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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.
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.
NERDS. stuff that MATTERS!
Sports? bah...
These appear to be the same as the shooting lenses, skiing goggles, driving glasses we've had around for years, just in contact form.
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.
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.
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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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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
Steriods are not always dangerous though , only if abused . ,safely .
.
It is quite possible to take steriod treatments to improve your health and boost your fittness
Multiple diffrent steroid treatments are used to aid many many phyisical injuries or diseases. So they are not always dangerous even if someone at the peak of their physical prowess takes them in safe doses they could improve abilitys slightly without negative effects on the health
But i see your point , as most people taking anabolic steriods are doing so without competent medical care and are probably OD'ing and at severe risk.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
That MIGHT have been funny, if you hadn't mistakenly thought that it wasn't spelled "Mormon." :)
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 mean naked?
If this rule was implemented, the WNBA might become watchable.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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."
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.
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.