Slashdot Mirror


User: pagel

pagel's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
5
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 5

  1. Re:nonsense! on Laser Vision Surgery for Developers? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Oh-please! Don't fall for this nonsense! The mechanisms of myopia and the like are very well studied and understood.

    While your "looking habits" probably can do something to your vision during eye developement (i.e. childhood) this whole eye-training thing is totally bogus.

    Myopia is not caused by tensions of muscles - strain on those is a result of the (insufficiently corrected) myopia. The reason for myopia is that the eye bulb is too long and thus the image projected by the lens system would be in focus a little in front of the retina. In the case of close objects (e.g. computer screen) this can be compensated by "accomodation" (i.e. focussing closer). Of cause a person with myopia has to focus "harder" compared to a person with regular vision which causes the strain on the eyes, that people experience while reading without glasses (headache, burning eyes, blurred image after some time).

    If a myopic person stets the lens for infinty (i.e. focusses on a distant object) the immage remains blurred because we can't focus beyond a certain point which unfortunately is not sufficient for the too long eye ball. Thats why you call it shortsighted: close objects can still be seen in focus while distant ones can't.

    If the eye ball is too short the opposite happens.

    So what happens if you throw the glasses in the bin and decide to give your eyes some excercise? At first you feel blind becasue you are used to corrected vision and the uncorrected images are impressively bad. After a while you start to get used to be back to bad vision and get the impression of improving vision. Maybe your perception even improves a little over the initial situtation because you (your brain) adapts to the the poor input from the eyes and does all it can to compensate. And our brain is extremely good at dealing with missing or poor data (thats why we don't see our blind spot). If you measure the vision of someone who underwent "eye-training" you find that the vision is just as bad as it was but the person still believes in a miraculous improvement.

    Oh and a final personal note: I've been suffering from myopia for a long time now and although I can read without glasses I never do because my eyes get tired of the effort quickly.

    Philipp

  2. Re:Just a quote from my biology teacher... on Build Your Own Virus · · Score: 1

    It is sad to hear nonsense like that from a biology teacher! If he can't believe that a simple thing like HIV was "made" by evolution how does he explain human beeings - creation? You don't live in Kansas, do you?

  3. Re:Is it really from scratch? on Build Your Own Virus · · Score: 1

    Of cause some biological tools like the reverse trancriptase used to generate virus RNA from the DNA template are involved in the process.
    But that is not the point. The virus was assembled in vitro (or from scratch) but it was not designed from scratch - actually not at all: They used the known sequence of the virus, had a DNA template synthesized, made RNA from it and in vitro translated the RNA into virus proteins. All that is pretty easy to do and doesn't require much more than the "mail order kits" that have stirred people up so much here.
    After having generated all those virus components you have to assemble an actual virus from the parts - the simpler the virus the better the chances that it assembles more or less spontaneously at this point.

  4. Re:A typo, surely? on Build Your Own Virus · · Score: 1

    Not - not a typo, just poorly phrased: What they actually ordered was DNA. You send the company the sequence ant they synthesize a strand of DNA for you.

  5. Re:This is not a review. on Sizing Up StarOffice 6.0 · · Score: 1

    Well, I use StarOffice 6.0 for a while now and as much as I like it, it suffers from just the same problems that MS Office has: bloat. On top of that it is not quite stable if you do more than just letters and text-only presentations.
    I had the damn thing crash on me quite often. Cut and paste with other apps beeing the a popular occasion ...

    At some point I tried open office but it crashed on the attempt to load my SO presentation - so I postponed the adventure.

    So, I think we need to be a little carefull when recommending SO or OO to people who try to get actual work done with it. It's just not quite there, yet. On the other hand maybe we get a lot of bugs chased away now that the source is open - I sure hope so!