From Bad Astronomy. It takes no work to see the illusion, but a lot of effort to see past it.

The "blue" and "green" swirls are exactly the same color. Don’t believe me? Verify it for yourself.

Well, here’s an article about some election science that should be covered everywhere. The authors were apparently too busy to tweet, but they found the Washington Post just the same.

Update: here’s a blog roundup on #iranelection/Twitter that highlights the possibility that much of the so-called Twitter revolution is actually just ye old neocons up to their old tricks. Funny how TechCrunch fanboys (editors) are going ga ga over the fact that a neocon on FoxNews claimed twitter founders should get the nobel prize for keeping their servers running through the crisis. I’ll buy that for a dollar!

You will want.

Update: There’s a video on XBox.com that shows some of what they intend to deliver, with a disclaimer at the bottom. Also, check out Milo. Most impressive.

Here’s the scene. My wife and I are checking out with over $300 worth of stuff. Our 2 year old son is sitting in the cart, in the built-in child seat, still strapped in. We normally leave him in the cart during checkout and he’s generally happy. We can always get to him quickly if otherwise.

The checkout woman, a young over-eager type, apparently uses the "extra cart" technique to load checked items into. I’ve seen it before, and it’s frankly silly IMO when there are heavy items to cross-load, as was the case with us. She’s just going to hurt herself over time.

She quickly, forcefully spins the spare cart around and casts it out in front of the register area. Our son being in the next cart apparently disrupts her routine, as she can’t transfer him from cart-to-cart as easily. So she scans all of the heavy items left in our cart (the smaller ones are on the conveyor belt already) and turns my son’s cart towards the re-loading area, but not all of the way. She starts scanning smaller items from the conveyor belt and leaves my son — in the cart — out of reach.

Seeing what she did with the previous cart, I step in to the "area" to gently move my son’s cart the additional 4-5 feet to the end so I can start loading items while she scans, as I’ve done many times before (if she had a 2nd person helping her, I wouldn’t have bothered).

At this point she literally yells at me, "what are you doing?!"

"I’m moving the cart to load it," I say.

"This is an employee-only area," she yells. "Customers need to stay on that side of the register."

I look at my son alone in the cart. "I’m just helping out. You’re being incredibly rude."

"This area is dangerous," she continues scolding me. "Carts are always flying and customers could get hurt."

–only if the employees "fly" them, I think to myself. The register next to hers isn’t even open, so it’s just her alone. And if the area is really so dangerous, she probably should ask us to not to leave our children in the freakin’ carts. I’d hope she wasn’t planning to repeat her cart "flying" routine with my son, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

"This must be your first time," she says, faking a smile.

That’s two. I’m already annoyed, so I don’t tell her that I’ve probably been coming to Costco since before she started high school.

"No," I say without smiling, "it’s not." In fact, the checkers almost always appreciate the help.

I joke to my wife about our son, "maybe we should take him out of the cart now. You never know when stuff is going to fly."

But my wife is livid — stunned is more like it. As I finish paying, she goes off to find the manager to complain, only to be passed through three different people, none of whom seem to have the slightest interest in customer concerns. The last one, the actual manager, tells her to fill out an index-card customer satisfaction form to lodge her complaint.

"No thanks," she says, as we walk out.

And all this after Costco just lost a class action lawsuit that showed the company was systematically abusing their customers during renewals. My wife and I had just upgraded our membership, but I’m thinking now of a permanent downgrade. Costco clearly doesn’t take customer satisfaction seriously — or professionalism for that matter.

The result? A conservative (by European standards) paper posts a fairly reasonable article and in the comments, the conservative US Drudge-report readers go absolutely nuts — from claiming "oil-based" paints will increase our dependence on foreign petroleum (bad assumption), to wondering if painting one’s roof white would cause one’s house to flood (inane), to many repeated comments about painting black people white (utterly racist).

Mostly, they just couldn’t help themselves but try to sound like they knew something when they clearly didn’t, the repetition of the word ‘idiot’ reaching new heights of unintentional self-mockery.

It would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that these people have some influence on what the world does or doesn’t do. I’m going to go with sad.

Show the average 14-month-old baby a sealed jar of cookies, and you get some pretty predictable behavior. The child will reach for the treats and, when thwarted, look beseechingly at the nearest adult. The request for help — delivered with eye contact, gestures and often with pleading sounds — is unmistakable. But some babies don’t do it. One little boy, captured on video by psychologist Wendy Stone at Vanderbilt University, repeatedly places a researcher’s hand on the cookie jar but never once looks at her face to see why she isn’t responding. Eventually, tragically, he gives up.

Show the average 18-month-old a video of toddlers at play, and you can bet that the tot will be mesmerized by scenes with strong emotion: a fight or kiss. But some babies have other interests. At the Yale Child Study Center, psychologists Warren Jones, Ami Klin and Sarah Shultz measure when toddlers stop blinking — a reliable indicator of rapt attention. The typical child will stare at the scene of a kiss, but a child with autism will be transfixed by the opening and closing of a door.

Last week, Google announced O3D, their stab at an open standard for 3D Web development based on Javascript. Well, it’s Javascript, plus a native compiled plug-in that does almost all of the actual work. And there’s the rub. No install, no work.

People somehow think that "running in a browser" is some magical feat of performance, when in fact plugins are just native applications that use the browser windows instead of their own desktop window. And O3D is just another compiled application that provides hooks for Javascript code to control it. Running 3D in Flash or Silverlight in any performant way is a magical feat, but only because sandboxing plugins like Flash and Silverlight have chosen to eschew native 3D hardware support in favor of safer CPU-only code, finally dipping some toes in the water this year. No native 3D support means slow, circa-1995 graphics, end of story.

The question will be, can Google get everyone to install their plugin? If so, it could become as ubiquitous as Flash or Silverlight and therefore be a viable candidate for the common platform for Web 3D. Of course, it also assumes that people, including developers, will like using it. A casual look at the Javascript bits of source code for several of the demos Google put out dashed my hopes that they’d cracked the nut of making 3D easy to use.

My guess is no. Without compelling applications (streaming video did this for Flash), people won’t install O3D and developers won’t develop for it. It’s the classic cold start problem. In fact, Google would be smart to use O3D to provide better video playback for YouTube to drive adoption.

Meanwhile, some very smart approaches, like Unity3D, which uses C# plugins to provide sandbox security for unknown code, do as good or better job at the same idea. Unity has its own integrated WSIWYG editor, web packaging systems for multiple OSes, and comes with professional support. Other approaches, like Vivaty (also a browser native rendering plug-in) keep alive the last major attempt at Web 3D standardization, X3D, which was born VRML, Cosmo, and SGI Inventor before that. Some ideas never die.

The shining star in all this is the Mozilla and Opera efforts at adding native 3D canvas support. You see, if there’s no plug-in, then there’s nothing to install. Web pages could leverage 3D content as long as people are running a recent browser. But these approaches are not entirely compatible and it’s been slow going. Khronos is also trying to get OpenGL ES in browsers, which again could do well if it’s adopted, chicken and egg.

My own take is that no Web 3D system will truly work until 3D web content is made as flexible as text and imagery. Right now, my fonts will scale to my wishes and text will flow to fit my screen width. With 3D graphics, the equivalent is generating objects via declarative modeling, not polygons. None of the approaches I’ve mentioned really make use of this fact. And because of it, no matter how fast they get Javascript to run, you’ll still see that "loading…" 30 second delay in starting up any real 3D scenes, not to mention any crash due to bad or malicious data bringing down the whole browser or worse. And that, right there, is the kiss of death.

The problem isn’t that there isn’t one common language for 3D, or that it doesn’t run in a browser. The problem is human nature, and very few of these efforts seem to be designing for the real world.

It’s easier to just download the CSV file and look at it in Excel…