Someone was looking to set up some LED panels, and I insisted they should form an icosahedron net for no particular purpose, as is my wont. Long story short, I tricked myself into learning a few things.
read morePosts about topics that I don’t actually have any experience in. The Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force.
Someone was looking to set up some LED panels, and I insisted they should form an icosahedron net for no particular purpose, as is my wont. Long story short, I tricked myself into learning a few things.
read moreWhere “alternate” pretty unambiguously means “better,” but I couldn’t pass up the alliteration. Previously I’ve shown how human cone cells certainly do not peak at red, green and blue frequencies. But those colours are only associated with the peaks; what would it mean to depict the entire range of responses as a single colour? The […]
read moreObservation: red and green lights make yellow; green and blue lights make greenish-blue… Hypothesis: additive mixtures of lights average out the wavelengths to an intermediate colour. Prediction: red and blue together will produce green. Experimental: nope – it made purple. Now, audience participation time – choose your own Conclusion! colours add by a mechanism somewhat […]
read moreInternet assertion: Humans see colour with red, green, and blue cone cells, named for the colours they best detect. Human cone peak sensitivities: This is part of the reason why the labels L, M, and S (for “long”, “medium”, and “short”) are used exclusively in the literature: the traditional names for cone cells have almost […]
read moreIn any “discussion” concerning the “merits” of degrees Celsius versus degrees Fahrenheit, there’s an even chance someone will joke that we should all be using kelvins instead. Well I’m that guy, but without joking. Two principle reasons: it makes more sense, and nothing useful is lost. more sense There’s a lot of talk over how […]
read moreFor some reason the Ampere, a unit of electrical current, is a base unit of the SI, and electrical charge – an actual physical property of particles – is a derived unit. It’s quite comparable to defining velocity as a base unit and deriving length from that. Worth noting is that, from 2019 onwards, the […]
read moreIn the realm of colourimetry, some form of chromaticity diagram is a convenient tool to see and understand what coordinates in a given colour space mean and how they relate to each other. Colour is inherently three-dimensional, but by transforming the space such that one of those dimensions represents luminance, it can be reduced to […]
read moreYou’ve heard of Kruger and Dunning’s famous Effect, right? Wherein people who are really bad at something think they’re real hotshots? In fact, let’s ask the internet for some graphical aid: And this isn’t just some internet nobody’s conception of human behaviour – they’re all citing Kruger & Dunning (1999) (but usually less explicitly). Well, […]
read moreBy this point you are perhaps vaguely aware of the presence of feathers on these animals called birds. Does this accurately describe you? Read on! These feathers didn’t come from just nowhere, and it turns out that at least a dozen dinosaur taxa more basal than birds are preserved with some sort of filamentous integumentary […]
read moreA common objection when it comes to discussion of modern dinosaurs is always phrased the same way: “birds aren’t dinosaurs; they’re descended from dinosaurs.” It’s exactly as helpful, meaningful and accurate an assertion as insisting “birds are descended from animals.” It’s true, but what actual point is it trying to make? Presumably the problem is […]
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