Vischeck

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Parrot.red.macaw.1.arp.750pix.jpgUpload any image and Stanford’s Vischeck program will show you how a color-blind person would see it.

The program lets you choose among three flavors of color blindness. This macaw appears as a protanope would see it, someone who can’t distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum.

About 10 percent of American men have some deficiency in color perception, but it’s not always a handicap. In some situations it’s actually an advantage: Color-blind hunters are unusually good at picking out prey against a confusing background, and color-blind soldiers can sometimes “see through” camouflage that fools everyone else.

In fact, it’s possible that in extreme situations we’re all color-blind. Some people claim that in extreme emergencies, like a train or aircraft crash, the brain’s visual system suspends color processing and switches to black and white. If that’s true, then designers should pay even more attention to the color of emergency brake handles, phones, etc.

If you’re interested, the Stanford page can also display your Web page as the color-blind would see it, and it even offers free PhotoShop plugins so you can experiment further.

| Science & Math

Unusual Deaths

  • Sherwood Anderson swallowed a toothpick at a party and died of peritonitis.
  • Francis Bacon died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow.
  • Jack Daniel, the distillery founder, kicked his safe when he forgot its combination, injured his toe, and died of blood poisoning.
  • Actress Isadora Duncan broke her neck when her scarf caught in a car’s wheel.
  • Tour de France winner François Faber was in a trench in World War I when he learned his wife had given birth to a daughter. He cheered and a German sniper picked him off.
  • Jockey Frank Hayes died of a heart attack during a race in 1923. The horse finished first, making Hayes the only dead jockey ever to win a race.
  • Pope John XXI died when his scientific laboratory collapsed in 1277.

The all-time winner is still the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, who survived being poisoned, shot multiple times in the head and torso, bludgeoned, mutilated, wrapped in a sheet and dropped in a frozen river. He was swimming to shore when he died of hypothermia.

| Death

WTF?

http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml

Hey, what happened to acronyms all of a sudden? SAT no longer stands for anything, we are informed. Neither does AT&T, KFC, or AARP. Their meanings are obsolete, but their organizations keep using them. The whole thing is vaguely Orwellian.

Good acronyms are useful because they’re simple and memorable. But for every perfect flower (BASIC = Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) there’s a misbegotten weed (USA PATRIOT = Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism).

Deeper in the muck are bureaucracy-spawned monsters like ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC, Navy-speak for “Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command.”

Only the Soviet Union could have produced this:

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT

It stands for “The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete, and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.”

And I think the American Symphony Orchestra League must be very careful in training its receptionists. You can’t have them saying, “Good morning, ASOL.”

| Language

Rimshot

A guy walks into a store and says, “Excuse me, I’d like to buy a guitar pick and some strings.”

The clerk looks at him uncomprehendingly. “Pardon?”

“I’d like a guitar pick, please, and some strings.”

The clerk thinks for a moment and says, “You’re a drummer, aren’t you?”

“Yeah! How did you know?”

“This is a travel agency.”

| Humor

St. Andrews Face Transformer

http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph

Upload your own photo into this face transformer and you can change your age, race, or sex, or see yourself as a Modigliani, Botticelli, or El Greco, or even as manga. (This Mona Lisa is half chimpanzee.)

The software was developed by Bernard Tiddeman and David Perrett of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. Earlier this month they estimated how Elvis Presley might have looked on his 70th birthday, and they’ve also rendered John Lennon at 64 and morphing videos of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

Tiddeman says, “This technology was designed to help psychologists understand how our brains interpret faces, an immensely important social function, helping us to recognize friends, choose a mate, or read people’s emotions.” They’re also using it to plan facial surgery and to help find wanted and missing persons.

Why do we recognize each other by the fronts of our heads? Because hair and clothing change too much, and because people’s hands are too similar. Studies involving prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, imply that there may be a specific face perception system in the brain.

Even stranger is Capgras delusion, in which you recognize the faces but lose the emotional response to them, which makes it seem as though your friends and family are being replaced by impostors. Creepy.

| Art · Science & Math

Dead or Alive?

Dead or Alive settles bar bets and morbid curiosity. Brooke Astor is still alive at 102, and Richie Valens was only 17 when his plane went down.

The data seem pretty accurate, overall, even the strange cases. Jimmy Hoffa is listed as “missing”; Deep Throat and D.B. Cooper are “unknown.” Fifty-seven people have died in the last six months. How on earth do they keep this thing up to date?

| Death

Churchill Anecdote #7

In 1931, George Bernard Shaw wired Winston Churchill: “Am reserving two tickets for you on opening night of my new play. Come bring a friend — if you have one.”

Churchill wired back: “Impossible for me to attend first performance. Would like to attend second night — if there is one.”

| History · Humor · Literature