Pure speculation on my part, but I'd start by studying the anatomy of the muscles involved. I'd then attempt to contract them in isolation from other muscles, feeling the muscles as well as possible, both with my hands and trying to interpret the movement directly, and attempting to identify the muscles that actually did contract. I'd then attempt to contract surrounding muscles, and isolate those are well as possible too. It may not be possible to 100% isolate the individual muscles, but I'd expect to gain some control over them. Then I'd attempt to relax the hiccup muscles in isolation, using the feeling of the muscle contracted as a reference, like you would in progressive muscle relaxation. No guarantees that it will work, but the starting point for all these body tricks is gaining awareness of what your body is really doing.
The trick is basically to fall asleep without sleeping, as I assume microsaccades are not present during deep sleep. When I was a kid there was an "astral projection" fad in my school, and people would pass around books about it and try to learn the technique. It doesn't actually work, but you can learn to "shut down" parts of your brain while maintaining consciousness. As the article says, microsaccades are not motor noise, so you can learn to stop them. You can learn to consciously control lots of supposedly unconscious body processes, eg. you can make one hand hotter than the other, or change your heart rate at will. This kind of "body hacking" is the truth behind "ki" and other mystical things.
If you can perfectly relax your eyes you can watch the image fade. Color fades before lightness, and eventually the whole image is just noisy gray. It's easiest if there's nothing visually interesting in your field of vision so you don't accidentally look at something and move your eyes.
I think you can make a distinction between high level "seeing" and low level "looking". I have "seen" visual artifacts when tired or distracted, but they were not something I could actively look at. Likewise, if I focus my mind correctly I can "look" without seeing, accepting visual input from the eyes without attempting any further processing (this is a very interesting trick if you can manage it, as you'll notice that the eyes are actually very poor quality as cameras, and it is only because they are backed but such excellent "software" that they are usable). That the high level visual processing is highly abstract does not mean that low level visual differences are unimportant. The temporal sampling rate makes a difference in perceived high level motion quality beyond just latency. You don't need strobe effects to see this difference, just high contrast fast motion. Horizontal scrolling text makes the difference very obvious.
The 2233rz is the first 120 Hz LCD on the market. A real 120 Hz, not interpolated. If the graphics card can handle it, it will display 120 images per second in games, with at the same time, what is basically zero image ghosting - responsiveness just isn't an issue - and improved fluidity.
It's only very recently that LCDs with acceptable refresh rates have become available (the ViewSonic VX2265wm, and the Samsung 2233rz), and AFAIK they are only available bundled with 3d glasses and not at all in most countries.
If you can see a strobe light flickering at 60Hz then it would seem that the effective sampling rate of your eyes must be at least 120Hz. However, I've heard somebody argue that the flickering is actually the equivalent of interference beat patterns between different speed parts of the eye. I think this is unlikely, but the way to test it would be to use a variable speed strobe light and check that the perceived flicker speed increases smoothly as the strobe speed is increased. I don't have access to a strobe light, but a 60Hz CRT appears to me to flicker faster than a 50Hz CRT, so I think the flicker is just plain flicker.
Vi and vim are both poor text editors in that they trick you into thinking you are highly productive because most of your time is spent on intense thought. This is subjectively quick, but usually measures slower than simpler interfaces. When hardware was the bottleneck spending a lot of time in thought to avoid waiting on hardware might have improved productivity, but now we have displays that update faster than 5fps it is counterproductive.
If this is true then it may be possible to train this ability. Maybe I learned to do it subconsciously by playing FPSs, and those who claim not to see more than n frames per second literally can't see any improvement because they never learned how.
In a LAN game the communication latency is insignificant, and if that quad SLI guy is using the default Alternate Frame Rendering mode then he's at a latency disadvantage. Increased graphics detail might even be a competitive disadvantage, making it harder to pick targets out of the visual clutter.
Frame rates higher than 60fps are valuable even for web browsing and general desktop use. Compare how easily your eyes can track mouse motion on an LCD compared to a high refresh rate CRT (be sure mouse sampling rate is high enough that the cursor is updated every screen refresh). Scrolling and window movement are also much smoother and easier to control. With excellent motion quality and low latency the computer feels like it is part of your own body rather than a separate object, reducing mental effort for all tasks.
For those that doubt the value of higher motion quality, an excellent test signal is horizontal scrolling text. You will be able to read much faster scrolls on a high end CRT than a 60Hz LCD.
Consider a mutual surprise situation where both players react with identical 180ms reaction times. One has hardware with total latency of 30ms, while the other's hardware chain has total latency of 40ms. The latter player probably thought that extra 10ms latency wasn't worth worrying about, but here it is responsible for his loss.
As for motion quality, 60fps is clearly inadequate, but in my experience there are greatly diminishing returns beyond about 100fps. Note that this is on a CRT with an impulse response characteristic, on sample and hold displays a higher frame rate will be needed to compensate for the temporal smearing. In the opinion of some experienced FPS gamers, a true 120Hz LCD comes very close to a CRT: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1387713
The refresh rate needed to avoid flicker with an impulse light characteristic display is unrelated to the frame rate needed for perfectly realistic motion quality. Note however that non-flicking sample and hold displays such as LCDs will produce lower motion quality than impulse response displays of the same refresh rate because of the temporal smearing. (see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx for explanation).
Standard 24fps film is nowhere near high enough to reproduce real motion, as anybody who's watched 60fps Showscan film will know. The difference between 60fps gaming and 100fps or higher gaming is also obvious. And if you carefully examine high contrast fast motion you can notice a difference at even higher frame rates.
And while 10ms latency may not be perceptible, latency is cumulative from all sources, and every millisecond added to your reaction time puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
Books don't have an "optimum viewing angle" because all viewing angles are equally bad. No matter how you hold the book either your arms or you neck will get tired. I'll always read on screen rather than paper if I have the choice. The only advantage of books is the higher resolution printing, but you can increase the screen text size and sit further back to compensate.
The 'w' and 'q' are in muscle memory, as this is one of the consistent strings of shortcuts I mentioned, but the initial ':' is not. That some common vi commands require so many keypresses is a design flaw.
Keyboard shortcuts are not amenable to muscle memory, as the muscle movement differs depending on the previous shortcut. Returning to the home position between each keypresses allows muscle memory, but I'd be very surprised if it were enough to compensate for the movement inefficiency. Consecutive strings of keyboard shortcuts can be memorized by muscle memory (as with typing whole words), but if you use a string of shortcuts frequently enough to memorize in this way it would be better consolidated to a single shortcut.
On the other hand, mouse gestures or pie menus require the exact same movement each time, so are highly amenable to muscle memory.
We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
Try timing yourself on some web browsing/text editing/file managing tasks. Keyboarding may be faster occasionally, but you'll be surprised how often mousing wins.
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$399 including the keyboard, which is too expensive for such a low spec (600MHz cpu, 256MB ram) device IMO.
I modified my Linux kernel to poll my keyboard every 2ms.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity . I think the autodetected default values are too low.
Pure speculation on my part, but I'd start by studying the anatomy of the muscles involved. I'd then attempt to contract them in isolation from other muscles, feeling the muscles as well as possible, both with my hands and trying to interpret the movement directly, and attempting to identify the muscles that actually did contract. I'd then attempt to contract surrounding muscles, and isolate those are well as possible too. It may not be possible to 100% isolate the individual muscles, but I'd expect to gain some control over them. Then I'd attempt to relax the hiccup muscles in isolation, using the feeling of the muscle contracted as a reference, like you would in progressive muscle relaxation. No guarantees that it will work, but the starting point for all these body tricks is gaining awareness of what your body is really doing.
The trick is basically to fall asleep without sleeping, as I assume microsaccades are not present during deep sleep. When I was a kid there was an "astral projection" fad in my school, and people would pass around books about it and try to learn the technique. It doesn't actually work, but you can learn to "shut down" parts of your brain while maintaining consciousness. As the article says, microsaccades are not motor noise, so you can learn to stop them. You can learn to consciously control lots of supposedly unconscious body processes, eg. you can make one hand hotter than the other, or change your heart rate at will. This kind of "body hacking" is the truth behind "ki" and other mystical things.
If you can perfectly relax your eyes you can watch the image fade. Color fades before lightness, and eventually the whole image is just noisy gray. It's easiest if there's nothing visually interesting in your field of vision so you don't accidentally look at something and move your eyes.
That old myth has been throughly debunked earlier in the comments.
I think you can make a distinction between high level "seeing" and low level "looking". I have "seen" visual artifacts when tired or distracted, but they were not something I could actively look at. Likewise, if I focus my mind correctly I can "look" without seeing, accepting visual input from the eyes without attempting any further processing (this is a very interesting trick if you can manage it, as you'll notice that the eyes are actually very poor quality as cameras, and it is only because they are backed but such excellent "software" that they are usable). That the high level visual processing is highly abstract does not mean that low level visual differences are unimportant. The temporal sampling rate makes a difference in perceived high level motion quality beyond just latency. You don't need strobe effects to see this difference, just high contrast fast motion. Horizontal scrolling text makes the difference very obvious.
It's only very recently that LCDs with acceptable refresh rates have become available (the ViewSonic VX2265wm, and the Samsung 2233rz), and AFAIK they are only available bundled with 3d glasses and not at all in most countries.
If you can see a strobe light flickering at 60Hz then it would seem that the effective sampling rate of your eyes must be at least 120Hz. However, I've heard somebody argue that the flickering is actually the equivalent of interference beat patterns between different speed parts of the eye. I think this is unlikely, but the way to test it would be to use a variable speed strobe light and check that the perceived flicker speed increases smoothly as the strobe speed is increased. I don't have access to a strobe light, but a 60Hz CRT appears to me to flicker faster than a 50Hz CRT, so I think the flicker is just plain flicker.
Vi and vim are both poor text editors in that they trick you into thinking you are highly productive because most of your time is spent on intense thought. This is subjectively quick, but usually measures slower than simpler interfaces. When hardware was the bottleneck spending a lot of time in thought to avoid waiting on hardware might have improved productivity, but now we have displays that update faster than 5fps it is counterproductive.
If this is true then it may be possible to train this ability. Maybe I learned to do it subconsciously by playing FPSs, and those who claim not to see more than n frames per second literally can't see any improvement because they never learned how.
5fps is only adequate for text editing if you're using vi. Modern text editors work best at at least 60fps.
In a LAN game the communication latency is insignificant, and if that quad SLI guy is using the default Alternate Frame Rendering mode then he's at a latency disadvantage. Increased graphics detail might even be a competitive disadvantage, making it harder to pick targets out of the visual clutter.
You've obviously never compared high contrast fast motion on a 100Hz+ CRT side by side a 60Hz LCD.
Frame rates higher than 60fps are valuable even for web browsing and general desktop use. Compare how easily your eyes can track mouse motion on an LCD compared to a high refresh rate CRT (be sure mouse sampling rate is high enough that the cursor is updated every screen refresh). Scrolling and window movement are also much smoother and easier to control. With excellent motion quality and low latency the computer feels like it is part of your own body rather than a separate object, reducing mental effort for all tasks.
For those that doubt the value of higher motion quality, an excellent test signal is horizontal scrolling text. You will be able to read much faster scrolls on a high end CRT than a 60Hz LCD.
Consider a mutual surprise situation where both players react with identical 180ms reaction times. One has hardware with total latency of 30ms, while the other's hardware chain has total latency of 40ms. The latter player probably thought that extra 10ms latency wasn't worth worrying about, but here it is responsible for his loss.
As for motion quality, 60fps is clearly inadequate, but in my experience there are greatly diminishing returns beyond about 100fps. Note that this is on a CRT with an impulse response characteristic, on sample and hold displays a higher frame rate will be needed to compensate for the temporal smearing. In the opinion of some experienced FPS gamers, a true 120Hz LCD comes very close to a CRT:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1387713
The refresh rate needed to avoid flicker with an impulse light characteristic display is unrelated to the frame rate needed for perfectly realistic motion quality. Note however that non-flicking sample and hold displays such as LCDs will produce lower motion quality than impulse response displays of the same refresh rate because of the temporal smearing. (see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx for explanation).
This is an old myth, the human eye can see a difference far higher that 25fps.
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
"So what is "Enough fps"? I don't know, because nobody went there so far."
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx
"Whatever temporal sampling rate you choose, it's unlikely to be fast enough"
Standard 24fps film is nowhere near high enough to reproduce real motion, as anybody who's watched 60fps Showscan film will know. The difference between 60fps gaming and 100fps or higher gaming is also obvious. And if you carefully examine high contrast fast motion you can notice a difference at even higher frame rates.
And while 10ms latency may not be perceptible, latency is cumulative from all sources, and every millisecond added to your reaction time puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
Books don't have an "optimum viewing angle" because all viewing angles are equally bad. No matter how you hold the book either your arms or you neck will get tired. I'll always read on screen rather than paper if I have the choice. The only advantage of books is the higher resolution printing, but you can increase the screen text size and sit further back to compensate.
The 'w' and 'q' are in muscle memory, as this is one of the consistent strings of shortcuts I mentioned, but the initial ':' is not. That some common vi commands require so many keypresses is a design flaw.
I touch type about 90wpm. If I'm selecting text I'll generally move my hand to the mouse, because I've measured it to be faster.
Keyboard shortcuts are not amenable to muscle memory, as the muscle movement differs depending on the previous shortcut. Returning to the home position between each keypresses allows muscle memory, but I'd be very surprised if it were enough to compensate for the movement inefficiency. Consecutive strings of keyboard shortcuts can be memorized by muscle memory (as with typing whole words), but if you use a string of shortcuts frequently enough to memorize in this way it would be better consolidated to a single shortcut.
On the other hand, mouse gestures or pie menus require the exact same movement each time, so are highly amenable to muscle memory.
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
Try timing yourself on some web browsing/text editing/file managing tasks. Keyboarding may be faster occasionally, but you'll be surprised how often mousing wins.