analyze this

After reading metamanda's post about personality testing, I decided I would kill a little time by taking an exam myself.

I discovered that I am apparently of type ENTJ, or "Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging", with measurements of Extroverted: 1%, Intuitive: 33%, Thinking 11%, and Judging: 67%. In other words, I am very balanced with respect to my "vertedness", but make lots of judgments. I'm obviously quite suspect of the accuracy of such exams. But here I go making a judging statement... you just can't win.

More (or less, depending on how geeky you are) interestingly, I also noticed a weird effect with the font color on the page describing my personality type. It seems to involve text on a light background with hex color #660066 (that's 102,0,102 RGB for you base-10 types, or "darker magenta" for everyone else). Now either go to the page in question or check out the text below and start scrolling your web browser up and down:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs

Do you notice the font getting brighter, more purple-y? If so, you probably are viewing on some form of LCD monitor. When I first encountered this, it weirded me out, so I tried it in a score of applications and it all worked (placing the text on a black background, however, killed the effect). I thought either I had found a cool trick of the human visual system, or a property of my display device. An unsuccessful attempt to replicate the test on a CRT monitor confirmed that the display was most likely the culprit. For reference, I'm running on an IBM Thinkpad T23, and other Thinkpad laptops have shown themselves capable of producing the effect.

A web search on the topic has not revealed anything yet, though in the process I did find that Darker Cyan (006666) seems to do the trick as well.

If you get the effect too, or better yet, know something relevant about LCD display technology, post a comment. My rough guess is that there's something about the varying response of the LCD that causes the effect to happen.