Perspective

Today's lesson comes courtesy of perception.

The following are a series of "Odd One Out" questions, try to pick the odd one out and describe why it is the odd one in the group.

1)
Hand
Foot
Eye
Tongue
Ear

2)
Milk
Coffee
Tea
Juice
Soda


Write down your answers.

These are both questions I have received from the "Daily Brain Games" day-to-day calendar that I bought at the beginning of the year. They are all marked as "easy"... and I have gotten them wrong. In fact, I have only gotten one of the "Odd One Out" questions right all year so far. However, I feel that I have some reason to believe that I am equally correct as the authors of the Daily Calendar (not to detract from them, they have made a pretty cool day-by-day thing, one that I will buy next year).
I'll go through the answers and reasons I gave and the "actual" answers from the daily calendar at the end of this post.

Now...
Perspective. We all have our own.
It can be as simple as a height change, for example an ant might mistake an elephant's leg for a tree trunk whereas the elephant might mistake the ant for another piece of dirt. Other examples include people misinterpreting the brutality of combat sports as being barbarianism and others mistaking Two and Half Men and The Big Bang Theory as comedy.

For some reason, people think that the two people on the top steps look alike... and have done for 

roughly 25 years.

Then you get all of those other ones where things deliberately mess with your head to prove a point.
The following two are the most common:

The point being that your mind plays tricks on you and a lot of it is down to perspective and tricks of the mind.

Another example of this is floor and bathroom/laundry tiles.
I remember going to Michael's place and sort of wigging out whenever I went to the toilet because his floor tiles were in that maddening style where you could see cubes... or the inside of a box, depending on your mind and how long you stared at it.

Not quite this....

...but this.
Incidentally, my brain hurts.

The perspective, without other information like depth, forces you to change how you are thinking constantly.

The amusing thing is that it is very hard to make it work if it is an actual set of 3 dimensional objects. For example:

Apart from a shower that needs cleaning, what do you see?

Sitting on my toilet, looking in to the shower, I can see this poor attempt at the cube illusion, but I simply can not reverse the direction in my head for any more than a few seconds. It is the inside of a cube, not the outside... until I saw it on my camera screen and lost the binocular vision.

Anyway...





This is related to writing how?
I'm working together with a friend and we are discussing alternative ways of writing various things. We email and critique each other. In the end, however, there has to be an "absolute"... that is the final product. That's not to say that we are both wrong or we are both right, or indeed that there is an absolute... but there there will always have to be an "answer" that gets sent out and is "final". The difference in opinion always comes from different perspectives and perceptions of what works best.


The Odd One out questions, again.
1)
Hand
Foot
Eye
Tongue
Ear

2)
Milk
Coffee
Tea
Juice
Soda

Write down your answers.

If you answered:
- "Foot" because "the others are associated with senses whereas it is associated with movement/travel/motivation"
- "Soda" because "it is the only one regularly associated with 'bubbling drink'"

Congratulations!

You are just like me and got them "wrong".

Answers according to the calendar:
- "Tongue" as "the others all come in pairs"
- "Milk" because "it is the only drink to come from an animal"

As far as I can see, both points are correct, but one had to be selected as an "absolute" for the purposes of publishing... and that, in itself, is the point.
A final product, particularly anything that involves anyone's perception or point-of-view, will always have "errors"... to some people.