![]() When you define, say, “the distance between the eyes”, you can measure that as distances between inner-edges, or between pupils, or between outer edges. The thing is, the “evidence” for the claim consists of rectangles drawn around photographs of faces – and if you look closely at those rectangles, what you find is that the placement of the corners isn’t consistent. You can see a bunch of that nonsense here. One example of that: there’s a common claim that human faces have proportions based on &phi. It’s just a number that’s kinda-sorta in the 1 1/2 range. People claim it comes up all over the place in nature: in beehives, ant colonies, flowers, tree sizes, tree-limb positions, size of herds of animals, litters of young, body shapes, face shapes.Īnd yet… it seems like if you actually take any of those and actually start to look at it in detail? The φ isn’t there. People find it in musical scales, the diatonic and pentatonic scales, and the indian scales. You can certainly find a ton of things in paintings whose size ratio is about 1 1/2, and people find it and insist that it was deliberately done to make it φ. People claim it’s in all sorts of artwork. A number that’s just a tiny bit more that 1 1/2 is really easy to find if you go looking for it, and people go looking for it all over the place. The problem is, virtually all of the places where people claim to find it are total rubbish. The problem with φ is that people are convinced that it’s some kind of incredibly profound thing, and find it all over the place. If you take the largest square from that, you’ll get a rectangle whose sides have the ratio 1:φ. The reason that that’s interesting at all is because it’s got an interesting property when you draw it out: if you take a rectangle where the ratio of the length of the sides is 1:φ, then if you remove the largest possible square from it, you’ll get another rectangle whose sides have the ratio φ:1. It’s the number that is a solution for the equation (a+b)/a = (a/b). ![]() Over time, I’ve come to really, really hate the number φ.
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