34
POPSIran: You Suck At Photoshop. Here's the caption on the NYT illustration above: In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange).
30
POPSHigh speed waterfigures image & video - magnificent! This video show how the waterfigures are created. This video&image show the forming of the waterfigures. A falling droplet fall to the formed waterfigure and a flying projectiel pull through the droplet forming a new splash on the air. The projectiel is activated by a high power unit, this act as a coilgun system and give a stable traject. The falling droplet pass through a laserbeam and generate a signal for the exact timings of all the necessary modules. The waterfigures are generated on a waveform. This waveform is a digital data and can be adjusted in time, form, frequence and volume to develop the correct figure.
28
POPSThe image you have of your own face, is highly cartoonish. Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly substract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brain, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.
26
POPSGrand Illusion!!! The Mystery Crash
courtesy of Luxman, Luxenbourg. Hunt the Boeing! And test your perceptions! As everyone knows, on 11 September, less than an hour after the attack on the World Trade Centre, an airplane collided with the Pentagon. The Associated Press first reported that a booby-trapped truck had caused the explosion. The Pentagon quickly denied this. The official US government version of events still holds. Here's a little game for you: Take a look at these photographs and try to find evidence to corroborate the official version. It's up to you to Hunt the Boeing! Did you find the Boeing? Can you still defend the official version of events? > Well done! Remember to get in touch with master of illusion, David Copperfield. He'll be glad to hear from you! You found the official version lacking in something (like a Boeing, for example): > If you begin to question whether a Boeing really did crash on the Pentagon then, no doubt, you'll be wondering what happened to the aircraft that disappeared
25
POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."