Sometimes, when I'm most frustrated with my research, I like to remember a former labmate of mine who is a post-doc in a visual working memory lab I worked in. I saw him at Psychonomics back in November: he had a poster on a new optical illusion that no one had documented yet. He walked me through the poster, as professional as you please, and when I asked how he had thought of it, he said it was all because of an accident! He was programming something else to test and he kept on seeing this weird resulting image on the screen; it drove him nuts because he thought there was something wrong with his programming! Eventually, he realized that he was... well, seeing things. Like the way we see a very clear triangle delineated in the following well-known illusion:
So he started asking questions on it, testing people on it, and was, at the time of the conference, in the process of writing up a paper for publication. I thought this was amazing and said to him, "You mean, you DISCOVERED a new optical illusion that NO ONE has ever studied before?"
He broke into this huge kid-like grin: "Yeah!"
It's hard to explain what was so touching about that moment and why it's such a sustaining memory for me (without getting too sentimental about the often excruciating process of academic research). But it makes me think of the last Calvin & Hobbes comic (click to enlarge):
"It's a magical world... let's go exploring!"
Yes, I had nail polish swatches for you today, too... :)
SpaRitual Reverie
"Radiant" is the word that comes to mind when I look at this polish. Also, "brushstroke-y". I thought this an amazingly pretty golden tangerine shimmer but between the hard-to-control formula and the brushstrokes, I feel pretty "meh" about this one.
A lot less radiant but a little more workable. The application on this Entity polish was very good and easy: I used three coats here but could've done fine with two. It's not a mindblowing color or anything, a simple orange shimmer. Still, it was my NOTD for a couple of days and it held up very well.
