Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 February 26

= February 26 =

Car websites
Anybody here know of any good car websites that shows cars from every time period and of every type and of every nationality? Same thing with motorcycles. B-Machine (talk) 04:13, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia itself may be a good starting place to look this up. List of car brands is pretty comprehensive, and may provide a good launching point for your research.  -- Jayron  32  04:34, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm talking about independent websites, not manufacturers' websites. B-Machine (talk) 04:40, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think Jayron was pointing you to the manufacturers' websites in particular. We have here articles on most every car brand in the world and many of those articles contain images of those cars.  Dismas |(talk) 04:44, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

http://www.motorbase.com/ seems to be the sort of thing you're looking for (though a quick glance suggest it's mostly classic cars rather than modern cars). a slightly longer glance (and a search for, say, a Ford Focus) returns pages for those so probably still what you're looking for. ny156uk (talk) 12:38, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Strange uphill optical illusion at night
The place I currently work is a very flat land. On the 30 km drive to the office, the change in altitude is probably less than 5 m and the landscape does indeed look very flat. However, when it is dark and particularly when it is foggy, the journey back seems to be forever uphill - sometime quite steeply uphill, even though I know for sure the land is just as flat as it was in the daylight. Have other people experienced this optical illusion? Is there a reasonable explanation for it? Astronaut (talk) 20:23, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * If you set off to work before dawn, you might find you are still going up hill. No doubt, you don't want to go off to work that early to test this and require a possible explanation. The angle of ones head lamps can create a false horizon.  Example, when landing a light aircraft at night on its nose light,  one must rely on the instruments, rather on what the senses are kidding you in to believing. Fog also separates one from normal visual references. --Aspro (talk) 21:36, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * For those that don't know about this, the sky just above the horizon is the brightest part of the sky. Landscape photographers are quite familiar with this phenomena.  Dipped and full beams are focused below this and so depresses the apparent horizon.--Aspro (talk) 22:06, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) A road near where I live appears in poor light to be going uphill no matter which direction you drive along it, and some places can produce the same effect even in good visibility, the best-known British example being perhaps the Electric Brae. Our article on gravity hills blames the lack of an unobstructed view of the horizon, but that doesn't explain why your slope and mine should always be uphill rather than downhill.  Perhaps a psychologist should be answering this. --Antiquary (talk) 21:41, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/mirrors/physicsfaq/General/roll-uphill.html..Hotclaws (talk) 22:32, 27 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't know what it's called, but there's a similar phenomenon experienced by pilots who don't have clear skies, and can think they're climbing when they're actually falling. This has been suggested as the cause for the small-plane crashes of both JFK Jr. and the pilot of Budy Holly's plane. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:12, 1 March 2011 (UTC)