Dad has often mentioned that when he first got eyeglasses he was surprised to see that trees had discrete leaves; I never found that to be a big deal.
But now I sometimes find that blades of grass stand out with unnatural vividness. I wonder whether it’s because contacts can give a more accurate correction (because their position is less variable) or because, with this lateral bifocal arrangement, the contrast between sharp and blur is always subconsciously present.
By the way, if I ever use the construction The X is just that, a X, slap me.
I found an unintentionally funny bit:
Do you remember the old adage about how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Karl Marx didn’t.
Acton wrote that famous line four years after Marx died. – I always wondered what “corrupts absolutely” is supposed to mean.
The movie of Watchmen apparently changes Ozymandias’s costume from gold to greys. Whose stupid idea was that?
It has been said (though not in that article) that the Pacific Ocean is the scar of the whack. So if the whack hadn’t happened, would Earth’s crust be all continental? In that case the plates would likely be much less mobile, and most of the big mountains would be volcanic, as on Mars.
Although a big whack may be necessary for plate tectonics as we know it, it’s apparently not sufficient; Mars is also thought to have had one, forming the northern lowlands.
Anita Rowland, a blogger who linked to this humble effort several times in its more energetic first year, died of cancer in December.
(If I were still in the habit of reading blogs, I might have known that before now.)
The puzzlingest search string I’ve seen lately is ice weapons in sherwood maps.
After wearing glasses for thirty-odd years, I’m tired of it. I’m thinking of surgery; since I’m on the verge of needing bifocals, my bright idea is to have one eye adjusted for distance and the other for arm’s length (the typical distance of a computer screen or a gun sight). It did occur to me that this might be a Bad Idea for some reason I hadn’t thought of, so I decided to bring it up with my optometrist. To my surprise, as soon as I mentioned LASIK he brought up monovision. He pointed out that some people find it very hard to adjust, and suggested that it would be wise to try it with contacts first before risking anything permanent.
So now I have contacts; temporarily accepting a lot more optical fuss in the hope that later I’ll have much less. With them, my dominant eye is (according to Doc Lowe) about 3/4 diopter more farsighted then than my, er, submissive eye. (Presumably there is a term of art but I don’t know what it is.) I think his plan is to increase the difference every few weeks.
I haven’t got the knack of taking soft contacts out. With hard ones, you just put tension on the lids and pop!. These I have to drag out with a fingertip. Today and yesterday I stripped one eye on the first try, but had a much harder time with the dominant eye – which is counterintuitive; you’d think the thicker lens would be easier to grab.
Entirely unrelated: In The Atlantic, an article on the rationale of the naked streets movement (though it doesn’t use that phrase). The key point: when rules take the place of judgement, people learn not to use judgement. A similar argument has been made about safety regulation in general.
Forgive my waxing hyperbolic . . .
This is a tiling of the hyperbolic plane by triangles whose angles are π/2, π/3, π/7 – the smallest possible tile. I present it in a conformal mapping analogous to the Mercator projection, which I’ve never seen done before.