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I'm extremely short-sighted. After looking at all the pictures, and thinking "Okay, that's pretty nifty," it occurred to me to try taking off my glasses and vie
by camtarn 10y ago
I'm extremely short-sighted. After looking at all the pictures, and thinking "Okay, that's pretty nifty," it occurred to me to try taking off my glasses and viewing them again. The result is amazing :) All of the individual shapes blur into invisibility, leaving only a very recognisable if fuzzy version of the original image.
- teddyh 10y agoThat’s “near-sighted”, not “short-sighted”, which is another thing entirely.
- petercooper 10y agoNear-sightedness and short-sightedness are the same thing in the context of ophthalmology, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-sightedness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-sightedness
- teddyh 10y agoOriginally they were synonyms, but one of them has come to have a more metaphorical meaning, to the point of using it literally is actually confusing.
- tombrossman 10y agoOP is from Scotland, same as my wife, and I can confirm 'short-sighted' is the correct usage in Britain for what most Americans call 'near sighted'. The term does not have the negative connotation in Europe that it does in America.
- contingencies 10y agoSame in Australia/New Zealand AFAIK.
- camtarn 10y agoCheers for clearing that up :) I was rather confused by the comment.
- mod 10y agoYou've failed to consider the rest of the world and their usage of the term; it's a bit short-sighted, really.
- taneq 10y agoBut not near-sighted. Only one of the terms is overloaded. ;)
- OJFord 10y agoFunny! I'd never heard "near-sighted" before that Wikipedia article. Surely in using 'short' exclusively metaphorically, its metaphoric effect is lost entirely?
- khedoros 10y agoDon't feel too bad. I had to read it twice to get the meaning, myself. The fact that it's used in a literal sense outside of the U.S. isn't something that I would have considered. I suppose that my viewing of foreign media has had a dearth of references to optometry.
- stingraycharles 10y agoWhat do you call "extremely" ? I am -6 and did not notice any of what you describe, so I assume I'm not nearly as bad a case as you are ?
- camtarn 10y ago-9 plus heavy astigmatism. My maximum clear vision distance without glasses is about six inches!
- amelius 10y agoYou can get a similar effect by pressing Ctrl "-" a couple of times in your browser, to shrink the images. The result is that they look much sharper. But of course, this spoils the original effect.
- taneq 10y agoHuh, it really does. Very cool! Similarly, the mosaic effect that they use on TV to hide faces sometimes leaves them still recognizable if I take my glasses off, even if they're completely unrecognizable when seen clearly. I wonder if this effect works for people who aren't short-sighted? Like, maybe short-sighted peoples' visual systems develop to use more focus-invariant features.
- anchpop 10y agoMost people can manually defocus their eyes to accomplish the same effect as a farsighted person taking off their glasses
- tripzilch 10y agoYes, but I think the GP was talking about learning, forming new (different) brain connections, because most near-sighted people navigate the world with blurry vision for at least a few minutes daily, sometimes more. (personally, since my eyesight without glasses or contacts is pretty bad, no more than 15 mins until I get annoyed with the difficulty spotting small objects and go for my glasses :p gonna laser those puppies one day, maybe. it's amazing living in an age where they can actually fix this sort of thing, shame if I didn't take advantage of it)