Category:
Eyes and Vision
Patent
No. 12,156,603 recently issued to Lillian A. Foucha of New Jersey. An explanation from the patent:
Bedding, such as blankets, sheets, comforters, quilts, and the like are typically utilized to keep covered, warm, and comfortable. In addition to their natural warming properties, blankets can be utilized to provide a safe, private enclosure to increase user comfort. Individuals may desire to cover up to provide a personal space, or alternatively to keep their head warm under the bedding. However, by covering a user's head with bedding, the individual is unable to view their surroundings while so covered. In order to view a television, for example, the individual must lower the bedding to expose their head, thereby exposing their head to cold air or otherwise violating their enclosed safe space, which may lead to discomfort. In view of the above concerns, it is desirable to provide bedding having viewing lenses therein that can provide a window to the exterior surroundings while allowing the user to remain completely covered up under the bedding.
via
Jeff Steck (bluesky)
Wouldn't you look chic wearing these? And no more viewing the world through "rose-colored glasses."
Original patent here.
A Dec 1967 article (
"Effect of humming on vision") by
William Rushton in the journal
Nature reported that:
Humming causes the eye to vibrate and this can produce a strobo-scopic effect when a rotating black and white strobe disk is viewed in non-fluctuating light.
I'm sure that's interesting, but it's a response to Rushton's article published four months later that I find more interesting. A former member of the Air Training Corps described how it was possible, by humming (or rather, "purring"), to make your head vibrate such that, when looking at a spinning propeller, the propeller would seem to stop in mid-air. By increasing or decreasing the intensity of humming/purring, one could then determine in which direction the propeller was rotating.
I haven't tested this out to see if it works, but if any of you do have a chance to test it out, please report back with your results.
Nature - Apr 20, 1968
Mechanix Illustrated - Mar 1941
Part of designer Sinead Gorey's "Phonecore" collection.
More info:
hmd.com
In 1950, graduate student Fred Snyder of the University of Wichita spent 30 days wearing special glasses that inverted his vision. It was part of an experiment designed by Dr. N.H. Pronko, head of the psychology department, to see if a person could adapt to seeing everything upside-down. The answer was that, yes, Snyder gradually adapted to inverted vision. And when the experiment ended he had to re-adapt to seeing the world right-side-up.
Snyder and Pronko described the experiment in their 1952 book,
Vision with Spatial Inversion. From the book's intro:
Suppose that we attached lenses to the eyes of a newborn child, lenses having the property of reversing right-left and up and down. Suppose, also, that the child wore the lenses through childhood, boyhood, and young manhood. What would happen if these inverting lenses were finally removed on his twenty-fifth birthday? Would he be nauseated and unable to reach and walk and read?
Such an experiment is out of the question, of course. Yet another experiment was made: a young man was persuaded to wear inverting lenses for 30 days, and his experiences are reported here. His continued progress, after an initial upset, suggests that new perceptions do develop in the same way as the original perceptions did. Life situations suggest the same thing. Dentists learn to work via a mirror in the patient's mouth until the action is automatic. In the early days of television, cameramen had to "pan" their cameras with a reversed view. Later the image in the camera was corrected to correspond with the scene being panned. The changeover caused considerable confusion to cameramen until they learned appropriate visual-motor coordinations. Fred Snyder, the subject of our upside-down experiment, found himself in a similar predicament, at least for a time.
Images from
Life - Sep 18, 1950:
"Graduate student Fred Snyder falling down after removing special eyeglasses that reverse and invert everything he sees. Immediately before removing glasses he rode a bicycle with perfect control along sidewalk in Central Park."
AKA
Norma Eberhardt. Her heterochromia was reportedly the trait that initially attracted the attention of a photographer, leading to a modeling (and later acting) career.
Wikipedia has
a list of other actors with heterochromia, but Eberhardt's condition was far more pronounced that most of the other people on the list.
More info:
curator's cabinet
Life - July 18, 1949
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, when asked to define pornography, "I know it when I see it."
Marty Snyder couldn't see it, but he figured he would know it anyway, especially if the person sitting next to him filled him in on what he was missing.
Snyder ended up serving on the Clarkstown censorship panel for less than a year
because he died of a stroke in 1974.
South Mississippi Sun - Oct 25, 1973
Jet - Nov 22, 1973
Pc Austin said that when he pulled over the car, Aziz, who wore dark glasses, was fumbling with the controls. When asked if he noticed anything about Aziz he replied: "I did — he didn't have any eyes."
London Daily Telegraph - Sep 5, 2006