A new picture has been doing the rounds.

You might recall how back in February this year a debate over one particular dress and its color went viral (I mean global). Was it gold and white or was it really blue? Ok, it wasn’t the debate of the Century; it wasn’t as if the World held its breath while JFK debated the Soviet missile crises; or in more recent time; whether global warming is a fad. But not to take too much away from the dress Kerfuffle, celebrities like Taylor Swift, Ellen DeGeneres, Will Smith's son Jaden and the Kardashians joined in the skirmish.

More recently, a new picture has been doing the rounds. If you look at the picture above and focus on the girl’s eyes for a say 5 or 6 seconds; then look at the empty area to her right; what do you see?

The optical illusion works by using a technique called ‘negative afterimage’. The eye’s photoreceptors identify colors and code them.

We have three color channels, gray-scale, red and green and blue and yellow, which allow us to code color in any environment. When looking at a specific color, the cells in the relating color channel increase in activity. However, after a short while, the activity of these cells decline.

When we direct our gaze at a uniform background; the white box these cells do not return to their resting activity state, instead they go to a much lower state.

It's that decline; the weakening of the yellow code - that codes for the opposite color to become stronger, so you'll see blue. Therefore, in the illusion above, our blue receptor cells decline, which stimulates the opposite hue, yellow. This in turn allows us to see a more natural skin tone and balances out the negative image to reveal the opposite.

The Road To Reality - an absolute joy, a masterpiece

An absolute joy – a masterpiece

THE ROAD TO REALITY A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. By Roger Penrose. Illustrated. 1,099 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.

From the man who gave us the 1990 best seller "The Emperor's New Mind," putting forward the notion that consciousness arises from the intersection of the two grand theories of the physical world; quantum mechanics and general relativity. The icing on the cake was the promise to prove (with Gödel's incompleteness theorem) that computers would never be able to think. He apologized for all the hard math then. It seems the math didn’t deter readers then, and it didn’t deter Penrose from giving us even more this time round.

Penrose's latest effort, "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe," is his most ambitious yet, more than twice as long as "The Emperor's New Mind" and arithmetically more demanding. Penrose starts from the very first attempts by the Greeks to grapple with the complexities of the known world to the latest application of infinity in physics; 

The Road to Reality carefully explores the movement of the smallest atomic particles and reaches into the vastness of intergalactic space. Penrose examines the mathematical foundations of the physical universe, exposing the underlying beauty of physics and giving us one the most important works in modern science writing.

It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. Whilst it assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, so that, for example, the early chapters give us the mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book - this is no book for those struggling with Dyscalculia.

A case example; "For each pair of natural numbers p and q such that p + q = n, we can define a corresponding 'real form' of the complex group (Sp(*n, C) by taking only those elements which are also pseudo-unitary for signature (p, q) - ie which belong to U(p, q). This gives us the (pseudo-) symplectic group Sp(p, q)." To be fair, Penrose goes to great lengths to involve us in this work. Penrose believes in our ability to understand the maths only if we try. No question, this is tough going, yet there is just enough of a tease to indicate the book isn’t intended solely for the author’s fellow physicists.

THE ROAD TO REALITY is rarely less than challenging, but the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams. This is a wonderful book. If it is a quality of a great writer not to treat the audience like idiots, then Penrose is indeed great, and the position of this book on the bestseller lists is understandable.

Why Women Want Tall Men

Altezza mezza bellezza, as the Italians say—height is half of beauty.

Ours it seems is a culture that valorizes the tall and belittles, as it were, the short.  Being tall is also associated with career success: in fact it has been estimated that a person who is six feet tall is likely to earn around $166,000 more over the course of a 30-year career than someone who is five foot four. The taller you are, for instance, the more likely you are to go on to higher education. This is true even after controlling for cognitive ability, suggesting that some kind of subtle—indeed unconscious—bias may be operating among educators.

For males in particular, height seems to be linked to greater happiness and self-esteem. With psychological advantages stemming in part from the pervasive tendency to associate height with power. That tendency is embedded in our language: we look up to people we consider superior; those without influence are the little people.

Evolutionarily speaking, one might argue that a tall man would be preferred by women because, if you follow the argument, he’ll be stronger and better able to ward off physical treats to his family. In the beast-eats-man world of primitive civilizations, this argument might have a rationale. However, unless taller equals stronger, faster, and smarter even in this scenario, height wouldn’t seem to offer any particularly unique advantage.

In an intriguing 2013 study, Dutch psychologists Gert Stulp, Abraham Buunk, and Thomas Pollet followed up on some of their earlier work on male height to find out more about what leads women to prefer those lanky guys. They were also curious to learn how and why people are satisfied with their own height.

Stulp and his colleagues sought to understand not only who prefers whom in terms of height, but also how people feel about their own height. The participants in this study were 650 first-year heterosexual psychology students who received course credit for completing the survey. They estimated their own height, and reported on their sex, ethnicity (most were Dutch or German), and reported on their sexual orientation. The rest of the questions, simply enough, asked them to report on their relationship status, the height of their partner, the satisfaction with their own height, and their satisfaction with the height of their partners.

The results on partner preferences are a bit discouraging if you’re a short man. In general, women were more likely than men to think that the man should be taller and they didn’t want to be in a relationship in which they were taller than their male partners. Men liked being taller than their partners, but they didn’t care about the height difference as much as women did.

As it turns out, people do tend to partner with people of similar height due to a phenomenon known as assortative mating.  However, no one seemed totally happy with their partner’s actual height. Men were most satisfied with women 

Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Tricks

According to Wikipedia office politics is the use of power and social networking within an organization to achieve changes that benefit the organization or individuals within it.

The modern working world is a dangerous place, where game-playing, duplicity and sheer malevolence are rife. Do talent and hard work count for nothing? Is politics everything? Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Tricks by Oliver James provides us with some answers.

The basic notion in this book is that as ever more of us work in complex white-collar environments, success at work depends ever more on office politics. Where blame can be spread and credit stolen, and the bonus pool depends on staying in the boss's good graces, you need to know how to hustle.

The traits that make for a successful hustler are not always attractive, James says. In fact, there's a "Dark Triad" of character types disproportionately represented in office environments: psychopaths, who have no conscience; machiavels, to whom others are but pieces on a chessboard; and narcissists, bursting with malignant self-love

This book teaches how to read the lie of the land; suck up without looking sucky; boast without looking boastful; network and scratch backs; cultivate a persona but don't cause yourself to have a nervous breakdown by cultivating one wildly unlike your own, and so on.

Of particular amusement is in the way he talks about fields of work and structures of reward that encourage the worst sort of politicking. It's good to read someone being scalding about tournament bonus schemes, "360-degree assessment", public‑sector outsourcing and neoliberal labour markets from the point of view of psychology rather than ideology or economics.

James is also sceptical of human resources gobbledygook. He quotes with approval, for instance, an unnamed HR veteran who assures him IQ testing is a waste of time: "The ancient statistical tests are of course fraudulent. As for interviews and personality tests, the whole idea of getting an individual to declare the unknown sources of their life motivation is daft beyond the reach of words."

Most triadic people are the way they are, apparently, because they were unloved as children.

James doesn’t show a  link between how well you do on tests of intelligence and how good you are at office politics. Being clever at exams and tests does not mean you will be clever at politics. As you have probably already observed in your working life, some apparently not very bright people do extremely well, while many people with great educational qualifications and high IQ scores, do quite badly.