Irrationality? Floating rocks? Rockbergs! Feb 14, 2018

Floating ice and floating rocks, small pond on campus, March 7, 2016

Time to reread one of my favorite books, Irrationality, by Stuart Sutherland. An excuse for a few quotes. He's funny; you have to watch for it.

"What constitutes a rational decision depends upon one's knowledge. There is a rider to this. If one has reason to believe one's knowledge is insufficient, then it is rational, particularly in the case of important decisions, to seek out more evidence: unfortunately, as we will see, when people do so, they usually act in a wholly irrational way, since they only seek evidence that will support their existing beliefs." (p. 5)

"The effects of conformity on beliefs and attitudes are the more injurious because people tend to associate with others who have similar beliefs to themselves. ... the only way to substantiate a belief is to try to disprove it. But because like mixes with like, people are rarely exposed to counter-arguments to their more deeply held convictions, let alone to counter-evidence. Their beliefs conform to those of their associates: hence, there is little possibility of eliminating persistent errors. "(p. 41)

"Everyone is irrational some of the time and in particular everyone is susceptible to the availability error. I give a final striking example ... In 1969, Jerzy Kosinsky's novel Steps won the American National Book Award for fiction. Eight years later some joker had it retyped and sent the manuscript with no title and under a false name to fourteen major publishers and thirteen literary agents in the US, including ... the firm that had originally published it. Of the twenty-seven people to whom it was submitted, not one recognised that it had already been published. Moreover, all twenty-seven rejected it. All it lacked was Jerzy Kosinsky's name to create the halo effect: without the name, it was seen as an indifferent book." (pp. 28-29)

"People have an amazing capacity to remember pictures. After being shown 10,000 photographs just once they can correctly recognize almost all of them a week later. This is in marked contrast to the very poor memory for isolated words."(p. 19)

"The term 'love' was defined in an authoritative dictionary of psychology as 'a form of mental illness not yet recognised in the standard diagnostic manuals'. (p. 115) [The authoritative dictionary was written by S. Sutherland...]

Now, about those floating rocks. I have seen that pond drained. It is about knee-deep, and there are no rocks sticking up in it. What happens is that when the pond freezes over, students throw rocks out onto the ice, trying to break it. At first this doesn't succeed, and in the freeze-thaw cycles, some of the rocks get frozen to the ice. When they finally break it [that's why there are those entirely unnatural sharp edges to the ice], some of those rocks are attached to large enough pieces of ice to support them, mostly invisible under the water, and the rocks go floating around the pond. Rockbergs.

Re-examine what you see. Go over the evidence. There are floating rocks, and underground jumping rocks. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

But real. With rational explanations.


He gives citations for almost everything, but not for the Jerzy Kosinsky story. I have to wonder who that 'joker' was who re-submitted the story...

The Sun has been practicing the moon illusion

This was taken June 26, about 8:00 PM daylight time. As you can see, not yet sunset. But the sky was very smoky, and it was possible to look right at the sun, which looked overall orange. And, as it neared the horizon, it looked very large, like a harvest moon.

For a couple of things about the moon illusion:

http://illusionsetc.blogspot.com/2005/11/moon-optical-illusion.html

http://www.lhup.edu/%7Edsimanek/3d/moonillu.htm

One of them mentions that the sun does it too, except that we can't look directly at the sun, usually. Well, that day it was smoky enough that we could. Here it was large and orange. Some places, the smoke caused a lavender sun, as at Arcata over on the coast. Wish I'd seen that.

http://yubanet.com/scitech/Unusually-widespread-haze-is-causing-a-rare-atmospheric-optics-phenomenon---the-lavender-sun_printer.php

A couple of days later, it was a surprise to see real light and shadows again, it'd been so long.

It's getting smoky again.

Papercut color

I did this design several years ago when I was taking color theory, as a papercut. It was my favorite of several I did at the time. Red-violet & blue-green, two colors that are both capable of looking either warm or cool, depending on context. The idea is that it looks like a light is shining through the page.

The inspirations for this series of designs included Harriet Hargrave's books on Baltimore Album papercut-design quilts, and the symmetry of William Morris' fabric designs.

I always thought it would be fun on a t-shirt. Now, with Cafepress, I just have to send them the design to have it on a tee. Also, of course, a pillow, and a tile box and a round ornament or magnet. This version has been Photoshopped for richer color and some texture.

With luck I'll have a new section for it up at Cafepress this weekend. Leave me a comment if there's any particular item you'd like to see it on that I don't have.

July 6 2008

I got the whole section done up at Cafepress, including the new color t-shirts, and my new color variants on the design a few weeks ago. WRW Color by Design

And now, at Spoonflower, I can have one of my alternate color versions tiled as fabric, unique custom fabric, digitally printed!

Kaleidoscope Night Sky

This is my coloring of a classic quilt pattern called Kaleidoscope. I designed something similar some years ago, but never made it. I didn't mean to stay up so late last night drawing it in Illustrator, but it took a long time to figure out how to recreate this effect; the coloring is not at all the classic one. I wanted to get an illusion of depth, and of light shining through the surface, and I think this succeeds. Half-close your eyes to see the light and dark pattern better.

When I first designed this (with colored pencils and markers on graph paper), part of what stopped me from making it was the potential difficulty of finding the fabrics with the color gradients needed to get the effects of depth and light. Traditional fabric printing doesn't do gradients very well. I wasn't dyeing yet. Now I could dye or dye-paint a gradient that could do those patches. And since I used my favorite colors, these are ones I have worked out how to dye.

I could have found a black with white stars fabric, probably. In this version, those tiny stars are 5 and 6 points, and they have colored edges. I'd never find a fabric like that, though now I could dye-paint a black and white batik with faint star colors.

There are at least 3 sizes of circles in this design that can be brought out by the coloring; this version shows the mid-size one. Although I have used colors halfway between the blue and blue-green, and the blue and purple, in those overlapping circles, it just looks right, not as if the colors are a transparent overlap, which I thought it might. (By the way, there's one gradient direction error in the picture - do you see it? I never have to worry about the hubris of trying to rival the gods with perfection, since I always make errors. And no need to put in a deliberate error either, like the Amish.)

Now in the comments at Dressaday on the June 6 Black and Pink stripes post, Jasmin told us about digital textile printing for fabrics. This is a similar process to printing on treated fabrics with your inkjet, and fixing the prints (supplies at dharmatrading.com) which I've done. But unless you have a very large printer, that's only for 8.5x11 inches pieces. These new technologies are becoming available for custom printing even for small yardages, if you have digital images in the right formats. And they do millions of colors beautifully, so gradients will work.

So I could have printed enough for a bedspread or wall-hanging, or a designer dress! Or sell the design to a digital printer who wants to make commercial yardage. At a minimum I'm going to upload a high-resolution version to my Cafepress store, WRW Color by Design and put it on a throw pillow with black borders, since I'd love to have one of them. And maybe a black tee-shirt…