cognitive inference

Perhaps avert your eyes if you find such optical effects to be headache or vertigo inducing, but Jacques Ninio’s classic Extinction Illusion has twelve fleeting dots on the grid that dash away when you try to focus on them is really worth a spare moment or two. Hardly anyone can see all the dots at once due to poor peripheral vision and the mind’s eye tends to generate solid crossings over the scintillating, contrasting gaps. I wonder how someone manages to design an optical illusion that’s meant to be evasive and dazzling in the first place.

beautifish or rub-a-dub

The UK government made a laudable decision last week, in favour of the environment, mostly unnoticed and quite unilaterally (which kind of makes me wonder if Britain were still in the EU if it could have done so without extensive consultation—and regardless, it would surely be better if the whole bloc enacted this ban) pledging to prohibit the use of plastic microbeads in cosmetics.
In response to a petition championed by several environmental organisations and voluntary-industry action, the tiny plastic beads which for whatever reason were introduced to toothpaste, soaps and facial scrubs (instead of salt or diatoms, I suppose—microscopic fossils of plankton that used to do the scrubbing) will be totally phased out by next year. Although it is disturbing enough that one’s morning shower eventually floods the oceans with billions of tiny particles that enter into the food-chain and never go away, there’s an even more dismaying aspect to consider: though far from inconsequential, the plastic beads are rather harmless in themselves (at least relatively less so for marine life that macro-sized plastic pollution) being inert. That characteristic makes the beads a magnet for the other nasty things that man puts in the seas. Most artificial toxins are hydrophobic and could latch on to the beads and bring more chemicals into the ecosystem. I hope Britain’s stance goes global.

the league of extravagant grannies

Via the fabulous Messy Nessy Chic, we learn about the design duo of Osbourne Macharia and Kevin Abraham who invent, lavishly embellished, and then document fictional scenes and sub-cultures in their native Kenya. Check out more of their uplifting and fun work here.

a halo darkly

Via the always interesting Kottke (who’s sporting a spiffy new look) we learn that tiny, dwarf galaxies as they age can attain a higher concentration of dark matter than the apparent universal constant of one part to five (in favour of the weakly reacting sort of matter rather than the one, baryonic, that we experience) because normal matter is much more flightly and prone to erosion by more massive galactic neighbours.
As counterintuitive as it seems, that much was at least expected and could be a sort of lens for getting to better understand the unidentified nature of dark matter, but astronomers were astounded to detect a wholly new class of galaxies—first spotted in the faint and shy wall-flower called Dragonfly 44. The galaxy appears to be almost entirely composed of dark matter (whether there’s a totality of dark energy as well in the mix is not mentioned) but it’s roughly the same size as the Milky Way. Imagine a galaxy our size but instead of four-hundred billion, there’s only a paltry four to eight billion stars knocking together out there—suggesting that there is something very flawed in the way we think galaxies coalesce and evolve, since those lonely stars ought to be pulled apart and absorbed into other star systems. Researchers are hoping to find more of these big, “empty” galaxies looming closer to home and perhaps observe dark matter and its properties directly.