false features in text

spent the morning reading papers. there was an interesting exchange in JOV about what was probably my favorite paper of last year; the exchange strengthened my opinion of the paper, but i'm not going to go into it now, because this post is irrelevant to the actual substance of the articles in question.

here's what i saw/see (in the letter-to-editor attacking the paper in question, as displayed in my browser):

[if you want to see it, keep fixating this line, but attend to the lower part of the text below].

Do you see it? I need to ask around. I notice these things a lot, but they're never as salient as this. In case you don't see it, here's an illustration:

There you go. Go back to the first one and see if you don't see that arc. I only see it peripherally (had to draw that line in without looking at it), but scale isn't so important, and neither is field location (so long as it isn't central). The left eye sees it better than the right, and it's stronger overall with both eyes. To me, it's so salient as to be distracting. I had to do all these tests to convince myself it wasn't a retinal tear or something.

(also interestingly ironic is that the paper(s) in question are all about measuring threshold-versus-noise functions, which are shaped just like the illusory/actual line.)

It's apparently just accidental peripheral concatenation of the structure of the letters and words in the paragraph - crowding, basically - but really, if you look straight at the texture, it's damned hard to see just what is stimulating this process, and why it isn't happening everywhere. But it's neat - basically, a positive effect of crowding or lateral interaction, which is usually held up for its negative (destructive) effects.

Also, I think this qualifies as a deja trompé. Haven't had one of those in a while.

special blue light

something i forgot to mention in the Montreal post:

standing on the balcony outside AR's apartment, you can watch the alley four floors down. across the alley is what looks like an old office building - occupied, i mean, just old. it's nighttime, dark with moonlight and streetlights. the lights are mostly out in the building across the alley.

on the ground floor, through a window, seemingly under a desk, you can see a faint blue glow. it seems to come and go, but in fact it's constant. it's a blue LED at the front of a computer tower, or some other device. it's just dim enough that if you foveate it, you see blackness, but if you look away just a degree or more, it pops into view.

it's easy to see this effect with stars at night, or with any dim detail when you're dark adapted. and we all know that the fovea is free of blue cones, though i think this light was not so blue that it wouldn't be stimulating green cones, if they were sensitive enough. the trick is that they were not sensitive enough, but the periphery was. but the answer can't be that it was rods mediating the peripheral seeing, partly because the color sensation was plain, and partly because we were going in and out of the apartment, there were other lights all round, so the rods shouldn't have been especially useful.

so the explanation must be the blue cones and the insensitivity of the green cones. the light was dim enough to be invisible to green cones, which if it were brighter would probably  be stimulated (though maybe it was blue and pure enough that this latter point isn't even true; however, a quick google suggests that standard blue LEDs have peak spectral power at around 540nm, which is within the M-cone tuning width).

anyways, i thought this was interesting. it took me a couple of minutes to convince my companions that the blue light wasn't actually slowly flashing on and off, that it was all in their behavior. that was the best part.

TMS

went up to montreal for the weekend, on account of jp's inter-rotation break. had a mostly good weekend, won't go into the problems here.

relevant part to this journal: i had my first TMS. my friend tk has been working on some TMS experiments alongside her boyfriend, ar. ar is french. so one point of interest for the weekend was spending a night and some time in the apartment of a frenchman in montreal, which i'd never done before. small things matter.

anyways, even though they were resistant owing to my falling on their official list of 'do not tests' (migraine), i managed to push my way into the TMS room and got a few zaps. jp too. they had it set at low power, don't remember the numbers. they started at parietal cortex and got arm and hand muscles to twitch, though i could never really feel it through the much more salient face twitching (which i think was just caused by conduction through facial nerves, not cortex). both me and jp got the arm/hand twitches. i didn't think it was that interesting really. maybe higher power and finer tuning would produce a more interesting result.

then they tried occipital cortex. jp couldn't see the phosophenes, but thought maybe she might see something. what i saw was very clear. exactly synchronous with the click, against the darkness of occluded and closed eyes, below and just right of fixation (which happens to be the locus of most of my migraine auras, though i didn't mention that), i saw a patch, maybe half a degree across and of irregular but defined shape, with a boundary shaped like poland or ohio. it seemed to be a brightening of the background noise, almost had a golden hue against the red-black background; as it flicked off, i thought it left a fine-grained afterimage, redder, maybe with striations.

so that was interesting. less amazing than i expected, but he was keeping the power low so as not to induce a seizure. i've read up on it, and there's no actual evidence that migraineurs are susceptible to seizure from TMS. i told him i figured it was like having everyone turn off their e-book readers on the airplane at takeoff. no evidence of trouble, but it is the brain (or an airplane), so may as well be safe.

got a sunburn biking across montreal. saw the buckysphere. i have a mustache.  what else... well, many things. by the end of this week, i must have applications prepared. must or bust.

security state

what with all the stuff in the news lately about the State spying on the internet in all sorts of deeper-than-expected ways, i thought this was interesting:

my institute was recently eaten by Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary, MEEI, a hospital. rather than fully digest us, MEEI dissolved parts of our organization and replaced with their own, so really it's more like the ant that is infected by a fluke that effectively replaces or overrides parts of her brain, or the caterpillar whose internal processes are slowly displaced by wasp larvae. i think the ant example is better.

anyways, as a part of this absorption, our computer network was transferred to the control of the MEEI network, and they are insane about security. it's as though we're at los alamos. everything is supposedly super secure. patient privacy, etc etc. as a part of this transfer of authority, every computer in the institute was infected intentionally with a suite of spyware that allows the MEEI IT people to control or observe all of our data flow. in theory. our internet is filtered, our emails are filtered (unless we take simple steps to avoid the filtering), all access to local computers is supposedly filtered. it's irritating in the all-encompassing authority they take on, at the same time that it's ridiculous how easy and convenient and necessary it is to get around everything they try to do.

one set of spyware is called "DeviceLock". you can always see it running in the background, under processes named DLservice.exe, DLtray.exe, etc. this is a program for, supposedly, ensuring that external storage devices must be encoded or they can't be used with institute systems. but i've discovered additional functions, which are mentioned in that link. there's a process running in the background, "DLSkypePlugin.exe". what does it do? who knows! let's ask DeviceLock:

""Skype" control supports blocking, allowing, auditing, shadowing and content analysis of outgoing instant messages and files as well as auditing, alerting, shadowing and content analysis (for contingent shadowing) for incoming instant messages and files. Also, supports blocking, allowing, alerting and auditing of incoming and outgoing audio/video calls;"

 where does a hospital IT department get the authority to do something like this? can someone explain to me, please?

on a final note, while most of the IT spyware can't easily be disabled - i, the virtual owner of this computer, don't have the "authority" - the DL programs can be terminated without any special privileges. an oversight, i'm sure.

update

no thoughts to essayize lately, at least none which aren't going into manuscripts. productive summer of writing so far, will have produced at least 4 papers of my own this summer and lots of stubs for future work. current paper is unfolding in an interesting way; collecting a little more data, should have it all done in another week or so.

going to montreal this weekend.

decision on postdoc i applied for won't come til octoberish. preparing faculty applications in the meantime.

migraine news: last friday night developed a fine, sharp, right-side headache, on the trainride home from seeing Pacific Rim - best movie i've seen in a movie theater *maybe ever* - came home, went to bed, couldn't sleep til 2am because of the pain.

interesting thing was, when i closed my eyes, i could see, faintly, these very, very fine striations, like looking at my thumbprints from 50cm distant; 20+ cpd. they would follow one direction and fade into the black/redness of the eyelight; then i would see the other orientation, and they would fade, and so on. they kind of had the appearance of the extreme eye movement striations, but finer. maybe they were from irritation of the optic nerve? i couldn't tell if they were in one eye or the other, only noticeable when both eyes were closed.

umm...

lately: struggling to prioritize. a recurrent state, been a few months. not too bad this time.

list:
1. have interview thursday; should be studying guy's papers. have been, but not for a few days. meant to get back to it tonight. gonna be too late soon.
2. started drafting new adaptation paper today. should be easy, taking forever.
3. spent much of last week designing a metric for a new study/paper (the paper is the study), then quit working on it as soon as i got it working.
4. trying to corral a bunch of coauthors into working on a paper i collaborated on but am only interested in to the point that i don't want to look too bad when it is someday published.
5. returned to my mind is an offer i made a guy earlier in the summer to give him a demo of an idea, which i need to follow up on.
6. for some stupid reason, writing a paper and doing computations on simulating/demonstrating cat vision, using it as a vehicle to talk about the idea of simulating/demonstrating vision pictorially.

may i return here soon and look upon this list and despair.

seeing spots

phosphenes aplenty these past few days, and a headache since saturday (mid-monday now), but no aura. i'll spend this post describing the phosphenes, which are interesting.

the phosphenes are always exactly foveal, less than a degree across. they are never noticeable for more than a few tens of seconds. the sensation is very similar to the very beginning of the typical aura. their appearance is very subtle, as though there is a smudge over the central view. it's comparable to having looked at the sun glinting off a surface and having a bright foveal afterimage. sometimes it seems that i can close my eyes and see a floating spot, like an afterimage, which easily fades from view; sometimes i can't see anything.

another sensation that the phosphene is similar to is lustre or shimmering as from interocular conflict. earlier today i found myself gazing into the distance above my desk, thinking about something, and thought i was seeing a spot; then after a few seconds i realized that my left eye was seeing a mark on the underside of a plywood shelf, where a screw pokes out, with my left eye, while the same view by the right eye was occluded by a hanging piece of paper. once i understood what i was seeing, the sensation seemed to change; it is as though i am strongly sensitized to the onset of the aura, and when i think i am seeing it, or seeing these blippy phosphenes, i feel that i know i'm seeing it, which turns back around and affects the way it feels to see it.

a third way of describing the sensation is as scotoma-like, but there is never any scotoma, or at least not any so large or stable that i can see it. it's more like what is seen is interfered with; maybe it's a scotoma in the confluence? mostly in V2/V3?

anyways, the foveal spots are always brief. in the past few days i've noticed them a dozen times. during the same period, i've repeatedly noticed the familiar difficulty with reading text, especially in the morning. i look at black text on a white background, and it's very difficult to read, as though the letters are jumbled. i think what's happening is that the afterimages aren't being properly suppressed, and that it's only noticeable with the high-contrast stimulus of black-on-white text, especially on a computer screen where the white is really bright. at other times i've noticed problems with afterimages, especially of textures, seeming to 'stick' from fixation to fixation, thinking that i see something in one location when it's actually carried over from the previous fixation. these sensations aren't afterimages in the common sense of light impressed in the retinas, which have their characteristic slow fuzzy fade; they are clearer and sharper at the same time that they are less substantial.

a headache started saturday sometime, then disappeared, then reappeared yesterday, subtle - only noticed it when changing posture - and remains today, where it was slightly excruciating earlier and mostly gone now. right trigeminal nerve, felt it above the right eye at the supraorbital nerve, and above my upper right teeth.

halted aura

today in the lab, around noon, started to get really light sensitive, felt very unsteady, a little nauseated. for the past couple of days kept seeing weird flashes of blue light, like lens flares in the j.j. abrams jokes. also, i've noticed the eye crank lines more than usual in recent days, of course when making extreme eye movements, but not really extreme. i feel like the visibility of those phosphenes is linked to the migraines.

as the day went on, it (the discomfort) basically got better. had a coffee around 4, after that i don't remember being bothered so much, just had half the lights off in my office.

then, about 7:15, wrapping up my files, and notice it's hard to see; then discover a fairly well-developed scotoma in the left field, less than 5 degrees out. for whatever reason i hadn't noticed it up to that point - i don't remember exactly what i'd been doing for the few minutes previous, probably reading something, which is when i usually notice.

so i got out my tracking program and had some problems - one problem was that the new target i had set up was just too phosphene-like. it was a dumb idea, flickers too much, too noisy. better to just have a slow-counter-phasing block like a perimetry target. even when i could find the aura, it was hard to set the target. which leads to the second problem: the scotoma was weak. i think that even when i did find it, the target shone through, which i've never seen before. usually the scotoma is absolute, and i did find some times/places where it seems the target (or my finger) really were invisible; but, it also seemed that i could pass the target over what felt like a scotoma region, and its contrast would seem to attenuate, but it wouldn't disappear.

i got a couple of 1-2 minute recordings, breaking in between, and then the aura evaporated. it seemed normal in its geometry, if faint, barely ever saw the fortification spectrum, but at some point - i'd say 15 minutes into its normal course, barely 10-20 degrees out, it just disappeared and didn't come back. i think i stopped the second recording around the time it disintegrated, so i have a record of where it was. it was weak and small from the start, so the CSD wave must have just disintegrated. very strange. for a while after, a few minutes, i had a clear feeling of visual disorganization in the left field, but nothing obvious, nothing i could really pin down, and certainly no scotoma.

no headache whatsoever - there was a slight headache in the afternoon, right side, normal place, but transient and weak, i gave it a 0.5.

came home and had dinner, bit of a weird feeling but nothing significant. weird.

cat vision

Sharpness is, really, an illusion. It doesn't represent anything about the world, it's just an indication that the limits of resolution of the visual system have been met. In that sense, it's relative. I've thought about sharpness a lot, starting in graduate school, when I first wondered whether, having learned the quantitative difference in visual spatial resolution between cat and human, a cat could see stars. My first thought was no - stars are so small, if blurred they can't be seen; then I recognized that human acuity is nothing special (a sort of Copernican principle for vision), and that sure, cats should be able to see stars just as humans can. But they would look different, wouldn't they? Blurrier? No. To see blur implies you have the acuity to see what is missing. So then, they would look larger? No, for the same reason - if a star appears as a disk, that implies its edges are seen separately, which implies acuity to separate them. So to a cat, whose acuity is almost an order of magnitude worse than a human, stars must also appear as points. How to make sense of this?

This gets at a more general sort of paradox about visual resolution. Lower acuity isn't the same as blur, not at all. Acuity is an ability or a capacity; blur is a state or an affordance. A certain acuity enables you to see a certain amount of blur - that is the relationship. But we easily confuse the two by trying to represent the effects of acuity as blur. This is a common demonstration: illustrate the spatial resolution of the visual field as round window with a focused center and increasing blur towards its boundaries. This kind of demonstration is useful in that it shows what is lost in peripheral vision (in terms only of 1st-order resolution) relative to central vision. But it is harmful in that it conflates blur with this relative difference in visibility. Because really, no matter what the resolution is, there is finer content that cannot be seen.  We can think of this kind of demonstration, of comparing resolution at different visual field locations in terms of blur, an 'isometric' demonstration, since space is kept constant or symmetric over the whole field, though apparent sharpness falsely appears to change. This demonstration doesn't violate our intuitions about space - space seems, and is, symmetric to translations across the visual field - though it does fool us regarding blur.

Another way of demonstrating the same variation in resolution across the visual field is to reverse this relationship; that is, with an isoambylic representation of the field. This representation would have equal sharpness everywhere, but would vary metrically across the field, giving something like a fish-eye lens view of the scene. For some reason, even though the isoambylic representation is just as 'fair' as the isometric, its distortions are more disturbing. Maybe it's because the spatial asymmetry is unfamiliar, whereas blur asymmetries are more familiar.

So now we go back to cat vision. Imagine that you and a talking, scientifically interested cat, are discussing the topic at hand, and wondering how to explain to one another the differences in your spatial acuity. I think it's time for a dialogue!

Tacitus: So, here we are.
Otho: True.
Tacitus: We're supposed to demonstrate to one another the differences in our visual fields, in terms of spatial acuity. How do you think we might do that?
Otho: Well, for starters, let's use pictures.
Tacitus: That's kind of a given.
Otho: Good. Here are two copies of a scene. The one on the left represents your acuity: you see that in the center, the image is sharper, and it gets blurrier as you go out towards the edges.
Tacitus: I do see that. Nice and sharp in the center, blurrier toward the edges.
Otho: If you stand right here, and look at the center of the picture, you shouldn't be able to tell that there's any blur, because the blur is matched to your acuity. What do you see?
Tacitus: It's just as you say. Interesting!
Otho: Good. Now, this picture, on the right, represents my acuity. It's similar in that in its center, it's sharper, getting blurrier towards the edges.
Tacitus: I see that, but...
Otho: But what?
Tacitus: But it looks just like my picture. I can't see a difference. Maybe.. it's not quite as strong a trend, from the center outward, but I can barely tell.
Otho: Well, the difference is obvious to me. It's because my acuity is so much better than yours, all around.
Tacitus: Well, then this isn't fair. Why can you see so clearly the difference between our visual fields, while I can't see it at all? I feel left out.
Otho: Hm.
Tacitus: Here, let's try this. Instead of using blur to represent acuity, let's change the size of the images. We'll transform the images so that the acuity limit, which is just a measure of distance within the visual field, will be a fixed distance.
Otho: So that means that when acuity is high, the image will be relatively magnified, since you're taking a small distance in the visual field and stretching it to, let's say, one centimeter. And when acuity is low, the image will be compressed, since you're taking a big distance in the field and squeezing it into that same centimeter.
Tacitus: Exactly!
Otho: The images will look funny, though.
Tacitus: Well, the funny-ness will be our explanatory tool. We should both be able to notice changes in size, right? I can see a spot a centimeter across from this distance, and so can you.
Otho: It does seem fair.
Tacitus: Okay, here we go.
Otho: Wow! My visual field is so big! And look at the distortion, it's like a fish-eye lens! Why is your field so small?
Tacitus: Didn't you just explain it to me?
Otho: I know, I was just surprised.
Tacitus: And mine also looks like a fish-eye lens, just a bit less extreme. Yours is interesting, I can see so many details there that I can't see in mine. I didn't realize you could see such small things!
Otho: I'm sure you did, you just haven't realized it in a visual sense.
Tacitus: Well here it is.
Otho: Can I go back to bed now? It's 3am.
Tacitus: Go ahead and try. We'll see how it goes.

prime day

today is a prime sequence day: 7-11-13. this is the next-to-last time this will happen this century; the last one will be 11-13-17. Last Prime Day sounds ominous.

the preceding is only really true in places, i.e. the USA, where we use the month-day-year notation for dates (and if we ignore the century count). if we use the more typical ordering of day-month-year, the Last Prime Day will be this November 7th: 7-11-13, and then no more until the 1st of February, 2103. (the first American Prime Day of the next century will be January 2nd of the same year).

titles are hard

woke up this morning, after nine, opened then closed my eyes, and saw a glittering arc in my left visual field: this is the fourth or fifth time now, at least (i could pin it to one of those if i looked back over these records) that this has happened as i awoke. the aura was typical, about 10 minutes or so in, already with the leftward midline jag, then arcing downward. like last time, when i woke in the middle of the night at a similar stage, i decided not to run and record the end of it, just laid there and observed.

i watched half of it with eyes closed, and the scintillations were a bit plainer that way, typical fortification spectrum. i noticed that even - or especially - with eyes closed, eye movements seem to briefly abolish my perception of the scintillations. with eyes open, the same seems to happen, but it's less plain. the scotoma was very thin, which i've noticed before with the early morning (and the previous, nighttime) auras.

a few minutes after i awoke the headache started, and i gave it a 3. left side aura, headache focused on right frontal nerve. might have peaked at 4 or so around or after noon, when i could feel it in my teeth, but now it's more like a 1, i have to shake my head or stand up to feel it.

july fourth! getting work done lately. checked the proofs of one paper and submitted another. need to revise a third. need to work on a fourth and a fifth, editing and improvements of unsubmitted papers. and then there's a sixth that needs to be written, outlined it in toronto. so it's been a good summer for papers, at least.

that's it for now. spending july 4 playing video games, need to get back to that before it's time to cook dinner.

toronto

just in time to make it 2 for June:

Notes at the Robards Library on the U.Toronto campus, 3:30 pm on 6-26-13.

My feet are very tired. Got up this morning at 5, took a shower, kissed my wife goodbye, and went out to meet the waiting taxi. Had a coffee at the airport.

Got on the prop plane to Toronto at 6:30. Had a coffee on the plane, with a muffin and a cup of yogurt. Clearly I am thinking of food.

Looking out the plane window while we were still on the Boston tarmac, I noticed that I could see the flicker of sunlight through the propellers - I was sitting right next to the front of the left engine, on a plane that was two thirds empty - but only in my periphery. So the propellers were rotating no faster than 60 Hz. Once we went to take off and the engines revved up, I couldn't see the flicker anymore - revving up meaning revving faster, you see.

Got to Toronto by 9, the Billy Bishop airport, on a little island on the lake in front of the city. First person off the plane, last through customs. Canadian customs are actually pretty challenging! Dunno what was up with that.

Then, took a 1 minute ferry ride to the shore, and walked north on Bathurst street. Made it to Kensington market and found a little open air restaurant to get breakfast. It was almost 10. I was already soaked with sweat. Ninety degrees out, humid, and not a cloud in the sky, and I'm wandering the streets of a strange city with a 10 pound bag on my back and a poster tube on my arm. I had a cheese omelet, which came with salad and hashbrowns, it was pretty good. And toast.

I am so hungry. I then wandered for about an hour, through Toronto Chinatown, until I came to the Toronto Art Gallery or whatever it's called. Bought a ticket and discarded my luggage, and wandered the museum for 3 hours. Best part by far was the set of installations on the fourth floor, something I've never seen before: little repeating 3-d audiovisual pieces, rooms full of stuff with recordings playing - some of the recordings were little dramas, one was just a rainstorm, from start to finish. It was great. Had a coffee at the museum.

Then I left the museum and went the wrong way, south instead of north, deeper into the city instead of towards the University of Toronto. Finally I made it here, and now I'm resting in the library, cooling off and writing these notes. I took lots of little videos of my day so far.

From here, I need to 1) get something to eat, 2) get to a subway station, 3) figure out how to use the Toronto subway, and 4) use it to get to York, or as close as I can (then I have to take a bus, apparently). If all goes well I'll be at York University in no less than 90 minutes. Wish me luck! I'm so hungry.

part 2, 18:56pm, June 28 2013

Meeting is over. Sitting in the weird weird weird Billy Bishop Airport departure area/lounge. It would be much nicer if half the flights weren't delayed because of some storm.

Meeting was interesting. Had several talks with F.K., about my current in-review JOV paper, for which he is one of the reviewers; about my current little blur adapt project that I presented (to 3 people, I think) here at this meeting, he had some very helpful comments there; and on other random spatial vision lightness brightness topics. Lots of fun, I think talking to him made the whole meeting worthwhile.

Also met with D.G., as a sort of pre-interview for a postdoc position. Not sure I want to really apply. I was testing to see if it was something that might be up my alley, definitely far up it, but now I'm thinking maybe too far. It's probably too much of a stretch to try to work natural scenes and spatial vision into the level he's working at. I'll study his work over the next couple of weeks, then let him know.

Also managed lunch with F.W. to discuss migraine psychophysics. She seems to have cooled a bit on the migraine spatial vision business, but is still interested. Similar attitude to N.H. about the difficulty and unlikelihood of having migraineurs do vision tasks or perimetry during their auras, though I am not convinced. I will take the long view. M.D. is enthusiastic, I met with him last week. I am almost thinking of writing an entire proposal out, it seems it would be relatively straightforward. I feel I've put all the requisite pieces together, i.e. bounced ideas off all the important people. The main thing that's missing is predictions as to how certain psychophysical properties might be influenced, which is something that L.L. brought up on his own. So now, it seems I should get back to him.

Interesting things I saw... C.B.'s keynote address was pretty bad. I don't know what the general opinion was, but it seemed for the wrong audience - like he was addressing a bunch of visual physiologists in 1992. Don't know what was going on there. Good talks were R.K. on superior colliculus, showing us maps and explaining function, things that if I've ever learned them I've forgotten; G.L.'s talk was interesting, reading and training reading with CFL patients; H.W.'s talk was good, R.B.'s I thought was too much review; A.P.'s talk on form perception and V4 was very interesting. A.P.'s and R.K.'s were like little topical seminars on things I didn't know; I guess R.B.'s was similar but I already knew all of it. D.Z. gave a talk on how MRI magnets affect the fluid in the semicircular canals, resulting in constant nystagmus for anyone who gets into an MRI machine. I remember the slight shock I got the one time I was put in an MRI magnet, but I don't remember noticing nystagmus. I might have thought it was concentration problems, instead.

So that was the meeting. Mostly good, a little slow in some places. I got to attend the retirement of the great H.W.. Poster sessions were too brief, barely worth the trouble, though I did get F.K.'s comments and H.W. came by and didn't complain about anything, though he didn't volunteer compliments or suggestions either. He thought the phase filter was a neat idea, though.

***

Observations on Canada

The way of speech is different. They do say 'soarry' instead of 'sarry', and they say it a lot. I hear a lot of 'os' instead of 'as', 'possengers' instead of 'passengers'. There's something else, a character that feels narrow somehow. I don't know what 'narrow' means there, but it feels right, so I'm using a word that feels right to describe a feeling that I can't otherwise describe. May all be in my head.

The York campus, which is in the northern Toronto suburbs, had lots of animals. I saw a raccoon, a groundhog, and a rabbit, and lots of black squirrels. I saw the groundhog and the rabbit at the same time. I don't think I've seen a raccoon up close since I was a kid, probably out at the cabin or something. And I'm not sure I've ever seen a groundhog up close. This was all right in the middle of campus.

When I was trying to get up to York, just having gone into the Spadina station, I got turned around and lost and couldn't find my way. An older guy, long white hair bound up behind his head, heavy set, white beard, noticed that I looked confused, stopped, and told me where to go.

Again, I feel that the people are different. A part of it must be in the speech, which sounds American but is subtly different. I think a professional would be necessary to explain the differences completely. Multiple idioms that I've heard from C* and D*, many times up here. I wish I could explain the feeling better, because I don't think it's all language. Maybe more visits will resolve this place better for me. It may be because this is big Toronto City, but people seem to dress strangely, less conservatively than Americans in general. Gaudiness isn't standard but seems more common than on Boston streets, at least. I guess I can't generalize from Toronto to Canada. Toronto is clearly an immigrant city, I would say barely half the people I saw in the city were white, lots of Chinese, black, brown, etc. In that sense, it reminds me more of San Francisco or LA. It's very unlike Montreal, which did not have such an American appearance, and which at the same time was much more white.

Aside from the people, it looks exactly American. No obvious differences in infrastructure. The York campus has lots of tunnels and connected buildings, which I would guess is more due to the winter cold and snow and not some sort of Canadian preference for warrens. When I walked through the city I got feelings of China-ness somehow, I think because there was so much construction going on. Nothing about watching the streets makes it look different in any obvious way from watching American streets.

All flights are delayed by hours. Some are nearly canceled. I don't know what's going on, must have been a string of storms across the northeast.

First time ever, I saw another Tennesseean at a vision meeting. He was an undergraduate from MTSU of all places, said he was from Bellevue. I questioned him a bit and he just talked and talked. Despite being from Bellevue, he seemed not to have heard of Cheatham County or Kingston Springs, and so I didn't like him. Complained of Tennessee as a place to escape, where no one wants to return. How can you want to escape if you don't even know your surroundings? Not that I'm not ambivalent about this myself, and I'm half over as old as this guy, but I don't think I was ever that bad. Main thing that rubbed me wrong was that he talked too much, which I guess is just a personality trait. It will probably get him places, I don't know.

Back to Canada. The buses were just like American buses. The subways were regular subways, long cars like the China style, where you could walk from end to end. Spadina station where I first got on was a link between two lines, one of which I didn't travel on, but it looked a lot like the Boston green line, trolly cars running through tunnels. I would have liked to try that one. The friendly white-haired guy got off one of those.

Forgot to mention til now, had a headache yesterday morning, give it a 7, maybe even 8. Woke up with it and it got worse through the morning, coming and going. Quasi-hangover, but I'd just had 3 beers with a full dinner the night before, not enough for a real hangover, though I think the alcohol probably did cause it, in addition to dehydration from the long trek across the city and the general relief of arrival. Slept terribly Wednesday night, partly from the headache starting, and partly from Terry calling and texting me every 10 minutes starting around 6am, probably had barely 5 hours total.

Right eye trigeminal was sore, still sore today, but the headache disappeared over lunch yesterday, went from a 7 to nearly zero. I was still a bit dazed and confused, but got over it pretty quickly. Slept well last night, got at least 8 hours in, maybe more.

accidental maxwellian view?

Busy this month, and keeping it to myself so far.

The title of this post is just a guess. Let's talk about some interesting entoptic (or maybe just optic) phenomena.

First is something that I've noticed before, in the same context that I'm going to describe here, but also during our winter trip to China in late 2011, lying in bed one morning and watch the sunrise through the curtains, with my eyes full of sleep.

I'm standing at Fenway Station, waiting for the train to come and take me home. I'm soaking wet because its pouring rain and I didn't take an umbrella. My glasses are specked with water droplets. The sun has set.

I find that I can attend to the fine structure of the images projected on my retina (I'm doing this one eye at a time) through the water droplets. This is a little strange, since the droplets are just a couple of centimeters in front of my eyes, so it should be impossible for me to focus on them and to resolve such fine details, but I'm doing it anyways.

The droplet images - for the most part circular, disk-shaped - look like something between an amoeba and an image of the sun. The amoeba-ness is from their speckled, squirmy, internal structure, like a bag of little bits and pieces. The details are fine, near my acuity limit. The sun-ness is from their perimeter, which has a rim that stretches outward, like the corona of the sun in eclipse. I will draw a picture and put it here, since I can't find anything like it on the internet.

These things I've noticed before. My theory is that the droplets are acting as little lenses, focusing an image near my pupil, which is then - in a sort of accidental Maxwellian view - getting perfectly focused on my retina. The structure I'm seeing is the texture of the interface between the water and the surface of my glasses, little bits of dust and et cetera. It's like seeing a water droplet through a microscope, which adds (through psychological association perhaps) to the impression of seeing an organism. The rim is the edge of the droplet, the meniscus, and the corona is the stretching of the edge due to surface tension.

All that is just a guess! Nobody I talk to seems to have a good explanation, but that seems as good as any.

The next part I had not seen before.

I found that in my left eye, but not in my right, when I blinked, I saw bright specks, pin points of light, against the background of the droplets. I couldn't see the specks outside of the droplets.

When I attended more closely, I discovered extremely fine structure to the points of light. Basically, they looked like this:

I tried a sinc function, but that wasn't quite right, because I couldn't see more than a couple of rings, like you see here. What you see here is the product of a radial sin function, with the center set to 1, and a radial Gaussian. In words, each pin point was surrounded by a black ring, which was surrounded by another bright ring, then a dim ring, and then I'm not sure. Each little point was the same as the others, but I had to get them near the fovea to see them clearly. They were tiny; they each were only a few arcmin across. And, they were bright: the central point was white, and the ring surrounding it was black.

I really don't know what these things were. I have forgotten a crucial detail: did they move when my eye moved? I feel that I could look from one to the other, but I don't remember if this is really how it was, or if it's just how it seemed. If that's how it was, they can't have been on the surface of the eye, and it's hard to explain why I only saw them in the left. At the time, it made sense to me that they were on my cornea, specks of dust, so I think they must have been fixed to my point of view. They slowly faded and became less distinct, and I would occasionally blink to restore them.

So, weirdness at Fenway.

Binding Problem

I am still evolving, as I read all this NCC stuff, but in testing myself and my thinking, I find that I produce something very similar to what I have produced several times in the past year or so (also under the Vision tag):

My view has been that the phenomenal visual scene can be likened to a stack of qualia or phenomenal properties, all simultaneously experienced or bound together in such a way that it is often difficult to see the bound parts as distinct from one another, although they are distinguishable in principle. The root of this stack is the set of phenomenal properties that I believe are most often identified with ‘qualia’, i.e. properties that have scalar magnitudes or intensities. Brightness and darkness, color, contrast, and then at a slightly higher order, orientation, scale, direction, speed. These are familiar as physical objects of study either in the psychophysical field of spatial vision, or as determinants of sensitivity in the neurophysiology of the first few synapses of the initial retinocortical pathway for visual encoding. But they are not the only phenomenal properties of visual scenes, and in fact they are not the properties of scenes that we spend the most of our ordinary visual time analyzing. Instead, we spend most of our visual effort attending to more fuzzily inferred properties of the scene: identities, utilities, depths, valences, affordances. These are the properties of a scene that are immediately apparent to us, but they are the ones that require the most inference: the shape and meaning of a word; not so much its contrast or color, which we can easily adapt to and forget, although they remain in our phenomenal consciousness. I am reminded what Foucault said regarding the multiple layers of a calligram: “As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things.” All these things are simultaneously present and part of the seen scene, but we tend to attend selectively to certain levels.

I think it is clear from this conception of the phenomenal scene that indicating the presence of phenomenal properties, i.e. that something is present in consciousness, requires the presence of the higher level inferences, but not necessarily of the lower level ‘root’. I can daydream or close my eyes and continue to experience visual phenomena, although they are indistinct and insubstantial, and I can tell you about what I experienced, and then we can argue over whether or not visual imagery constitute visual phenomena. However, if all I have is the spatial scene, but I am unable to make any inferences about it, then I cannot report anything about it – reporting presumes context, or cause, or object, and these all require higher level inferences. Or rather, perhaps I could report, but my reports would be nearly meaningless, not least because objective meaning is tied to subjective meaning, which is what we have removed in this example. My reports would, at best, maybe with some minimal inferences, allow me to transmit information about the perceptual magnitude of local, ‘low-level’ features. I would then be performing in a psychophysics experiment, and you would probably be using signal detection theory to interpret my responses. Norma Graham noted the strange convenience of this situation more than 20 years ago, when she noted, “It is (or we can hope it is) as if the simplicity of the experimental situation has made all the higher level stages practically transparent.”

[last Monday, the 13th,  I woke up with a great headache that lasted more than 48 hours. left side on the first day, right side on the second. nothing else particularly interesting.]

notes after midnight on May 17, 2013

When I was about 12, I could go outside some afternoons, in my backyard, and see giant helicopters flying across the sky, with what looked like trucks and tanks suspended below on long cables, in long processions, one giant helicopter after another. That would have been nineteen-ninety, ninety-one, the Gulf War. Just now, on my last night in this house, to which my family moved in winter of nineteen eighty-five, when I wasn't yet six years old, I went out to the car to get the computer that I'm now writing on, and I hear a roar, a helicopter, coming from the southeast. I stand and wait to see it, and can't find it, as it's getting so loud that I can feel the vibrations. I'm confused at the conflict between what I hear and what I don't see, just a sky of stars, and then I see it, an enormous shadow, a blank space against the stars, flanked by dim lights, and the sound I hear finds its match.

Now I lay on the floor of the living room, what we called the room where my mother's pianos sat for more than 25 years, which is now empty but for little piles of human junk here and there. I'm sleeping here just for the strangeness of it, and because I figure if I sleep in my old bedroom, a smaller space as the boy who painted cats might advise me, I will get a cave cricket in the mouth. Usually a room looks larger when you clear it out, but the piano room looks smaller without the pianos. The true nature of the house is revealed in this room, a set of almost ramshackle wooden boxes, this room the boxiest of all of them.

I get to hear the crickets and frogs outside, and the constant truck of I-40. I mentioned the stars. And I get to spend one last night in this string of boxes in the countryside, set in an undrainable swamp, in the Harpeth hills. Only yesterday did I get that cliched phrase - you have these hills or those hills, hills is an appendage for a pleasant or obscure prependage. But this place is in the hills, and it was flooded by the Harpeth only 3 years ago, so I think it deserves the name.

I'm not sure what to make of all of it. I never quite understood my surroundings when I lived here, I only saw what was just at my nose and never questioned it or looked further, though I thought I did. Now I think I know how to see further, but coming back here and wandering around, I feel the old ignorance surface, and it's a strange feeling of simultaneously knowing where I am and never having known, and really only knowing that I'll probably never be back.

may may may

May's a slow month even when I don't go to VSS, I guess. One post last year in May, and may be this is the only one for 2014.

Bunches of stuff going on. Flying into Huntsville Wednesday. Procrastinating on a short fellowship application to go to Melbourne. Pestering a professor in Nashville for a job. Doing lots of cleanup work in Boston, finishing big papers, reviewing other people's papers, fixing RA projects, starting little papers. Practicing Chopin waltzes and Bach sinfonias to pass the time. Read Plato's Apology and Crito last week, still haven't committed to Phaedo. Started playing RoTK XI again this weekend. Cleared out of the kitchen on orders from my landlord. Playing with natural scene statistics, inventing new analyses. Always, always trying to learn Chinese.

Despite all this, I feel as though I'm doing nothing at all. Perhaps this is an explanation? I don't know, I haven't read it.