"Humans are not perfect creatures and tend to distort the facts either intentionally or unintentionally. There are always the brightest minds who offer justice, but they are exception. So always be reserved of what others tell. It might be more fiction than fiction."
☆ Maria Karvouni Truth
The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing
No Eurovision for us today. We haz limits.
But how about another TV themed thread.
"He is not like on TV."
A vacuous phrase generally used to exculpate pure evil, like Rapey Dude One, or a warning of some darkness.
But seriously, who would you really want to be like they are on TV? Off the top of my head maybe Tom Hanks or Mr. Rogers.
The actor typecast as a serial killer for their whole career?
A football player? His cleats would ruin the expensive
...
A study shows that people react more strongly to new restrictions, such as smoking bans, before they're introduced than afterward, when they better recognize the #societalbenefits: http://go.tum.de/848001
iStock/manwolste
I rediscovered something I wrote in my blog about 1½ years ago. It’s something that doesn’t get old and needs constant reminding.
— How Come We Always Assume the Worst in Others? —
Most people are pretty decent, says Dutch historian Rutger Bregman¹, author of ‘Utopia for Realists’ (2017) and ‘Humankind’ (2020).
1/2
In an eight-minute video² he explains quite plausbily how doomscrolling, using social media, watching and reading the news changes our perception of humankind. We only see all the bad things happening, which makes us quite susceptible to being persuaded of human vileness. On the other hand, if you believe in the goodness of humanity, so often you are dismissed as this naïve person who doesn’t have a realistic view of the world.
But Bregman, after researching the matter, comes to the conclusion that humans are not as evil and raw as they are made out to be. An example: One of the astonishing discoveries from the second World War is that only 15 to 25 per cent of the American soldiers actually fired their guns. They had to be trained and brainwashed to be able to be more ‘effective’ during the Vietnam War.
Another valid point he’s making is that science is the only self-correcting system that we have that sort of criticises itself and then develops and becomes better […] 
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutger_Bregman
² https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=TXN7QGGNSWk&local=true
The fact that he keeps his hand at 90 degrees in his shirt/coat... visually cuts his height down.
The "Presence" — PERCEPTION #04
People in this career are better at seeing through optical illusions
This happens when you leave your doll alone for long — PERCEPTION #03
No evidence that personality traits are revealed during ambiguous image testing
https://phys.org/news/2025-03-evidence-personality-traits-revealed-ambiguous.html
Why Your #Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day - YouTube
People interpret dogs' emotions based on context. When shown a picture of a dog adjacent to a leash, they interpret the dog as being happy; when the same picture is manipulated to show the dog adjacent to a vacuum cleaner, they interpret the dog as being unhappy.
Summary: https://knowridge.com/2025/03/are-we-misreading-our-dogs-new-research-says-yes/
Original paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08927936.2025.2469400#abstract
Baby with deer skull, nothing unusual here — PERCEPTION #02
"As biological entities we sail on a tiny raft of timescales between the atomic and the cosmic; we know that in a tenth of a second a world of things happen, and in the century virtually nothing."
—Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006)
Do we all see red as the same colour? We finally have an answer
It is impossible for us to know exactly how another person's experience of the world compares to our own, but a new experiment is helping to reveal that colour is indeed a shared phenomenon
Giving Science and Anti-science the Side Eye
Side Eye Science
This is Side Eye Science and I'm T. T. Perry, PhD. We're giving science and science-skeptics some side eye. If you want to figure out what's true about the world, should you "do your own research" or "listen to scientists"?
A 350-year-old optical illusion story is behind the viral selfie location of Saint Ignatius
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-year-optical-illusion-story-viral.html
Hello #psycholinguists on Mastodon! I'm currently doing a review on idiosyncrasies in phoneme perception, where it comes from, how it develops through childhood, how we can study it... If you have references or any idea on the topic, I'm more than interested! @psycholinguistics #psycholinguistics #phoneme #perception
It’s a great time to brush up on our logfals.
#NoAI 
Greg Cocks 
