Delete please
 

delete

You're fundamentally missing that the black is the vinyl background showing through the tape. It's not on the card, IMO.

My freakin's gosh!!!! What an idiot I've become. Perhaps it's time to take off this mask and get some oxygen to my brain.

If you missed seeing this thread (and thank God you did), this facebook meme basically shows what it was...

Attachment 394680

It's an old optical illusion caused by the brain being predisposed to certain shadow effects. You can also experience it when looking at craters on the moon. Not sure what it has to do with the original post.

Well, since the thread hasn't been deleted, I'll jump in again...

The original post showed scans of a card that seemingly had a black border on the side, where it had no business being. I wondered if I was fundamentally missing something, and swarmee pointed out that hell yeah!! I was missing something (the plastic/vinyl card holder caused the illusion). It made me laugh, because it became so frickin' obvious that my brain created an optical illusion (that maybe no one else saw?), and every time I looked at the original pics since then, I never saw the non-existent black border again...hence, my use of the facebook meme.

Very understandable. You know, a while ago, after one of the first photo-mapping missions to Mars, a lot of people - even experts - got all excited about an unusual rock formation on the planet's surface, claiming that it looked so much like a human face that it "must have been" carved by an intelligent being. Turns out that it was simply another example of folks observing an optical illusion produced by shadow effects similar to what we are discussing. I guess the upshot is that people just can't trust their lyin' eyes sometimes, eh?