7/4
i'm thankful that i don't have to work today but i also don't have to go anywhere or talk to anyone who expects me to celebrate this country.
i'm thankful for this transcript of paul robeson's appearance before the house committee on un-american activities in 1956.
i'm thankful for this video of an imaginary rollercoaster.
i'm thankful, though the voice is a bit over the top yukk yukky at times, for this fascinating post about the problem of building a calendar and how slippery time can be.
i'm thankful for this paragraph from a metafilter thread (all but one of these links are from metafilter threads somewhere or another) about visual perception:
"As you read this sentence, you are making rapid eye movements, called "saccades," to shift the focus of your eyes in discrete little hops across the line of the sentence (and then at the end of the line, down to the next sentence). Humans tend to make multiple saccades per second during tasks like reading, driving, and playing sports, often without being aware of these tiny motor movements. And I do mean tiny. It takes about 100 ms for your brain to plan a saccade to a new location, and about 50 ms for the actual motor movement of your eyeballs rotating in their orbits. Here's the neat part: if you think about it, for each saccade, the light information that is hitting your retina is changing with every. Single. Saccade. Every time you move your eyes, you are upending the visual input your brain receives. But we aren't aware of that disruption. We perceive a stable visual world. How?
Right when your brain says "make a saccade," you shut down taking in new visual input until after the saccade ends. That means your system is effectively blind to new information while you're moving your eyes. Which makes sense -- all that information would just be blurry and streaky anyway because we move our eyes so quickly. When your eye lands, you get that new information and you re-map or refresh your previous knowledge of the world with the new visual information."
i'm thankful for this video about weird mario kart 64 speed runs and alternate dimensions.
i'm thankful for this video from sungwon cho about a guy who never figured out the walt disney logo, which i have watched a hundred times but still makes me laugh every time.
i'm thankful to get to go running now before the heat of the day sets in.
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