(via Organized Ignorance)

I follow a site called Mighty Optical Illusions which is a daily dose of…wait for it…optical illusions! The guy that runs it interprets the word “illusion” pretty loosely. They range from the kind of lame “spot the errors” illustrations from when you were a kid to the wierdest “is it moving, or am I falling over” type illusions and everything in between (impossible objects, B&W pics that look like they’re in color, photos of cats, 3D sidewalk paintings, sculptures that don’t make sense…until you look at their shadows, etc…).

The latest post was somewhat poignant I thought. It’s an image that demonstrates quite clearly…well…here, take a look at it:

Want to demonstrate how cruel and violent the military is? Show the picture on the left. Want to demonstrate how humane and caring the military is? Show the image on the right.

Don’t forget, every image is potentially an illusion. Just because it’s clear and obvious what’s happening in a picture doesn’t mean that that’s what’s actually happening.

I can’t help but love logarithmic scales. Most graphs and images that we see are drawn using a linear scale. By that I mean that the axes (axises? axis’?) count using the basic numbers so that it goes 1, 2, 3, etc… Logarithmic images, on the other hand, have axes that count using the exponents, usually with a common base number like 10. In this way it counts 10¹, 10², 10³ or more commonly (amongst us non-mathematical types) 10, 100, 1000. In this way, things that are of greatly differing size or values can be compared.

One great example of this is the XKCD comic Height. It uses a logarithmic scale with a base of 2 so that every tic represents twice the height of the previous one. I fell in love with that image when I first saw it. But of course, “real” scientists have done him one better. Below is a (slightly and ineptly edited…by me) image of the logarithmic universe which apparently was posted waaaay back in 2005. It shows pretty much the entire universe. I’ve limited this image here to just the area near the earth. Click on it to see the complete image (warning it’s a big image…remember it’s the entire universe).

I’ve found some new favorite wallpaper for my computers. These are absolutely amazing satellite images of Earth! From the site:

The images in this compilation are from the Landsat 7 satellite and were created to introduce the general public to the Landsat Program.

Various combinations of the eight Landsat 7 spectral bands were selected to create the vivid RGB composites that we have featured.

Go here or click on the image to see for yourself. I highly HIGHLY recommend it.