We are deeply intuitively familiar with our everyday physical world, so it was perhaps a bit of a surprise when researchers discovered a blind spot in our intuitive physical reasoning: it seems humans are oddly terrible at judging knot strength. One example is the reef knot (top) vs. the grief knot (bottom). One is considerably […]
Last year, mathematician and professional optical illusionist [Kokichi Sugihara] came up with an arrow that only points one way. Technically, it’s ‘anomalous mirror symmetry’, but if you print this arrow and look at it juuuussst right, it appears this arrow only points one way. [Ali] had the idea to turn this arrow illusion into something […]