The red-green test (binocular balancing) does work on anomalous trichromats, i.e. most of the people who are colourblind or colour deficient. Just because you can't distinguish between red and green doesn't change the way the wavelengths focus. (We have to adjust our questions to refer to the right or left side, rather than the red or green, but that's about it.)
Very few people are missing a particular colour of cones; rather, the light-sensitive pigment is altered by genetics to be most sensitive to a different/"wrong" wavelength. So your red-green colour deficient people usually have their 'green' cones more sensitive to red instead of green (or vice versa). That doesn't mean that they don't see green, they're just less sensitive to it than they are to red; the photopigments are still activated by wavelengths other than the one they're most sensitive to.
For more info, look up the spectral sensitivity functions for the various photopigments; you can imagine how shifting the sensitivity of any of the curves will affect things, but it will in no way prevent normal colours from being visible.
(I'm an optometrist. And yes, it's spelled "colour" here.)
Doesn't this mean that anyone in China who speaks, say, English or Russian could get around the censorship just by searching Bing in their other language?
And I suppose this also prevents Chinese people from using a proxy to search Bing, if anything in simplified Chinese is being censored regardless of IP location?
Wouldn't it be great to have a free wireless network available virtually nationwide, regardless of filtering, for the simple purpose of online connected devices? Alarm clocks that gather local news and weather, refrigerators that order milk for you when you run out, an oven that preheats when you signal it from your car on the way home... none of these tasks need tons of bandwidth, nor do they depend on having uncensored access. I think this free wireless might take these sorts of things from the realm of science fiction, or at least hardcore geeks, to the hands of the masses.
If you've got 20/10 vision, you'd probably be disappointed with these. According to the article (and summary), the resolution is 1.5 arcminutes, which is equivalent to about 20/30 (or 6/9, for us metric-using folks), meaning your normal vision would be much clearer and detailed than what you're seeing coming from the virtual display. Although, if this is from a 640x480 VGA panel, I'm sure they could work in something of a little higher resolution in future prototypes....
"For all of our sanity we are going to try to keep these names alphabetical after Breezy. We might skip letters, and we'll have to wrap eventually. But the naming convention is here for a while longer, at least."
As far as limiting the possible viewing distances goes, it's not really a big issue. Most people who wear bifocals do it because they can't accommodate anymore - the crystalline lens in the eye can't change its shape like it used to. Normally, when you want to look at something at near, your lens gets more curved, adding more dioptric power to the eye so that the image stays in focus; as you get older, the lens gets denser and less flexible and you can't accommodate anymore.
Now, that doesn't mean that when you're 40 and start needing reading glasses, that you have no accommodation left; it's just less. So if these glasses are set for focusing at near being, say, 40cm, and you want to look at something 30cm away, your eyes should still be able to make up the difference. (In fact, the "reading add" used in bifocals doesn't totally eliminate the need to accommodate; it just reduces the level of accommodation needed to a level that the wearer can handle. Usually you can focus on something really close for a short period of time, but it gets kinda uncomfortable fairly quickly, so the reading glasses are meant to reduce this stress.)
For much older people (say, 65+) and those who wear trifocals, this may or may not cut it. But for a lot of people who have bifocals or progressive multifocals, it'd be much better to have your whole field of vision focused at the same spot.
Firstly, as other posters have mentioned, you could probably use more sleep and less computer time, if that's at all possible. As one of my professors recently said - doing too much of anything is going to hurt your eyes.
Secondly, get an eye exam if it's been a while (over a year) since your last one. Even a small amount of refractive error, dry eye, or any other condition is going to get aggravated staring at a monitor for hours on end.
There are different glasses and monitor filters (for CRTs only, I think) that can be used; some people find it helps, while others don't. Try it if you'd like.
I think the most important thing to do is try and follow the 20-20-20 rule: Every twenty minutes, take a break for twenty seconds and look at something at least twenty feet away. This lets your eyes refocus, gives your extraocular muscles a break from focussing (no they aren't designed to stare at something on your desk all day), and see if that helps.
Back when I started using Firefox and noticed its "Keyword" feature on bookmarks, I thought it'd be neat if I could do a lyrics search straight from the address bar. So lo and behold, I made myself a bookmark to: http://google.com/search?q=%22%25s%22+lyrics&btnI= I'm+Feeling+Lucky
and assigned it the keyword "l" (for lyrics, obviously.) Firefox replaces the %s with whatever follows the keyword when it's typed in the address bar.
Now when I want song lyrics, I can just type "l song artist/name" and hit enter, and the words show up automagically. Same deal works for guitar tabs or anything else. It's surprisingly handy.
(And yes, I realize this Google thing's got more features. But when I want lyrics quickly, I don't need album covers or any of that jazz.)
Parabolic refers to the flight path used by the planes in order to simulate the weightlessness you typically see in spaceflight, not the path of the ball or anything else inside the plane.
Slashdot Mirror
The red-green test (binocular balancing) does work on anomalous trichromats, i.e. most of the people who are colourblind or colour deficient. Just because you can't distinguish between red and green doesn't change the way the wavelengths focus. (We have to adjust our questions to refer to the right or left side, rather than the red or green, but that's about it.)
Very few people are missing a particular colour of cones; rather, the light-sensitive pigment is altered by genetics to be most sensitive to a different/"wrong" wavelength. So your red-green colour deficient people usually have their 'green' cones more sensitive to red instead of green (or vice versa). That doesn't mean that they don't see green, they're just less sensitive to it than they are to red; the photopigments are still activated by wavelengths other than the one they're most sensitive to.
For more info, look up the spectral sensitivity functions for the various photopigments; you can imagine how shifting the sensitivity of any of the curves will affect things, but it will in no way prevent normal colours from being visible.
(I'm an optometrist. And yes, it's spelled "colour" here.)
Doesn't this mean that anyone in China who speaks, say, English or Russian could get around the censorship just by searching Bing in their other language? And I suppose this also prevents Chinese people from using a proxy to search Bing, if anything in simplified Chinese is being censored regardless of IP location?
Wouldn't it be great to have a free wireless network available virtually nationwide, regardless of filtering, for the simple purpose of online connected devices? Alarm clocks that gather local news and weather, refrigerators that order milk for you when you run out, an oven that preheats when you signal it from your car on the way home... none of these tasks need tons of bandwidth, nor do they depend on having uncensored access. I think this free wireless might take these sorts of things from the realm of science fiction, or at least hardcore geeks, to the hands of the masses.
If you've got 20/10 vision, you'd probably be disappointed with these. According to the article (and summary), the resolution is 1.5 arcminutes, which is equivalent to about 20/30 (or 6/9, for us metric-using folks), meaning your normal vision would be much clearer and detailed than what you're seeing coming from the virtual display.
Although, if this is from a 640x480 VGA panel, I'm sure they could work in something of a little higher resolution in future prototypes....
Maybe there's a reason the almighty Canadian dollar coin is referred to as the loonie.
:P
There already is a reason - it's got a loon on it.
From the Ubuntu wiki:
"For all of our sanity we are going to try to keep these names alphabetical after Breezy. We might skip letters, and we'll have to wrap eventually. But the naming convention is here for a while longer, at least."
As far as limiting the possible viewing distances goes, it's not really a big issue. Most people who wear bifocals do it because they can't accommodate anymore - the crystalline lens in the eye can't change its shape like it used to. Normally, when you want to look at something at near, your lens gets more curved, adding more dioptric power to the eye so that the image stays in focus; as you get older, the lens gets denser and less flexible and you can't accommodate anymore.
Now, that doesn't mean that when you're 40 and start needing reading glasses, that you have no accommodation left; it's just less. So if these glasses are set for focusing at near being, say, 40cm, and you want to look at something 30cm away, your eyes should still be able to make up the difference. (In fact, the "reading add" used in bifocals doesn't totally eliminate the need to accommodate; it just reduces the level of accommodation needed to a level that the wearer can handle. Usually you can focus on something really close for a short period of time, but it gets kinda uncomfortable fairly quickly, so the reading glasses are meant to reduce this stress.)
For much older people (say, 65+) and those who wear trifocals, this may or may not cut it. But for a lot of people who have bifocals or progressive multifocals, it'd be much better to have your whole field of vision focused at the same spot.
Firstly, as other posters have mentioned, you could probably use more sleep and less computer time, if that's at all possible. As one of my professors recently said - doing too much of anything is going to hurt your eyes.
Secondly, get an eye exam if it's been a while (over a year) since your last one. Even a small amount of refractive error, dry eye, or any other condition is going to get aggravated staring at a monitor for hours on end.
There are different glasses and monitor filters (for CRTs only, I think) that can be used; some people find it helps, while others don't. Try it if you'd like.
I think the most important thing to do is try and follow the 20-20-20 rule: Every twenty minutes, take a break for twenty seconds and look at something at least twenty feet away. This lets your eyes refocus, gives your extraocular muscles a break from focussing (no they aren't designed to stare at something on your desk all day), and see if that helps.
(I'm not an eye doctor, but I will be soon!)
Back when I started using Firefox and noticed its "Keyword" feature on bookmarks, I thought it'd be neat if I could do a lyrics search straight from the address bar. So lo and behold, I made myself a bookmark to:= I'm+Feeling+Lucky
http://google.com/search?q=%22%25s%22+lyrics&btnI
and assigned it the keyword "l" (for lyrics, obviously.) Firefox replaces the %s with whatever follows the keyword when it's typed in the address bar.
Now when I want song lyrics, I can just type "l song artist/name" and hit enter, and the words show up automagically. Same deal works for guitar tabs or anything else. It's surprisingly handy.
(And yes, I realize this Google thing's got more features. But when I want lyrics quickly, I don't need album covers or any of that jazz.)
Parabolic refers to the flight path used by the planes in order to simulate the weightlessness you typically see in spaceflight, not the path of the ball or anything else inside the plane.