| "Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do
you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would
happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward,
away from the glass? People overwhelmingly give the same
answers. To the first question they say, well, the outline of my face
on the mirror would be pretty much the size of my face. As for the
second question, that’s obvious: if I move away from the mirror, the
size of my image will shrink with each step. Both answers, it
turns out, are wrong. Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find
it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as
you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will
remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of
your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected
in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does
not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you
sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the
size of the person’s image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our
innate sense says it should. What is it about our reflected
self that it plays by such counterintuitive rules? The important point
is that no matter how close or far we are from the looking glass, the
mirror is always halfway between our physical selves and our projected
selves in the virtual world inside the mirror, and so the captured
image in the mirror is half our true size." Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22angi.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
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