A Trio of Interesting Links
Today I visited an old favorite site, Damn Interesting. If ever a site deserved that name, it’s this one.
This site was linked to from an article on laughter. It’s essentially a Chinese (?) menu that’s been horribly translated. It starts off humorous, gets tiring for a minute, and then rebounds, becoming more hilarious than I could have imagined. Note that it gets mildly profane at the end. If you’re viewing this at work, that may be a bad thing. If you’re viewing it at home, a Chinese food menu inadvertently turning vulgar is about the best possible outcome.
Then there’s this article on Chuck Bonnet Syndrome, a sort of visual hallucination that’s apparently more common than we’d believe. What I find interesting isn’t so much the hallucinations themselves, but the stuff going on behind the scenes. The article implicitly sets up an analogy to the brain as a computer (even measuring the eye’s throughput in megabits per second–I’m really not sure how that figure was derived). It could be said, then, that the problem isn’t with the person becoming insane, but with odd bugs in the firmware of their brain. Perhaps most interesting is that eyes actually have dead spots, which we ordinarily don’t notice due to some excellent interpolation. But they have an example graphic, which lets one “see” (err, not see?) the presence of a dead spot.
And then there’s this interesting tale of an airplane, practically fresh off the lot, that experiences myriad failures. I won’t spoil the “ending” (the cause of the problems), but I’ll say that I found the whole article pretty interesting. Err, damn interesting.