Not Physics Weirdness, But Brain Weirdness

This is an interesting little thing.



There's actually a tourist attraction (currently closed, as it was part of the same complex as Prehistoric Forest) that is almost certainly a partly artificial (possibly initially accidentally) exploitation of the same effect called Mystery Hill, which, as I've mentioned in the past, is hecka disorienting; my kid brother took an unpleasant fall in the place once when he was little that nearly ruined the trip*.

...Honestly, I think that the long-distance camera shot they use before they reveal the horizon over the water is probably misleading; it'd likely be easier to tell if one was there oneself (I kind of could tell that it must have been a subtle "reversed" gradation from my experience with Mystery Hill).

*My sister was crazy-prepared enough that she had a decent first aid kit in her purse, which helped get the kid calm enough; there's something soothing about having a bandage properly applied, at least among my family. Not that the Mystery Hill section was a big loss; it's just a few minutes spent in a degree of physical discomfort brought on by the sensation that you ought to be falling over. There's also a lame perspective trick that I've never once seen work because the tour group is supposed to have at least two people of the same height, and everyone in my family is of very different heights, so I've never been in a tour group where there's been decent matching. (My mother is of very average height; my sister is on the short side; when my kid brother went with us, he was still tiny because the place closed years ago; and while my dad's nearly as tall as me, that's only a nearly-and he didn't go often anyway** I stand around six foot four. Suffice it to say I've never been in a tour group with someone my own height.

**I suspect Mom actually mostly liked these trips because the place was around when she was a kid-and my uncle on her side, who is incidentally a now-retired Berkeley physicist, seems to have had much the same association-while Dad's family never seems to have had the least interest in such silly pursuits as the rest of us. This might have as much to do with the fact that, while he's in the same age range as the Baby Boomers, Dad's not actually from the same generation as they are because his parents were an older generation, and his upbringing actually reflected that.

-Signing off.