Honestly when have you heard of a cure for a cronic condition that didn't require regular drug treatment?
Well, gosh, I guess if you cure it, then it isn't chronic any more.
If your definition of "chronic" is "persisting over a long period without killing the patient", well, there are any number of long-term infections that can be cured by antibiotics, anti-fungals, or whatever.
If your definition of "chronic" is "not able to be cured by a single round of treatment", well, I can only congratulate you on your insight -- sure enough, conditions that can't be cured by a single round of treatment must instead be controlled by regular treatment.
If you mean to say "the multibillion-dollar medical industry suppresses cures in favor of ongoing treatments", please explain joint replacement (as opposed to the gold mine of physical therapy, pain-control medications, and assistive technologies).
When profits are down, investors don't ask the worker, they don't fire the worker, they look at the leadership team.
...and ask them, "What are you doing to reduce costs?" To which the "leadership team" invariably answers, "Well, of course we're looking to improve efficiency wherever we can, particularly by rightsizing and right-shoring across the organization." The usual result: the leadership team continues on, possibly accepting a small cut in their bonuses as a "show of good faith", and the teams doing the actual work get butchered.
And when the house of cards finally does collapse, it seems that those top-level execs quickly land new top-level positions, while the workers struggle to find a position paying a reasonable fraction of their previous salary before their unemployment benefits run out.
No, I don't claim to know how it is across the entire economy, but that's what I've seen at a number of start-ups and large companies. At none of those companies have I seen the top-level execs fall without a large number of "workers", if not the entire company, going first.
This doesn't make sense. Does middle age, or indeed has middle age, make it more likely that a person will pass on their genes? Not really. Most people reproduce before then.
Because contributing to the knowledge, skills, and security of your children -- those who will be carrying your genes forward -- in no way influences the likelihood that those genes will persist.
1) If you have cataracts, corneal irritation, or smudged glasses, bright objects against a dark background are MUCH harder to resolve than dark images against a white background.
Try grey on black. It reduces the contrast, and works. Really.
It'll reduce the smear/spike effects, but it'll also reduce legibility. Contrast is critical for resolving fine detail. (I have been thinking in terms of reading text, not, say, playing Pac-Man.)
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
And when you turn your head away from the monitor, you'll get eye strain when the eyes have to adjust again.
Fair point, I suppose, although I never seem to have trouble with it myself. Maybe it's just that rooms aren't usually that dark -- which, if true, weakens my original point anyhow.
I think a good solution is monitors that adjust their brightness based on ambient light. (A few manufacturers do those -- Fujitsu and Eizo at least)
Maybe, but I've had to disable that feature on iPads and my work laptop. The lower-brightness settings just aren't legible enough. If you're in your twenties, your mileage will vary -- but, trust me, this is one of many ways that getting old sucks.
Well, to the extent that my eye condition is that I have natural lenses and corneas, I agree, and accept your condolences.
I've read the same discussions of acuity, and many more. If the human lens and cornea were optically perfect, yes, a wider aperture would produce a clearer image. Unfortunately, they're actually not very good at all, no offense to any Intelligent Designer who may be reading.
We have the impression of sparkling clear vision for several reasons. We normally use only the central part of the lens, which (as you've read) tends to de-emphasize optical weakness. Our most sensitive spatial resolution comes from the fovea, which rests at the center of the lens's focal field; again, that's where distortions are least prevalent. And, once an image does fall on the retina, it gets image-processed to hell and back by the retina itself, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, and big chunks of the rest of your brain to boot.
If a dilated lens produced the best spatial resolution at the retina, we'd expect that the sharpest things we could see would be isolated bright objects in a dark field. Things like the moon, or stars. As it turns out, though, we don't resolve those things very well at all. That's why we get vague impressions of "the man in the moon", and that's why so many cultures talk about stars having points.
I certainly don't hate anyone for preferring light-on-dark. I'm just trying to point out that there are legitimate physical reasons that light-on-dark poses problems for a lot of people.
Let me count the problems with light-text-on-dark-background:
1) If you have cataracts, corneal irritation, or smudged glasses, bright objects against a dark background are MUCH harder to resolve than dark images against a white background. With black-on-white, you just get reduced contrast; with white-on-black, you get distracting smears and rays all over the page.
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
3) In a bright room, a mostly-dark display will be more obscured by reflections and glare.
This is one reason I stopped hanging out at dpreview.com. Yeah, I know, photographers think their stuff looks better against a black background, but more than five or ten minutes on the site gives me a headache.
The first video does mention polarization, and gives a good visual demonstration. It apparently doesn't require a polarizing layer for "the rest of the world", just for the display, which knocks out my "dimming" objection. But I'm still seeing focus degradation that's noticeable even on top of YouTube's compression. I could see tolerating this for specialized short-term applications, but I still don't think I'd be happy with it on a long-term basis.
More to the point, though, I still don't see the advantage over corrected-focus projection systems. If you can arrange your projection system to make the virtual image appear at infinity -- and you can; this is already well-understood, well-established technology -- why on Earth would you force the user to wear a contact lens, especially one that degrades normal vision?
...and I'm not surprised, given that they apparently laid off the ones who were supposed to handle this article. Anybody want to take a crack at correlating the category scores with the green-bar indicators?
I don't see anything in the linked article about polarization. They seem to be proposing zone-based focus, just like existing dual-focus contacts.
If they are using polarization, it might help -- but at that point, you're also dimming external light significantly. This presents its own problems in night, twilight, or indoor combat.
Dual-focus lenses like do produce sharp images at multiple focal ranges (or, in this case, from multiple sources) -- but they also produce blurred images at every focal range. So, you see a sharp image, but with halos around bright objects, and no way to mask them out. If you have to look at a white-on-black display, or a glowing readout in the dark, you're in for a real treat.
We already know how to integrate optics so your HUD shows things at a neutral focal distance. With holographic optics, we ought to be able to make such optics lightweight and compact enough for anyone's tastes. So why "correct" the eye to super-nearsightedness?
...to think that screen resolution (dpi) has been essentially static for over ten years. My 1999 laptop had a 1024x768 display. The new laptop I was just issued at work has 1366x768 -- a downgrade, IMHO, from the previous laptop's 1280x800.
I've been thinking of getting a 17" MBP (1920x1200) for personal use, but I'm holding out in light of rumors that the new models might have double-res screens. After using a 4G iPad, I've realized that a 200+dpi laptop or desktop display is worth whatever extra it costs. I'd take a 15" 2880x1800 display over a 17" 1920x1200 in a heartbeat, and I'd easily drop an extra grand for it.
I'm not going to cheap out on something can increase or decrease my eyestrain for many hours a day.
It may only be a coincidence, but the comparison of a month's labor to the value of an ounce of gold hasn't been far off for quite a while.
Funny thing. I make around 80% more than I did ten years ago in dollars, but in terms of gold ounces, I make less than a third of what I did then (gold has gone from $300 to $1650).
Now, there has been inflation during that time -- but I can say with certainty that my buying power has increased, not decreased. Unless, of course, I'm buying gold.
If you choose to believe that Stuff In General has dropped sharply in value in the last ten years, I'm not sure how to argue the point. But to me, it certainly looks like the value of gold has increased. Use it as a yardstick if you must, but in my opinion, a yardstick shouldn't be that elastic.
Use a little electricity to re-fix some of the CO2 you have released, and you can immediately and locally offset CO2 instead of growing a tree farm hundreds of miles away.
And everything would be just peachy if we could do that. But thermodynamics, that hidebound, officious boor, insists that undoing our messes takes more energy than making them in the first place. In other words, if you "use a little electricity", you'll re-fix only a very little of the CO2 you produced.
Fixing CO2 to make fuel inherently consumes more energy than burning fuel to make CO2. You win if the energy you're consuming is extremely cheap, or something that would otherwise be wasted. But if your efficiency is only on par with natural photosynthesis (a few percent), you're not winning very much.
Still better to charge a battery, if you can support the size, weight and cost. But it'll be a long time, if ever, before batteries can compete with hydrocarbons (and free ambient oxygen) on energy density.
...and reaction rates. I'm guessing this wouldn't be useful in a regenerative-braking regime, but I'd love to know whether it's fast enough for grid load-balancing, efficient enough to eventually become cheaper than alternatives, or just an interesting proof-of-concept. My money is on the last.
If cancer is the result of an inherent flaw in the design in the human body then it can still be eradicated by eliminating whatever "flaws" exist in the human body that lead to the development of the disease.
Sure, all you need is omniscience and omnipotence.
The human body is a lot more complicated than a computer program that you can check for infinite loops. Oh, wait, you can't do that, either.
Remember that over 60% of cancers are environmentally caused (eating, drinking, smoking, sun, exposure to chemicals) and live accordingly.
Well, duh. Just stop eating and drinking, and your tumors will stop growing within weeks. If you're willing to cut out exposure to all chemicals, the hard vacuum will take care of your cancer in scant minutes.
Hang on, there's a Pfizer truck out front, and someone's at the d...
Slashdot Mirror
So, basically, what you're asking for is a lap cluster, right?
Honestly when have you heard of a cure for a cronic condition that didn't require regular drug treatment?
Well, gosh, I guess if you cure it, then it isn't chronic any more.
If your definition of "chronic" is "persisting over a long period without killing the patient", well, there are any number of long-term infections that can be cured by antibiotics, anti-fungals, or whatever.
If your definition of "chronic" is "not able to be cured by a single round of treatment", well, I can only congratulate you on your insight -- sure enough, conditions that can't be cured by a single round of treatment must instead be controlled by regular treatment.
If you mean to say "the multibillion-dollar medical industry suppresses cures in favor of ongoing treatments", please explain joint replacement (as opposed to the gold mine of physical therapy, pain-control medications, and assistive technologies).
When profits are down, investors don't ask the worker, they don't fire the worker, they look at the leadership team.
...and ask them, "What are you doing to reduce costs?" To which the "leadership team" invariably answers, "Well, of course we're looking to improve efficiency wherever we can, particularly by rightsizing and right-shoring across the organization." The usual result: the leadership team continues on, possibly accepting a small cut in their bonuses as a "show of good faith", and the teams doing the actual work get butchered.
And when the house of cards finally does collapse, it seems that those top-level execs quickly land new top-level positions, while the workers struggle to find a position paying a reasonable fraction of their previous salary before their unemployment benefits run out.
No, I don't claim to know how it is across the entire economy, but that's what I've seen at a number of start-ups and large companies. At none of those companies have I seen the top-level execs fall without a large number of "workers", if not the entire company, going first.
I haven't had a chance to see the famous video, as my only gateway onto the Net is very expensive, er, blocked by the corporate firewall.
Not if it's texture-based rather than chemistry-based.
Could be. It's undecidable from within the simulation itself.
This doesn't make sense. Does middle age, or indeed has middle age, make it more likely that a person will pass on their genes? Not really. Most people reproduce before then.
Because contributing to the knowledge, skills, and security of your children -- those who will be carrying your genes forward -- in no way influences the likelihood that those genes will persist.
1) If you have cataracts, corneal irritation, or smudged glasses, bright objects against a dark background are MUCH harder to resolve than dark images against a white background.
Try grey on black. It reduces the contrast, and works. Really.
It'll reduce the smear/spike effects, but it'll also reduce legibility. Contrast is critical for resolving fine detail. (I have been thinking in terms of reading text, not, say, playing Pac-Man.)
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
And when you turn your head away from the monitor, you'll get eye strain when the eyes have to adjust again.
Fair point, I suppose, although I never seem to have trouble with it myself. Maybe it's just that rooms aren't usually that dark -- which, if true, weakens my original point anyhow.
I think a good solution is monitors that adjust their brightness based on ambient light. (A few manufacturers do those -- Fujitsu and Eizo at least)
Maybe, but I've had to disable that feature on iPads and my work laptop. The lower-brightness settings just aren't legible enough. If you're in your twenties, your mileage will vary -- but, trust me, this is one of many ways that getting old sucks.
Well, to the extent that my eye condition is that I have natural lenses and corneas, I agree, and accept your condolences.
I've read the same discussions of acuity, and many more. If the human lens and cornea were optically perfect, yes, a wider aperture would produce a clearer image. Unfortunately, they're actually not very good at all, no offense to any Intelligent Designer who may be reading.
We have the impression of sparkling clear vision for several reasons. We normally use only the central part of the lens, which (as you've read) tends to de-emphasize optical weakness. Our most sensitive spatial resolution comes from the fovea, which rests at the center of the lens's focal field; again, that's where distortions are least prevalent. And, once an image does fall on the retina, it gets image-processed to hell and back by the retina itself, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, and big chunks of the rest of your brain to boot.
If a dilated lens produced the best spatial resolution at the retina, we'd expect that the sharpest things we could see would be isolated bright objects in a dark field. Things like the moon, or stars. As it turns out, though, we don't resolve those things very well at all. That's why we get vague impressions of "the man in the moon", and that's why so many cultures talk about stars having points.
I certainly don't hate anyone for preferring light-on-dark. I'm just trying to point out that there are legitimate physical reasons that light-on-dark poses problems for a lot of people.
Oh, so very, very much this.
Let me count the problems with light-text-on-dark-background:
1) If you have cataracts, corneal irritation, or smudged glasses, bright objects against a dark background are MUCH harder to resolve than dark images against a white background. With black-on-white, you just get reduced contrast; with white-on-black, you get distracting smears and rays all over the page.
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
3) In a bright room, a mostly-dark display will be more obscured by reflections and glare.
This is one reason I stopped hanging out at dpreview.com. Yeah, I know, photographers think their stuff looks better against a black background, but more than five or ten minutes on the site gives me a headache.
Ah, for the days when most people were literate enough to recognize, never mind use, rhetorical devices like litotes.
There's the info I was looking for -- thanks!
The first video does mention polarization, and gives a good visual demonstration. It apparently doesn't require a polarizing layer for "the rest of the world", just for the display, which knocks out my "dimming" objection. But I'm still seeing focus degradation that's noticeable even on top of YouTube's compression. I could see tolerating this for specialized short-term applications, but I still don't think I'd be happy with it on a long-term basis.
More to the point, though, I still don't see the advantage over corrected-focus projection systems. If you can arrange your projection system to make the virtual image appear at infinity -- and you can; this is already well-understood, well-established technology -- why on Earth would you force the user to wear a contact lens, especially one that degrades normal vision?
...and I'm not surprised, given that they apparently laid off the ones who were supposed to handle this article. Anybody want to take a crack at correlating the category scores with the green-bar indicators?
I don't see anything in the linked article about polarization. They seem to be proposing zone-based focus, just like existing dual-focus contacts.
If they are using polarization, it might help -- but at that point, you're also dimming external light significantly. This presents its own problems in night, twilight, or indoor combat.
Dual-focus lenses like do produce sharp images at multiple focal ranges (or, in this case, from multiple sources) -- but they also produce blurred images at every focal range. So, you see a sharp image, but with halos around bright objects, and no way to mask them out. If you have to look at a white-on-black display, or a glowing readout in the dark, you're in for a real treat.
We already know how to integrate optics so your HUD shows things at a neutral focal distance. With holographic optics, we ought to be able to make such optics lightweight and compact enough for anyone's tastes. So why "correct" the eye to super-nearsightedness?
This seems like a solution to the wrong problem.
You don't understand exponentiation.
It's a shibiload.
...to think that screen resolution (dpi) has been essentially static for over ten years. My 1999 laptop had a 1024x768 display. The new laptop I was just issued at work has 1366x768 -- a downgrade, IMHO, from the previous laptop's 1280x800.
I've been thinking of getting a 17" MBP (1920x1200) for personal use, but I'm holding out in light of rumors that the new models might have double-res screens. After using a 4G iPad, I've realized that a 200+dpi laptop or desktop display is worth whatever extra it costs. I'd take a 15" 2880x1800 display over a 17" 1920x1200 in a heartbeat, and I'd easily drop an extra grand for it.
I'm not going to cheap out on something can increase or decrease my eyestrain for many hours a day.
It may only be a coincidence, but the comparison of a month's labor to the value of an ounce of gold hasn't been far off for quite a while.
Funny thing. I make around 80% more than I did ten years ago in dollars, but in terms of gold ounces, I make less than a third of what I did then (gold has gone from $300 to $1650).
Now, there has been inflation during that time -- but I can say with certainty that my buying power has increased, not decreased. Unless, of course, I'm buying gold.
If you choose to believe that Stuff In General has dropped sharply in value in the last ten years, I'm not sure how to argue the point. But to me, it certainly looks like the value of gold has increased. Use it as a yardstick if you must, but in my opinion, a yardstick shouldn't be that elastic.
"But everything they said was surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet."
</shudder>
Use a little electricity to re-fix some of the CO2 you have released, and you can immediately and locally offset CO2 instead of growing a tree farm hundreds of miles away.
And everything would be just peachy if we could do that. But thermodynamics, that hidebound, officious boor, insists that undoing our messes takes more energy than making them in the first place. In other words, if you "use a little electricity", you'll re-fix only a very little of the CO2 you produced.
Fixing CO2 to make fuel inherently consumes more energy than burning fuel to make CO2. You win if the energy you're consuming is extremely cheap, or something that would otherwise be wasted. But if your efficiency is only on par with natural photosynthesis (a few percent), you're not winning very much.
Still better to charge a battery, if you can support the size, weight and cost. But it'll be a long time, if ever, before batteries can compete with hydrocarbons (and free ambient oxygen) on energy density.
...and reaction rates. I'm guessing this wouldn't be useful in a regenerative-braking regime, but I'd love to know whether it's fast enough for grid load-balancing, efficient enough to eventually become cheaper than alternatives, or just an interesting proof-of-concept. My money is on the last.
If cancer is the result of an inherent flaw in the design in the human body then it can still be eradicated by eliminating whatever "flaws" exist in the human body that lead to the development of the disease.
Sure, all you need is omniscience and omnipotence.
The human body is a lot more complicated than a computer program that you can check for infinite loops. Oh, wait, you can't do that, either.
Remember that over 60% of cancers are environmentally caused (eating, drinking, smoking, sun, exposure to chemicals) and live accordingly.
Well, duh. Just stop eating and drinking, and your tumors will stop growing within weeks. If you're willing to cut out exposure to all chemicals, the hard vacuum will take care of your cancer in scant minutes.
Hang on, there's a Pfizer truck out front, and someone's at the d...
Everything old is new again:
The Feeling of Power, Isaac Asimov, 1958