Fog rolling in from Lake, Michigan

Posted on March 5, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Fog rolling in from Lake Michigan yesterday morning. Took this photo while stopped at a traffic light on Wells Street heading east on my way to work. Downtown Milwaukee. 

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Moon and Roofline

Posted on March 3, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Had an errand to run last night and noticed how striking this roofline looked beneath the moon. I especially liked the strong, stark, “color blocking” effect. Such a plain but forceful image. Just these large, sharply-defined blocks of solid color separated from the night sky by that bright, horizontal line of the white metal cap.

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Milwaukee skyline, spotlighted by sunshine

Posted on February 18, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

I was visiting someone at Froedtert Hospital last week, a week ago today, actually, and had to park on the very top of the parking structure. Like, the very farthest corner away from the buildings on the very top floor. Got my 10,000 steps in that day, for sure.

But on the plus side, or should I say further plus side, since I also got some additional walking time in, when returning to my car after the visit, I was greeted with this rather arresting view as I got off the elevator.

Milwaukee skyline, from the roof of Froedtert Hospital's ER/specialty clinics parking structure - 1

Because I was parked in the farthest southeast corner of the roof (only a little “motorcycle parking” square space between my car and the wall), I had an unfettered view when I reached my vehicle.

Milwaukee skyline, from the roof of Froedtert Hospital's ER/specialty clinics parking structure - 2

Although it was overcast, the sun was breaking through and illuminating several of the downtown buildings.

Milwaukee skyline, from the roof of Froedtert Hospital's ER/specialty clinics parking structure - 3

See the light brown building topped with the red and white sign in the left third of the photo? That’s Miller Brewing, which is over 25-45 city blocks away from those tall downtown buildings (25+ from the nearest at around 10th Street and 45-ish from the tall buildings on the right side of downtown proper, which is about 18 blocks east of 10th and about 7 blocks south.)

I’m not sure what the building at the far right of the photo above is. It’s possible  that it’s Bay View Terrace, a lonely high-rise apartment building (now condos, actually) just south across the Hoan Bridge (crossing the Milwaukee Harbor and associated land) from downtown. But it looks more like the Potawatomi Hotel Casino, which is located less far south of downtown and is also in the 1700 block west (on Canal Street, in the Menomonee Valley, once aka the “Industrial Valley,” although its industrial heyday is long past and efforts are underway to restore the natural marshland environment.

These photos really demonstrate the way a telephoto lens compresses distance. I was standing at approximately 87th Street. Miller Brewing is around 37th or so. Downtown runs from about 10th Street on the west, then 10 blocks to the Milwaukee River, which is the dividing line between east and west, and then about 9 or 10 additional blocks east from the river to Lake Michigan. The U. S. Bank building (tallest building in the photo, white, with its name in blue and red across the top, and also the tallest building in Wisconsin) is at 777 E. Wisconsin, and the buidling to its right is the Couture (tallest apartment building in the state, according to Wikipedia), located at 909 E. Michigan.

So my photos cover about 107 city blocks. Not bad for snapshots taken with my iPhone 16!

One last photo, not of downtown but of Miller Park, newly named (as of 2020) American Family Field. Apparently it’s the only ballpark with a fan-shaped retractable roof, according to Wikipedia anyway. That feature is clearly distinct in the photo, and you can see that the roof was closed that day. Miller Park (as I still think of it) is due west of Potawatomi, around 44th Street, so approximately 45-40 blocks southeast from where I was standing.

American Family Field, foof closed, view from the west

It was fun seeing the sights from this unusual perspective. Although I groaned with each level I was forced to ascend in the parking structure (busy day at Froedtert, I guess), it was a real treat in the end that my far-flung, last available parking space on the roof turned out to be the best seat in the house!

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How to tell if a video is AI: Some clues

Posted on February 7, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Some fun “time lapse” videos of landscaping, patio/courtyard, and balcony makeovers have been coming through my Facebook feed lately. The other day I shared one with a note saying:

This is such a fun use of AI; these videos provide not only a nice, short, uplifting break from the slog of workday tasks but also a rejuvenating “refresh” of ideas and inspiration.

One of my friends left a comment that asked, “Why AI?”

Now, I assumed she meant: How do you know it’s AI? She may have only meant: Why did they make an AI video when they could have filmed a real project? So my bad if she meant the second, because I posted a lengthy reply to the first question, with screenshots and analysis and just really got into explaining how you could tell it was AI.

Sorry, Margaret, if I misinterpreted the intent of your question and went down the wrong rabbit hole!

However, havng once gone down that rabbit hole, I was now left with several screenshots of that video in my phone’s camera roll, and I figured, hey, why not do a THIRD blog post in as many days and share my possibly unwanted  and largely unread Facebook-reply blast with the rest of the world?

So here it is. I can’t find this “Moroccan Courtyard” video on YouTube, so I can’t embed it here for viewing right on this page. The video creator seems to post only on Instagram and Facebook.

Link to the video on Instagram HERE.

Link to the video on Facebook HERE.

So first we have the empty courtyard, and if you look at this screenshot, you can see the area in the corners and how much room there is, which is not a lot. By the end of the video there are two ginormous trees that can’t possibly be growing from that small corner on each side. The smaller trees could be, but not the two giant trees that pop up on either side at the very end of the video. Those trees would have to be planted outside the fence of the courtyard. But it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room between the buildings closer to us and that building that’s across the back of the courtyard.

Now we are sort of in the middle of the build, starting to put in the plantings, including the smaller trees along the outer edges of the courtyard.

And here, toward the end of the daytime hours, we suddenly have the giant trees in the rear corners and clearly between the buildings closer to us and the building farther from us. It seems unlikely that 1) they could plant such tall trees and 2) that those two tall trees would fit in the space provided.

 

Another weird thing from this point in the video is that the clouds in the sky suddenly stop, just freeze like a photograph. If you look at the sky throughout the video, at first it is overcast, and then we have rather large clouds moving quickly across the sky from left to right. Then the clouds reverse direction, which CAN happen during a day, but usually does not. Usually the wind is moving in one direction pretty much all day. But then, the thing I find a little strange is that as the workers are setting the furniture into place, the sky just completely stops, holds completely still like a photo, and then it starts up again with clouds moving.

So I guess what makes me think it’s AI is the combination of those two really large trees that apparently are getting planted as part of the landscaping and the strange things happening in the sky.

It’s still a fun video to watch, though! I would love to have a little garden area like this

(Later . . .) I’m thinking even harder about why my impression of this video was that it was AI. I went back to one of my screenshots and looked closer, only to find that some of the trees are weirdly blurred, but only in spots, parts of those rear (small) trees are not blurry, while other details, like the palm tree looking things, are in sharp, sharp detail.

Also, the man in the front left has no head.

The other men’s heads are blurred out in a manner similar to the weird, spotty blurring of those trees in the back. This is from the middle of the build, before the ginormous trees are put into place.

A close-up view from this image is below. What I find “suspect” is that the blurring seems selective. The man’s head and the tree surrounding it. Yet detail at the top of the tree behind the man and detail of that tree/plant with the spiky fronds is fairly crisp.

Nobody is going to go to these lengths in daily life to see whether a video is AI or not. But I think we can and should, all of us, work to train our sixth sense to be more aware of the AI “tells.”

Because one thing is for sure: The AI video tsunmai is coming. The tide is way, way out, and the water is starting to foam. We need to recognize the signs and do what’s necessary to avoid ending up as flotsam!

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Associated Press: Please! Do better!

Posted on February 6, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

As a professor who teaches political science from as neutral a position as possible (sort of like teaching a comparative religion course from an observer’s perspective versus teaching a theology course from a believer’s perspective), I try to present “The Press” as a quasi-governmental entity (as in “The Fourth Estate) characterized by both positive and negative attributes. Americans have long held the press in high esteem, so one of the flashpoints of “disagreement,” shall we term it, between people with left-leaning versus right-leaning political ideologies in recent years has been the issue of journalism’s trustworthiness.

I have been dismayed by the news media’s complicity in its own destruction. Donald Trump may have popularized the concept of “fake news” and led the growth of widespread mistrust among his followers, but I have also seen too many blatant falsehoods and twisted/spun versions of the facts to take much of anything I see reported in the news at face value. Sometimes I listen to other people talking politics and have to will myself not to allow any physical movement, like shaking my head or widening my eyes, to convey my suprise at their seemingly willfull acceptance of “opinion” for “fact” in the news they consume. These are smart, thoughtful people. I don’t know why they don’t see what I see. But I never say anything. I remember my Greek mythology and what happened to Cassandra (slavery, and later murder) when she tried to warn the people of Troy of the danger associated with kidnapping Helen and accepting that gift of a giant wooden horse from the Greeks.

Maybe I shouldn’t even say anything here on my blog, except I’m speaking directly to (yet indirectly, in terms of the media channel; maybe I should say instead that I’m directly “addressing my remarks to”) the Associated Press. Maybe the people responsible for the article I’m going to talk about weren’t deliberately trying to be manipulative. Maybe their own biases are so ingrained that they don’t even see it on the page (or, in this case, on the screen). But this is basic stuff that a good editor who cares about quality journalism should not allow to slip through.

So, here was the headline that caught my eye this morning:

Associated Press headline, from a story dated February 6, 2026

“Experts?” I wondered. What kind of “experts” exist on the topic of the U. S. Census? Would these be political scientists? No. The only experts quoted were a “former congressional staffer who consults on census issues” and “an associate vice president at the Population Reference Bureau,” described by the reporter as a “nonpartisan research group.” Neither of these sources is objectionable, and both individuals do work closely with organizations on matters related to the Census Bureau, but in my opinion, it is a bit of a stretch to call them “experts” in the context of that headline. They might be experts about the U. S. Census, but they are not experts about the impact a citizenship question might have on society.

Additionally, what even is going on with the last paragraph in this screenshot: “Among the questions on the ACS is one that asks, ‘Is this person a citizen of the United States?’ Questions for the census aren’t supposed to ask about citizenship, and they haven’t for 75 years.”

Opinion stated as fact in the Associate Press news article dated February 6, 2026

If you parse that last sentence out, I suspect you’ll be as surprised as I was.

Who says, for example, that questions for the census aren’t supposed to ask about citizenship? Is there some international treaty to which the U. S. is signatory decreeing that all countries must abide by this rule? Is there an international body, like some agency at the United Nations, with the power to issue standards of governance related to census-taking procedures? No, there is not.

And the second half of that same sentence (“and they haven’t for 75 years”) immediately had me googling to see what the case was prior to that. Which search, as you might guess, informed me that from 1890 to 1950 the U. S. Census did indeed ask about citizenship.

Now, why would a reporter issue such a baldly-stated non fact as the first part of that sentence (“questions for the census aren’t supposed to ask about citizenship”) followed immediately by the clue that would direct any thinking person with a couple extra minutes to the proof needed to demonstrate that the first part is, for want of a better term, “fake news”?

This is exactly the kind of incompentence or dishonesty (take your pick) that has landed legacy news media in the situation they currently enjoy. And it’s too bad. The Associated Press was one of the few remaining bastions of quality journalism that I turned to every day. But for several years now, I’ve seen too much of this truth “fudging” for my high regard to continue indefinitely.

Reuters, it’s up to you now ❤

Unless/until the AP shapes up, you’re the one news organization I find the least fault with (basically none). Please don’t let me down and leave me with no news source I can rely on to be unerringly trustworthy in this crazy, confusing world!

Posted in Media studies, Political Analysis | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Freshly Pressed is back!

Posted on February 5, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

I was thrilled to see that WordPress is bringing back its “Freshly Pressed” feature!

For quite a while now, it has seemed to me like the “social” end of the WordPress experience has been dying. Most of the bloggers I began following years ago have stopped posting, and it has become harder and harder to find new blogs to follow, reducing my WP “Reader” feed to a mere, paltry shadow of its formerly robust daily array of blog posts featuring philosophical essays, book/movie reviews, photography galleries, cooking how-tos, artists’ behind-the-scenes, personal journals, and anonymous online diaries.

All the great OG types of blogs that once flourished in the pre-Substack era.

Blogs!

Not “newsletters.”

It has also been a little dismaying that at the very same time I was mourning my slowly deteriorating feed of imaginative daily content coming through my WP Reader, WordPress seemed intent on mimicking the Substack model by publishing supportive posts for WordPress users on how to produce “newsletters” to send to “subscribers” and how to “promote growth” by engaging with the Blaze ad platform and marketing their “content” by paying for visibility.

Nothing wrong with that, of course! But this “hustle bro” vibe is certainly very different from the more “social” experience of the WordPress blogging community I joined back in early 2012.

Back then I was always looking for new blogs, new voices, new creative online friends. And the WordPress home page at that time featured a list of 19 “Freshly Pressed” blogs per day, rotating in new posts as the older posts dropped out, that were like the best of the best from the week. If you were looking for quality writing about interesting topics, here was a great place to find it. I discovered lots of great blogs and bloggers to follow from the old WordPress home page. My WP Reader was overflowing with posts. Every morning brought new voices with  blog posts that were thoughtful, entertaining, informative, and aesthetically beautiful.

Much to my astonishment, I was fortunate enough to have one of my own posts, “Jonah Lehrer and the ‘marvellous Boy,'” singled out by the WordPress editorial curation team for Freshly Pressed status. My brief moment of WordPress “fame” was both thrilling and overwhelming. (And sad, as well, because my recognition arose from a post I wrote about something disastrous career-wise for a writer I admired.)

I’m not usually a person who collects achievement “badges,” mostly because badges are an artifact of gaming culture, foreign to me as a product of the pre-videogame era. The whole “gamification” angle underlying so much of the UX of almost every digital experience just kind of turns me off. I like doing things because I like doing them. The added layer of “achievement” and leveling up is, for me, an unwelcome distraction. In fact, years ago they (previous adminstration at my university) tried to give digital badges to faculty for engaging with a certain interface at work, like we would have badges displayed on our faculty profiles, and most everyone rebelled and refused to engage until the “reward” went away. Because, really, isn’t there something a bit juvenile and unprofessional about earning and displaying badges for properly doing one’s job. (Opinion is definitely my own, of course 🙂 )

And yet.

Despite having said all that, I did choose to display the “Freshly Pressed” badge from WordPress on my blog!

screenshot image of the WordPress "Freshly Pressed" badge

A screenshot of my very own “Freshly Pressed” badge from my 2012 post, “Jonah Lehrer, and the ‘marvellous Boy‘”

I had worked hard on that post, felt proud of my work, and was very gratified that WordPress editors had NOTICED and chosen it to represent the “ideal” of quality writing.

Even once “Freshly Pressed” had faded away, so that most people visiting my blog would have no idea what it meant, I never did take that badge down. I liked it. It made me remember those shiny early days of blogging and how exciting it was to have someone “like” my posts or even better, leave a comment on one of them. And having that vestige of “old” WordPress was kind of a nod to other blogging survivors like me, a recognition of kindred spirits, a wink conveying an insider’s sense of IYKYK.

So everyone pay attention!

Link HERE to bookmark the Freshly Pressed page now, before you forget 🙂

 

Posted in Writing, blogging | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

AI-generated music and performers rise to the top of Christian and Country charts

Posted on December 22, 2025 by Katherine Wikoff

Just a super quick post this morning to share an article I found fascinating: “1 big thing: AI gospel singer tops Christian charts, from Axios AI+, a newsletter I subscribe to. Here is the link to the article online: https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-3f578c6c-b15f-4520-b015-ec13435e4b35.html

The gist of what I find fascinating is that, like me and my posts of AI-co-written short stories and poetry along with my chats, the humans behind the AI “artists” in this article are experimenting with AI to produce (co-produce?) creative work. The man who brought the Gospel singer into being describes his creation as “a musical project, not a political puppet.” The point appears to be exploring new tools for making art rather than challenging people’s fundamental worldviews of what is and isn’t acceptable (moral, ethical) behavior and what it means to be human and —at least, not challenging those worldviews any more than good art usually does lol

Take a few minutes to click over and read the article if you have any interest.

In my opinion, the type of work described is the future of creativity: art produced by a human in partnership with an AI tool. The fact that these AI-generated artists and songs have risen to the top of the Christian and Country music charts indicates that other humans recognize something in these creations that is valuable and connects with whatever it is inside humans that responds to works of art.

“Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” the award-winning artwork that started it all – Midjourney, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Interesting, also, is the way copyright and intellectual property protections are evolving alongside artists’ experimentation with AI. See, for example, this article from April 2025 in WIPO Magazine, the publication of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is the United Nations agency “that serves the world’s innovators and creators, ensuring that their ideas travel safely to the market and improve lives everywhere.”

I liked this highlighted section of the article, which captures its focus:

The capabilities of today’s generative AI (genAI) technologies raise significant questions about the nature and scope of human authorship. How much human input must an artwork, such as a piece of music, have in order for it to receive copyright protection?

Although the article talks mostly about U.S. copyright law processes and principles, its broader point is to consider the entire worldwide ecosystem for protecting the rights of creators, whether artists or inventors.

Okay, so that’s my post for today. Hope you find it interesting. I’d probably keep on going with this topic this morning, sharing more articles and writing up commentary on them, if I had more time. Lucky for you, though, I have to go finish up my final course grades for the semester! 🙂

Posted in Art, Creativity, generative AI, Music | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Talking with ChatGPT about Google Sites

Posted on December 18, 2025 by Katherine Wikoff

This is final exam week at Milwaukee School of Engineering, where I teach. While I’m busy grading and wrapping up this semester, at the same time I’m trying to make sure I capture some “lessons learned” for future semesters teaching the same courses and also making notes for yet a different course that I’ll be teaching in the upcoming semester.

Specifically, I’m teaching SOC 4001 Digital Society in the spring, and I want to find a way to combine two assignments into a larger “joint” assignment. Doing this will require students to create a website, but I don’t want them to get too caught up in website design at the expense of storytelling. Students with limited backgrounds in web design, in particular, may become sidetracked by technical challenges rather than focusing on their primary task: crafting a story that shares compelling information and creates a coherent narrative (linear or nonlinear) that connects dots, elicits an emotional response, and extends beyond the story itself, resonating within the larger context of “Digital Society.” The catalog course description calls for a collaborative multimedia digital-storytelling project, so I need to have a website builder easily capable of supporting media and allowing for fluid storytelling.

Below is a copy of a chat I just finished with ChatGPT. As you’ll see in my initial prompt, I recently mentioned Google Sites in my digital storytelling class, mostly as an anecdote about how Google used to have a nice website-building platform but I thought it went away, as I never hear about it anymore. But then a student overhearing my remark was intrigued enough to look it up and discovered that, nope, apparently Google Sites did NOT go away! And it looked really easy to use, he thought. Indeed, it does, with lots of options for someone unfamiliar with modular, block-based editors and content-authoring environments like the Gutenberg block editor in WordPress, which I still find so clunky and unhelpful for publishing the very straightforward content on my blog that I’ve developed a workaround that allows me to continue using WordPress’s old “Classic Editor.”

Anyway, I’m sharing my chat with you for two reasons. First, you might want to check out Google Sites if you’d like a free, easy-to-use website builder. This might be especially great if you’re a teacher and would like students to create multimedia stories (like my students are doing). Second, if you haven’t yet used ChatGPT, or if you’ve only used it to smooth out your style in a written document, you might be interested in seeing how low key and quick my chat was. I had a thought; I asked ChatGPT for info (more detailed and complete than a browser search would provide); and within literally about two or three minutes, I had what I needed to make a decision and move forward. Quick and easy!

In fact, I use ChatGPT for most of my searches now unless it’s something very simple. It would have taken me much longer to figure out the scoop with Google Sites if I’d done a Google search, poked around the Google Sites site, tried to see what the Reddit community thought, etc.

So below, FYI, is my search. ChatGPT has gotten better and better. It does an excellent job of remembering our previous chats. You’ll notice that with zero prompting on my part, ChatGPT remembers that I teach courses in film/media studies and digital storytelling.

I said:

I’m looking ahead to a future semester and thinking of asking students to use Google Sites to create multimedia stories. I haven’t used Google Sites in maybe 6 years. I thought Google Sites no longer existed, but when I mentioned it in class, one student was intrigued enough to look it up and not only found it was still around but thought it looked cool. So can you tell me what is up with Google Sites? Can you actually still publish a website and have it public enough to show up in a Google search?

ChatGPT said:

Yes — Google Sites definitely still exists today as a website-creation and publishing tool from Google (it’s part of the Google Docs Editors suite) and not a defunct service. Wikipedia

Here’s a clear overview of what’s up with it:

🛠️ What Google Sites Is Now

  • It’s a free, web-based site builder that lets you create webpages without coding, using drag-and-drop tools. Wikipedia
  • You can include multimedia like images, embedded video, text, links, Google Docs/Slides/Forms, etc., making it suitable for multimedia storytelling projects. Wikipedia
  • It’s simpler than platforms like WordPress or Squarespace, but it is very easy for students to learn and use. Wikipedia

🌐 Publishing a Site

Yes — you can publish a Google Site and make it accessible on the public internet:

🔎 Being Found in Google Search

Publishing alone doesn’t guarantee your site will immediately show up in Google search results — but it can be indexed and show up over time:

  • Google will crawl public sites on the web and can index them in search results automatically eventually. Google Help
  • You can speed up visibility by submitting your site to Google Search Console after publishing. Many users report that indexing can take some time and effort (adding structured content, linking to it, etc.). Reddit
  • There’s also a setting to request that search engines not display your site, but that’s optional — by default, if the site is public, it can be crawled. Google Sites

📌 Sharing & Classroom Uses

  • You only need a free Google account (like a Gmail) to create and publish a site — no separate hosting fees. Alibaba
  • The public URL is sharable with a link, so students can send their published site to instructors, embed it in portfolios, or connect it to other digital projects. Google Sites
  • If you want a custom domain (e.g., yourdomain.com instead of the sites.google.com URL), that’s also possible with additional settings or domain purchase, though not required for a class project. Google Sites

📅 Practical Tip

For classroom use:

  • Have students publish their site as “Public on the web” so anyone with the URL can see it. Google Sites
  • Optionally teach them about Google Search Console to help their site appear in search results.
  • Encourage adding meaningful text content and links — search engines need context to index well. Reddit

In short:
✅ Google Sites is actively supported. Wikipedia
✅ Students can still build and publish public websites. Google Sites
✅ Those sites can show up in Google search, though indexing isn’t instant and may need a bit of SEO care. Google Help

If you want, I can walk you through a step-by-step plan for a student assignment using Google Sites!

I said:

I love this! I did find Google Sites easy to use, and I think my students will like it, too. I also love that a Gmail account gets them in the door. I think everyone has that. Thank you!

ChatGPT said:

You’re very welcome! I’m so glad this clicked for you 😊

Given your background in film/media studies and digital storytelling, Google Sites is actually a nice fit pedagogically: it lets students think in terms of structure, sequence, and multimodality without getting bogged down in tech. And the low barrier to entry—“you already have a Gmail account”—removes so much friction, especially compared to WordPress or anything that smells like “web hosting.”

A few quiet strengths you might appreciate as an instructor:

  • Narrative architecture without code: Pages, subpages, scrolling sections—students have to think about pacing, hierarchy, and visual rhetoric.
  • Multimedia integration is almost frictionless: YouTube, Drive video, audio, Slides, Docs, images—all embed cleanly.
  • Revision is visible: Sites autosaves and keeps version history, which is useful if you ever want to talk about drafting, revision, or process.
  • Public-facing but not scary: Publishing to the web feels real, but the stakes are lower than “launch a personal website.”

If you end up using it, you might frame the assignment not as “build a website” but as:

“Create a public-facing multimedia narrative using the affordances and constraints of Google Sites.”

That language tends to cue rhetorical awareness rather than tech anxiety.

If you’d like later on, I can help you:

  • Design a sample prompt or rubric
  • Think through privacy language for syllabi (public vs. link-only)
  • Or sketch a low-stakes scaffold (storyboard → site map → draft → published story)

But for now—this sounds like a really smart rediscovery. I love when a “dead” tool turns out to be quietly perfect for a new moment.

I said:

Me, too! ❤

ChatGPT Logo

ChatGPT Logo

Posted in Creativity, generative AI, Learning, Teaching, Writing with AI, Writing, blogging | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

(𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴) C O O O o o ʟ

Posted on December 5, 2025 by Katherine Wikoff

As I was putting on my coat yesterday afternoon to head out to my 3:00 PM class, I noticed what appeared to be a smudge or scuff on the wall near my office window. Slightly upsetting. Not only was it unsightly, but I couldn’t imagine what might have caused it. Sort of like walking out to your car after work and finding a big scrape or dent that hadn’t been there when you left it.

But wait. The wall was bathed in bright, direct sunlight. Could that smudge just be a shadow? To test that theory, I held my hand out to block the sunlight—and the smudge/scuff disappeared. Whew!

Pulling my hand away, I noticed a faint, white afterimage of my fingers trailing their shadow. Cool! But immediately I began to doubt what I’d seen. Had I imagined it? I held my hand up a second time and pulled it away. Again, the afterimage.

Then I began to wonder: Was that afterimage visible only to the naked eye? Or, could someone also view it in a video, even if mediated by a screen.

Well, only one way to find out. I pulled out my phone and shot a quick video of my hand’s shadow on the wall. And YES! When I looked at the video, I could still see that afterimage trailing the shadow as my hand withdrew.

(This is all basically happening as I’m buttoning my coat to leave for class, don’t forget. Multitasking 🙂 )

Much later, when got home from work last night and was showing the video to my husband, I had to laugh at the sound of myself murmuring the word “cool” in rather awed tones. I hadn’t intended saying it—wasn’t even aware, in fact, that I had. But clearly, my inner voice has a mind of its own, as evinced by that little whisper of a thought slipping into the air without asking permission 🙂

Some things never get old—like popping bubble wrap, snapping retractable tape measures closed with a “thunk,” and (if you’re from Wisconsin) eating cheese curds so fresh they literally squeak against your teeth. Playing with optical illusions surely deserves a place among this pantheon of small pleasures.

You have no doubt seen afterimages before. (Link to Wikipedia article on “afterimages” HERE.) You’ve probably also played the little optical illusion games like looking at the green, black, and yellow United States flag for several seconds and then transferring your gaze to a blank white wall and seeing the flag in its correct colors. Or viewing a “negative” image of a photo and then, similarly, looking at a white wall to see the correct photographic image.

But have you seen the optical illusion created by pairing the afterimage of swirling spirals with Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night ? Click on the video below to give it a try.

It’s really (whispers) C O O O o o ʟ  🙂

Posted in Creativity, Life, Science | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Narnia

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Katherine Wikoff

We had a major snowfall in the Midwest over the weekend. Saturday was a cozy, “inside” day, watching the snow fall like powdered sugar gently sifted over white frosting. Yesterday was an “outside” day, cleaning off the cars, clearing away the snow, and trying to beat the falling temperatures (always a challenge in the Midwest, as snow is so often followed by a blast of Arctic air).

A nice time for seeing the neighbors, as well, for all of us were outside doing the same thing. One of our neighbors has a remarkably powerful snowblower, so he was kind enough to clear the base of our driveway (snow plows had been down our street and blocked us in; if you live in a cold, snowy place, you know what I mean!). He also took care of our other neighbors’ drive, as they were out of town, due home Sunday night, and would have had nowhere to pull in after their long trip home.

Anyway, this morning on the drive to work, I noticed these streetlights for the first time ever in 30+ years. They are in a historic neighborhood just to our east, and they are quite different from the streetlights everywhere else in my inner-ring Milwaukee suburb. If they hadn’t been lit, making them stand out against the snowy branches, I doubt I’d have seen them even today. Don’t they remind you of Narnia? All we need is Mr. Tumnus.

Narnia-style street lights amide snow-covered trees in a residential neighborhood on a gray, overcase morning

Isn’t it funny how a small-ish change (in this case, snow-covered tree branches and streetlights lit past their normal time, probably because it was so overcast) causes you to take note of things that were there all along?

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