Fun with Science!

If you aren't reading the Freakonomics blog, let me try to persuade you onto the bandwagon. It's a thought provoking, covers a broad range of topics, and is a lot of fun. I came across this other site from there. I'll warn you, the current illusion does a lot of blinking, and there is a warning that it should be stared at if you suffer from epilepsy or migraines.

http://www.illusionsciences.com/

I wanted to add my little bit of philosophizing, in an addendum to yesterday's post. Psychology and related fields show that we are prone to misinterpret all types of different stimulus. This leads certain people to just completely mistrust the senses, and try to escape into magical thinking. I personally fell into that trap like that for a time. These illusions don't discredit the idea of an objective reality, just that we have an easy understanding of that reality. Learning about how we think and how the world works lets us overcome distortions in thinking. The email I referenced yesterday fell into that type of trap, though on a lesser scale. Attitude will never triumph over accuracy. What we can learn from all this is to limit our mistakes, so that our decisions will be all the more effective.