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Permormance-Enhancing Contact Lenses
coastal984 writes "With all the allegations, criticisms, congressional hearings, and suspensions concerning performance-enchancing steroids and supplements in sports, namely Major League Baseball, Nike has now introduced performance-enhancing contact lenses. These new lenses, which give players wearing them a scary orange/amber tint to their eyes, block out useless blue tones and make colors such as red (i.e. the seams on a baseball, vital to batters) easier to see. They also block out sun rays and help ease shadows, as well as improve overall vision. There are also versions for golfers and other sports, and soon to be versions for night contests as well."
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Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Sounds a bit dodgy if you ask me, I mean where else have you read that phrase?
Weapon
Permormance-Enhancing Contact Lenses ?
And I thought it was just the underwear...
Could use some enhancement of their proofreading "permormance".
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
i'd be interested in these if they're available for prescription focal adjustments.
i'm almost blind in my right eye due to near-sightedness, and don't wear glasses, but i'd wear these contacts if i can get them for correcting my own vision.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Apparently golf pros (Tiger Woods being one) are having their eyes recalibrated to 20/10 and better using Lasik. Some are attributing Woods' latest successes to it. Heard it on NPR.
Personally, I can't wait for the cyborgs.
vk.
I've got to get me a pair of 90fps contacts.
The hell with sports, let's give gamers a boost!
block out useless blue tones
And at once a thousand tiny hi-piched screams sounded through the night, and no one ever saw a smurf, ever again.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
If there are no negative health effects, then what's the big deal? I can't understand why making ourselves better in these kinds of ways is in any way bad. . This anti-human-improvement sentiment that goes around whenever anything like this is announced reminds me of Vonnegut's Story about 2081 where everyone is finally equal.
IMHO, I see it as a deeper cultural trend that originally started with Frankenstein. With every technological improvement, especially if it is augmenting human capability people are expecting some sort of Daedalus ironic ending. It's in a lot of sci-fi movies. Think Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, Terminator, The Matrix.
Hardly. This is not really a newsworthy piece - if sunglasses with the same tints, etc, have the same effect, you can hardly call contact lens' that do the same revolutionary in any sense.
Could this make the highways safer?!
NERDS. stuff that MATTERS!
Sports? bah...
Didn't know how to let someone in charge know that the submit story link is leading to a 503.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
These appear to be the same as the shooting lenses, skiing goggles, driving glasses we've had around for years, just in contact form.
I agree wholeheartly. Another line of reasoning to support these views is exactly what does performance enhancing mean? Where is the line drawn? Would performance enhancing substances be legal if there where not side effects? I think they already are.
For example, "sports drinks" like gatorade can help an athlete, and give them an edge. Sucking down a bottle of oxygen can improve endurance. Maybe sports should ban O2? All sports should go completely natural. Athletes can only eat farm fresh organically grown food, uniforms must be handwoven of natural fibers. Heck maybe the breathability of cotton is an advantage. Perhaps the greeks got it right: nude olimpics. Those fancy suits track athletes wear must make them faster.
Today's athletes arguably have better diets and "legal" training supplements available to them, as well as superior equipment as compared to their counter parts from earlier eras. Our society values continuous improvement, and limiting drugs is simply an artificial measure, that seems to go against the true values of our society.
Eventaully there will be two versions of every sport. It is pretty easy to guess which version woulf be popular and attract the fans.
-MS2k
In most sports, you should be wearing safety glasses anyway, and whatever fashionable tints you want incorporate, you can incorporate there.
I suspect people put this tint into contact lenses because you probably look kind of stupid wearing pink safety glasses.
I just recently discovered I do, in fact, HAVE a permormance, and I am also very interested in enhancing it.
I see it as a deeper cultural trend that originally started with Frankenstein.
It started way before, and probably always existed. Daedalus you're citing is a good example, Pythagoreans killing Hippasus another.
If there are no negative health effects, then what's the big deal?
I can't understand why making ourselves better in these kinds of ways is in any way bad.
Its fine in real life. But in sports, you have to make a decision - do you want to see competition based on the hard work of the athlete or the hard work of his doctors and technicians? If you want to see the later, then no problem.
If you want to see human atheletic competition than artifical body modifications - chemical, mechanical or otherwise, need to be kept out and a clear and up to date definition needs to accompany that ban.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
do you want to see competition based on the hard work of the athlete or the hard work of his doctors and technicians?
if everyone is using performance enhancing contacts/gatorade/drugs then the edge they provide is negated. it's all relative, and whatever personal motivation or smarts an athlete has will be the deciding factor. I'd use examples of athletically gifted people who failed to compare to more experienced but lesser talented atheletes, but they'd probably be lost on the slashdot crowd and we can all think of times when someone superior on paper simply doesn't live up the intangible qualities, such as leadership or motivation, of a lesser-talented individual.
there are a lot of fine lines I'm not even going to attempt to place, but my point is that if everyone is enhanced then the enhancements cease to be deciding factors.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Seems to me to be a fairly odd thing , I mean they dissallow steroid and other treatments , So why should a lense that allows you to more easily compete be allowed.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
There's a difference between better technology and doping. Look at it from a sporter's point of view. If doping were legal, a sporter would be forced to inject performance-enhancing drugs to 'score'. This can never be completely safe, since those people already put tremendous strain on their body during competition (think cardiac arrest).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
It would depend on what was being decided. The rules are often linked to the tools, which implicitly includes peoples bodies. Change the bodies you have changed the rules.
So which rules can you change and still be playing the same game played 100 years ago?
It doesnt even touch on the fact that not everyone is going to want or be able to benefit from the same advancements.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
News for Jocks. Stuff that doesn't matter.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Those contacts remind me of the blue-on-blue Fremen eyes of the the Dune TV-series.
I guess it probably wouldn't appeal to Nike - but someone should develop a similar product for people that spend a long time in front of a screen.
Great for the millions of people that work all day at a computer, and with possible applications for leisure too. Improve your coding/Doom3 performance with specially designed contact lenses - yes please
People will alter there brain chemistry with drugs to make them more motivated or feel more confidant. And everybody ends up the same...
That might be a bit of a stretch. I have worn sunglasses with the same lens tinting for a few years now. They really do make a nice difference because blue light is so harsh.
But other than taking the optical properties of a relatively inexpensive pair of sunglasses, this isn't what I would call 'performance enhancing contacts'.
I was expecting a HUD or something cool like that, not a description of what I already wear for cycling.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I though human eyes saw blue the best
Actually, the human eye has peak sensitivity for yellow light.
So why would you want to block it out??
Because the blue wavelengths of light are the ones most scattered by nitrogen. Since nitrogen accounts for 78% of our atmosphere, blue light gets scattered quite a bit, which is why the sky is blue. Since blue light scatters so much, it tends to blur vision. Screening these wavelengths out leads to an overall sharper picture.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Steroids, etc. are permanent and dangerous.
Contact lenses are like gloves to give you a better grip, or baseball cap to keep the sun out of your eyes, or shoes with cleats to get a better grip in the dirt and grass. When you're done, you take off the contacts and have no after effects at all.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
How is this anything other than an improved version of sunglasses? It's not like these lenses link into a laser-calibrated swing mechanism that helps the guy hit better. Personally, I think this is a great step forward.
Thinking back to when I played, I wonder if it helps outfielders pick up fly balls better - even with sunglasses, sometimes the glare of the sun can make a ball uncatchable.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
my point is that if everyone is enhanced then the enhancements cease to be deciding factors.
That is only true if everyone has equal access to all available enhancements.
Which will never happen.
So it really comes down to who has the most money and the best business accumen.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
But in sports, you have to make a decision - do you want to see competition based on the hard work of the athlete or the hard work of his doctors and technicians?
It should never be wrong to artificially bring an athelete to a level of ability that others exist at naturally.
At the very least, there should be an all-drug\modification olympics to see just what people are capable of.
And once in a while, I'd love to see competitions where engineering skill and medical ability were secondary to natural ability and athletic performance.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
We are a species that, naked, dies from cold or sun. Our clothes are our skin. So are contact lenses our eyes, and cars our feet?
If anything this and similar are gradually working to deconstruct the idea of the natural born human as a standalone unit. Rather, all humans are necessarily "cyborgs". Creating and integrating with tools to extend the self is the true species specialty.
You're right. We should make skateboarders go back to bakelite wheels, bikers back to steel frames, baseball players back to no hats (or at least no brims), skiers back to wooden skis, and runners back to bare feet.
Or maybe we should make helpful technology pervasive and available to everyone so that the natural good are even better and the level of competition is universally higher and more entertaining.
Take it out to the max and you should see the problem (assuming you're reasonable). They just started a DARPA program to make vastly better legs and arms. From what I know of current technology, it is very possible that in 10 years, an amputee will be able to have a neurally controlled limb attached with strength and speed characteristics well beyond those of any modern athlete. So, should we allow all of those athletes who have their legs and arms replaced with "bionic" limbs to compete on an equal basis with those that don't? What do records then mean?
Another example is the bionic heart. Once they work out the problems, a heart that doesn't beat but instead just steadily pumps has already been proven to yield better overall performance than a natural one. Should Olympic marathoners with bionic hearts be allowed to compete?
Let's say I interface a small computerized dictionary that on the demand of a specific thought or movement spells a word that was just spoken to me or that I just spoke into an eye or ear implant so that I can see it. This would actually be possible today though it hasn't been done. Should I be allowed to compete in a spelling bee?
The end result of progressions like these is that sports become dominated by those who have the money to pay for the enhancements instead of by those that have worked hard to naturally improve what they were born with.
I think the answer is to group all sports into two categories.
Pure and Natural : no performance enhancing anything and the players are all as nature intended.
You mean naked?
I, for example, don't care about the usual spectator sports, and I am only mildly interested in watching sports that I do myself. If those sports were dominated by drug-enhanced cyborgs, it would be pointless for me to watch them, since there is no connection anymore to how I do the sport.
On the other hand, if someone wants to establish new compentitions where (non-lethal) enhancements are allowed, I am not stopping them.
chl
They want the humour? They want the humour? They can't _handle_ the humour!
You mean naked?
If this rule was implemented, the WNBA might become watchable.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The activity that most closely resembles a contest of "hard work" is conventional massive multiplayer online gaming. The highest ratings go to those who carry out the most repetitions.
If you do not want to see a competition based on the athlete's innate biological ability plus his or her hard work plus the hard work of his or her doctors and technicians, I think you will need to publish a Standard Athlete specification analogous to Formula One racing.
It wasn't a typo. They had to spell it like that to get it through the spam filters.
I've heard before that part of the concern with stuff like this is that it makes it harder to compare todays players with those from decades past. They make a point of trying to keep baseball construction as consistant as they can so that todays players will be hitting a ball that reacts as much as possible like the ball that Babe Ruth was hitting.
Now, I'm all for performance enhancements of all types as long as its disclosed, but I don't see any problem with also banning enhancements from certain sports to stay with the spirit of that event. Perhaps we need events for enhanced and 'all natural' players. I mean, theres more than 6 billion people on the planet, surely there's room for more than one way to play any give game?
Tommy John surgery is to fix the elbow of pitchers in baseball. It used to be considered very complex, now days it is like going in for a teeth cleaning, and according to some it can actually make you better than you were before.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
Because these are effectively sunglasses. Certain tints of colours improve your vision under certain situations by reducing the amount of blue light you see.
These things are so far removed from being anything near 'cheating' it's not funny.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Cheating .. well would you be ok if they then allowed the pitcher to have a mechanical aid to fire off the shot . or perhaps a laser sight or targeter attached to their sun-glasses ? perhaps a small computer to relay diagnostic information as to the wind speed and direction and give them a rough ideal tragectory. using an optical device to filter out light so you can better see the ball is still an artifical aid , no matter how ingenious .
.. its basicaly the same idea .
Im not the biggest sports fan ever , but from freinds of mine who are , its about doing the best you can and having a laugh , not using a prostetic to give yourself the edge.
If i were say playing a game online , is it then ok for someone to use a hack on their graphics card driver(a case came up a year or two ago with some offical s3 drivers i think it was that had a wall hack as a feature) to more clearly see the enemy
just my opinion non the less
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Does baseball currently allow players to wear sunglasses and call it a legitimate thing? The answer is yes they do allow sunglasses.
For $20 CDN I can buy a pair of sunglasses which have this same yellow/amber tint which changes the amount of blue light getting to my eyes, and that has the effect of making certain colours more visible in some situations.
Until their sunglasses start having a HUD, or a tracking system, or actually forcibly shifts the spectrum so that stuff which wasn't normally visible to the human eye (eg thermal imaging) suddenly is, I will keep maintaining this is just a pair of contacts which behave just like a relatively inexpesive pair of sunglasses.
These are nothing like some evil prosthetic to give yourself an edge. This is nothing like a hack to a graphics card to allow you to see things the other players cannot. This isn't even about having a pair of pro-only shoes that are highly calibrated to the way you walk.
This isn't even anything like cheating.
Go play baseball with a pair of yellow shooting glasses which have been around forever. That is exactly what this is like.
Take a poll amongst the other players, and say "hey, does anyone mind if I wear sunglasses or is that cheating?"
There is astonishlingly little in this which would give one player an edge over another which isn't trivially negated and ignored. (As in if you feel it helps, go buy some nicer sunglasses)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's an incredible performance enhancer - It improves not just muscle developement and reflexes, but mental accuity and judgement as well, vastly over those who use little or none of the enhancer. It's called FOOD!
Vision around and beyond 20/20 isn't always possible w/ lasik or anything else for that matter.
THere is a notion of maximum correctible vision. When I had my lasik done I ended up at 20/20 and 20/15. The doctor explained to me that it becomes less a problem of focusing the light than one of your brain processing the imagery. Each person has a different threshhold that their brain can process and I believe it is fairly rare for it to be much beyond 20/20, 20/15.
...nobody is really interested in seeing natural performance. There is a pretense and lip service, but professional athletes know that their careers are over if they don't use performance-enhancing... things... and it's obvious that the fans don't seem to mind.
What the fans want to see is people with bodies that don't look like normal human bodies, performing deeds that no natural human can perform.
All sorts of athletes have been caught using performance enhancers and very, very, very few of them have seen their careers affected negatively as a result. The fans make excuses. The players' unions resist serious testing and enforcement. And the officials mumble platitudes in public and look the other way in private.
It's been decades since the Olympics featured natural athletes, and half a century since the Tour de France did...
So you're saying we should have to play sports naked? That sounds like the only way to remove performance "enhancements". (Must. resist. joke.)
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Since nitrogen accounts for 78% of our atmosphere, blue light gets scattered quite a bit, which is why the sky is blue. Since blue light scatters so much, it tends to blur vision.
While blue light does get scattered by the atmosphere, this is not the reason why humans don't get sharp vision in the blue tones. The eye is good at telling apart tones of blue - as opposed to green - but not only the spacial resolution for blue is pretty bad - only about 2% of the cones are for blue (the rest are for red and green) the lens doen't refract light uniformly for all wavelengths, so that blue is essentially out of focus by design of the eye. While the rods are more light sensitive, the cones have a higher resolution, and are used for focussing, but even that just doesn't work well with blue or violet due to the low number of blue cones.
Googling for "rods", "cones" etc. reveals some interesing articles like this one.
ugh couldn't find the original article thing on popsci.com but here's what i found thru google http://www.core77.com/challenge/humanpower/pages/8 desc.htm i think it's just a concept but i wonder if the night version Coming Soon(tm) from nike is like this?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
perMORONs! Get it? Hahahahaha!
What about performance enhancing surgery? I read an article recently about pitchers having their tendons shortened or braided to improve the speed of their pitches.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
It's been decades since the Olympics featured natural athletes, and half a century since the Tour de France did... ... who are always long on accusations and short on evidence.
Armstrong in particular is tested every other day for everything from steroids to herpes. People have gone so far as to ransack his hotel room looking for evidence of substance abuse. Always the result is the same: move along, nothing to see here.
first off, i just want to get it out there that i'm not in favor of steroids in sports. that said...
some enhancements, like e.g. steroids, are very effective and also very bad for the athletes's health
granted it's hard to know the long-term effects of any drug, regardless of how well tested, but I'm willing to bet that Barry Bonds will have access to considerably higher quality steroids than what you can buy on the street. Add that to the professional staff of doctors keeping an eye on him, and I'd venture to guess that a pro athlete is safer taking steroids than I am taking tylenol.
Of course this brings up the issue of competitive athletes who don't have the financial/scientific backing to use steroids safely, but if you're looking purely at pros in the big leagues their risk is fairly minimal.
If those sports were dominated by drug-enhanced cyborgs, it would be pointless for me to watch them, since there is no connection anymore to how I do the sport.
I'm a pretty sporty guy. On any given week I'm generally playing in 2 to 3 competitive events for my college. That said, the connection between me playing football and NFL players playing football is already completely non-existant when you look at how they play the sport. I play with people who run a damn fast 40, and I play with people who are huge, but I play with hardly anyone who runs a fast 40 and is huge - and keep in mind that I'm talking about sports at the college level. There are some excellents players who will never even come close to making it big. Pro sports is a whole new ballgame, no matter how you look at it.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.