Most people are aware of how a cut on your tongue feels like a gaping wound, whereas you may get a gash on your leg without even feeling it. As Aimee on Mis.Science reports, Matthew R. Longo and Patrick Haggard have also found out that it means we don’t really know where our hands are. They carried out studies where participants attempted to map their hands. The results were consistently out: people thought that their knuckles were higher up and their base of their fingers lower.

The suggestion here is that we may get it wrong because we don’t need to get it right. Dreyfus also comments on this with the observation that people make the shape of a door handle when walking towards it which is more accurate then if they consciously try to make it.

A brief interlude into vision as well as touch

To what extent is color a physical thing in the physical world, and to what extent is it created in our minds? We start with Sir Isaac Newton, who was so eager to solve this very mystery, he stuck a knife in his eye to pinpoint the answer. Then, we meet a sea creature that sees a rainbow way beyond anything humans can experience, and we track down a woman who we’re pretty sure can see thousands (maybe even millions) more colors than the rest of us. And we end with an age-old question, that, it turns out, never even occurred to most humans until very recently: why is the sky blue?

Via Radiolab.

I’m not sure if this has any relation to Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle, but Significant Objects is worth checking out for its exploring how stories add value to objects.

I remember reading in somewhere about the therapeutic nature of animals ‘particularly if they are small, soft, and docile’. I couldn’t help but be reminded about this when reading about this heart warming story about The Chook Project, a craft based project that emerged out of the 2009 Victoria, Australia fires that became known as ‘Black Saturday’:

Barbara lost 27 friends and neighbours on Black Saturday. She fled her home only minutes before the firestorm hit. Her studio and her husband’s workshop burnt to the ground. Mercifully their home survived. When she returned to it, she found that radiant heat had cracked the windows and the vicious winds had blown the doors in. Every surface of the inside of her home was covered in a thick layer of soot.

Everything in the house had to be painstakingly cleaned. In that process, Barbara unearthed Cocoa, a knitted and felted chook that she had made eight years previously with yarn spun from her neighbour’s chocolate coloured alpaca. Those same neighbours, along with their alpacas had perished in the fires. Barbara set about bringing Cocoa back to life with a wash and new stuffing and took her in a bag to her dear friend’s funeral. Those present were so pleased to see Cocoa that she was passed around for a cuddle, soothing everyone in her own special way during that sad event.

h/t @forumulate

[UPDATE: I've now extended this concept out into a mini-site. Take a look at the Through Thick and Thin site for a rough prototype. The next steps? Getting more objects, making a proper calculator … and figuring out what to do with this!]

What is the right weight of something? If it feels too heavy it’s uncomfortable, yet something that feels too light is cheap.

That was the theme of the Rightweight workshop that took place in November 2010 (I’d just arrived in the country and didn’t know about it, but wish I’d been able to attend.) Luckily there’s a book documenting the event.

One of the ideas I was most interested in was that of density. In a world of injection-moulded materials, it’s hard to get a handle on what something actually weighs short of actually looking up the weight. (I know that people are surprised at the relative weight of my 2007 Black Macbook—admittedly it’s been souped up with a bigger hard drive than it initially came with, and black is as slimming for laptops as it is for dresses).

One idea put across was what various objects would be made of were they solid instead of hollow. The authors said that based on density, an iPhone would be a literal brick, based on its density. Here’s the graph he provided (which I’ve also made into an interactive graph)

Rightweight Graph

An idea I got from that was what would happen were this to be the case?

First…

The iPhone 4

As it turns out, they were right, with a weight of 140g and a volume of about 63cm3, it comes out at a density of 2.23g/cm3 which is somewhere between brick and concrete.

An iPhone has the same density as brick

The Macbook 2007 model (the one I own):

At  2.36kg (including batteries) and a volume of 2029cm3  (2.75 x 32.5cm x 22.7cm), it comes out at a density of  1.16324 g/cm3 = somewhere among nylon/rubber/paper (literally a Macbook!)

And a Macbook is the same weight as a book

Macbook Air

A Macbook air weighs 1.08kg and has a volume of 576cm3 ((0.3-1.7)/2 x 30 x 19.2 cm) = 1.875 g/cm3 (halfway between carbon fibre and brick).

Magic Trackpad

With a weight of 140g without batteries and and 186 with 2xAA batteries and a volume of 464.209cm3 it comes out as 0.28g/cm3 without batteries (cork) and  0.376705cm3  with them (between cork and pine). 

Magic Mouse

With a weight of 47g without batteries/93g with them and a volume of 42.387cm3 (11.43 cm  x 5.84 cm x 1.27 cm x ~0.5 for the curvature) the density without batteries = 1.10883 (nylon/rubber) and with batteries =  2.19407 (brick/concrete)

Battery

With a weight of 23g for lithium and a volume of 7.7cm3 (0.7*2 x π x 5.3) it comes out with a density of  2.97g/cm3 ( a bit more than granite/slate/aluminium)