Hacker News Reader

Comment by camtarn | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

That’s “near-sighted”, not “short-sighted”, which is another thing entirely.

Near-sightedness and short-sightedness are the same thing in the context of ophthalmology, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-sightedness

Originally 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.

OP 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.

Same in Australia/New Zealand AFAIK.

Cheers for clearing that up :) I was rather confused by the comment.

You've failed to consider the rest of the world and their usage of the term; it's a bit short-sighted, really.

But not near-sighted. Only one of the terms is overloaded. ;)

Funny! I'd never heard "near-sighted" before that Wikipedia article.

Surely in using 'short' exclusively metaphorically, its metaphoric effect is lost entirely?

Don'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.

Huh, 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.

Most people can manually defocus their eyes to accomplish the same effect as a farsighted person taking off their glasses

Yes, 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)

You 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.

What 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 ?

-9 plus heavy astigmatism. My maximum clear vision distance without glasses is about six inches!

This may be of value to you if you have not done it already, but I came in from -8ish to -6ish just by doing these exercises.

http://www.seeing.org/techniques/

-11 in both eyes here. Seeing the same thing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com