Thomas Edison in 1879, around the time of the first public demonstration of the incandescent light bulb:
We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
The cost of light.
Source: Early Light Bulbs, Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
2.
Theatre lighting designer Alex Forey’s eye-opening Young Directors’ Guide to Lighting: Intensity, Colour, Angle, Texture, Atmosphere.
we are often responsible for directing the gaze of the audience to where it needs to be
Just an incredible piece about shaping light, both the practicalities and the narrative control. Worth a read for a glimpse into another world. (Assuming you’re not already a theatre person, which I’m not.)
It is galling that software interface design lacks a similarly rich language and set of tools for how to speak with the user.
An attempt to hack the human eye into seeing near-infrared (Science for the Masses, 2014).
Humans use the vitamin A1 to build red-sensitive pigments in the eye.
But freshwater fish use vitamin A2 instead to create a pigment which has been shown to be sensitive to light of wavelengths up to 1400nm in some species, which is well into the near infrared range.
And so, an experiment:
The members of Science for the Masses and a handful of our collaborators will completely eliminate all retinoids and caretinoids (vitamin A and its provitamins) from our diets by switching to a special vitamin A deficient (VAD) blend of Soylent provided to us by special request. We will then supplement with two compounds: 3,4-dehydroretinol (A2) and retinoic acid (RA).
The idea being that it’s possible to deprive the body of vitamin A1 in order to force the eye to use vitamin A2 instead, and therefore see the world as fish do – in the near-infrared.
So - I guess - you could see objects glow with heat, directly?
Sadly it wouldn’t work: No, These Biohackers Can’t Give Themselves Infrared Vision (Wired, 2015).
HOWEVER:
I am less concerned with biohacking itself than what this idea shows cultural anticipation for…
You could hack the same experience with augmented reality smart glasses. Take the video feed, then compress the colour spectrum such that deep red is unused. Then take a separate feed of the infrared, and hue shift it into the red channel.
(Note that standard cameras see infrared by default and it has to be filtered out. The rear camera on my iPhone is filtered, but the front-facing camera is unfiltered and can see IR – which I use pretty regularly to see if the TV remote batteries are working. Point the remote at your phone and press a button: the IR bulbs will appear as sharp points of light. All of which is to say, you wouldn’t even need a dedicated IR sensor for the smart specs.)
Then wear the specs for a few days to give it time for your brain to adjust, touch a few objects of various temperatures (while looking at them) to train your perception, and you would be able to see heat. A kind of lo-fi cyborg prosthetic.
Could be a practical industrial application for smart glasses, aimed at plumbers, mechanics, and electrical engineers.
4.
A nugget from Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter back in December:
The amount of work that bought 1 hour of light in prehistoric times now buys 53 years of light.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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1.
Thomas Edison in 1879, around the time of the first public demonstration of the incandescent light bulb:
The cost of light.
Source: Early Light Bulbs, Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
2.
Theatre lighting designer Alex Forey’s eye-opening Young Directors’ Guide to Lighting:
Just an incredible piece about shaping light, both the practicalities and the narrative control. Worth a read for a glimpse into another world. (Assuming you’re not already a theatre person, which I’m not.)
It is galling that software interface design lacks a similarly rich language and set of tools for how to speak with the user.
RELATED: What wipes in Star Wars teach us about the brain and also interface design (this blog, April 2021).
3.
An attempt to hack the human eye into seeing near-infrared (Science for the Masses, 2014).
Humans use the vitamin A1 to build red-sensitive pigments in the eye.
But freshwater fish use vitamin A2 instead to create a pigment which
And so, an experiment:
The idea being that it’s possible to deprive the body of vitamin A1 in order to force the eye to use vitamin A2 instead, and therefore see the world as fish do – in the near-infrared.
So - I guess - you could see objects glow with heat, directly?
Sadly it wouldn’t work: No, These Biohackers Can’t Give Themselves Infrared Vision (Wired, 2015).
HOWEVER:
I am less concerned with biohacking itself than what this idea shows cultural anticipation for…
You could hack the same experience with augmented reality smart glasses. Take the video feed, then compress the colour spectrum such that deep red is unused. Then take a separate feed of the infrared, and hue shift it into the red channel.
(Note that standard cameras see infrared by default and it has to be filtered out. The rear camera on my iPhone is filtered, but the front-facing camera is unfiltered and can see IR – which I use pretty regularly to see if the TV remote batteries are working. Point the remote at your phone and press a button: the IR bulbs will appear as sharp points of light. All of which is to say, you wouldn’t even need a dedicated IR sensor for the smart specs.)
Then wear the specs for a few days to give it time for your brain to adjust, touch a few objects of various temperatures (while looking at them) to train your perception, and you would be able to see heat. A kind of lo-fi cyborg prosthetic.
Could be a practical industrial application for smart glasses, aimed at plumbers, mechanics, and electrical engineers.
4.
A nugget from Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter back in December:
The cost of light!