Da Vinci Days
2001
Oregonians for Rationality booth
How do our eyes 
fool us?
How do our ears 
fool us?
  How do others 
fool us?
    How do we 
fool ourselves?
Magic of the Mind
Perception. Deception. This picture is telling a lie.
Spooky wheel		 from Jerry Andrus
This picture is not lying. But your mind might be.
Nutty nuts
It's the "Waterfall Effect"!
but spinning . . . not falling
a whirlpool
Watch a waterfall for many seconds, and when you look away the world seems to be perpetually rising.  Watch this wheel spinning, with its several spirals moving in (or out), and when you look away everything seems to be expanding (or collapsing into a point).  But these spirals wobble, too.  And when you look away, everything seems to be heaving and crawling.  Look at your hand, or someone else's face, and the flesh seems to be crawling, too.  LOOK!
It's an outrageous version of "The Necker Cube Illusion."!
but one to drive a mechanic mad

If you're close, you look at the nuts with one eye.  (From a distance, both eyes work fine.)  The nuts are nuttier than they look.  As you walk by them, they seem to move in all the wrong directions.  And when a fluorescent light bulb is pushed through them, the lamp bends and twists in ways that drive an electrician mad. 

 

Discover the bridge to understanding...

Click on the back part of the tent to see what going on back there.
Paradox Box table
 


 

Stereoscopic pair of Paradox box
Spread eyes on left pair             Cross eyes on right pair



  

Hundreds of Paradox Boxes walked out of City Park these two days. A younger magician adds his skillful deceptions... Jerry Andrus's Paradox Box is a startling illusion.  You hold the box in your hand and look at it with one eye.  When you rotate the box a bit, it moves in some "wrong" way!  Certainly not the way you moved it.

View the stereo pair of the box.  The "Necker Cube" effect powerfully deceives you into seeing the "box" as a solid treasure chest.  It is actually a hollow corner made of paper.  The hand is seen in clear, proper stereoscopic depth.  The box will "pop" in and out as you can command your perception to do your will.  If you can command it.  (Note that when you view the other pair and view it "improperly"—cross on the "spreading" pair, for example—the box appears as a treasure chest, as it should, but the hand is in inverted stereo.)

O4R handed out printed sheets which, with the aid of scissors and tape, yield three Paradox Boxes of different sizes.

 
Didn't we hear (see) this somewhere else?
They're gorgeous, George!
Jerry Andrus explains how a solid steel rod passes right through the steel of the grating we see in the window.  Jerry, being a professional magician, makes a very convincing case that he can cause solid steel to pass through solid steel.
Gorgeous Soap Patterns

George Andrus (Jerry's brother) displays a video of soap bubbles photographed to show ever-changing, spectacularly colored patterns.
Meanwhile, at the rest of the event -->A visiting Saturnalian sauntering north toward Jefferson St.

 
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