Eyes in macro and more rayleigh LOL

Oh, the colours of the eye. I read something quite interesting today... Eyes, namely, the irises, they can only be 2 colours. Clear, or brown. The other colours are... Well, they're not caused by the object actually being coloured. Brilliant, right?

As I was saying, the brownness in your eyes are pigments; Little splotches of colour, in essence. Organic colouring is called pigments. Or something along those lines. Were full of it. Basically all the colours of our bodies are created when hemoglobin, and melanin, our natural pigment, both skin and eye, combine to make colours together. Brilliant, right?

To give you some interesting perspective, the only difference between bright skinned people and dark skinned people the difference in concentrations of melanin in their respective skin cells!

Back to the topic, aye (THAT RHYMES WITH EYE HAHA). So what are the other colours? Obviously, some people have blue eyes. Or green. Can you guess? YES IT'S RAYLEIGH SCATTERING

Ive written about it a couple times already... Slight dejavu, here. Anyhow, it's the same kind of elastic scattering that makes the sky look blue! How? Structural colouring! The atoms and such, in your eyes, are structured in a very specific way, that bends light in the same way as individual particles in the sky do!

Lots of animals, especially feathered such, make use of structural colouring (What evolutionary purpose it serves, I do not know.). Take the feathers of a peacock, for example. Or the iridiscent feathery wings of a duck. They kinda shift colour when the angle of view changes, and this is a telltale, but not conclusive, sign that indicates structural colouring.

The results of the mingling of these pigments and this structure are the beautiful orbs of spectation that we get to carry in our heads. Fucking brilliant.





Whats more, MACROSCOPIC PHOTOGRAPHY
OF SAID FUCKING EYES
WOOP

I made this little experiment. Mouse over the pictures, I implore you.

Actual egopics

 I'll apologize beforehand, because this isn't what my entries are generally like, but I feel I've been neglecting photographing, and especially portraits, for a long time. So I've decided to fuck the art for once, and just post pictures of my ugly mug instead! Woo!

In truth, there were a whole lot more than 3 photos taken. More like 50. I figured I might have included them as an animated GIF, to save place on the blog and still show most of them, but that just didn't work.

And yeah, I'm kinda naked in those photos! Almost. It all started when I had been making a sandwich, really. This ray of light, bound in from the window, hit me just as I walked past a mirror, on the way back to my PC. Fuck, I thought. What a hunk. Then I had this awesome idea, and I placed the mirror in the path of the light, reflecting it outwards again. Voila, a setup with 2 lightsources, one providing that brilliant backlight, the other shining up my face in a gloriously contrasted and overexposed fashion.

And so I sat there for like atleast an hour, in the crossfire of these 2 blinding lights in my dark room, taking pictures of myself through the mirror. And I had to move the mirror and myself constantly to keep with the moving ray of light!

Creating the most badass photos ever witnessed by man was my initial idea. I rocked them sunglasses, and all that. But that just looked fucking weird, really. I cant post that here. These 3 looked deep enough, I thought. I only made black and white photos, because.. I don't know, I don't look good in colour?


Myep. I wasn't feeling that inspired in writing about anything scientific today, so this will have to do! Some easy reading, for you. I'm getting lazy, again, aren't I. I need to get a hold of myself!

cuteness and robotic stuff-

Cuteness. Its not actually a personal thing, it hasn't got very much to do with preference. To clarify, I'm talking about visual cuteness. In actuality, there is only one cute thing to humans, and thats babies. Yeah, babies.

To that you might say that, well, seals are pretty cute. Or the little colourful figures in Angry birds. Theres a very logical explanation to that. Babies look soft, right? Round forms, not bony, certain proportions, that kind of stuff. Soft and plushy. Basically, the softer you look, the more you look like a baby, thus, youre cute. Voilá.

 This might all seem pretty weird. What, are we all just pedophiles then? You go "Cats are cute" and im like THATS BECAUSE YOURE ATTRACTED TO BABIES


Not really. First and foremost, cuteness isn't a sexual kind of attraction. You woudln't be attracted to something cute if it didnt also have sexually appealing traits, and one does not automatically come with the other. Cuteness is moreof an emotional attraction.

So why are things cute? Well it's obvious, isn't it? Cuteness makes you care. Cuteness is based on the properties of the human baby. Cuteness must be an evolutionary tool to make humans care for their children! Which is totally sweet!

Hairy, wrinkled, small forehead, saggy skin, just not puffy enough. Simply, not cute. Very unbabylike. The youngling in the entry "sans empathy" looks much younger, and this has much more appealing features. Again, its because it reminds you of babies. Pedophile.


I think I'm in this artistic phase. Im drawing tons of baboons. Sometimes, its skulls, torsos, arms or faces. This time, its monkeys. This one wasn't particularly reminiscent of a monkey, I thought to make it more humanlike.

Theres another weird phenomen of attraction when it comes to near-human looking things. Basically, the more humanlike something becomes, the more OK it is. But there is one exception. If something is very near to, ALMOST human, then its fucking creepy. If it were just a little less, or a little more human, then it would be fine. But we can't deal with near human.

Examples? Manga is pretty cool, but Downs syndrome is just too real. Or corpses. Too human, but not human enough. This phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley, and it's why well made humanoid robots look so weird to us. ASIMO is still outside the Uncanny Valley, and so is Jarvis, but if a robot has a fleshy human face, it stars getting iffy.