Ben Balas

Hey there #visionscience and #psychscisky friends! I wanted to take a moment to (finally) do a proper promo 🧵 about my new textbook: Practical Vision Science, which is now available from Routledge books. <1/n> www.routledge.com/Practical-Vi...

As of our last outreach event we have even more excellent Jack-O'-Lantern faces from kids to add to our amazing #Halloween #visionscience database! I love this task because every answer is both correct and awesome.

ive talked on how i wont engage with writers who use ai, i wont eat at a restaurant with an ai menu, i wont have anything to do with it. but what this post illustrates is regardless of how OTHERS react, ultimately the worst part about using ai is that you are punishing YOURSELF and dont even know it

Q*Bert on our Vic-20! I could get all the way to the invisible pyramid levels when I was little, but my skills have dramatically eroded over the years.

I love this assignment! I feel this would play well to my absolutely terrible cartooning.

Movie night at home with the kiddo and tonight's vampire feature was BLADE. So 90's, so bad-ass, so much amazing CGI. #FilmSky

Screaming for more fries! #photography #pareidolia #ThingsWithFaces

OK team, I need some help here. I'll be dressing up as The Riddler for a Halloween event at the Red River Zoo and I have vowed this year to have some good riddles (I have been lacking in this area in previous years!). Gimme your favorites!

New paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!

Students made their first minicomics in my intro making course - mostly standard format but this student, a first time maker(!), did something so off the charts I’m still reeling from it! & he made like 12 of them for his classmates! A paper engineering feat of flipbookery as well as killer drawing!

Tonight's showing at the Fargo Theatre was the 2010's entry in their Centennial Film Series: Jordan Peele's GET OUT. This was my 2nd time watching and it's a whole different movie when you know what's coming. ICheck out @blaisebalas.bsky.social's article about it below!

Sad news about Freddie Jackson's passing, but seeing this clip put a big smile on my face.

More #Halloween #HorrorMovie writing from @blaisebalas.bsky.social at So Desensitized! Her #vampire series continues with a critical look at Coppola's BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA and her take on where the real romance is in the Dracula narrative. #FilmSky #HorrorSky

The kiddo has begun her annual October blitz of #Halloween pop-culture blog posts! This year's theme is #vampires and today she's got a great post about WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS. Give it a read if you love #horror, #movies, or just want some fun media commentary. #FilmSky #HorrorSky #HorrorMovies

Day 1 of #artober (or #inktober if you prefer) and the prompt I decided to work with was APPLE. Nice excuse to get the markers out and continue trying to get more comfortable with color.

It can be tough to tell whether or not your #chess game is getting any better, but every so often I spot a tactic I know I would have missed a little while ago. Got this one right during a 2+1 Bullet game this evening: White to move and mate in 3!

@erconwell.bsky.social and I just spent several minutes together (using two apps) to work out if we have ever been within 50 yards of a moose. Now one of us has to go change our answer to the local newspaper's poll. #FargoProblems

Four of my favorite tactics from this year's Chess Olympiad, with a clear star. jenshahade.substack.com/p/play-like-...

Checked out the matinee showing of PRIMETIME at the Fargo Theatre today and it was much more interesting and much weirder than I thought it was going to be - excited to talk about this at Film Club next week! #FilmSky

For the Day 26 #sciArtSeptember prompt cedar, I am sharing this one of a kind cyanotype on water colour paper 11” x 14” has an image of the moon, a fern leaf, cedar leaf and bedstraw, embellished with my linocut prints of pollinators. The insects are a yellow eastern swallowtail butterfly, a virgin

Very excited that this paper with @mgreenephd.bsky.social is out! Check out the thread below for what we found out about how participant height changes the nature of visual input and subsequent perception. #visionscience

Guy Delisle is one of my favorite comics creators & when I saw his book MUYBRIDGE on the shelf at the Fargo Public Library I snapped it up. It's a wonderful history of the man himself, the early experimental years of photography, & the birth of the motion picture. Highly recommended! #VisionScience

Had a quick meeting with my recruitment coordinator this afternoon and we (1) Sorted out some details for an upcoming study, (2) Planned out our next outreach events, and (3) Found out that operators at the Lutefisk Hotline answer the phone on the 2nd ring! #fargofacts

Tonight’s reading. This is not quite what I expected but it is truly a fascinating premise. Top five billing on artistic merit in 2026.

The kiddo's latest article about the Fargo Centennial Series is up at the High Plains Reader! This time, she's writing about the September Feature, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. Enjoy! hpr1.com/a-sitcom-saf...

Finally crossed the 1700 mark in Blitz on @chess.com! Wish it had been a cleaner win, but I'll take it - now to log off to keep my rating safe for at least a few hours. 😁 #chess

🧪 New cat species identified in Bolivia, first in over a century - Called Tilcayo by local communities, it is part of a group called tiger cats found across much of South America www.reuters.com/business/env...

Movie night at the Fargo Theatre and tonight's feature was Albert Brooks' DEFENDING YOUR LIFE. This was one of those movies I saw in fragments on HBO a bunch as a teenager, but only ever watched all the way through once. Neat concept, lots of funny bits, but heavy on the exposition at times.

Come on - can't we do a show based on some more recent debunked/falsified science?

My older brother is an outstanding musician, so I spent much of my youth being taken to his concerts & complaining about their length and frequency to my parents. But when he played the Kennedy Center, I knew how cool it was and I was proud to go to DC to see him. The hell with this garbage.

I like the way the ai guys keep saying ai could kill us all within 10 years. But they can’t stop or China will do it first.

Just impulse-bought tickets to see @therightram.bsky.social's THE MANY DEATHS OF LAILA STARR at the Minnesota Opera. No regrets. Also: You should go buy it at your local comic store and then you too will have no regrets. www.boom-studios.com/series/many-...

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 “Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

I picked up @imagecomics.com THE KARMEN BLADE up this week and loved it! I was a big fan of LITTLE BIRD, so very excited to see a new title from this creative team. Really excellent balance between a grim, epic tone in the text and art that is as exhilarating as it is nightmarish. #ComicsSky

The premise is that there are Muppets and they're doing a show. I need nothing else.

Astrophotographer Adam (AJ) Smadi caught this image a few hours ago from Washington state. A thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface. And 2,400 times farther away—and on the other side of the Sun—mighty Jupiter, and its moons Io (left) and Ganymede (right).

Anyone ever get a chance to play Time Traveler in the arcades? Or maybe you never even heard of it?

Afternoon at the movies to see COYOTE VS. ACME! I am a life-long Wile E. Coyote fan and this didn't disappoint. Tons of excellent Looney Tunes cameos (Peter Lorre!), some excellent gags, and a script that balanced the humor with just enough heartfelt stuff. I'm really happy this made it to theaters!

That first sentence is great, but they also keep getting better as you go.

I try not to let stuff like threatening to change Lake Ontario's name to Lake America take up space in my brain, but I can't help but note that instead of HOMES, this would give us SHAME as a mnemonic. #welp

Movie night at the Fargo Theatre & tonight's feature was THE END OF OAK STREET. Much different in tone than I expected: I thought we'd get lots ofmadcap energy and to borrow the kiddo's observation, it had a lot more genuineness than that. Weird, funny, scary and well worth watching! #FilmSky

Summer's end usually means alternating optimism & pessimism about the coming term, but this past week @erconwell.bsky.social & I have been comped a cocktail & a dessert by different former students so I'm feeling better than usual! I assume these are the "rights & privileges" mentioned on my degree.

I was just asking a colleague about this this morning: How much do students need to learn about AI so they aren't "left behind?" Are we talking an 8-week curriculum? More (or less?) Regardless, my neuropsych course starts in ~1 week and we're going to work on some brain-only reasoning. 🧠

Recovering from a nasty cold. Today is the usual stage where if Aerosmith comes on the radio while driving I sound better-than-usual for the 1st half but have no hope for the 2nd. There will be a magic 30 minutes sometime tomorrow where I will be capable of a flawless version of "What it Takes."