Cortically Magnified

I got the idea from a photo of a clock that I found randomly on eBay. I thought that it was a novelty clock with a very unusual industrial design, but after a little while, I realized that what happened was that the seller took the hands part, and placed them haphazardly on the clock face. But it got me thinking, clock hands don’t have to rotate around the center, if they are mounted on rotating discs.

I can’t be the only one who has trouble reading comic books. I have problems interpolating between the panels, and I find it hard to recognise the characters. In other words, I don’t know how one panel is related to the next, and I don’t know who’s who. Reading comic books to me is like a simulation of cortical lesions. It induces a mild form of akinetopsia(deficit in the perception of motion) and prosopagnosia (deficit in the perception of faces).

The Economist is probably not the best place to look for rigorous scholarship on comparative punnology, but a recent article did ask a very good question: Why English is such a great language for puns? I am not sure if the superiority of English in punning is that obvious, but the argument seems to be convincing: For English is unusually good for puns. It has a large vocabulary and a rich stock of homophones from which puns can be made.