The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson Page B
Authors: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
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first engineer’. He based his buildings on the proportions of the ideal human body, where the height is equal to the span of the arms and eight times the size of the head. He didn’t use φ at all, whether or not Phidias once used it for a similar purpose.
What kind of stripes make you look slimmer?
Vertical ones, surely?
Nope.
According to research carried out in 2008 at the University of York, it is stripes running across the body that make the wearer appear more trim.
The experiment asked people to compare over 200 pairs of pictures of women wearing dresses with either horizontal or vertical stripes and say which of them looked fatter.
The results showed conclusively that, with two women of the same size, the one wearing the horizontal stripes appeared to be the thinner of the two. In fact, to make the women appear to be the same size, the one in the horizontal stripes had to be 6 per cent wider.
Led by psychologist Dr Peter Thompson, the York team had been puzzled that the conventional view that vertical stripes are ‘slimming’ went against a famous optical illusion, the Helmholtz square, in which a square filled with horizontal lines appears taller than one filled with vertical ones.
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) was a German polymath. Not only was he a qualified physician and a theoretical physicist, he also helped found the discipline of experimental psychology and transformed the science of optics, writing the standard textbook on the subject and, in 1851, inventing the ophthalmoscope, an instrument which enabled people to see the inside of the eye for the first time.
On the matter of striped dresses, von Helmholtz was absolutely categorical: ‘Frocks with cross stripes on them make the figure look taller.’
For some reason, everyone has steadily ignored him for well over a century. When Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County,Arizona, reintroduced striped prison uniforms in 1997, female inmates begged him to make the bars vertical so they wouldn’t look fat. He said: ‘I told them I am an equal-opportunity incarcerator – the men have horizontal stripes, and so will the women.’
Striped prison uniforms, first introduced in the early nineteenth century, made it easier to spot escapees in a crowd. But they were also intended as a psychological punishment. In the Middle Ages, striped clothes were the pattern of choice for prostitutes, clowns and other social outcasts – whether or not they were overweight.
One piece of received fashion wisdom the York team did confirm was that black really does make you look slimmer. This research was provoked by another famous optical illusion, in which a black circle on a white background appears smaller than a white circle on a black background.
ROB BRYDON I have a friend who’s quite short and he likes to wear vertical stripes because they make him look taller.
DAVID MITCHELL Only when he’s not standing next to anyone. It’s not going to make him look taller than a taller man. It’s all relative. You won’t just say: ‘Oh, there’s a normal size man next to an enormous man’ and then go: ‘Oh thank God, he’s taken his striped shirt off, it’s actually a tiny man next to a normal man.’
How many eyes do you need to estimate depth and distance?
One.
You’d think that we need both eyes, but we don’t.
It is true that most depth perception is created by the different angles of vision produced by each eye. It’s the way that 3-D film works, combining the output of two different cameras. When we look at something we create a single ‘field of view’, with the visual information split between the right and the left eye. The right-hand field from both eyes is sent to the right side of the brain; the left half of the field is sent to the left side. The brain merges them into a single solid-looking image.
However, our brains can still judge distance with a single eye. If you lose sight in one eye, the brain processes information from the
What kind of stripes make you look slimmer?
Vertical ones, surely?
Nope.
According to research carried out in 2008 at the University of York, it is stripes running across the body that make the wearer appear more trim.
The experiment asked people to compare over 200 pairs of pictures of women wearing dresses with either horizontal or vertical stripes and say which of them looked fatter.
The results showed conclusively that, with two women of the same size, the one wearing the horizontal stripes appeared to be the thinner of the two. In fact, to make the women appear to be the same size, the one in the horizontal stripes had to be 6 per cent wider.
Led by psychologist Dr Peter Thompson, the York team had been puzzled that the conventional view that vertical stripes are ‘slimming’ went against a famous optical illusion, the Helmholtz square, in which a square filled with horizontal lines appears taller than one filled with vertical ones.
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) was a German polymath. Not only was he a qualified physician and a theoretical physicist, he also helped found the discipline of experimental psychology and transformed the science of optics, writing the standard textbook on the subject and, in 1851, inventing the ophthalmoscope, an instrument which enabled people to see the inside of the eye for the first time.
On the matter of striped dresses, von Helmholtz was absolutely categorical: ‘Frocks with cross stripes on them make the figure look taller.’
For some reason, everyone has steadily ignored him for well over a century. When Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County,Arizona, reintroduced striped prison uniforms in 1997, female inmates begged him to make the bars vertical so they wouldn’t look fat. He said: ‘I told them I am an equal-opportunity incarcerator – the men have horizontal stripes, and so will the women.’
Striped prison uniforms, first introduced in the early nineteenth century, made it easier to spot escapees in a crowd. But they were also intended as a psychological punishment. In the Middle Ages, striped clothes were the pattern of choice for prostitutes, clowns and other social outcasts – whether or not they were overweight.
One piece of received fashion wisdom the York team did confirm was that black really does make you look slimmer. This research was provoked by another famous optical illusion, in which a black circle on a white background appears smaller than a white circle on a black background.
ROB BRYDON I have a friend who’s quite short and he likes to wear vertical stripes because they make him look taller.
DAVID MITCHELL Only when he’s not standing next to anyone. It’s not going to make him look taller than a taller man. It’s all relative. You won’t just say: ‘Oh, there’s a normal size man next to an enormous man’ and then go: ‘Oh thank God, he’s taken his striped shirt off, it’s actually a tiny man next to a normal man.’
How many eyes do you need to estimate depth and distance?
One.
You’d think that we need both eyes, but we don’t.
It is true that most depth perception is created by the different angles of vision produced by each eye. It’s the way that 3-D film works, combining the output of two different cameras. When we look at something we create a single ‘field of view’, with the visual information split between the right and the left eye. The right-hand field from both eyes is sent to the right side of the brain; the left half of the field is sent to the left side. The brain merges them into a single solid-looking image.
However, our brains can still judge distance with a single eye. If you lose sight in one eye, the brain processes information from the
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