Interesting article from the New York Times’ Benedict Carey: Magical Thinking: Why Do People Cling to Odd Rituals?

Children exhibit a form of magical thinking by about 18 months, when they begin to create imaginary worlds while playing. By age 3, most know the difference between fantasy and reality, though they usually still believe (with adult encouragement) in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. By age 8, and sometimes earlier, they have mostly pruned away these beliefs, and the line between magic and reality is about as clear to them as it is for adults.

Unless they’re the current US president, in which case they continue to make speeches manifesting their magical beliefs all the way to the age of 60…

Teller (of Penn and Teller) has written a really fun review of Peter Lamont’s The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: The Grift of the Magi. Also, the New York Times has an excerpt from the book’s first chapter available online. Good stuff.

Not really magic, but Janus likes to think of it that way, which is good enough for my topic-selection purposes. Anyway, if you like those stereo-isogram thingies where you fuse the two images to make a three-dimensional picture pop off the page, here’s one rendered entirely in ASCII: stereo.txt. Complete with an uplifting message crafted just for obsessives who spend time weblogging when they should be doing something more productive.

From Daypop comes word of a cool new batch of optical illusions: The latest works.

From the Spring 2003 issue of New Witch magazine, courtesy of Popular Science, courtesy of Janus: The real reason your computer keeps crashing.

Thanks to Ymatt, too, for the nice Houdini image for the new category icon.

From Daypop comes word of this really fun (if slightly nauseating) optical illusion: raareffect.jpg. The circles aren’t actually moving, you see.

More fun turned up in a few second’s Googling: Akiyoshi’s illusion pages and optillusions.com.

Art-school philosophy prof and generally fun smart-ass Crispin Sartwell has a review of Jamy Ian Swiss’ Shattering Illusions: Essays on the Ethics, History, and Presentation of Magic in today’s LA Times book reviews: Entertaining deception. It actually sounds like a pretty cool book; maybe I’ll pick it up when I finish The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which just arrived today.

Edward Tufte is cool: Pioneer space plaque redesign.