illusory yellow pic.twitter.com/xIxX6eHMcq

— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) November 30, 2023

Japanese experimental psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka (previously at Neatorama) consistently fools our eyes with his optical illusions. In this graphic, you see three circles: cyan, magenta, and yellow. But there is no yellow. You can zoom in or use an eyedropper tool to check, but Nicolas Jacob already did that for us.  

What we perceive as a yellow circle are white stripes, the same as in the background of the graphic. What's different is that the yellow circle area is made up of black stripes instead of the blue stripes that the rest of the graphic has. In subtractive color mixing, the perception of color is produced by the absorption of light by other colors. Yellow is produced by the absence of blue, so the black and white stripes on a field that is otherwise blue-striped produces the illusion of yellow. Notice the green area of overlap is made of cyan and black. Color is in the eye of the beholder. Or is it? -via Boing Boing 

In 2015, the world went crazy for Mad Max: Fury Road. The fourth film in the Mad Max franchise was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won six. Nine years later, we get another look at George Miller's post-apocalyptic world with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It's a prequel that tells the origin story of Imperator Furiosa, this time played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Chris Hemsworth co-stars. The movie is directed by George Miller, with several of his collaborators from Fury Road returning for the prequel.

You might be surprised that the kidnapping of young Furiosa is set at 45 years after the collapse, years before she meets Max, who was a young adult during the collapse. But considering how this world has been altered and retconned since the first Mad Max movie in 1979, you shouldn't think about it too much. Like Fury Road, Furiosa tells a story that has nothing to do with the real world. Miller is still working on another sequel centered around Mad Max himself. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will open on May 23rd in Australia and May 24th in the US. It will also be shown in IMAX theaters. -via Metafilter

Do you ever find yourself gesturing with your hands as you talk on the phone to someone who can't see you? It seems so natural that we don't think about it. Is that something we learned, or something that just comes with language? Lauren Gawne is a linguist who studies gestures in different cultures. She tells us that people who have never been able to see use gestures when they speak, and will gesture even when speaking to another blind person.

Further, blind people will use the same kinds of gestures that other people with the same language use.  but that doesn't always work across different languages. A study of blind people who speak English or Turkish showed that speakers of both languages use the same gestures that sighted people speaking the same language use, but the gestures that matched other English speakers are not the same gestures that (blind and sighted) people speaking Turkish used. Since these gestures were not learned by watching, there must be something about the language that naturally includes gestures. -via Metafilter, where you'll find more links.

(Image credit: Derrick Coetzee)

Every year, Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness tries to get a neural network to generate a new Advent calendar, and every year the latest AI programs show how they do not yet understand Christmas. The last one we posted was in 2021, and you must admit it is getting better, but still hilariously misses the mark. Above is just a portion of the interactive calendar. I don't know why it's labeled 2022; that might be human error. But that error is nothing compared to snov phidde, fendli, and gedowmad.

Shane tried time and time again to get ChatGPT4 and DALL-E3 to cooperate with each other to generate Christmas icons and scenes with labels, with varying results. One attempt gave us something labeled SNO GLOIE, with a picture of a Starbucks holiday cup. A snowflake cookie ornament was labelled GINGERBOMAN, which has to be someone's name. More elaborate Christmas scenes were generated that look nice and Christmassy at first glance, but contains horrors when you take a closer look. See them and more at AI Weirdness.   

The Japanese geisha is an artist and entertainer, but the word does not mean just any artist or entertainer. The culture and profession of geisha is limited to a very strict and meticulous system developed over a couple of hundred years, in which geisha provided entertainment for parties and events for wealthy people who wanted to impress their guests. The misconception of geisha as sex workers came from the aftermath of World War II, when Western soldiers brought much-needed cash to Japan and sex workers passed themselves off as geisha to attract them. That doesn't mean that real geisha weren't mistreated or abused, and indeed they encountered plenty of sexual harassment. It also doesn't mean there weren't some geisha who used sex to enhance their status or enrich themselves, but it wasn't part of the system as intended.

Learning the profession of geisha takes years of strict education and training, which each woman is expected to pay for in full when she begins her career. Each step in the process has its own duties, curriculum, and expectations, as well as rules for her appearance. In the 19th century, families would sell their young daughters to a geisha house at around age six, and the geisha house would become their family as well as their employer. Now, becoming a geisha is voluntary, and training starts at age 15. But the draw is not what it used to be. There are only around a thousand trained geisha left in all of Japan today, where there were once tens of thousands. Read about the system of geisha and how it's changed at History Collection.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: OSU Special Collections and Archives)  

Superman is strong enough to squeeze coal into diamonds. Spider-Man can throw a handy web to swing from. The Invisible Woman has the power of... well, you know. These superpowers are just another day at work for some of nature's creatures. In another installment of his True Facts series, Ze Frank gives us the rundown on animals with the powers of transparency, constriction, and slime flinging. There are no spiders, because we know what they can do. We even named a comic book superhero after them. Flying isn't even considered a superpower among animals, since most insects and birds do it, and even some mammals. I guess you could say flying is downright pedestrian, but that would be a joke in itself. Still, there are limits and some drawbacks to each of these superpowers. There's a one-minute embedded ad at 3:45. Don't you just love it when a commercial is interrupted by another commercial?

When Chinese laborers built the transcontinental railway from the western side in the 19th century, they brought a traditional pain relief oil with them made from Chinese water snakes. Snake oil was an intriguing idea, and Clark Stanley saw an opportunity. He bottled his own snake oil liniment and sold it for decades. The medicine was eventually analyzed and found to consist of mineral oil, beef suet, red pepper, and turpentine. Not only was it ineffective, there were no snakes involved at all! That's how the term "snake oil" came to be used for anything fake or deceptive. For his deception, Stanley was fined $20.

There's also the story of the man who convinced people that rubbing expensive metal objects on their bodies would relieve pain, the woman who passed herself off as a princess of a fictional country, the doctor who sewed goat testicles into mens' scrotums, and other charlatans from history profiled in a list at Mental Floss.

Want to see how your Christmas tree started out in life? This guy who goes by Boxlapse at YouTube bought a pine cone at the supermarket last year and decided to grow a stone pine tree (Pinus pinea) in a pot. This video is a time-lapse that covers 300 days of his experiment. As you can see, it rather dramatically went from a pine cone to a recognizable tree in less than a year. I was expecting a slight touch of tinsel to be added at the end, but I guess that might limit the shelf life of the video. Add six more years to this story, and you'll have the cut trees that are being sold for Christmas decorations right now. He says he is continuing the experiment, so we may see further growth of this same tree next year. -via Digg

Theodore Gray has a new book out called Tools: A Visual Exploration of Implements and Devices in the Workshop, which is full of everything you need to know about tools. Gray made quite a splash over the last twenty years or so with his many iterations of the Periodic Table of Elements, so his publisher had the idea to make a periodic table of tools to accompany the book, with photographs by Nick Mann.

The Periodic Table of Tools in interactive form has its own website. You can see that the table is headed by hammers on one side and driver bits on the other. Click on any of the cells and pull up more examples and information on that tool. Rearrange the table by groups and see how each type of tool relates to other types of tools, although some allowances were made, like giving "toy tools" and "antique tools" their own cells in fairly random places. If you look at each photograph closely, you will find some surprises. The Periodic Table of Tools is available for sale as a 36" x 20" poster. It would look good in your workshop. -via Metafilter

For most Americans, Napoleon Bonaparte's dealings with the United States began in 1800 when he acquired the Louisiana territory from Spain, and then while depressed about the Haitian Revolution, turned around and sold it to the US for $15 million, or about three cents an acre, in 1803. It was a huge acquisition, but the only part the Spanish or the French really controlled was New Orleans, with the rest being Indian country.

Whichever country controlled New Orleans, it was filled with Napoleon fans. And as the French emperor went on to bigger battles in Europe, he retained the never ending loyalty of New Orleans residents. After Elba, after Waterloo, Napoleon considered returning to New Orleans for his retirement. His brother had already emigrated to America, and Napoleon confided in others that moving to the U.S. would bring him the dignity he deserved. In fact, he was trying to arrange his own passage to America when he was captured by the British and sent to St. Helena in 1815. Read about Napoleon's retirement plans, and the city that wanted him, at BBC Travel. -via Messy Nessy Chic

(Image credit: Infrogmation)

The video is just a few seconds long, but it contains multitudes. The little girl wants to pet the dog, but she can't because that's a bear! Her confusion may be funny, but I would have scooped the child up and had her in the door before she got the phrase out. Would it make you feel any better to know that the joke isn't real? The audio is from an earlier, unrelated TikTok video. That might make it less funny, but it's still dangerous to have a small child that close to a bear. Let's assume that the little girl was not eaten by the juvenile bear, and that she has learned to avoid such encounters in the future. The lesson is, don't believe everything you see on the internet, but there's nothing wrong in enjoying the funny fakes. Therefore, let the musical remixes commence!



The newest is from pianist Brandon Ethridge. -via Boing Boing

Perhaps you've heard the story of how the Teddy bear came about. The bear was inspired by a 1902 incident in which President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a young bear that had been trapped for the occasion, which was illustrated in cartoon form for the newspapers. Candy store owner Morris Michtom asked his wife Rose to make a toy bear and they named it Teddy, after Roosevelt, and they sold like hotcakes.    

But there was some objections to the popularity of Teddy bears as a children's toy. Apparently stuffed toy animals weren't all that popular before the Teddy bear debuted, and some social commentators thought they would spell the end of American life as we knew it. Why? If little girls started playing with plush animals instead of baby dolls, they might reject babies and never have children! Luckily, we figured out that toys are more than just career-training aids. Read about the Teddy bear's rise to fame and the backlash it engendered at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Smithsonian Museum of Natural History)

Way before electricity, city officials saw the benefit to lighting up the street so that people could find their way around. When electricity was in its infancy, some towns took the easy way- instead of replacing hundreds of gas lamps, why not just built one tower, or several for bigger cities, and make them very tall? Electricity produced enough light for people to get around, even from a very tall tower. As far as the electrical mechanism goes, they were primitive, but they worked. Eventually, cheaper, safer, and more efficient electric streetlights were developed, and these "moonlight towers" were replaced. Except in Austin, Texas. Austin decided to keep the towers as part of the city's personality, although they have been restored and rebuilt. The city still has 29 of their original 31 towers. Tom Scott gives us a rundown on the towers, how they worked, and what they look like today. 

The UK Biobank study is a long-running study of 467,354 people in the United Kingdom who have been documenting their eating habits, among other data, since 2006. A new study took data from that large population and studied those who changed their eating habits at different ages, particularly those who switched from processed foods to a healthier, more natural diet.

The results showed that people who switched from unhealthy eating habits to healthier regimens added up to ten years to their lives. Those who had average diets to begin with showed gains as well, although they were lesser because those people were healthier to begin with. The age at which one began eating a healthy diet made a difference, but even people who began eating better in their seventies showed longevity gains of four to five years.

The healthy diet is described as one without sugary drinks and processed meats, and "rich in whole grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and moderate amounts of fish." Read more about this study and the results at ScienceAlert. -via Real Clear Science 

(Image: www.Pixel.la Free Stock Photos) 

Twin brothers Pat and Sean Kelly are musicians and DJs for private events in Philadelphia. When you mix music on the fly, you get a feeling for what works together, and an awful lot of songs work together. You know sometimes you get a song stuck in your head, and it reminds you of another song that uses the same chord progression, and then that song is stuck in there as well. Take this to the limit and you've got magic, especially if you've got a brother to sing with. They call this medley "My Brain at 3:59am – A Mashup." Twenty songs in one minute, divided by two singers, means each song gets about six seconds, but that's long enough for you to know what song it is, and now you've got an entire mashup stuck in your head. If you hear any songs you don't know, there's a list of them at Boing Boing.