Optical Illusion: The Blue and Green in this Spiral are Actually the Same Color
from discover.com:
You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the “blue” spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the “green” one.
The orange stripes go through the “green” spiral but not the “blue” one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color.
Kryptos: Not even the CIA can solve its own commissioned sculpture
So more than 20 years ago, the CIA commissioned a sculpture to be erected in the courtyard to increase the beauty of the place as well as pay homage to the smart cookies that worked within. American artist James Sanborn was hired for the project, and he created the work Kryptos, a rather large bronze work with encoded letters cut into it. Sanborn worked with a top CIA cryptologist in order to learn how to create codes.
So what makes this work so special? Even after almost 20 years, no one has been able to fully decode Kryptos, even the CIA’s top code breakers. The first three sections, K1 K2 and K3 have been successfully solved, but K4 is yet to be broken. Not only are CIA agents working on it constantly, but there is also a Yahoo! Group with over 1000 members dedicated to the solving of K4.
Here is a rather in depth article about the structure that was in WIRED this month.
