One of my favorite brain-benders is the Ponzo Illusion. You’ve seen it: the simplest case is with two short horizontal lines, one above the other, between two slanting but near-vertical lines. The upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they’re the same length.
The illusion works because our brains are a bit wonky. The slanted lines make us think that anything near the top is farther away; the lines force our brain to think those lines are parallel but receding in the distance (like railroad tracks). The two horizontal lines are physically the same length, but our brain thinks the upper one is farther away. If it’s farther away, then duh, our brain says to itself, it must be bigger than the lower one. So we perceive it that way.
The award-winning chef used a specially designed grill with a built-in forklift mechanism designed to flip the oversized culinary creation.
Reader says it took six hours to cook the behemoth of a burger, starting off with a patty weighing 139 kilos. The grilled patty was then nestled in a 48-kilogram bun, dressed with lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, red onions, pickles and barbecue sauce.
It then took emergency services a further seven hours to actually get him free.
Their task was made more difficult due to further embarrassment on Xiao's part - despite the fact that a crew of firemen all stripped down to their underwear to help in the rescue, he refused to undo his own trousers so that he could be more easily pulled free from the mud.
7. Recycle frying oil. After frying, strain oil through a sieve lined with a coffee filter.
8. Weigh chopped foods. Place chopped ingredients in a coffee filter on a kitchen scale.
9. Hold tacos. Coffee filters make convenient wrappers for messy foods.
10. Stop the soil from leaking out of a plant pot. Line a plant pot with a coffee filter to prevent the soil from going through the drainage holes.
To begin construction, she bites the petals off of flowers and flies each petal — one by one — back to the nest, a peanut-sized burrow in the ground.
She then shapes the multi-colored petals into a cocoon-like structure, laying one petal on top of the other and occasionally using some nectar as glue. When the outer petal casing is complete, she reinforces the inside with a paper-thin layer of mud, and then another layer of petals, so both the outside and inside are wallpapered — a potpourri of purple, pink and yellow.
In other words, a summering gray whale north of Alaska, swimming eastward along the Alaska coast, may have been able to take advantage of ice-free conditions to continue swimming eastward, all the way through the Canadian Archipelago and west of Greenland, (or, perhaps more likely, westward, above Russia and Europe, via the Northeast Passage) until instinct instructed it to turn south and ultimately hang a left.
