A circular coin held at a slant to you doesn’t look like a true ellipse. The half that’s closer to you will be fuller and the half that’s away from you will be flatter because of perspective.
ETA: Pfft points out below that circles actually map to ellipses under perspective projection. Before I posted this, I took a look at an angled circle, and it looked as I described it—at the moment, they’re looking like true ellipses.
Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color. Take a careful look at someone who’s wearing a monochrome garment. Very little of it will be the color you think it is—most of it will be much lighter or much darker, and this doesn’t take into account the effects of the colors of nearby objects getting reflected onto it.
It took a major effort of will for me to hear the way I pronounce water. I have a Delaware accent, and I say warter. It looks ugly in print, but it sounds wetter and altogether more like H2O than the more usual wahter—which also looks weird in print.
My last name is Lebovitz. Most of the people I’ve dealt with can’t say it accurately or remember it, even if they’re told it twice, had it spelled for them, and shown it in print. The problem is that Leibowitz is more common, and most people seem to slot in the more common name so strongly that they can’t perceive immediate sensory input that’s a little different.
This is an irritant for me, but the cognitively important aspect is that if something so simple (all the phonemes in my name are part of the standard English set) and objective is so hard to perceive, how much more are we missing which doesn’t have a person saying “that’s a short ‘e’ and a ‘v’ not a ‘w’ ” to us?
Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color.
One of Dennett’s points is the misleading notion that our mind “fills in”. In the case of vision, our brain doesn’t “paint in” missing visual data, such as the area in our field of vision not captured by our fovea. Our brains simply lack epistemic hunger for such information in order to perform the tasks that they need to.
I’ve noticed that this account potentially explains how color works in my dreams. My dreams aren’t even black and white—the visual aspects are mostly just forms. However, if the color has meaning or emotion, it’s there. I recently had a dream where I looked up at the sky, and the moon was huge and black, moving in a rapid arc across the sky then suddenly diving into the Earth causing an apocalyptic wave of dirt to head towards me. The vivid blackness was present, because it meant something to me emotionally. The houses, in comparison, merely had form, but no color. In any case, it seems that the question “Do we dream in color?” can’t be answered adequately if using a “filling in” model of the mind.
On the name issue, Steve Yegge has a great story about people mis-spelling his name. Scroll down to “You know how sometimes they lose your file?” (or just read the whole thing, because it’s all pretty good).
The v in Spanish pronunciation is actually a hybrid b/v sound. I always heard v until this was pointed out, then I could switch at will between them when hearing a piece of audio.
A circular coin held at a slant to you doesn’t look like a true ellipse. The half that’s closer to you will be fuller and the half that’s away from you will be flatter because of perspective.
ETA: Pfft points out below that circles actually map to ellipses under perspective projection. Before I posted this, I took a look at an angled circle, and it looked as I described it—at the moment, they’re looking like true ellipses.
Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color. Take a careful look at someone who’s wearing a monochrome garment. Very little of it will be the color you think it is—most of it will be much lighter or much darker, and this doesn’t take into account the effects of the colors of nearby objects getting reflected onto it.
It took a major effort of will for me to hear the way I pronounce water. I have a Delaware accent, and I say warter. It looks ugly in print, but it sounds wetter and altogether more like H2O than the more usual wahter—which also looks weird in print.
My last name is Lebovitz. Most of the people I’ve dealt with can’t say it accurately or remember it, even if they’re told it twice, had it spelled for them, and shown it in print. The problem is that Leibowitz is more common, and most people seem to slot in the more common name so strongly that they can’t perceive immediate sensory input that’s a little different.
This is an irritant for me, but the cognitively important aspect is that if something so simple (all the phonemes in my name are part of the standard English set) and objective is so hard to perceive, how much more are we missing which doesn’t have a person saying “that’s a short ‘e’ and a ‘v’ not a ‘w’ ” to us?
One of Dennett’s points is the misleading notion that our mind “fills in”. In the case of vision, our brain doesn’t “paint in” missing visual data, such as the area in our field of vision not captured by our fovea. Our brains simply lack epistemic hunger for such information in order to perform the tasks that they need to.
I’ve noticed that this account potentially explains how color works in my dreams. My dreams aren’t even black and white—the visual aspects are mostly just forms. However, if the color has meaning or emotion, it’s there. I recently had a dream where I looked up at the sky, and the moon was huge and black, moving in a rapid arc across the sky then suddenly diving into the Earth causing an apocalyptic wave of dirt to head towards me. The vivid blackness was present, because it meant something to me emotionally. The houses, in comparison, merely had form, but no color. In any case, it seems that the question “Do we dream in color?” can’t be answered adequately if using a “filling in” model of the mind.
Circles do in fact map to ellipses under perspective projection—it’s a rather counter-intuitive fact of projective geometry.
On the name issue, Steve Yegge has a great story about people mis-spelling his name. Scroll down to “You know how sometimes they lose your file?” (or just read the whole thing, because it’s all pretty good).
That was an awesome link.
The v in Spanish pronunciation is actually a hybrid b/v sound. I always heard v until this was pointed out, then I could switch at will between them when hearing a piece of audio.
Just to make sure I understand, the first vowel sound in your last name is the same as the one in “red”, not “reed”, right?
Yes. Thanks for checking.