Tag Archives: perception

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Significant dates

Unless you live in the USA with their weird backwards way of writing dates, today is a special date: 11/12/13.

This is the last time you will see a sequential date until January 1st 2103. You won’t get to enjoy that one though, because by then you, your parents, your friends, your pets if you have them, and everyone you have ever known or loved will be dead. Don’t be too depressed though, because there is a silver lining: at least that annoying National Tiles guy will be dead too.

I got a little distracted there, but back to the special date. But wait a minute…the date isn’t really 11/12/13. Jesus isn’t breaking out in the Holy Acne of Antioch or being embarrassed by sudden bulges that his mother can’t explain. The year is 2013. 11/12/2013 doesn’t look nearly so nice, does it? We humans seem to have a knack for conveniently ignoring facts or information that get in the way of what we want to believe. And this, dear readers, is pretty much the basis of the entire Biblical justification for opposing homosexuality.

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What does a fly see?

Something has always bugged me (he he) about the way a flies’ vision is portrayed in books or other media. Flies, as you probably know, have compound eyes. Instead of a big round squishy eyeball like the two you probably have, flies have a whole mess of cones, each one effectively an individual eye (that cannot focus or move) arranged in a mosaic around most of a sphere.

This leads to the issue of how they are portrayed. I’ve used an example based on a Far Side comic, since it is deliberate so I can make my point without being personally critical of anyone. The portrayal is typically something like this:

So here is a question I ask of you. Does the following picture reflect how you see?

A picture of a fly duplicated as if the human eye viewed everything as a mosaic of two images

A fly how a fly might think a human sees a fly based on how a human thinks a fly sees.
© Shouting at the Clouds

Of course not. You see something more like this (ignoring the fuzziness of peripheral vision etc):

A single image of a fly

A fly as a human might really see a fly

Notice the difference? That’s right, your brain mashes the images together so you perceive it as a single image. Why wouldn’t the fly brain do the same thing?

Bonus reference: this link talks in a little bit more depth about how fly eyes work.

If you are wondering where I got the picture from, it is a weird-looking fly I photographed at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. If there are any entomologists out there I’d be interested to know what species it is.