It's amusing how often you see someone get out of their car, take ten steps towards a store, then go back to their car, rummage around for a second, then walk into the store.

And nobody says it out loud but you can tell they're all thinking the same thing:
"shit, my mask!"

Brb building an rfid based mask detector that will honk the cars horn at me if I leave the mask in there.

And I'm not looking forward to what weird Twitter searchers are gonna drop in now that I said RFID and MASK in the same tweet

Personally I'm working on a smart mask that'll have a flexible lcd in it, so when I smile it can use flex sensors to detect it and show an image of a smiling mouth there.
And if I wink, it rickrolls you. Obviously.

One weird thing I've always wondered about with blinking and winking: put a finger against your face under your eye, then blink and then wink.
Did you notice how your face doesn't move when you blink, but does when you wink?

You're using different muscles to close one eye than you do to close both eyes. That always seemed strangely designed to me. You'd think winking would just be blinking but with one eye, or you'd blink by winking with both eyes.

Part of the difference is how you can close your eyes tight, which is different from just closing them like a blink. That's the kind of movement you use when winking, just with both eyes.

And I think part of why our eyes work that way is related to how our eyes are not just evolved to see well, they evolved to communicate.
We have HUGE sclara (the white part of the eye) which makes it very easy to see where people are looking.

And the theory is that we evolved eyes like that because it helped us coordinate when hunting. If you can tell where someone is looking, it helps you look the same way.

So maybe our winks are this big facial movement (instead of a half-blink) because weren't not winking for our own benefit or anything, it's a way to communicate. We've got very expressive faces because it helps us communicate emotions and such, so why not winking?

Also the final weird thing is that I can blink with one eye: that is, I can wink without moving my face.
But only with my left eye. My right eye can't do it.

And I don't know which way I'm weird in that case.
Can most people half-blink but I'm odd because my right eye can't do it?
Or can most people not half-blink, and it's weird that I can do it at all?

Basically I don't know if I'm the one eyed man in the land of the blind or the one eyed man in the land of the two-eyed.

Anyway. Random coffee run thoughts, and I'm sorry to everyone who is now winking and blinking in a mirror because I made them do it.

anyway the smiling-mask thing is something I keep thinking about because I keep noticing I'm smiling at retail people.
I always do that: they're doing a hard job and I'm trying to be nice.

but I keep realizing I was automatically smiling when I walk/drive away, and then I'm like "but... I was wearing a mask. they can't SEE my smile!"

fun fact: there's something called the "Duchenne smile" which was discovered in the 19th century by a neurologist with the awesome name of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne (de Boulogne).

he experimented with understanding how facial muscles worked and were controlled, by using electricity to manually force them to move.
He was also one of the first to use a new technology to help communicate concepts in biology: PHOTOGRAPHY!

So his monograph Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine on the muscles of facial expression is full of scary pictures where he's zapping patients with electrodes and describing how it changes their expressions.

but one thing he identified was that there's two types of smiles, caused by the fact that smiling is controlled by two muscle groups.

There's the Zygomaticus major muscle which connects to the edges of the mouth

and the Orbicularis oculi muscle which helps close the eyelids.

And he realized that sometimes you smile using only your zygomatic major muscle (so just your mouth), and sometimes you include the orbicularis oculi muscle (so your mouth and eyes)

and the "duchenne smile" is the both-muscles sort of smiling.

And the interesting thing is that while there's been a lot of study into genuine vs fake smiles, it turns out like so many things, it's a spectrum, and there's not just two types of smiles.

And an exaggerated Duchenne smile is often associated with lying, because it looks like you're trying too hard to be friendly: it's too clearly a genuine smile, which is an amusing idea.
"That smile's fake, and you can tell, because it's trying too hard to be genuine"

whereas the opposite end, the non-Duchenne smile, is similarly seen as fake.
It's the kind of smile you often do if you're in a job where you have to smile... probably because it's the easiest to hold for long periods.

Wikipedia says it was known as the "Pan Am Smile", because the flight attendants were required to smile at every passenger.

It's also the "botox smile", because when botox is used to prevent eye wrinkles, it ends up partially paralyzing the orbicularis oculi muscle, so every smile ends up looking like a non-Duchenne smile

BTW the general difference between non-duchenne smiles and duchenne smiles (in situations where you're not trying to lie or present a fake smile, at least) is that duchenne smiles seem to be associated with joy and laughing, and major positive emotions

whereas non-duchenne smiles are more like general contentment and social pleasantness.

smiles are weird, evolutionarily.
most animals only show their teeth as a threat or warning, like "hey, you see these? they're gonna end up in your neck in a second, so cut it out/get out of here"

some monkeys and apes do a "fear grin" thing where they show their clenched teeth to show that they're harmless or that they're submitting to a dominant group member.

which apparently somehow morphed into the way we use it, for the whole "I'm happy/being nice" thing.

although a lot of that is cultural, of course. how much you smile at strangers has a lot to do with what country you're in and your role in a business context.

also because I'm a geek I'm excited to learn there's a system to encode facial movements, called the Facial Action Coding System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System

the most interesting part is that there's specialized versions of FACS for non-human primates and several non-primate species.
You know, because sometimes you need to digitize facial expressions for a cat, dog, or horse.

random biology-etymology fun fact:
the muscle in your cheeks is called the "buccinator muscle".
It helps with eating, suckling, whistling, and smiling.
Differences in how it connects with your zygomaticus major muscle are why some people have dimples and others don't.

but why's it called that? well, latin, of course. it's always freaking latin.
"buccinator" is a form of "bucinator", which is a trumpeter.

which makes sense!

But specifically that's a Buccina/Bucina, a brass instrument used by the roman army.

and "Bucina" was coined by combining the root of "cano, canere" (meaning "to sing") with the irregular 3rd declension noun "bos (gen. bovis)", meaning... cow.

IT'S NOT A TRUMPET, IT'S A SINGING COW

so yeah, you have dimples (or don't) because of a muscle named after an old roman war-instrument, which some smartass centurion named "the singing cow" because of the sound it makes.

I swear, half the reason all the anatomy stuff is named in latin is because no one knows latin and therefore doesn't realize how stupid it sounds.

this is the well known saying (of uncertain origin):
"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"

which translates to "Anything said in Latin sounds profound"

An amusing case of this principle is the (former) town of Subligna, Georgia (USA).
It was named after a settler named Doctor William Underwood.
Subligna is just the combination of two latin words: "sub" meaning "under" and "lignum, ligna" meaning... "wood".

And let me tie it all the weirdness of this thread back together in the obvious way:

Babylon 5.

So Babylon 5 had an episode named in latin. "Sic Transit Vir", clearly named after the latin phrase used in papal coronation ceremonies (up until the 60s, anyway), "sic transit gloria mundi", meaning "Thus passes worldly glory".

It translates "thus passes man", since "vir" is the latin word for "man".
You can see it in words like "virtue" and "virile/virility"

But it's also a pun, because one of the characters on Babylon 5 is the Centauri Vir Cotto (left), assistant to the Centauri ambassador Londo Mollari (center)

so that's the latin joke in B5.
But what does that have to do with other things in this thread? like smiling?

WELL, lemme explain some B5 backstory.

So Babylon 5 takes place in the future, the 23rd century.
It takes place mostly ON Babylon 5, a space station built by earth, as part of the Babylon Project.
The project was to have a big neutral place where all the races could meet together and get along, a sort of Space-UN

why was Earth so interested in building a space-UN place that they built 5 giant space stations for it? (yes, 5. the previous 4... didn't end well. 3 got blown up and one of them just vanished into thin... vacuum?)

Well, they just got out of a nasty war that nearly killed them

see a while before, they ran into these boneheads:
The Minbari. They're an old race, very religious, very peaceful, and within 24 hours of meeting Humans they decided to kill every single one.

And the reason that happened was smiles. Well, not exactly. But it's related to them.

So a human ship and a Minbari ship run into each other out in the middle of nowhere, and it's the Minbari ship carrying their leader, this guy, Duhkat, head of the Grey Council.

that's not to be confused with this guy, Dukat, who was an alien on a show about a space station airing at the same time on a different network.

Anyway, the Humans and the Minbari approach each other, peacefully. The Minbari want the humans to see that they have no warlike intentions, so they do the obvious thing you do when you're being peaceful... you open your gun ports.

with your gun ports open, the enemy can see that your weapons are powered down and aren't targeting them.
clearly that's a gesture of peace, right?
anyone would agree with that!

meanwhile the humans see a big scary alien ship flying towards them with the gun ports open and go OH SHIT and fire everything they have, then flee

And while the Minbari ships massively outclass the human ships, they were coming in peacefully, so no defenses up, no weapons charged, nothing.
Their ship survives with damage, but Dukhat dies. Their greatest leader, murdered while holding an olive branch.

It's like if we met aliens in the middle ages and the first thing they did was accidentally shoot the pope.

so the pissed Minbari naturally decide humans are Just Bad and nearly destroy humanity in the war, and when humanity barely survives it, they decide HEY MAYBE WE SHOULD SET UP SOME KIND OF NEUTRAL GROUND SO WE CAN TALK AND SORT SHIT OUT IN PEACE, BEFORE THIS HAPPENS AGAIN?

I think JMS (the creator of B5) explicitly compares the gun-ports-open thing to how baring teeth is a smile for humans but a threat for canines in one of the commentaries, but I don't have that reference handy right now.

anyway if you're a sci-fi fan and you haven't watched B5 yet, you should. The first season takes a while to get going but it sets up a lot of stuff that works out really well for the rest of it.