Ben Balas

YouTube video by SeeingScience Does Jim Carrey have a Doppelgänger, or is #FaceRecognition just harder than it seems? #science

I thought this business about Jim Carrey possibly having a doppelganger required a response from someone who thinks a lot about the #Science of #FaceRecognition. Enjoy! youtube.com/shorts/PpPU_...

YouTube video by SeeingScience A big optical #illusion in a tiny room! The #science of the Ames Room.

Still learning the ropes at YouTube, but I've got a new version of my Ames Room video set up as a Short now! Check out the #science of how linear perspective cues can lead you to make big errors when judging object size! #psychscisky #visionscience youtube.com/shorts/a0uPD...

My wife spotted a rebel meadowlark in ND a few days ago!

This thread has some incredible #sciart for you to marvel at. Give @artologica.net a follow for more!

YouTube video by SeeingScience Do you know what a penny looks like? A Seeing #Science History Lesson in #psychology

Just put up a new YouTube short about a classic #cogsci experiment: Our poor memory for what a penny looks like! Given that the penny is retiring, I thought it was worth talking about this great piece of #psychology history. Enjoy!

Kids These Days Don’t Spend Winter in Haunted Hotels Anymore On The Shining and Shelley Duvall

The kiddo just put up her first article over at Medium! This one's a great discussion of Shelley Duvall's performance in The Shining, so go check it out if you like #HorrorMovies and great pop-culture writing! #FilmSky #HorrorSky

Science of Chess: Seeing moves with momentum over the board Prediction is fundamental to how we see, and for strong players it's also part of what they see OTB.

A new #science of #chess post over on my lichess blog! This time I'm looking at a study demonstrating that stronger players make automatic predictions of next moves that affect their perception for better and for worse. Enjoy!

Drome by Jesse Lonergan "One of the best books of the year.” —Booklist, starred reviewJesse Lonergan rewrites the rules o...

Just finished reading @jesselonergan.bsky.social's fantastic DROME. To borrow a word from the book, this one feels "elemental." So many beautiful panels and pages, and the way movement stands out as a core component of the narrative was fascinating. Def. going to read and re-read this one.

Now published in Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social)!

Schulz-Hildebrandt, H. (2026). When purple perceived only at fixation: A fixation- and distance-dependent color illusion. Perception, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/0301...

Fargo Theatre gears up for 26th Fargo Film Festival The community icon is also celebrating a century of arts with its 100th anniversary parties.

I'm incredibly excited for this year's Fargo Film Festival! This year I was a jury member, so I can tell you that there's a bunch of excellent submissions coming to the newly-renovated Fargo Theatre in a few weeks. Get yourself to Fargo and check out some great films!

Thought I'd share this scratch-art portrait of the Log Lady in honor of #TwinPeaks day. Like so many of my portraits, it looks a little like a combination of the person I was trying to draw and someone I know personally (in this case, one of b's grade-school teachers).

This is great!

The kiddo is almost certainly going to watch the pilot for the umpteenth time on this #TwinPeaks Day and I might just have to join her.

YouTube video by SeeingScience Seeing size wrong in a model Ames Room!

Gearing up for our Spectacular Science Celebration at #NDSU tomorrow and thought I'd post a quick video of one of the demos we'll have out: The tiny Ames Room! #visionscience #stemeducation

YouTube video by SeeingScience Seeing Faces That Aren't There - A SeeingScience Research Report!

I've got a new #visionscience #scicomm video for you! In this one, I talk about one of our recent papers about face #pareidolia - enjoy! #PsychSciSky #STEMEducation

You don’t need Disney-level resources and drawing skills to create animation.

People have made classics with sand and a source of light. With magazine clippings, or their own bodies animated via stop motion. There’s no barrier to entry, as we explore: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/sand-and-a...

A flapper in a bat costume with spread wings against a backdrop of sun rays

A woman and her collie in a forest of birch trees, their forms interplaying with the brown of the background

A well-dressed lady inspects several hats in a nicely-appointed milliner’s shop. She is picked out from the black background by the red buttons and detailing on her long coat.

A young lady poses in front of a beach umbrella, the shadow tones merging her figure with it.

C. Coles Phillips was an illustrator born in Springfield OH, a longtime staff artist at Life magazine & Good Housekeeping’s sole cover artist from 1912-14. He was famous for his “fadeaway girls,” figures which use the background color & negative space to fill in the blanks.

#historyofillustration

a group of people dancing on a stage with a cloud in the background ALT: a group of people dancing on a stage with a cloud in the background

Movie night at home with WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. We were waaaay past due for showing this to the kiddo and it was absolutely as funny as I remembered. #movies

Kiwanis Pancake Karnival Returns for 68th Installment - KVRR Local News FARGO, N.D. (KVRR) – A time-honored tradition returned to the Fargodome this Saturday for breakfast delights and community fundraising. The 68th annual Kiwanis Pancake Karnival once again brought in r...

My Mid-Western Dad streak continues: First, I was interviewed about snow shoveling a few months ago. Now, I'm lurking in the background of the photo accompanying a local news story about the Kiwanis Pancake event I volunteered at today. #dadenergy

Bloody Valentines: Horror and Romance as the Perfect Combo Hi all, and happy Valentine’s Day! On this most romantic day during what is objectively the worst month, I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss the...

Excellent #ValentinesDay post from @blaisebalas.bsky.social about #HorrorMovies and #Romance and why they go together so well. Go read and subscribe for your regular fix of great pop culture writing! buttondown.com/blaisebalas/...

Anna Atkins’ blue algae and the dawn of photography Every architect knows what a blueprint is. Fewer know the process behind it — cyanotype printing — was first used not for buildings but for algae. In 1843, English botanist…

Anna Atkins' blue algae and the dawn of photography boingboing.net/2026/02/12/a...

YouTube video by SeeingScience How do upside-down goggles work?

The #scicomm content creation journey continues with another short #visionscience video! In this one, I take apart some upside-down goggles to show you how they flip everything you see. Enjoy (and don't forget to subscribe)! www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcB9...

The 11th hour - or how I invented a card game that might even be fun Learning a bunch of new solitaire games got me wondering how you design one

New post over on my Substack - this time about #solitaire instead of #chess! I got kind of into learning new Solitaire games recently and decided to try inventing my own - if you want to read about it (and maybe try it out) go check out the article here.

I've been in a bit of a #chess slump lately (esp. in Bullet and Blitz) but I'm super proud of this 10-minute game today: 6 Brilliant moves in the endgame! Surely not going to happen again anytime soon, but at least makes me feel like I'm learning a little something.

How to Hack Magic Eye Images Turning a tough binocular phenomenon into an easy monocular one.

...go check out my most recent Substack post about how Magic Eye images work and how this approach lets us rely on an easy monocular depth cue instead of a tricky binocular one. Enjoy! 👁️🧠📽️

benbalas.substack.com/p/how-to-hac...

YouTube video by SeeingScience How to Hack a Magic Eye Stereogram!

I've got a new #visionscience video for you! Today I'm showing off how to see the hidden object in Magic Eye stereograms without worrying about getting your eyes lined up the right way.

If you're interested in reading why this works... <1/2>

Great perspective by @juliafstrand.bsky.social on building an undergrad lab! I've mostly worked with undergrad RAs throughout my career and I think we've done a lot of work and made the lab a good place to gain skills and experience for a lot of different next steps. #PsychSciSky #visionscience

Catherine O'Hara: An Absolute Legend Hi all, and welcome back to So Desensitized! Today’s post was going to be about something else, and then Catherine O’Hara died and I just didn’t feel right...

New post from @blaisebalas.bsky.social at So Desensitized about Catherine O'Hara's passing and her wonderfully weird and always hilarious work on-screen. buttondown.com/blaisebalas/... #Movies #FilmSky

Great #visionscience question from @michaelanes.bsky.social! The more you can get students to work on looking at things and talking through what they see, the more I think you can steer them away from thinking of learning as just the accumulation of facts.

Thanks for sharing this! This is a great paper and I hope I didn't mangle it too much in the blog post. 😀