overt and covert

Beginning with some lines of haiku lifted from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Hyperallergic explores how the battery of diagnostic tests that psychologists use or purport to use (recalling that for the Rorschach ink blots and the like, there are no wrong answers—just crazy ones) taken out of the clinical-setting and context become accidental-art. I especially enjoyed the primer on the now discredited narrative-type or storytelling exams, like the Thematic Apperception Test or Make a Picture Story that operated on the principle that the subject’s motives and character would be revealed by his or her projections, since our veiled self-indictments must mean that we are repressed or vicarious ourselves.

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.