Designer Stanislav Katz told us that "rumor has it that the one who dares to gaze at it long enough would see a certain superhero symbol unravels." Link – via Nerd Approved and Cool Material

There’s a puppy in that mirror! But where is he? I can see him, but he’s not behind the mirror. What’s going on here?

via Urlesque

An issue of Life magazine published on July 23, 1945 includes an article about a secret weapon proposed by some Nazi scientists toward the end of World War II. It was a huge mirror that, if placed in orbit, would focus sunlight on enemy nations and burn them:

Plausible schemes to build a station in space were engineered on paper long before the war. European rocket enthusiasts, including Dr. Hermann Oberth, who may have been the designer of the V-2, had planned to use the space station not as a weapon but as a refueling point for rockets starting off on journeys into space. … The only major obstacle: constructing a rocket powerful enough to reach a point where a space station could be built. If the modern German scientists had been able to make such a rocket, they might have ben able to set up their sun gun. Whether the sun gun would have accomplished what they expected, however, is another matter.”

The German idea of using the sun as a military weapon is not new. There is an ancient legend that Archimedes designed great burning mirrors which set the Roman fleet afire during the siege of Syracuse, in which Archimedes later died. This legend, and the German plan for building may be proved physically impossible by a simple axiom of optics. This is that light cannot be brought to a sharp, pointed focus with lenses or mirrors unless it comes from a sharp, pointed source. Since the sun appears in the sky as a disk and not as a point, the best any optical system can produce is an image of this disk. At very short focal lengths, the image is small and hot but as the focal length is increased the image becomes progressively bigger and cooler. At the distance the Germans proposed to set up their mirror (3,100 miles) the image of the sun cast on the earth would be about 40 miles in diameter and not hot enough to do any damage.

Link via blastr | Image: Life

At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f ) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).

Have you ever tried this? The effect can be really creepy, like this video example from Lasse Gjertsen (in Norwegain, but may sound NSFW). The entire article is available as a pdf, or you can read a summary at Mind Hacks. Link -via Metafilter

Sure, you’ve seen kittens and mirrors before, but this video has a bit of a punch line. -via Arbroath

Nothing is going to stop this young lady! In the comments at YouTube, her parents say that this was really just a one-time affirmation, but that Jessica, now 12, is a straight A student and an athlete. -via Holy Kaw!

Flickr user SiLver sKY spotted a street performer near Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. He was wearing an outfit composed of mirrors, from head to toe. More pictures at the link.

Link via Nerdcore | Photo: flickr user SiLver sKY used under Creative Commons license

How many times have looked in a mirror and saw someone you didn’t realize was there with you? Never? Well, it happens a LOT in the movies. -via FilmDrunk

Andrew Hicks, a mathematician at Drexel University, have created a mirrored surface that is bent in a way so the image you see is not reversed (not a mirror image).

From the New Scientist:

By calculating how to vary the way each of tens of thousands of points on a mirror’s surface reflects light he can create mirrors that do amazing things. For example, reflecting text without reversing it or capturing a full 360º scene without distorting objects.

Link – via geekologie

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by philosophile.

Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.

"In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes – how to make an image – using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.

Link

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