said, I'm not so sure about how the "loch ness aftereffect " one works (3rd place): http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/05/best-illusions-turning-wheel-seems-to-jump-backwards.html

I don't have flash player 9 so I'm linking to the one that works for me :).

Maybe the sudden change that is untrackable causes the brain to guess that the rotation is the other way.

I find this illusion interesting (not a winner for this year): http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/illnews7e.html

Because some older people can't see the illusory motion effect!

Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time.

I accidentally discovered an interesting trick. I don't know if it's related to your point here, but if you get that "daydreaming" look in your eyes, you can stop (or rather, significantly alter) your eyes' saccadal movement (the way that they dart around to get a better model of your environment).

This illusion exploits your saccades to make it look like the snakes are rotating. However, if you start staring at it and get that "glazed" look that will tip people off you're not listening, the snakes stop rotating.

Well, they could do it the low tech way and just use this optical illusion, instead.

Great fun to print out. Freaks people out if they don't understand the trick ("Look at this new e-paper! Cool, huh?")

Fortunately, deja vu can be (and is) being explained by science. I hope we don't get an influx of pseudoscientific theories like we did with the recent telepathy/esp article...

The "nuclear lightbulb concept"

is still far from existing. We don't even have a viable solid core design, let alone a plasma core design. The tech just isn't there. Even if it was, the concept of a team of amateurs on minimal budget building a hundreds of tons high performance critical operation gas core nuclear reactor based rocket is just laughable.

Then there's the space elevator, which is looking like it might be feasible in the next couple decades

Yes, keep telling yourself that (just ignoring that no small budget team would be able to afford it even if it was possible). The truth of the matter is that the strongest measured single walled nanotubes are just over 60GPa, and bundles notably weaker (I think they've gotten a very small bundle almost 20GPa, and a bulk fabric of around 5GPa). Space elevators call for indefinite-length 100GPa bundles. Undercutting the requirement causes geometric price growth. We're nowhere close.

Increased structural purity and type-selected nanotubes will increase tube performance, but probably not enough. Longer tubes (hard to achieve) will improve bundle performance, but certainly not higher than the performance of the tubes themselves. Tube interlinking (sp2 (graphite) for sp3 (diamond) bond changing) would increase intertube bonding strength plenty, but would likely weaken their lengthwise tensile strength.

It may not even be physically possible. Even if it is possible, we're nowhere close to achieving it in the lab, let alone producing it on the large scale.

Capital costs in the neighborhood as some of the very large buildings or bridges we've built

The most expensive building that I can find is Mori Tower, at $2.3B (only 56 stories, but they're monstrous in area - 50,000 square feet each). For comparison, the Sears Tower cost $150M in 1973. The world's most expensive bridge is the Seto-Ohashi-Kojima bridge, at 8.3B$. Dr. Edward's calculations, probably the cheapest and most realistic, call for a 120GPa ribbon, and cost 40B$ (incl. $1.56B for 10 years operation). That's very hypothetical, of course, given that the most critical element, the cable, is currently impossible.

Hardware correlators do exist, and they are nicely synthesizable in an FPGA. Even university students do it.

shooting for "white" instead of "black"

The abs() function might be of use :-)

arrggghhh... those lines..., this one's better ;) really check your printer/camera combination out...

Explanation (the peripheral drift illusion) (PDF file)

that?

For the english version of the optical illusion page, click here: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

The parent poster's image came from this web page...

I just downloaded the whole lot, converted to .bmp, and will use them as my desktop wallpaper. No problem when I'm working -- I cover my whole screen with windows anyway. But when I leave for the day, anyone who comes to snoop around my PC will fall writhing to the floor...

o_O Egad! That's not even an animated GIF!

The parent poster's image came from this web page...

They have got to be the best optical illusions I've ever seen! I wonder if they would still work as well when printed instead of a computer screen, though...

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnake.gif.

Or, if productivity doesn't increase, the employees will end up killing themselves, thus saving the boss the effort of having to fire him.

Enterprise Mission is neither science nor pseudoscience. It's outright DELUSION! Does this look like a Sphinx?? There's something wrong in person's brain to make that kind of connection. Hoagland claims that some Martian rocks look like stoves and tools. I'm sitting here staring and staring at them, and they DO NOT look like these things! As far as we can tell from the pictures, they're just plain old rocks. To this guy, EVERY LITTLE ROCK AND SPECK is something spectacular. He's never seen an ordinary rock before. It's a face, it's a pyramid, it's an alien fort.

Science or phony science is not the issue. I don't see anything attempting to be science on that site. There are pictures and blurbs splattered about everywhere, I can hardly navigate it. I think the disheveled structure of the site is indicative of the scatterbrained nature of Hoagland's ideas.

It seems to me that some people's brains are "miswired" or damaged somehow and form illusory associations where there are none. In the same way that all of our brains trick us all into seeing optical illusions, some people are susceptible to less obvious illusions. Especially when it's FUN to see the illusions. And when you can make a living from it.

And here's some more: 1 peso, 5 peso, 10 peso and 100 peso notes.

By the way, the Japanese inscription on them reads "The Imperial Government of Greater Japan". Once again, I apologize for stomping all over your racist fantasies.

And here's some more: 1 peso, 5 peso, 10 peso and 100 peso notes.

By the way, the Japanese inscription on them reads "The Imperial Government of Greater Japan". Once again, I apologize for stomping all over your racist fantasies.

And here's some more: 1 peso, 5 peso, 10 peso and 100 peso notes.

By the way, the Japanese inscription on them reads "The Imperial Government of Greater Japan". Once again, I apologize for stomping all over your racist fantasies.

And here's some more: 1 peso, 5 peso, 10 peso and 100 peso notes.

By the way, the Japanese inscription on them reads "The Imperial Government of Greater Japan". Once again, I apologize for stomping all over your racist fantasies.

You know, I could see this as a torture device. If you wallpapered an entire cell with it, then every time the inmates' eyes moved, the walls would start crawling again.

After a few hours of that, I'd confess everything...

This makes my eyes feel like they're crawling out of my head.

Print one of these and you'll have all the magic animated paper you need without electronics or drugs!

Print one of these and you'll have all the magic animated paper you need without electronics or drugs!

Print one of these and you'll have all the magic animated paper you need without electronics or drugs!

What does CorelDRAW provide that GIMP doesn't (or couldn't)?

CorelDraw 9 is actually a small suite of packages, including CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint, a font navigator, a texture explorer, a bitmap-to-vector tracing package and various image distortion tools. So, to answer your question, the functionality provided by CorelDraw 9 that the GIMP doesn't do is vector-based artwork, rather than pixmap. This is still an area of the Linux application base that is not fully up to speed yet - there are various applications which do vector-art/vector-design on Linux, such as Dia, Sketch, KIllustrator, Xfig (ancient but still useful) and it's successor GTKFig, GYVE and Impress but many of these are as yet incomplete or have fallen by the wayside. That's not to say that CorelDraw 9 is necessarily the best vector art package out there - I'd like to see the latest Adobe Illustrator on Linux too - but it is a welcome filling-out of the application base.

There are several things in the Windows package which it will be very interesting to see what Corel do with regards to porting them, or if they are simply ommitted. For example, the MS Visual Basic for Applications scripting language used for automation of CorelDraw 9 - drop or replace? - and the Digimarc Digital Watermarking software, something I'm currently unaware of anything like this on the Linux platform. Plus the usual glut of a thousand TrueType and Type1 fonts you get with any vector or DTP package these days.

Whether Corel Photo-paint 9 holds a candle to the GIMP (I don't honestly know, since I haven't used Photopaint since v5) is vaguely irrelevent, since it is the vector art package in this lot that will probably be of most interest to most people.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Posted by jeremycrabtree:

Go here http://www.maru.cs.ritsumei.ac.jp/ ~sanchan/gyve/

It's the GNU Yellow Vector Editor, a little known Vector-based drawing program. It is intended to compete with the likes of Adobe Illustrator. Before you download it, you need to know that it "requires gtkDPS, ScriptKit, GNUSTEP base, gstep-Guile, gtk+, and guile libraries." Now, go get it, try it, and maybe pitch in and help the authors, I'm sure they won't mind.