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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."
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.
Contacts don't mix well with baseball. Too much dust and dirt, too many quick eye movements, (the lens lags on your eye for a fraction of a second) and what do you do when your lens just came free in the outfield?
That said, most companies have a pricy disposable sport lens on the market.
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Further, baseball diamonds are traditionally placed with the plate facing out towards between the north and east - in northern directions, the pitcher is fine, but if the plate is facing out towards the east, the setting sun to the west is right in the pitchers face - and pitchers are not allowed to wear sunglasses.
Finally, another challenge is picking up balls in changing lights (i.e. coming out of a shadow) or when its high in a bright daytime sky (thus blocking out blue-tones). When the ball is leaving a pitchers hand in excess of 90 miles per hour and coming off the bat twice as fast or more, every little bit helps...
When they come out with the night game lens, they will help players from losing the ball when its up in the lights, or when it blends in with the crowd, and other instances where the speeding ball is difficult to pick up.
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.
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.
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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."
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.