Orange you glad I don't make puns more often? Entity Orange Pearl and SpaRitual Reverie

Sometimes, when I'm most frustrated with my research, I like to remember a former labmate of mine who is a post-doc in a visual working memory lab I worked in. I saw him at Psychonomics back in November: he had a poster on a new optical illusion that no one had documented yet. He walked me through the poster, as professional as you please, and when I asked how he had thought of it, he said it was all because of an accident! He was programming something else to test and he kept on seeing this weird resulting image on the screen; it drove him nuts because he thought there was something wrong with his programming! Eventually, he realized that he was... well, seeing things. Like the way we see a very clear triangle delineated in the following well-known illusion:

So he started asking questions on it, testing people on it, and was, at the time of the conference, in the process of writing up a paper for publication. I thought this was amazing and said to him, "You mean, you DISCOVERED a new optical illusion that NO ONE has ever studied before?"

He broke into this huge kid-like grin: "Yeah!"

It's hard to explain what was so touching about that moment and why it's such a sustaining memory for me (without getting too sentimental about the often excruciating process of academic research). But it makes me think of the last Calvin & Hobbes comic (click to enlarge):

"It's a magical world... let's go exploring!"

Yes, I had nail polish swatches for you today, too... :)

SpaRitual Reverie

"Radiant" is the word that comes to mind when I look at this polish. Also, "brushstroke-y". I thought this an amazingly pretty golden tangerine shimmer but between the hard-to-control formula and the brushstrokes, I feel pretty "meh" about this one.

Entity Orange Pearl

A lot less radiant but a little more workable. The application on this Entity polish was very good and easy: I used three coats here but could've done fine with two. It's not a mindblowing color or anything, a simple orange shimmer. Still, it was my NOTD for a couple of days and it held up very well.

Old NOTD: Entity Dark Cinnamon

This was my NOTD a couple of days ago. It came out differently than I thought it would but I liked the effect anyway.

Entity Dark Cinnamon

It looks more like a chocolate brown with gold shimmer in the bottle but when you put it on the nail, you can see why it's called Dark Cinnamon. It's a red-leaning brown that has a lovely gold shimmer to it. A very deep and rich color; it somehow makes my nails look strong and tough. This was my first Entity polish too (purchased from TransDesign) and I was very pleased with the quality of the polish: it was opaque in two coats, easy to control, the small rounded brush was perfect for me and it dried very quickly with Diamont and stayed beautiful for a day without any tipwear (unusual for me). I really want to try more of this brand!

I heard back from CUNY yesterday and the abstract I submitted was rejected. :( I kind of expected it to be rejected but still, that totally sucks. I'm still going to New York though.