3 ms·
The thing is, 600 milliseconds is a number that comes up often. You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 mil
by Raphmedia 12y ago
The thing is, 600 milliseconds is a number that comes up often.
You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds and 1000 milliseconds. The rest is guessing work.
It's the same thing with the width of elements on the web. Know what 10px is, and you will be able to guess anything.
- bilbo0s 12y agoWell... I would agree that the Page story is not that impressive. Obviously, most people from the video game generation would be sensitive to a time period greater than 500 milliseconds. But that misses the point of the Jobs story. Some people really do have sensitivity to things that the vast majority of others have trouble perceiving. Most people would have trouble perceiving a millimeter difference in spatial dimension by touch. Having said all of that... the likelihood that the Project Manager in the original story... or even that the Project Manager in your workplace for that matter... is the maven that Steve Jobs was is remote in the extreme.
- dilap 12y agoI used to play a racing game called Trackmania; there was no collision, but it was really competitive in that you'd be racing simultaneously networked w/ other players. You could definitely tell when you completed the lab in a time that was say 10ms behind a different time. 600 milliseconds, +- say 50ms, is pretty recognizable.
- raziel2p 12y agoTop level players will gain ~10ms or more on eachother every other turn. At a level below the very top you're going to see gaps far bigger. With experience, you'll definitely be able to tell which parts of the track you did well or poorly at, but there is no way you're going to be able to get an accurate feel for all of those tiny gains and losses over the course of a 30-60 second track to accurately judge exactly how far ahead or behind another time you are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Ri6XUq6no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Ri6XUq6no
- dilap 12y agoI think you might be right...maybe I am remembering differences of more like 100ms? And thinking about it, in Trackmania it was less a perception of time that you noticed, but a sense of how smoothly and perfectly you had hit every turn. You could easily race the almost the exact same time multiple times in a row, and then feel it when you hit a turn more smoothly and shaved a few fractions of a second off your time. (Or similarly feel it when you screwed up and added a few seconds.) Man, thinking about this is making me miss trackmania :)
- dilap 12y agoOK, I got curious enough I wrote a small console game to test reaction times. It turns out I'm not nearly as good as I thought. I can nail a delay of 100,200,...,900ms exactly only about 40% of the time, and within +-100ms about 80% of the time. If anyone else feels like trying, you can do "go get github.com/erinok/howlonghowlong". Hit space to see a flash, and then type 1-9 for how long you think the flash was. It's surprisingly fun. (At least if you're incredibly weird like me.) I find I'll have periods of concentration where I can just nail it, and then it'll leave me, and I'll be sloppy.
- bashinator 12y agoGod I lost a bunch of hours to that game. Kinderheitstrauma.
- samjc 12y agoJust out of curiosity what do you think Kinderheitstrauma is?
- bashinator 12y agoWell, it's one of the original stunt maps in Trackmania, but it also literally means "childhood trauma".
- samjc 12y agoOh I see. Sorry, I'm german, and the word seemed out of context to me. Thanks for clearing that up :)