Color perception Wednesday

As a designer, I play with perception a lot. How human brains perceive their environments fascinates me to no end. I ran this gem last September and six months later it still amazes me.

I mean wow. It's an animated, inanimate object.

Well, I came upon two more good illusions on Twitter the other day. A web developer who writes Indigo Thoughts reprinted this one from Scientific American.

Follow these instructions:

1. Click on each of the graphics below, this will bring up a much larger image in a new browser.
2. Hold a finger in front of your nose and focus intently on it. This will cross your eyes.
3. Slowly remove your finger from view
4. On your screen you will see three boxes. The middle box will show the impossible color, a bluish yellow or a reddish green. Make sure the crosses line up.

Can you see yellowish blue?

Can you see reddish green ?

These exercises illustrate what are called impossible colors. Reddish green and yellowish blue are not the brown and green you'd expect them to be. Rather they are what they're called. These illusions takes a little bit of concentration to master but when you do master them you'll be observing a gaping flaw in your eyes' and brain's ability to process color. These impossible colors illustrate the opponent process and you can read more about it here.

When wall words say what they mean

The terrifically funny Alycia Wicker is an interior designer in Eastvale, CA and she writes the blog Casa Moxie. Casa Moxie is always brimming with great pointers and ideas and all of it's sprinkled liberally with Alycia's biting humor. I love it when she gets on a roll. She was on a roll earlier this week.

She has little patience for wall words and that's definitely something we have in common. I found this one on a website called Vinyl-Decals that sums up perfectly what I dislike wall words so much.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. I think what somebody who hangs that over her bed is really saying is something from Dante's Inferno. Like this:

Look it up!

Anyhow, Alycia took some liberties of her own yesterday and I thought they were hilarious. Here are some wall words from the mind of Alycia Wicker.

This is hilarious and it has me thinking of phrases I'd really like to see emblazoned on walls. So what bitingly funny words or phrases can you guys come up with? Who ever leaves the snarkiest quote today wins. Go!

Case closed! Mysterious marble a mystery no more!

Last week I wrote about designer Marc Newson's London apartment and I was struck particularly by the marble he used in his bath. Here's the bath in question.

Identifying that marble has become my life's work for the last few days and I'm beyond pleased to announce that I found it. According the stone wholesale site Alibaba, it is Calacatta Zebrino. It's sold by a quarry in Italy and I'd love to have a geologist explain to me how a marble could form with such pronounced strips intact.

Marble is a metamorphic rock. It starts out in life as limestone. Limestone forms from layers of sediment that accumulate at the bottom of a sea. At that point it's a sedimentary rock and it's expected to have layers. In order for it to turn to marble, the limestone has to be shoved down under the surface of the earth and be subjected to extreme heat and pressure for a few million years. Then, miracle of miracles, it has to work its way back to the surface. When it emerges, it's marble. Now, how could a process like that happen without messing up the layers? Anybody care to share an explanation?

However it happened, at least I know what it is. Oh happy day!

Newform's Minimal outdoor shower is an exercise maximalism

The every energetic and ever-talented Emilie Williams-Romero mentioned Newform's Minimal shower in a comment the other day. I'd never heard of it before so I tracked it down. Here it is.

Good glory here it is again.

It comes in four forms for outdoor use and four for indoor. There are also three kinds of coordinated body sprayers. What gets me though are its outdoor forms.

This is the single.

This is the crossed double.

This is the uncrossed double.

It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The controls are on the floor and controlled by your foot by the way.

Newform has been manufacturing water fixtures of arresting beauty from a small town in Italy's Piedmont (we call it Piemonte in Italian) since 1981. Who knew that the foothills of the Alps held such beauty? Other than the obvious beauty that is. Bravi!

Kitchen desks: absolute necessity or absolute waste of space?

So the yahoos at Apartment Therapy ran a post last week that touched a nerve. The post was about kitchen desks, but that's not grand enough so they refer to them as kitchen offices. "We spend lots and lots of time in out kitchens and we're so busy nowadays we'd be lost without being able to run our empire from a super cute kitchen office like this one." I'm paraphrasing but not really.

The gushing was directed toward the desk in the photo above. I suppose that if you're a nine-year-old and your empire consists of a front yard lemonade stand, a desk such as that would be fine. For anyone over the age of nine, it's going to come up pretty short.

I rip out kitchen desks so often it's practically a side line. I rip them out and replace them with something meaningful, like a pantry, because nearly every kitchen desk I've ever encountered was the size of the one above. The current owners can't use it as a desk so it ends up the repository for the junk that has no other place to go. Here are a couple of shots from my Before files.

The owners of those desks would be mortified to see them plastered across the screen like this, but they prove a point. Kitchen desks are a waste of money and space. Besides, who sits at a desk in the kitchen anymore? Am I wrong? Do you have a desk in your kitchen that you use and love? Or is it the junk repository?