Bower birds, optical illusions, and the joy of hypertext
Every once in a while, interesting subjects coincide in such a way that brings me back to the early days of the Web as we know it. BoingBoing’s post today about the male Bower bird got me started. The order of the images at BoingBoing emphasized the optical illusion, and at first I followed the Ames Room link to read more about that at Wikipedia. Fascinating stuff. When I went back to finish reading the BoingBoing post, I found the footnote link to the original Creature Cast article (a better read, in my opinion; see excerpt below). The emphasis there was on the bird first, then the optical illusion. A subtle distinction, but this difference got me interested in the bird itself, whose peculiarities extend beyond the already amazing ability to construct optical illusions to fool “the ladies.” Again at BoingBoing, a National Geographic article and photo gallery linked in the comments tell more of this color-crazy architect of a bird.
Clicking through page after page and site after site is such an everyday experience that it has become mundane. A decade or more of high school graduates don’t remember the days before little bits of underlined text took us from one page, document, server, or continent to another. But somehow tonight, as each link led to something more fascinating, I was reminded of those early days of surfing with Mosaic, when the act of serendipitous discovery was just beginning to come to the computer. Ah, geek memories.
Male bower birds boast an architectural prowess, it is true. They also have a discerning eye when it comes to the color palette for their homes. It turns out that, if that weren’t enough, these birds also use forced perspective, arranging stones in their court in size order to create an optical illusion for the female who is shopping around for a mate.
The males are creating variation of an Ames room, sort of like this one:
The trick in this picture is that the room is actually much deeper and taller on the left side, and so the leftmost suited guy looks really tiny, whereas the suit on the right is standing closer downstage, on the smaller side of the irregularly shaped room, which makes him look huge.
