記事

In the Steps of the Samurai

In an era of rigid hierarchies, Odano is said to have made the comment “all humans are equal when their bodies are dissected”.

Peter Tasker · EN

Edo Erotica: Shunga in Shinjuku

Even now official Japan is dubious about the worth of Shunga

Peter Tasker · EN

‘Straight to Hell’: The Extraordinary Life of Kazuko Hosoki

As to the value of her predictions, she got the big one right...

Peter Tasker · EN

The Geopolitics of Football: Japan 7 China 0

What China badly needs is love, love of the game as exemplified by one remarkable Japanese player.

Peter Tasker · EN

How Japan Can Bring the Money Back Home

Thanks to a ruthless and increasingly powerful China, David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is off the menu for the foreseeable future...

Peter Tasker · EN

The Katsu Curry Index Looks Quite Tasty!

You can tell quite a lot about a person by the way they eat their curry rice...

Peter Tasker · EN

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS IN THE 21st CENTURY

Top of the class is South Korea with an amazing increase in average wealth of 63% since 2020.

Peter Tasker · EN

THE OZU DIARIES: A PERSONAL LOOK AT THE GREAT DIRECTOR

This summer I spent some time in a small town of fifteen hundred people in southwest France. As you might expect from the country that pioneered the art of cinema, it had a movie theatre. More surprising was the film that was screened, a 1933 silent classic called “I Was Born But…” directed by Yasujiro ... THE OZU DIARIES: A PERSONAL LOOK AT THE GREAT DIRECTOR

Peter Tasker · EN

Zöllner Illusion

What: The Zöllner Illusion (pronounced TSOLL-ner, or just “zollner” if you’re not feeling fancy) is one of those delightfully old illusions that still gets me every time. It was discovered way back in 1860 by Johann Zöllner, a German astrophysicist who was probably just trying to look at fabric patterns and got thoroughly distracted [1]. Once you start playing around with the controls, the effect will be pretty clear… and it’s at least a little bit more fun to me knowing that the diagonal lines are causing my brain to glitch out.

Optical Toys · EN

Watercolor Illusion

What: The Watercolor Illusion is one of those gorgeous ones where your brain is just… painting things that aren’t there. The thing about this thats beautiful, is that it’s easily paintable (water colors obviously) with your own watercolors, on physical paper. You should effectively be able to look at this illusion and figure it out (it seems to work for me in greys/blacks/whites so its color blind-independent?) … the lines drawing the shapes have a subtle shading to them in one direction, not too dissimilar to water color painting.

Optical Toys · EN

Spinning Point Silhouette

What: Assuming that you’ve sat with this for a bit before going straight to the reading, there’s about a 50/50 chance that the “effect” happened, which is essentially your brain switching the rotation direction (even though on our side it’s the same way the entire time). There’s a similar experiment on the site, the Spinning Duck, which is based on the silhouette illusion [1], the same trick as the famous spinning dancer.

Optical Toys · EN

Müller-Lyer Illusion

What: The Müller-Lyer illusion (pronounced roughly MEW-ler LEER) is one of the absolute classics, you’ve probably seen it in a textbook at some point. Two lines, exactly the same length, one with arrowheads pointing out and one with tails pointing in… and the one with the tails looks noticeably longer. Here they’re animated, so the fins swing back and forth and you can watch the lines seemingly grow and shrink, even though they never change at all.

Optical Toys · EN

Flashed Face Distortion

What: The Flashed Face Distortion is one of the creepier ones on the site, and honestly one of my favorites. As you focus on the cross in the middle, the faces on the left and right start to warp… jaws get huge, eyes go a little alien, foreheads stretch, and these are some of the most famous (and good looking) faces on the planet. The moment you look straight at one though, it’s totally normal again.

Optical Toys · EN

Motion-Induced Blindness

What: Three big, bright yellow dots. Not faint, not tiny, not hiding. And yet, stare at the middle for a few seconds and they just… leave. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, sometimes all three at once. This one was found by Yoram Bonneh, Alexander Cooperman and Dov Sagi at the Weizmann Institute in 2001 [1]. Their original version was a swarm of blue dots spinning on a 3D sphere, but the spinning grid with the flashing green dot is the one that took over the internet, and honestly it’s the better one.

Optical Toys · EN

Expanding Hole

What: Stare at the black hole. Give it a few seconds. It’s growing, right? Like you’re falling in. It’s not, the image is totally still. It’s by Akiyoshi Kitaoka (pronounced key-TAH-oh-kah), and in 2022 some researchers showed it to 50 people and watched their eyes [1]. The wild part: your pupils fall for it too. They open up, like you’re heading somewhere dark. How To: Stare at the middle and let it build.

Optical Toys · EN

Rainbow Drift

What: Nothing here moves. Not one pixel. Every shape just sits there changing colour, and yet the arrows slide, the fish swim off and the vortex sucks you in. It’s a follow-up to my Reverse Phi Rainbows, same trick, just a whole lot more of it. The whole thing is inspired by jagarikin [1], a Japanese artist who posts these on X, and his running joke is sticking an arrow on everything.

Optical Toys · EN

ETH Study Materials

A collection of study material I created back when I was tutoring Computer Science at ETH Zürich

Pascal Schärli · EN

Sharekey Cryptography Review

During my master thesis I reviewed the cryptography of the end-to-end encrypted Sharekey collaboration app. This post covers the most interesting issues I found.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Breaking Military Grade Encryption to Animate my Name

Getting into the weeds of my flashy website banner, that simulates a padding-oracle attack on AES-CBC.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Quantum Apocalypse?

NIST finalized their first post quantum secure cryptographic algorithms in August 2024. This post provides a gentle introduction and an intuition on the actual impact.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Proton's crypto is not Transparent and not OPAQUE

Proton says privacy "isn't a promise, it's mathematically ensured." I found new ways they could read your data anyway.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Post-Quantum Crypto Won't Fix Your Architecture

Adding PQC to this product was like installing a vault door on a tent. The server could intercept your keys and an RCE let attackers run code on your desktop.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Filen's password onion made me cry

Filen hashes passwords with MD5(MD4(MD2(pwd))). This post shows several cryptographic weaknesses in their protocol and questions if it's even worth doing end-to-end encryption delivered through a webpage.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Unifi Travel Router Review

I recently snagged one of these, and took it on a road trip!

Rich Infante · EN