Invisible, but instrumental

On a non-unsual Quora binge, I noticed something unusual.

After performing an operation, there was a double horizontal separator between two segments

See red arrow

Ok, little bug in the interface, no biggie.

But then, with horizontal separators on my mind, when I looked back at the page, I also saw all this:

See soooo many red arrows!

Quora actually uses horizontal separators pretty heavily, but it's not immediately noticible when you glance at a page.
The thing your brain focuses on is the content. It doesn't take not of something as insignificant as a horizontal separator, but when you draw it's attention to it, you notice exactly how many times it is used.

This seems like a good manifestation of how our brain heavily filters the mass of raw data it gets from our senses, and only conciously remembers what it thinks is important.

Designers take advantage of this, and use seemingly innocuous objects like these separators to frame their content.

Restart

After more than a month of hiatus, I return to the blogging circuit.
Articles everyday is the goal.
Let's hit it.

Expect only the best.
 

Is Science SO unknown?

Today, at the supermarket, a salesperson who had set up a booth was trying to sell me some detergent. I ignored him at first, but then he tried to emphasize that this was not regular detergent. It had their special "Power of Vibrating Molecules" technology. 
Wait... WHAT? I asked him to repeat. He seemed pleased at my incredulity, and went on to repeat it. 

Quick tangent: You know you've had too much internet when the first thing you think of when you see a public slip up is: "I should blog about this!".

I'm not going to waste characters trying to explain why this is wrong.

Just, no.

What I want to know, is why advertisers, marketers and designers can get away with this at all?

There are, as far as I can think, two possible scenarios that could have taken place.

1.  The people ivolved didn't know middle school science, which everyone  is supposed to have given exams on.
   There's not much I can say about this except they are probably not competent enough to do their job. I'm not asking everybody working at detergent factory to know the entire chemistry behind hydrophobicity, but they at least the people in charge of putting words on the label should know enough science not to humiliate themselves and the rest of the company.
   
   You may think this eventuality is bad, but the next one is even worse.
    
2. The people involved knew the basic science behind this, but didn't think it would be a problem because the target audience was not sufficiently educated to know the truth.
   This basically means that the people who study their target audience for a living have come to the conclusion that said audience is so woefully ignorant of science that they could write just about anything they pleased and people would lap it up, and still buy their product.

If this isn't proof of concept that the general population is in urgent need of a little science education, I don't know what is.

Let's play a little game

There is a simple new post, typically Oliver Emberton, on his blog.

Read it.

No, seriously read it. Only then, should you read on.

If you've not read it, and played the entire game, then you're ruining it for yourself.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Sure?

Ok.

That was your face when the secret was revealed. 
It was, come on.

So, psychological tests. They can sometimes seem like the most enlightening of tools and sometimes, the silliest. How can we tell the difference?

The basis behind this particular game is it makes the players mind project it's own image onto routine, blank objects, like cubes and ladders. As it adds attributes to those objects those attributes can be, well, attributed to certain characteristics about the person's behaviour.

This is a fairly interesting way to glean information about people, and I have tested it on a samples (read: friends I could get hold of). The results were fairly accurate, if a bit vague. With friends, there was also the tendency to interpret the signs according to my perception of them.

So, why don't you give it a go? Ask a few people, gauge the result against their admitted characteristics, and hopefully, tell us about the results.

If you liked this, then you should read some of Oliver's best material. He's a great writer, and one of the first people that I bumped into when I ventured on Quora.

Molecular Logic Gates

Interdisciplinary inventions are always a source of interesting phenomena, and not just because it sometimes involves co-operation between physicists and chemists (I may have been joking).

In this exercise, a team of chemists used organo-metallic compounds to create logic gates. I go into the schmience on the schmience blog, but here, I wanted to discuss the concept and the effects of biological computing.

Electronics and Organic Chemistry. It's like mixing pandas and broken rubik's cubes.

When I asked around (read: people standing next to me in the lunch line) about the first thing that they thought of when I mentioned biological computing, they 'brain' or 'artificial brain' or some variant of that trend. This venture of making biology like the existing physics, is the heart of my question.

Taking into consideration the almost incomprehensibly complex piece of mush that is our brain, and also mind-bogglingly fast and accurate computing marvels that we've produced today:
Should we work towards making physically realistic biological simulations (like the one this article features), or biologically-realistic physics simulations (like neural networks)?

Open question.