“I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.” — Henny Youngman
Month: February 2005
Vischeck
Upload any image and Stanford’s Vischeck program will show you how a color-blind person would see it.
The program lets you choose among three flavors of color blindness. This macaw appears as a protanope would see it, someone who can’t distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum.
About 10 percent of American men have some deficiency in color perception, but it’s not always a handicap. In some situations it’s actually an advantage: Color-blind hunters are unusually good at picking out prey against a confusing background, and color-blind soldiers can sometimes “see through” camouflage that fools everyone else.
In fact, it’s possible that in extreme situations we’re all color-blind. Some people claim that in extreme emergencies, like a train or aircraft crash, the brain’s visual system suspends color processing and switches to black and white. If that’s true, then designers should pay even more attention to the color of emergency brake handles, phones, etc.
If you’re interested, the Stanford page can also display your Web page as the color-blind would see it, and it even offers free PhotoShop plugins so you can experiment further.
Venn and Now
I admire anyone who can fit Andrew Dice Clay and Dante Alighieri into the same Venn diagram. And it’s all accurate!
Tiny Pac-Man
Unusual Deaths
- Sherwood Anderson swallowed a toothpick at a party and died of peritonitis.
- Francis Bacon died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow.
- Jack Daniel, the distillery founder, kicked his safe when he forgot its combination, injured his toe, and died of blood poisoning.
- Actress Isadora Duncan broke her neck when her scarf caught in a car’s wheel.
- Tour de France winner François Faber was in a trench in World War I when he learned his wife had given birth to a daughter. He cheered and a German sniper picked him off.
- Jockey Frank Hayes died of a heart attack during a race in 1923. The horse finished first, making Hayes the only dead jockey ever to win a race.
- Pope John XXI died when his scientific laboratory collapsed in 1277.
The all-time winner is still the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, who survived being poisoned, shot multiple times in the head and torso, bludgeoned, mutilated, wrapped in a sheet and dropped in a frozen river. He was swimming to shore when he died of hypothermia.
Unquote
“Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.” — H.L. Mencken