monkeysphere!

(2 comments)
2004.08.08
Article of the Moment
Bill pointed out this smart and funny article on the Monkeysphere, how our monkey brains are probably only equipped to really deal with 150 or so other primates, and therefore everyone else we have to cope with become kind of 2D semi-people, they aren't really real to us... (BTW, I really like drawing monkeys.)


Quote of the Moment
Friendship's more lasting than love...and more legal than stalking
Jane, BBC's "Coupling".

Rambles of the Moment
I've been noticing lately...we must have a HUGE part of our subconscious brain dedicated to judging how old somebody is. Like, take this image, clipped from the cover of the recent ramake of "Freaky Friday":
What makes it "funny" is that Jamie Lee Curtis is dressed stereotypically young, and Lindsay Lohan is dressed "middle age", but it's still really obvious to our monkey-brains that Lohan is much younger than Curtis...even in this not-very-high-resolution photo. I know there's decent evolutionary reasons for that, and could probably start to pin down what visual cues I'm using to place someone age-wise, but still, it seems like a tremendously complicated process, something it would probably be tough to teach a computer to do. (Unless there's some shortcut I'm missing, like the way ears and noses keep having some amount of growth or whatever, so it's more of a ratio thing...)