I never take off my glasses

[conuly]

Well, unless I'm sleeping, showering, crying, or, sometimes, reading.

So I'm occasionally surprised by how bad my uncorrected vision actually is. Thing I learned today: If I take a glance at somebody very far away without my glasses, their bodies will blur so much that they'll look like a headless blob instead of a vaguely person-shaped blob. What is this? Is this the astigmatism?

****************************

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Comments

[wpadmirer]

The Gene Roddenberry thing is amusing. The Raising a Social Media Star is insane. Kids under 8 spending 65% of their time on YouTube? No wonder the fucking Kardashians are news.

The fallout shelter one was interesting to me. I remember my parents discussing it. We had a neighbor who had one (I got to go into it to hang out). As a 6th grader I had nightmares about nuclear war and fallout. (We had just moved to Florida where it was a bigger deal than in Kentucky where my parents first discussed the idea.)

I remember my mother telling me the story of The Beach. (She and my father saw it.)

As an adult, with all those memories, and understanding much more fully what it all means, I wouldn't want to be in a shelter. I wouldn't survive long without medications. (Alas, Babylon and the diabetics who died almost immediately? I'm not diabetic, so my death would be slower, with disability coming first.)

Yeah, people who daydream about a world after nuclear war, or any form of dystopia are just nuts.

[conuly]

Kids under 8 spending 65% of their time on YouTube?

You misread. They don't spend 65% of their time, their waking time, or even their free time on YT. They spend 65% of their screen time - that is, time spent on the TV, the computer, the phone, and any gaming systems.

And they don't generally spend it on Kardashians. The kids I know personally spend a lot of time on Minecraft videos. *shrug*

Alas, Babylon and the diabetics who died almost immediately? I'm not diabetic

There's a fascinating story about a woman who saved a couple dozen diabetics in Shanghai during WWII by extracting her own insulin from whatever scraps of pancreas she could beg from slaughterhouses.

Yeah, people who daydream about a world after nuclear war, or any form of dystopia are just nuts.

There is something vaguely appealing about the idea of starting over with a clean slate. Of course, statistically speaking, you wouldn't be one of the big winners.

Re: Dystopia Daydreams

[nodrog]

Yee haw!

“…  Anyone wanna play Risk™?”

[wpadmirer]

65% of their screen time still seems high. I would hope they would watch stories and movies. Nature shows. Something other than YouTube.

That is interesting about the woman who save the diabetics. DAMN.

Yeah, I really hate being referred to as a statistic because of my health. Years ago I had to have emergency surgery because of a complication after another surgery. I remember afterwards being "comforted" by the doc's rep saying she was "sorry I was one of the statistics." I blew up at her. (I'm not angry at you, it just reminded me of this incidence.)

It's never comforting to be told you're a "number." So I told the woman not to ever use that phrase again with someone who'd had complications from surgery. That it's dehumanizing, not comforting.

“New Yorker’ cartoon, 1930s

[nodrog]

The cosmetologist says to the customer, “You're one of the lucky few women with normal skin.”

[nodrog]

The problem was, Nevil Shute was a playwright, not a physicist, and either he couldn't be bothered to fact-check or discarded the facts as inconvenient.  Fact 1:  Fallout decays to harmlessness in about two weeks.  No globe-spanning death cloud lasting years.  Fact 2: Heavier fallout, actual metals &c. that might retain induced radioactivity longer, literally fall out close to the impact, producing a ‘nuclear footprint’ that may be large on a human scale but trivial on a planetary scale.

What planetary effects might be seen, then?  Climate change, and not much of that on the other hemisphere.  Because ‘nuclear winter’ had not yet been cooked up * , ol' Nevil didn't think of that at all - the USS Scorpion encountered no weather anomalies whatever.  [Neither, for that matter, did L Niven and J Pournelle think of it for their vastly better-researched 1977 book, Lucifer's Hammer.  Impact winter was not a thing then.  Fashions change with advancing knowledge.

But when facts obscure the message, ignore them!



*  Comrade Sagan of Cornell understood that principle.  Did you know that the Earth is just like Mars, a bone-dry, utterly featureless billiard-ball in space?  Well, it was by the time Comrade Sagan finished tweaking his computer model to get the “nuclear winter” scare propaganda he wanted.  He was, quite simply, a bad scientist whose Leftist political beliefs overrode every other consideration.

Meanwhile, the plain fact is that between Johnson Island and Novaya Zemlya, the US and USSR fought an atomic war for years - and guess what, we survived!

[wpadmirer]

That would have been nice to know as 11 year old me. (grin)

[nodrog]

Serious kudos for having read Alas Babylon, by the way.  Have you read Streiber & Kunetka’s Warday?  Despite being blurbed by the likes of Senator-for-Life Ever-Redward Kennedy and Dr Helen Caldicott, it’s actually a fairly interesting book, somewhat the antithesis of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising - it makes the point he avoids, that “weapons systems” that are only meant to be expensive, not to actually work…  might not actually work when called upon!  The only reason Western civilization survived the titular events is because our command-structure house-of-cards held up fractionally better than did theirs, before both collapsed and “the war blew out like a misstruck match.” 

The consequences are depicted realistically; it would be interesting to see how matters might stand by now.

[wpadmirer]

I haven't. I'll have to look into it. Interesting ideas.

Re: Gene Roddenberry

[nodrog]

http://www.thegeektwins.com/2014/07/6-horrifying-facts-about-star-trek-tngs.html

They stank, were too small, horribly uncomfortable, &c.  Star Trek: The Motionless Picture had a similar problem:  While the ‘space pajamas’ for the main cast were custom-tailored, the extras were handed feetie-jammies on the order of S, M, L, and the result during a long shooting day was nasty.

The screwy thing is, ol' Gene used to know better.  Stephen E. Whitfield's invaluable Making of Star Trek quotes him as saying, “The more NASA described future clothing, the more it sounded like long johns.”  He also said, and later utterly forgot, “We're making a show about 1966.  People in the 23rd century would seem incomprehensible to ordinary viewers.”


Maybe if ol' Gene had not gone so horribly moldy by then that it was necessary to excise him from his own creation to make a worthwhile movie, the uniforms might have looked like this.


               

Re: Gene Roddenberry

[conuly]

It's amazing there wasn't a general cast revolt over the uniforms.

Re: Gene Roddenberry

[greghousesgf]

how many of those actors accidentally peed themselves?

Re: Gene Roddenberry

[conuly]

DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

Re: Gene Roddenberry

[nodrog]

Marina Sirtis referred to her gray costume as “a denim spacesuit,” which is one of those phrases that sticks with you.

Re: Gene Roddenberry

[archersangel]

It's amazing there wasn't a general cast revolt over the uniforms.

saw patrick stewart at dragon con in '09 & he said that they only changed them to a two piece (around season 3 maybe?) because he threatened to sue paramount over the back problems with his doctor supporting him on the medical side.

[conuly]

Good for him.

[chelseagirl]

Me either -- with the glasses. And it's annoying because my prescription is so expensive that I have only one pair plus prescription sunglasses, and really wish I had several. (As a backup as well as for the fun of swapping out looks.)

[gatheringrivers]

Once you have a prescription, you can order glasses from online. Just gets a bit tricky if you have a smaller cranium than most, since you can't try them on and get them adjusted first.

[conuly]

In addition to what xevokitty said, it's important to know your pupil distance. You can measure it yourself with a ruler and a friend, but it's better to ask the eye doctor for it.

[fyrdrakken]

Popping up to shill for WarbyParker.com, which lets you pick out five or six frames for home try-ons before you place your glasses order. I've gotten my last couple of pairs from them, and came in at under $300 for each despite having the super-indexing thing to keep from having coke bottle lenses.

[cactuswatcher]

Since I had my cataracts removed I don't have those nearsighted problems any more. But after fixing my horrible distance vision, I do have to wear reading glasses at the end of my nose most of the time in the house. (A small price to pay!)

[fyrdrakken]

Not too long ago, I heard a story told on the Moth podcast that started out with the time the storyteller was five or six and just about to go onstage for her first ballet recital when a backstage mother yoinked her glasses off her face ("So you'll be pretty onstage!") and her vision at that age was already so bad she couldn't even tell which direction the audiene was and spent her entire time helplessly crashing into the other dancers. The horror of such casual blinding at the hands of others is going to stick with me for a while.

[conuly]

Oh. My. God.

Her daughter was already pretty. I hope that woman felt awful forever after.

[fyrdrakken]

The woman who took her glasses *wasn't her mother,* and whether that interfering stranger even realized what she'd done wasn't covered in the story.

But it's one more thing to fear about winding up in a hospital - having a staff member take off my glasses to get them out of the way and me not being able to see what's being done to me, or waking up with no idea where my glasses are.

[conuly]

That makes the story even worse. What a freaking jerk.