vision

More detective stories involving perceptual psychology

In a previous blog post, I reviewed Ellery Queen’s classic detective novel The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), which manages to involve color blindness in its puzzles. But I am not done yet! I have a couple more. On one hand, it feels to me that color blindness is gimmicky as a plot device. A mystery writer must be quite desperate for new ideas if she or he has to turn to perceptual psychology (or any branch of specialized knowledge, for that matter).
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A vision scientist's review of The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen (1932)

I don’t think mystery novels by Ellery Queen are popular in western countries anymore, but they are still read in Asia. When I was a PhD student, every time I had to travel from my home country Taiwan to the USA, I would buy an Ellery Queen novel at the airport bookstore. This way, I could land in LAX with a solved mystery. Ellery Queen novels are substantial books with very complex plots - perfect for long flights because uninterrupted concentration is needed to tackle them.
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Bright Earth by Philip Ball is a remarkably multidisciplinary book about color. In a chapter about renaissance art, he described the technique of cangiantismo, which is most famously associated with the work of Michangelo. Wikipedia’s entry explains: “Cangiante is characterized by a change in color necessitated by an original color’s darkness or lightness limitation”. The effect is unnatural but it’s what fascinates me most about Michangelo’s paintings. This article explains how the technique was used in contemporary art such as Monster Inc.
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Notes for Collection of Sand - essays by Italo Calvino

Collection of Sand is a collection of book reviews, exhibition reviews and travelogues that Italo Calvino wrote in the 70’s and 80’s. The quality varies. The best of them are unsurprisingly ekphrastic essays where Calvino described gardens, historical sites, and paintings in exquisite details. Those where he tried to regurgitate scientific or historical knowledge from academic books are less inspiring. But still, it is the variety of things that Calvino cared to write about that charms.
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What is the shutter speed of human vision? A new paper claims that at extremely low light condition, it can be as long as 0.6 second.