Michael Bach

A static image of the Mainz-Linez illusion: 4 vertical wiggly lines, in the middle of each a red disk. A small black cross in the center.

A new addition to my “Visual Phenomena and Optical Illusions” collection: “Mainz-Linez”. Here's the live demonstration and explanation of the somewhat mysterious title: michaelbach.de/ot/mot-Mainz.... Enjoy!

Screenshot of the ever-rising Shepard scale with frequency spectrum.

michaelbach.de/ot/aud-Shepa...
My demo of the ever rising scale, invented by Roger Shepard, had failed due to new security restrictions in browsers. I rewrote it and added plot showing amplitude vs. log(frequency), hopefully making it easier to understand this amazing effect. Enjoy! #illusion

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial-A dream and a bit of a nightmare

Serving as Editor-in-Chief at Science was fascinating. I greatly enjoyed working with talented and committed editorial, news, graphics, and production staff. But the inside look into scientific publishing and AAAS was also deeply disillusioning.

Belatedly I notice that others also have posted likewise. No matter, strengthens the intent.

Part of a cartoon.

Quitting the Washington Post: anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-qui.... Impressive, my admiration! Good read. Hope not harbinger of worse things to come. I learned of it via daringfireball.net.

A spider web, frosted

Bicycling through the nearby woods, I happenchanced upon this frosty gem.

How are people that used to be evidently smart so bad at understanding obvious truths that they actively destroyed the value of their core product?

Open the present by shaking the tree? Or is this Schrodinger's gift?

Two data plots. On the left needlessly landscape, on the right quadratic like the data themselves.

🧪In our journal club: Just had a paper where the authors needlessly made their figures rectangular, although the content was quadratic (same range on x- and y-axis). It really should be quadratic to understand the content better, also the identity line is then at 45°. Old gripe of mine, sorry 😎.

Great! How did you do that, with a VDU? And what was the delay between center and periphery?

ah, can't remember ever having heard about that.

One possible explanation: Flash is brighter in the center. And in the retina 10x brighter is about 14 ms faster.

that's the cow I meant.

Or Dallenbach's cow?

Are you possibly referring to Mooney Faces?

Graph showing LoA steadily decrease with the number of trials, above 18 slower. Inset is the FrACT icon.

A new paper on FrACT michaelbach.de/fract/: “Freiburg Vision Test (FrACT): Optimal number of trials?” (open access) dx.doi.org/10.1007/s004.... Mysterious “kink” at 18 trials (figure): 18 trials a good compromise between fatigue and precision for Sloan letters or 8-alternative Landolt-Cs.

It helps if you know Objective C + Apples GUI toolbox (in fact, nearly the same). I programmed over 100 #visual phenomena ( #illusions) and a major vision test battery with it…

I wrote a program to add the page numbers to the index words (its even on GitHub), but my editor said my selection was crap ( in politer words)…
Advice I thought of too late: set up a long-lasting web page for errata and put the URL into the book.

A crocodile swallows the word "Science"

I just finished an experiment: For three weeks I responded to every "invitation" from a predatory journal with "STOP PESTERING ME". Results: I now receive about twice as many per day than before… Time to end the experiment and conclude that I'm just validating my email for them 😎. #science